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Take, for example, the nature of man as delineated in the Scriptures, and as observed in daily experience. The truth respecting this is essentially duplicate. In one aspect this nature is just what it ought to be; in another it is just as fully what it ought not to be. It is most certainly true, on the one hand, that man has noble and spiritual faculties; that he is exalted in intellectual power, rich in capacity for the gentlest and loftiest affections; for patience, and for heroism, and for self-sacrifice, with a divine voice of conscience speaking within ;-"a little lower than the angels." It is equally true, on the other hand, that he is, in disposition and in act, alienated from God, averse to holiness, and a lover of sin. And, between these two truths, who cannot perceive the absolute harmony? Neither is the truth, as isolated from the other; but both conjoined express precisely the character of man. His will is free; his conscience is not dead; his mind is clear, though his dispositions are perverse; and it is the very nobleness of his constitution which makes his sin so criminal and destructive.

So of the inspiration of the Scriptures. Holy men spake in them. And it is the word of John, and the word of Paul, and the word of Matthew, and the word of James, which we are reading. Over the lapse of eighteen centuries, our hearts still beat against theirs. We become one with them in their up-lift of thought, and our minds are kindled by truths which fired theirs. And yet they spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost; and so there is everywhere in the Scriptures a divine authority, pervading and subliming the human utterance, not destroying or limiting its personal character, but yet shining through and penetrating it all, as the golden light imbues at evening the cloud beneath it.

The same principle applies to the person of Christ. The divinity of our Lord is established by the Scriptures. His humanity is a fact revealed with equal

clearness, and substantiated by the same or equivalent evidence. Neither of these facts, therefore, should be allowed at all to exclude or controvert the other. There is no antagonism between them. We need both facts in order fairly to understand the Scriptures. Both are essential to the perfect conception and love of the one Mediator between God and our souls. And he is the truly comprehensive and scriptural theologian who embraces both in his view of the Saviour; who dwells with equal clearness and fondness upon either, and does not insist, with clamorous folly, because he cannot grasp at once the total truth, in its sublime sphericity, that there can be no other side of it than he perceives, and that the mind of the Infinite cannot survey it more comprehensively than does his.

And precisely the same principle applies to the work of Christ in our redemption. Its work is bi-fold. Its completeness, and in part its glory, consisted in the fact that it met two needs of the soul; that it accomplished two ends under the divine administration. It was a work for atonement, and also for renewal and inward transformation. It met the longing of the penitent heart for an expiation of its past sin, and a visible ground of pardon and acceptance. It met also its desire and need of spiritual life, and the revelation of the Infinite. It just as really includes redemption from the bondage of sin, as redemption from its penalty; and the latter was as essential a part of it as was ever the former. Why not then include and contemplate both elements in our view of Christ's work?

He came to unfold before us the truth, with human simplicity and tenderness, and with divine authority; to declare the sublimest truth, pertaining to God and to eternity. He came to exhibit, in visible embodiment, the nature and purity of the divine law, and so to shed a silent influence from his remembered life

which, through all ages, should purify and instruct. He came to quicken with hopes of the immortal glory. He came, especially, to manifest and illustrate God's being and love; to bridge, as it were, the chasm between ourselves and the Infinite; to bring the Deity nearer our thought, and to give us a way of access into the heavens. And all this He accomplished. Through Him we may have life eternal. Through Him the divine life may be brought into our souls, and we be filled with the fulness of God.

And yet this element of Christ's work, important as it was, if we may trust the Scripture, did not exhaust it. That work had relations not to us only, and our race, but to the entire spiritual creation. It was intended, and it availed, to declare the righteousness of God for the remission of sins that are past. Its author came to be the end of the law for righteousness, to every one that believeth; to give his life a ransom for many; to bear our iniquities; to die for us, the ungodly; to be made a curse for us; to be sacrificed for us as our passover. He came, in other words, by his humiliation on our behalf; his voluntary obedience and suffering; and finally by his death, into the fearfullest agony of which it seems impossible for us to enter, to illustrate and establish the holiness of the law, and its authority; and so to manifest the righteousness of God, and his fixed purpose to maintain the law, that He might be just, and yet the justifier of him who believeth in Jesus. And thus, in the accomplishment of this, Christ furnished a ground of justification. By Him we have the Atonement. As once offered, He bore the sins of many; and there is now no condemnation to them that are in Him.

If there be any fact, the admission of which is necessary to the just explication of the scriptural phraseology, any which gives coherence and unity to its whole doctrinal system, any which strikingly pre

sents, in a single expression, the tenderness and the holiness of the divine nature, any which meets the deepest desire of the burdened and penitent heart, any which Christians, in all ages, have loved to contemplate, and around which have ascended most gratefully their jubilant praises, it is certainly THIS: that the death of our Lord atones for sin. Why, then, throw this away in order to hold another with which it is harmonious? or why adhere to this, and overlook its correlate? Why determine to have but half the sphere, when we may just as properly have all? Why not rather combine both aspects of Christ's work into a comprehensive and satisfying view, and regard it as did the sacred writers, as at once a ground of pardon and a source of life? No narrower view can save or satisfy the declarations of the Scriptures, can be severally applied to them, without breaking or crushing some portion of their language. No narrower belief will really meet the longings of the heart, or fairly interpret the faith and the experience of the church universal.

Honour to him, then, who speaks it ALL! Honour to him, and spiritual growth! And let him who has gained a part of the whole, a segment, a hemisphere, hold himself back most carefully from the vice of denial; and while he grasps his portion of the truth, which side soever it may be, whether of human freedom, or human dependence; of Christ's humanity, or Christ's divinity; of the love of God displayed on the cross, or the basis of pardon there established for man ;-while he holds this, and blesses God who hath revealed it to him, let him also hold open his thoughts to other related truths, that each and all may enter in their turn, until the full-orbed sphere shall be complete within!"

J. F. L.

THE MOMENTOUS QUESTION.

DAN. xii. 8.

It is ask'd by the patriot, who swells the loud cheer,
As the Crimean transport her sails are outspreading,
Though he stifles a sigh and he drives back a tear,
At thought of the brave, who their life-blood are shedding.

It is ask'd by the statesman,-but, Chatham! where now Is the heart or the hand to uphold England's fame? Where the hand stretch'd to aid, to support, to o'erthrow? Where the heart to bleed sore at a stain on her name?

It is ask'd by the soldier, whose glad kindling eye
And flush'd cheek seem to smile at the perils of war;
"What proud honours shall rest on my name if I die?
Or what laurels attend me to England's fair shore?"

It is ask'd by the merchant, whose vessels afar
With beauty adorn the fair breast of the ocean,

Who so tremblingly fears lest the rough hand of War
Should rudely assail them or check their proud motion.

It is ask'd by the rich, when a nation's great fear
Drowns the low soothing voices of pleasure and ease;
Rings the loud tones of battle and death in his ear,
Or moans sad tales of sorrow as autumn's night breeze.

It is ask'd by the poor man, when Care, Want, and Woe,
The sad train of War, his low dwelling have taken,-
Have ravaged the fields where his few pleasures grow,
And left him, a tree by the winter-storm shaken.

It is ask'd by the father, whose brow is so shaded
By a grief to which glory no solace can yield;
In one dreadful hour were a parent's hopes faded,
His first-born is sleeping 'neath Inkermann's field.

It is ask'd by the mother, whose colour has fled,
As tearless, her eyes strain the heart-rending page;
She knows that perchance 'mong the names of the dead
Is the pride of her heart and the hope of her age.

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