you the desire of your eyes? the one who is more to you than father, mother, brother, or sister, or friend. Do you not compel that beloved one to pass into the boat which is taking the others to deliverance; and when there is no room found for you, do you not stand quietly upon the deck of your sinking vessel, and see the raging elements around you, and face death calmly, because you know one is safe who is dearer than life? Ah! at that moment is not the thought of going down into that great, angry, cruel, deep sea, is it not transfigured by the act of love and sacrifice by which another has been saved? But that is vicarious suffering, vicarious death!

And now take all these ideals of sacrifice, weld them into one harmonious whole, and raise them to the plane of the Divine, and we have none other than the character of God Himself as He stands related to man; as the God of sacrifice and the God of love!

149. Is this incredible? Is this extravagant or impossible to conceive? We have traced and tested the highest influence in the life of man, in the life of humanity, and we tell you that it has its seat in the bosom of God Himself; that such an influence has come forth and been incarnate in a Person; that such a one, called Jesus Christ, has presented God to man as love, man to God as sacrifice, being Himself love, and giving Himself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world.

Yes; I believe that in some inscrutable way this power of going forth and giving Himself for mankind, entering into their sorrows and trials, becoming as one

with them in order to bear their sorrows, belongs to God. We may not be able to put our thought into formularies; but it may be a living thought for all that. Creation is itself a kind of sacrifice, a coming forth of God, a giving of Himself to others, that they might have life, and have it more abundantly. The preservation of man, or the continuous outflow of life-power from God, is sacrifice; and still further, the constant uplifting through death of all things, the passing out of death into life, the repair and regeneration of that which stands ruined sometimes by disease, sometimes by sin, and always by a kind of subtle imperfection-this supplying of the imperfect out of the perfect is again sacrifice, and such a sacrifice, remember, means sympathy, means love; and that is what draws the heart near to the unseen Spirit, through the manifestation of Jesus, because, 'as He was, so are we in this present world.' And whenever that form of personal, human sympathy rises before us, the thought of sacrifice is forced upon us. We speak of grieving the Holy Spirit of God, appealing to a sympathetic side of God's nature which is felt to be in intimate communion with ours, some God-like pulsation beating in time with the fevered pulses of a suffering humanity so we say, 'He bears our burdens, and in all our afflictions He is afflicted,' and 'the Angel of His presence saves us.' Such words are, no doubt, relative terms, but they are near enough practically for the religious life, for they bring us to God, they tell us of One touched with the feeling of our infirmities, of One

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who draws nigh unto us that we may draw nigh unto Him.

Now, in view of these remarks, I will close with a few observations.

1st. On Jesus Christ's sacrifice.

2nd. On our sacrifice.

150. First. Do not be superstitious. Do not think that the fact of pain is pleasing to God. That is one disastrous view of the Atonement, which has made Atonement in one sense of the word so unsatisfactory, because it has been represented that God took a certain delight in the actual pain and torment of the holy, righteous, and just One, which is impossible.

It is one thing to be pleased when you see a noble creature put himself between another and receive pain for him, it is another thing to take a holy, just, and righteous person and wreak the vengeance upon him which justly belongs not to him, but to the offender. Yet this is the way in which the Atonement has been sometimes brought before us. As if there were some kind of necessity for vengeance somewhere, as if it did not matter where it fell, so that if it fell upon the just, God was as well satisfied as if it had fallen upon the unjust. Why we are satisfied when we see the innocent suffering for the guilty, but not in the sense in which God has been represented as satisfied with Christ's sufferings. When a man who is a good man builds a reformatory, and deprives himself of his money, we are satisfied; we say he has taken upon himself to bear the sins of the

guilty; when one who loves another puts himself between that other and the consequences of his frailty, and takes the responsibility of actions which are not his own, and suffers because he loves his brother, his sister, we are satisfied; but it is not because a man has suffered so much pain, but because he has had that nobility of feeling to say to another, 'I will put myself in your place, I will undertake for you.' So it is with God. It is not that God arbitrarily smites the innocent for the guilty; but it is just this there are certain moral laws in this world which are designed for the well-being of the world, which are best for a man to live under, which are absolutely necessary, which are not to be twisted, but which must be conformed to under penalty-natural, inevitable penalty; and those who do not understand, or will not understand and keep those laws, break them and suffer the consequences; then it is lawful for one who does understand and obey them to disobedient, and step in between them to save them from

come to the help of the

the consequences of their actions. Then you say, the deliverer is smitten by God. Why, of course he is smitten by God in this sense, that the law remains which God has made good everywhere for everybody. He obeys it willingly where the other has broken it; he comes into collision in the breach, and is smitten. God has not taken a knife and pierced him; God did not stretch him on the cross; God did not tear his flesh and torment his spirit; God did not slay him arbitrarily for another's sins. He has stepped in-that is all-stepped into the place of suffering, and suffered vicariously. That is just

what you do when you go amongst the vile and degraded, and the better you are the more you will suffer from the results of their unclean, and filthy, and wretched lives. It is just what the doctor does when he goes into a plague-smitten hospital and catches the plague, and he may then preach vicarious sacrifice to those plaguesmitten ones; he may tell them, 'If you had been cleanly in your habits and obeyed the laws put before you, you need not have got this plague; but now you have got it, I have come here to try and alleviate your sufferings; I have cured some of you, others will get well, but I have been smitten down amongst you, and I shall die; I shall go home and see you no more, but I shall die happy, I have laid down my life for you, God has smitten me.' Certainly; but not in that sense in which He has been said to seize on an innocent though willing victim and punish him for the guilty, and then retire with a sort of glutted frenzy, or, as theologians say, 'satisfied justice.' Justice! what kind of justice would that be? Ah!' but we are told, 'you know this was a violent proceeding on the part of the Creator from our point of view, of course, but then the Creator's justice is of a different kind from ours!' I should think it was; of a very different kind indeed-so different a kind as to be called properly by the very opposite name. Tell me not God's justice is one thing and man's another; that God's love is one thing and man's another. If God's love is not the same as man's, then the word 'love' has no meaning as applied to God. Divine Justice is on an immensely larger scale, but it must be of the same description or character, dif