could be offered to Him on the side of the spirit of the world, struggled with them in a real struggle and conquered them, and that then His human nature having made itself so far forth victorious and perfect, received such a communication of the Divine nature as raised Him above all possibility from that time of being tempted by the evil spirit of the world. We certainly see this in the history. That particular struggle is never renewed. He never had any effort to make in putting aside that kind of temptation. But the contest with the evil which specially attacks the spirit, with especially the essence of such evil, the desire to do our own will, in the gratification of self at the expense of others—this, with which He was always being tempted from without, for no feeling of it arose within, had yet to be fought with and overcome in a last battle. This crisis came in the garden of Gethsemane. All possibility of the evil which tempts the inner life was brought to bear upon Him from without, in the temptation which was then offered to Him, of at the last shrinking back from the consequences of His work, and saving Himself to the ruin of those He came to save. According to the view suggested, He would conquer that temptation with the weapons of humanity, not of Divinity, and when that was over, then His human nature having made another step towards its perfection would be adequate to receive a further communication of the Divine Word which would raise Him beyond the power of ever being tempted by any spiritual evil. The spiritual union between God and man, ever, as I said, potentially His, would have now reached, through a growth unbroken by any reception of evil, its perfect development. The Captain of our salvation was now made perfect through suffering.' But no communication of the Divine Word would have been

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made as yet to His human nature, which would remove it out of the ordinary physical and mental conditions of humanity, except so far as power had been given to Him by His Father; except so far as perfect spiritual purity and clearness exalted and intensified His intellect and heart, so that His insight into human hearts and His power upon them were necessarily greater, almost infinitely greater, than those of any man who ever lived. We cannot measure, cannot comprehend, the actual power which sinlessness can give, not only such power as is expressed in the words 'He knew what was in man,' but actual power in the doing of acts beyond the ordinary power of man. But, leaving that fruitful subject of speculation, the view we suggest would allow us to say-and the history tends to confirm it—that Christ was not at this time a partaker of the absolute attributes of God. He was not omniscient, omnipotent, unlimited by time or space, impassible.

With regard to knowledge, to suffering, to the desires of the body, He would then be as we are, except so far as absolutely holy humanity modifies these things. There would not have been as yet that communication of the Divine Word to Him which would free Him from pain and death and the struggle of human nature with these things. As a perfectly holy man, but in entire spiritual union with the Divine Word, He would meet the dark power of death upon the cross. When that was overcome by His human will, when in dying he conquered death, then at His Resurrection and Ascension the union of the Divine Word to a perfect human nature would take place, and we should find in Him perfect God and perfect Man.

According, then, to this idea, we need not be troubled with the thought that theology imposes on us a fiction in asking us

to believe in the reality of the sufferings upon the cross. They were borne by a man, but by a man who was, through the spiritual union of His human nature with the spiritual nature of the Divine Word, essential and perfect Humanity, a man, and yet the Man.

And now having endeavoured to remove, so far as I am able, this theological difficulty, and having already spoken of this cry as the personal cry of a man like ourselves, what are its aspects if we consider it as spoken by one who was essential humanity, who felt Himself then as the impersonation of the whole race, who spoke to God and acted before God as the whole of humanity in one man?

First, in those words, He threw Himself into the whole passionate sense which the race has had of its being forsaken by God. By a sublime act of self-forgetful love He passed through the channel of His personal sorrow away from it altogether, and identified Himself with the same sorrow as felt by all mankind. All the long spiritual pain of all the race, when in contact with trials of every kind, with scorn of men and bitter death, it has felt itself forsaken of God: all the agony of those thoughts when betrayed of friends we have doubted of eternal love, when cruelty, injustice, or violence have made us disbelieve in any absolute goodness, when wars and their miseries, and tyranny and its curse, and the destruction wrought on miserable men by the forces of nature have made us think ourselves abandoned to the caprice of evil or the cruelty of fate-all that has ever made man feel himself abandoned, forgotten, forsaken by God-into the whole sense of this vast human suffering Christ, losing the consciousness of Himself and of His own pain, through the intensity of His sympathy with us, threw Himself—and so realising it as His

own, offered it up to the pity and love of God, and cried, as the expression of all this sorrow of mankind to God, 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me, forsaken Man?'

This was bearing our infirmities and carrying our sicknesses. In this way He took into Himself our suffering and suffered for it; in this way He represented in that hour unto the Father, by means of the perfect self-forgetfulness of love, all the spiritual pain of the world's absence from God.

But here I observe two things. First, that we must carefully distinguish the feeling of being forsaken from the reality. Man, having separated himself from God, feels abandoned of God: of that there are a thousand proofs. But the reality is that man has never been forsaken by God, though God was displeased with man. To be displeased with one's children and to chastise them is not necessarily to cast them out, even with us on earth, much less with our Father in heaven. And the glory of Christ is that He recognised that truth as man, even when by self-forgetfulness He had thrown Himself completely into the feeling of the race and suffered through sympathy its pain. He knew that man was not forsaken by God at the very moment when He realised the feeling of humanity that it was forsaken. Speaking then as the voice of the race, He used that paradox, 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me, forsaken humanity?'

Secondly, observe this point of difference. Our pain of this kind is mixed with weakness and doubt; it breaks into rebellion, it drifts into sin; man feels forsaken, and believing he is absolutely forsaken, passes into utter disbelief in God. God, looking then on man in this awful distress, saw man broken down by it and faithless in it.

But now He saw man in the dying Christ feeling all this

sorrow, feeling it as His own, and yet not broken down by it; still faithful, still unsubdued in spirit by it, still asserting God as righteousness and love, still claiming Him as His God; the strange paradox realised of man in agony at feeling Himself forsaken, and yet believing that He was not forsaken—' My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'-and, seeing this, God saw His ideal of humanity on this side of it realised, God saw man victorious over the power of this trial to lead Him into sin, God saw man in the depth of suffering at one with Himself. God saw and was well pleased. His ideal of man was realised and, uniting Himself to man in uniting Himself to Christ, He may be said to have reconciled Himself to man. For what is the reconciliation of the Father to us, theologically speaking? It is found not in the supposed satisfaction which God feels in having satisfied His justice by exacting from the innocent the punishment due to the guilty, but in. God recognising in Christ as the perfect Man, humanity as entirely at one with His life through a finished life of sacrifice. With such a humanity God could unite Himself in all His fulness. With existing humanity God, though pitying and loving it as a Father, could not, because of its sin, unite Himself fully. He loved it, came to it, moved in it, inspired it, educated it, but He never could be perfectly at one with it till all sin had disappeared from it. That was an imperative of His nature. But when humanity in Christ had fulfilled all righteousness and displayed itself as wholly at one with God's life of self-sacrifice, God was then able to unite Himself to it, to take it up into Himself. In this way Christ reconciled the Father to us, as the Article says. And now-still embodying infinite thoughts in finite words which seem to reduce the meaning of the thoughts-God sees in Christ the ideal