Without this, man's altar stands unhallowed and desolate, his ministry fails, his sacrifice is an abomination. For if he knew the Father as He is, if he saw His Majesty, if he felt the thrill of His love, then the sorrow unto death would pierce his soul with its seven wounding swords, at the thought of having ceased to dedicate his being to his God.

In vain, in vain to proffer dead kids and goats! In vain to leap and cut ourselves with knives! In vain, for still sin has taken the sharpness off the edge of our penitence! Deep in our heart of hearts, there dogs and haunts us the cloying love of the very sin we bewail. Its memory rises up, and, fly as we will, its memory still half fascinates; enticing voices call after us, clinging hands are laid about us, and we are half unwilling to throw them off. We may strain to break away-strain longing eyes towards the hope of God's awful purity— but we have not now the moral grasp to hold it fast. Its image is blotted, and confused, and shifting; it fades, it passes away; we fall back powerless, exhausted, discouraged; we cannot see God-we cannot grieve the holy grief that comes only to the pure in heart.

No; and if not, then we have no offering to bring Him; no sacrifice to lay on His altar; no sealing sign of fealty to plead. Our whole service is impotent and barren.

Unless it may be that there shall stand one day upon our earth One, clothed in our flesh, a man with blood, and bones, and body, such as we ourselves have, a man, with all the fulness of human passion,

and human imagination, with all the weakness of human ills, and human losses; one who shall yet retain amid the pressure and strain of this sorrowful and perishing humanity, the intense whiteness of a sinless spirit; such a one, and such a one alone, could bring before God the pure and perfect offering, the proof of a recovered loyalty. Such a one, seeing as He would see the unveiled holiness, the eternal righteousness of God, might indeed be sensitive to the full passion of an overwhelming contrition, might indeed plead before God a heart which the sight of what sin is had verily broken.

Blessed be the Most High, such a one has come: He has been seen on the earth: He has made the one offering of His own death, in which the sense of penitence found adequate expression, such as it could never find in the blood of bulls, or the pleading of rains.

"Sacrifice and sin-offering Thou didst not desire. But mine ears hast Thou opened. Then said I, Lo, I come! To do Thy will, O my God: yea, Thy law is within my heart."

It was done the perfect offering was completed, the offering of a heart that could not but break, if God for one moment abandoned it, so bitter, so mortal would be the anguish of its unblemished will.

It was done, on that Good Friday-on which, out of the blackness of the sun's withdrawal, from out of the abyss of an overwhelming desolation, there fell on man's shuddering ears, the loud and exceeding bitter cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

SERMON VIII.

THE SACRIFICE OF THE MAN.

“A body hast Thou prepared me.”—HEB. x. 5.

"By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ.”—HEB. X. 10.

"My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" In that bitter cry, lay the secret of redemption. In itself apparently the voice of unfathomable despair, it is, if we look at it closer, the utterance of an unquenchable hope. If any human heart could once feel that to be forsaken of God was an unendurable despair, was an agony bitter and fierce as death itself, then that heart, that broken heart, knows full surely what that God is, at losing Whom it so terribly despairs. Sin renders us unsensitive to the mortal agony of such a regret each increase of sin increases our callousness, our repulsion to God, our dislike of holiness. Only the sinless heart would break in twain for grief at God's forsaking.

Such a despair, then, if I may venture to call it despair, is indeed no despair. The soul could not so despair, if it were not so loyal-hearted; and, therefore, the despair of that bitter penitential cry loses its torment, loses all its hopelessness; it changes its character, it is transfigured; its very loudness penetrates the ears of God as an appeal, the appeal of a fealty which is so

unswerving, and invincible, and true, that it would feel any severance of its bond to be the very torture of death. Such an appeal witnesses that any such severance is for ever an impossibility to a soul so intimately conscious of what severance would involve. Such an appeal,

then, is in God's ears the pledge of perfect homage, the recovery of a renewed allegiance, by a humanity which, since it had once fallen into disloyalty, could only recover itself through a recognition, that it felt such disloyalty to be its ruin, its despair.

In that bitter cry, the sacrifice that man has to offer is once more renewed. That Cross has become his altar. The communion of the creature with the Creator is once again recovered; the joy of the Creator in a loyal and true-hearted creation, renews itself into its old Sabbath gladness, the gladness of a God who can repose, since the crown of His labour is achieved. Worship has begun anew the victim is there to make victorious appeal; the priest is there, lifting once more holy hands. The incense of praise and thanksgiving once again ascends as of old. The temple of God is filled with the smoke, and shakes with the tremendous Presence, as once more the voice of man goes up to mingle with the cry of the seraphim, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts! Earth as well as Heaven is full of Thy glory. Glory be to Thee, O Lord most High."

Let us venture to contemplate still nearer the nature of this our recovered sacrifice: by doing so, I think we may realize that it is no abstract theological dogma, but is endued with that real actuality which fits it to become factor, a power, in a world of flesh and blood.

For consider how the offering of a freewill was made: it was an actual physical death; and we know how startlingly vivid is the identification by St. Paul, nay, by our Lord, of the moral with the physical death,—“ He who loses his life for My sake shall find it. Unless ye eat My flesh, ye shall die." "Dead with Christ." Who can trace any dividing line that keeps asunder the twin conceptions? The death of the body is the death to the body; no analysis can keep them finally apart. And so, too, the cry of the bereaved heart against that deadly abandonment of God is no mere spiritual act; it issues out of, it takes effect in, an actual perishing of the flesh.

How is this? In attempting to account for it, forgive me if I once more recall the conditions of man's allegiance.

He was possessed of a double character: on the one hand, he was a mere creature, a created thing, a bit of this visible creation, a complicated living organism, moving on its own lines, endowed with its own capacities; an embodiment of a certain fixed quantum of force, which God has, as it were, detached from Himself, and set moving, and supplied with energy, and continuance, and substantiality, to go its own way, under the control and limitation of its own laws and conditions. So far he was simply the subtlest and most elaborate instance of that delight which had moved God to allow creation to assume the character of a real self-supporting existence, the image of that absolute self-sustenance which constitutes His everlasting joy.

On the other hand, man was more than the mere creature: he had the additional gift of a spiritual capa