tice was unsheathed against the man who is Jehovah's fel. low, and returned not to its scabbard till it had been bathed in the blood of Calvary.

It may be deemed at variance with this view of the subject, that the redemption of man is sometimes in scripture ascribed simply to the blood of Christ, or to his death alone. But such language is not to be understood as limiting the atonement of Christ to the simple act of dying, or to those sufferings in which there was an effusion of literal blood. The bloody agony of the garden, and the accursed death of the cross were prominent and concluding parts of his suf ferings, and, by a common figure, were fit representatives of the whole. They were the last portions, so to speak, the completion of his humiliation, without which all that went before must have been vain ; and may be regarded as having procured salvation, in the same way as the last instalment of a sum which is paid by degrees, may be suppos. ed to cancel the debt and procure a discharge. But, as when Christ is said to have been obedient unto death,' we are to understand the phrase, not of a single act, but of the duration of his obedience throughout the whole period of his life, so may it be said that he suffered unto death, as expressive of the duration of his suffering throughout the whole of his earthly course.

III. Yet is it not intended by these remarks to deny that a special importance attaches to the sufferings of Christ's soul, and of the concluding period of his life.

It is impossible to peruse the scriptures attentively and not perceive that a special emphasis is put upon these. We are not to confine the matter of atonement to any one kind or degree of suffering; but as little are we at liberty to overlook the speciality that attaches to those sufferings to which we now refer. His bodily pains were of consequence, but the agonies of his holy soul were of more consequence. The suffering of infancy and childhood and youth are not to be lost sight of, but those of the final conflict call for particular notice.

The soul is often spoken of with peculiar emphasis. 'Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin-The waters are come in unto my soUL-My SOUL is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh to the grave-My SOUL is exceeding sorrowful even unto death-Now is my soul troubled, and

what shall I say?"* What our divine surety suffered in his soul must ever surpass all our powers of description or conception. The language used by the inspired writers denotes the highest pitch of intensity, while we have the best reason to suppose that every variety of inward agony which a sinless spirit can possibly feel was experienced by him. His soul was exceeding sorrowful;-the most pungent sorrow filled his bosom; his heart was pierced through with many sorrows; he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He began to be very heavy:-an unutterable load of dejection, an overpowering weight of consternation pressed down his spirits to the lowest depth of depression. He was sore amazed :—filled with inexpressible wonder and horrific terror at the evil of sin, and the magnitude of the curse to be endured for its expiation. His soul was troubled; agitated with alarm, filled with apprehension, overwhelmed with anguish, at thought of that awful wrath which he had to endure; at sight of that thick darkness, that midnight gloom of hell which he had to approach and to dissipate; at experience of that condemnation which now weighed him down under its mountain load; at taste of that cup of gall which had to be drunk with all its wormwood bitterness. Well might he take up the complaint, 'My soul is full of troubles; the waters are come in unto my soul.' And thus was it that he made his soul an offering for sin.'

Nor can it be doubted that the sufferings of the latter period of his life possess a speciality of interest. The period of his mysterious agony, his awful desertion, and his actual death calls for particular notice. This is what is emphatically called 'his hour-the hour and the power of darkness-the hour that he should depart out of this world.'† It was now that he was subjected to that inexplicable ago. ny which, in the absence of every adequate external cause, covered him over with a copious sweat of blood. It was now that he was cruelly deserted by all his former friends, there not being among the whole multitude of those whom he had cured of their sicknesses, to whom he had preached the gospel of salvation, and whom he had chosen as his disciples, one to abide with him in his dire extremity, but

* Is. liii. 11; Ps. lxix. 1.-lxxxviii. 3; Mat. xxvi. 38; John xii. 27. + John vii. 30; Luke xxii. 53; John xiii. 1.

being left to utter the heavy complaint, I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. "* It was now that he suffered the withdrawment of all sensible tokens of his Father's love; the suspension of every kind of sensible support, of every display of divine complacency; the felt manifestation of God's righteous displeasure at sin; the total eclipse of the hallowed light which had formerly cheered him amid the deepest gloom; the paternal desertion which drew from him the deep groan of bereavement, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.' It was now that he suffered the pains of actual dissolution; he died the death of the cross; he bowed the head and gave up the ghost. It was no faint, no swoon, no temporary suspension of the vital functions. It was death-a complete separation of the soul and body; the heart having been pierced by the soldier's spear, and his enemies themselves bearing witness to the reality of his departure. 'Then came the soldiers and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was cru. cified with him: but when they came to Jesus and saw that HE WAS DEAD ALREADY, they brake not his legs: but one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came thereout blood and water.'t This was the period when emphatically the Son of God made atonement for sin; when the tide of suffering rose to its height; when the dregs of the bitter cup of anguish were wrung out; when the sentence of woe reached its climax. A period, into which whatever is painful in torture, ignominious in shame, distressing in privation, terrific in satanic assault, and over. whelming in experienced wrath, was, as it were, compressed!—a period, whether to the sufferer himself or to the guilty world whose cause he undertook, the most awfully momentous that had ever occurred since the commencement of time.

Such, then, is what constitutes the matter or substance of Christ's atonement,-his sufferings, all his sufferings, and the sufferings of his soul and of the concluding period of his life in particular. It is not necessary to suppose that the sufferings which Christ endured on our behalf were precisely the same in kind and degree which are experienced by the wicked in the place of final woe. There

*Psalm lxix. 20.

↑ John xix. 32-34.

are, on the one hand, ingredients in their misery which he could not feel, as remorse, despair, and the fury of evil passions. Remorse, he could not feel, for his soul was a stranger to personal guilt. Despair he could not feel, for he had full assurance of deliverance from the bondage of death and the prison of the grave. And as for sinful pas sions, they had at no time a seat in his breast. On the other hand, there were ingredients in the sufferings of Christ, arising from the repugnance of his pure soul at moral defilement, which those who go down to the pit are incapable of feeling. It is, I humbly conceive,' says Dr. Pye Smith, worse than improper to represent the sufferings of Jesus Christ, in their last and most terrible extremity, as the same with those of condemned sinners in the state of punishment. In the case of such incorrigible and wretched criminals, there is a leading circumstance which could not, by any possibility, exist in the suffering Saviour. They eat of the fruit of their own way, and are filled with their own devices. A most material part of their misery consists in the unrestrained power of sinful passions, for ever raging but for ever ungratified. Their minds are constantly torn with the racking consciousness of personal guilt; with mutual aggravations and insults; with the remorse of despair: with malice, envy, and blas. phemy against the Holy and Blessed God himself; and with an indubitable sense of Jehovah's righteous abhorrence and rejection of them. No such passions as these, nor the slightest tincture of them, could have place in the breast of the holy Jesus. That meek and purest Lamb offered himself without spot. His heart, though broken and bleeding with agonies to us unknown, ever felt a perfect resignation to the hand that smote him, and a full acquiescence in all the bitterness of the cup which was appointed him to drink the resignation and acquiescence of love and conviction. He suffered in such a manner as a being perfectly holy could suffer. Though animated by the joy that was set before him, he endured the cross and despised the shame; yet there appear to have been seasons in the hour of his deepest extremity, in which he underwent the entire absence of divine joy and every kind of comfort or sensible support. What but a total eclipse of the sun of consolation, could have wrung from him that exceedingly bitter and piercing cry, My God! My God! why hast thou

forsaken me?—The fire of Heaven consumed the sacrifice. The tremendous manifestations of God's displeasure against sin he endured, though in him was no sin and he endured them in a manner of which even those un. happy spirits who shall drink the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God, will never be able to form an adequate idea! They know not the HOLY and EXQUISITE SENSIBILITY which belonged to this immaculate sacrifice. That clear sight of the transgressions of his people in all their heinousness and atrocity, and that acute sense of the infinite vileness of sin, its baseness, ingratitude, and evil in every respect which he possessed, must have produced, in him, a feeling of extreme distress, of a kind and to a degree which no creature, whose moral sense is impaired by personal sin, can justly conceive. As such a feeling would accrue from the purity and ardour of his love to God and holiness, acting in his perfectly peculiar circumstances; so it would be increased by the pity and tenderness which he ever felt towards the objects of his redeeming love. A wise and good father is more deeply distressed by a crime which his beloved child has perpetrated, than by the same offence if committed by an indifferent per

son.

**

SECTION X.

VALUE OF CHRIST'S ATONEMENT.

WHATEVER may be the philosophical difficulties in which the subject is involved, there is no idea with which we are more familiar than that of causality. The terms power, cause, and effect, are in daily and constant use. It seems capable of satisfactory demonstration that the only correct notion attachable to these words, is that of invariable ante

cedence and consequence. There are certain things which never exist without being immediately followed by certain definite events. To the antecedent we give the name of cause, to the consequent the name of effect; and the proper

Disc. on Sac., pp. 45-47.