taught, but in passing beyond this we enter the region of speculation. Apart from his teaching we have little evidence of what was in the mind of Christ; his infused knowledge may have extended beyond our imagining, but the truth of the Incarnation does not require us to attribute to his human Soul the knowledge of anything which did not concern his mission as Incarnate. As the Eternal Word he could not fail to know all things; as the Word Incarnate, according to the truth of his Manhood, he could be ignorant of some things. Such is the twofold operation of knowledge in the Incarnate Word.

The twofold operation of will is even more important, though less debated. There is the same inexplicable difficulty. As the one Person could know and not know, so the one Person could will and not will. There is however a subtle difference between the two cases. Not to know what God knows implies no defect in a human soul, for human knowledge is naturally and essentially finite; but not to will what God wills would be moral failure. Knowledge and ignorance might coexist in the Person of Christ; was it possible for him at once to will and not to will? Could he in his Divine Nature will one thing, and in his Human Nature will otherwise? A conflict of the two wills would mean resistance of the human will to the Divine; and this would be sin. Can we speak of the Incarnate Word as liable to sin? The answer is that sin was for him a moral impossibility. We do not attribute to his Human Nature a natural incapacity for sin, which would be the denial of free will and so of his perfect humanity, but a boundless capacity for avoiding sin. A real effort was required to hold his human will in perfect harmony with the Divine Will, but the effort was never lacking, and there never was any doubt as to the issue. The supreme effort is recorded in

what we read of the Agony in Gethsemane, where the human will, naturally recoiling from the prospect of the Cross, and expressed in broken utterance of prayer, was brought into subjection with sweat of blood. The meaning of the Lord's temptation is nothing else but this. He strenuously put aside suggestions made to his human will which involved a conflict with the Divine Will. It is obvious that, for these temptations to be real, they must have been fitted to appeal to his nature in its sinlessness. Appeals to unworthy motives or depraved desires would not have touched him. He was tempted as we are, with the one exception of temptations based on the sin that is within us.1

The human life of the Incarnate Word was thus a continuous and successful effort after submission to the Will of God. "My meat," he said, “is to do the will of him that sent me, and to accomplish his work.” 2 His Human Nature being taken sinless by the Word, there was perfectly restored in him the freedom of the will. In this respect also he was the second Adam; and he succeeded, where man had originally failed, in freely adhering to the Will of God. Such was the immediate effect of the Incarnation. In the Person of Christ Man was restored to the perfection of nature, and supernaturally exalted according to the eternal purpose of the Creator.

SECT. II.-The Atonement

The Christian use of the word Atonement or Reconciliation begins with St. Paul. In five places he speaks of the reconciliation of the world, or of men, to God. In one of these places he indicates the means by which this John iv. 34.

1 Heb. iv. 15.

2

reconciliation is effected: "Ye that once were far off are made nigh in the Blood of Christ." This expression directs our attention to the many passages in which we read of expiation, or the cleansing of sin by the sacred Blood: to the words of St. John Baptist announcing the Lord Jesus as the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world; to the mystery of the Lamb that was slain, in the Revelation of St. John; and above all to the argument of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which reveals the Lord Jesus Christ as our High Priest, offering himself for the sins of the whole world, and through his own Blood entering into the Holy Place, having obtained eternal redemption.

Gathering this whole revelation into one head of doctrine, we understand by the Atonement the work of the Incarnate Son, cleansing us from the stain of sin, and redeeming or delivering us from the power of sin, so that we may return to that relation towards God for which we were created the relation of trusting and trusted children towards their Father. And this we understand to be effected by his offering of himself, a sacrifice for sin.

It

To understand the meaning of sacrifice, so far as it can be understood, we must go to the Old Testament. is developed in the New Testament, but on the principles taught in the Old. The writers of the New Testament, when they speak of sacrifice, assume a knowledge of the teaching and practice of the Law. The Lord Jesus Christ on one great occasion, as we shall see, spoke words that are unintelligible without this knowledge.

1 Rom. v. 10, 11; xi. 15; 2 Cor. v. 18-20; Eph. ii. 13–18; Col. i. 20-22. The word kaтaλay and the corresponding verb καταλλάσσειν, or intensively ἀποκαταλλάσσειν, occur nowhere else in the New Testament, except in 1 Cor. vii. II, where катα^^άoσeiv is used of the reconciliation of a wife to her husband.

what does

foreshadowed!

mean?

We have briefly considered the practice of the Old
Testament and the significance of the sacrifices there
recorded.1 We have now to consider their fulfilment in
Jesus Christ, his priesthood and his offering.

He is a Priest for ever, after the order of Melchizedek. This designation is used in the Epistle to the Hebrews to distinguish the Christian priesthood from the Levitical in two respects. It points on the one hand to an older and wider order than that of Aaron. The Levitical priesthood was peculiar to the nation of Israel. Melchizedek

was the high priest of a religion which was not confined even to the family of Abraham, but to which Abraham was subject. It was the religion of the Most High, the Creator and the Father of all men. In the second place, while the Levitical priesthood was inherited by descent, Melchizedek, standing alone, a mysterious figure whose origin is left unmarked by genealogy, represents a priest appointed directly by the act of God. Such is the priesthood of Christ, superseding that of Aaron by a return to an older and wider order of Divine appointment, as foreshadowed in the Book of Psalms.2

But Christ, appointed Priest for ever, superseded the priesthood of Aaron only by way of fulfilment. The Levitical priesthood was a true forecast of the Christian priesthood. There is no breach of continuity. We see this the more clearly if we consider the origin of the Levitical institutions. They were not wholly new. They were a continuation of the old order under special conditions. The meaning of the sacrifices which had been offered from the beginning was made clearer by the distinction of the sin-offering, the ? whole burnt-offering, and the peace-offering. But all these were implicitly contained in the simpler patriarchal 1 Above, pp. 138-140. 2 Heb. vii.; Ps. cx.

offerings. For the sin-offering a special ritual ordered, in which were involved the peculiar functions of the sons of Aaron; once a year were offered the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement, in the ritual of which was found the proper function of the high priest, the representative of Aaron himself; but all this ritual of the sin-offering was a true development of the patriarchal law which forbad the eating of blood. The rule confining sacrificial worship to the one sanctuary served by the Levitical priesthood was designed as a temporary measure to maintain religious unity, nor did it, until the last days of the kingdom, put an end to the wider practice. The history of Elijah sufficiently illustrates this.1

In the Levitical institutions there was thus a narrowing and particularizing of sacrifice and priesthood. In Christ there is a return to the larger order of Melchizedek, but not to primitive vagueness. The lessons of the Levitical order are not dropped. The argument of the Epistle to the Hebrews shows how exactly the significance of the special function of Aaron is carried to fulfilment in the one Sacrifice of the New Testament. The ritual of the blood, with the entry of the high priest into the second tabernacle on the Day of Atonement, is there treated as typical of the ascension of Christ into heaven by the power of his own Blood. But whereas the Levitical high priest repeated this ritual year by year, the expiation or redemption being continually renewed, we see it fulfilled in Jesus Christ once and for all. He has obtained an eternal redemption.2

We must not however regard the Lord's death as an isolated event working the Atonement. It was because

1 Acts vii. 42-50: cp. Deut. iv. 19; xvi. 3, II, etc.; Josh. xxii. 9-29; 1 Kings xviii. 23, seqq.; Jer. vii. 12-14; xix. 12, 13. 2 Heb. ix. 1-14.