How is it that we can all say to Him, in full assurance that He hears us, "We therefore pray Thee help Thy servants whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy precious blood?" How is it that we eat bread, and drink of a cup, at our highest act of worship, which has been blessed by a prayer beginning with the words, "Almighty God, our heavenly Father, Who of Thy tender mercy didst give Thine only Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption, Who made there by His one oblation of Himself, once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world ?”

How can we believe that One Man's Blood can be of such world-wide efficacy? Because we believe in the union of the Human and Divine natures in the Person of this one Man.

Now let us throw ourselves back into the time of the twelve apostles, and imagine ourselves for a moment the followers of Christ, and that we had been familiar with Him for two or three years, and had known well His mother, perhaps, and His cousins, and knew also that He was not much more than thirty years old, and had followed the trade of a carpenter. How could we have realized that He was a partaker of the Divine nature of the Eternal God? We could not. We might have acquiesced in what our Lord said, when He said, "I and the Father are One;" but, depend

upon it, if we had thought about these sayings, they would have seemed incomprehensible. Again, if we had heard our Master say, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh." If we had heard Him say this, if we had been in heart His true disciples, we should have said in ourselves, "This is very hard. It is an enigma indeed; but I know the goodness and virtue, and truthfulness and wisdom of this man so well, and I have seen Him do so very many mighty works which stamp His mission as from God, that I will wait. I will not leave Him. For to whom shall I go if I leave such an one ?"

These would have been our thoughts respecting Jesus. As long as we lived familiarly with Him, as if He were altogether one of ourselves, how could we realize that He was "God over all ?" We associate ideas of glory unspeakable, and light that no man can approach unto, with the presence of God, and here was One Who claimed to do all that the Father did, and to be honoured with all the Father's honour, whose countenance was wont to shine with no blinding light how then could we have realized that this Man could be the one Mediator between God and every soul? We could imagine from the wisdom of His discourses that, if they were sufficiently published

and diffused, He could teach all men-we could imagine Him exerting His supernatural power to feed His armies that He gathered around Him, so that He should dethrone Cæsar Himself; but how could we realize that His death should be accepted as the Ransom of all souls-His Blood be shed for the remission of all sins-His Flesh given for the life of the world? We could not, whilst He was with us, have "borne "such doctrines; but after He was crucified, and after He had risen again, and appeared supernaturally, first to one, then to another, in His Risen Body, then doubtless the question must have forced itself upon us, Was there not more in our Master's Death than we had thought? For when He appeared to have risen above the conditions and limits of this our mortal life, and appeared and disappeared, not as if He were a man, but a supernatural being altogether, then we could the better entertain the thought that His Death, keing the Death of One so Divine, had some exceeding significance or power.

But when he whole was consummated by the Ascension-when, in accordance with His promise to ascend to His Father, He had disappeared heavenward, and when, ten days after this, He gave the visible token that He was exalted to be Head over all things in the plenteous stream of the Holy Spirit reversing the curse of Babel, and giving the earnest that all men who would should be one family in

Him by His Spirit, and when His followers had begun to do works in His Name greater than even He had done, then we should have been able to bear any doctrine respecting the atoning efficacy of His sacrificed Body, seeing that we had such proofs that in that Body, once crucified, there dwelt the fulness of Godhead.

As long as He had lived with us as one of ourselves we should have thought that He belonged to ourselves, to His family, or at the most to His nation; but when He had ascended to the throne of God, and had sent us such a Token of His being there, and this Token had begun to work in the subjugation of Hisbitterest enemies-then we could have begun to entertain the thought, or rather the faith, that He belonged to all men—that He could gather up all into Himself that He was able to bear the sins of all-that, in fact, He could le, and that it was only likely that He was, a second Adam to all-that "as in Adam all die, even so in Him should all be made alive."

Now, we may apply all this to much in the Bible besides the Atonement but what we have said is sufficient for our purpose. No stronger case can be brought forward to illustrate the truth of Christ's wards than this of His own atoning, reconciling Death.

Christ, then, taught His isciples as they were able to bear it. He lid upon them no

greater burden than they were able to bear; but He undertook that One should come Who in His name and under His direction should guide them into all the truth-for the words do not mean all truth-i. e., all truth of every sort, but all the truth-all the truth as it is in Jesus-especially all the truth respecting Himself which it is needful for our spiritual wellbeing to be acquainted with. Now notice the terms in which the Saviour promises the teaching of the Spirit. The Saviour does not say He shall teach you all truth, or He shall suddenly illuminate you with all truth, but He shall "guide you into all the truth." He will, that is, lead you along a way, a path, by which, if you follow it, and keep in it, you shall arrive under His guiding at all the truth. Now the due consideration of this removes a very great difficulty respecting the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit, which we can hardly avoid having if we look at the present state of the religious world. Here we are surrounded by persons who claim to have the Spirit of God. They say that they are illuminated, and have this, that, and the other thing taught them by the direct influence of the Holy Spirit, and yet these persons differ from one another; they say contrary things. How is it, if they are all taught by one Spirit, that they speak so differently?

This, of course, would be a serious difficulty if the Holy Spirit poured knowledge or illu