burning house, and her charred remains have never been found. That
was a death for another, but 'Jesus died for us' in a deeper sense
than that. Take another case. A man sets himself to some great cause,
not his own, and he sees that in order to bless humanity, either by
the proclamation of some truth, or by the origination of some great
movement, or in some other way, if he is to carry out his purpose,
he must give his life. He does so, and dies a martyr. What he aimed
at could only be done by the sacrifice of his life. The death was a
means to his end, and he died for his fellows. That is not the depth
of the sense in which Paul meant that Jesus Christ died for us. It
was not that He was true to His message, and, like many another
martyr, died. There is only one way, as it seems to me, in which any
beneficial relation can be established between the Death of Christ
and us, and it is that when He died He died for us, because 'He bare
our sins in His own body on the tree.'

Dear brethren, I dare say some of you do not take that view, but I
know not how justice can be done to the plain words of Scripture
unless this is the point of view from which we look at the Cross of
Calvary--that there the Lamb of Sacrifice was bearing, and bearing
away, the sins of the whole world. I know that Christian men who
unite in the belief that Christ's death was a sacrifice and an
atonement diverge from one another in their interpretations of the
way in which that came to be a fact, and I believe, for my part, that
the divergent interpretations are like the divergent beams of light
that fall upon men who stand round the same great luminary, and that
all of them take their origin in, and are part of the manifestation
of, the one transcendent fact, which passes all understanding, and
gathers into itself all the diverse conceptions of it which are
formed by limited minds. He died for us because, in His death, our