Again, He died for all, in that His sacrifice represents the sacrifice
of all. We have heard of the doctrine of "imputed righteousness;" it
is a theological expression to which meanings foolish enough are
sometimes attributed, but it contains a very deep truth, which it
shall be our endeavour to elicit.

Christ is the realized idea of our Humanity. He is God's idea of Man
completed. There is every difference between the ideal and the
actual--between what a man aims to be and what he is; a difference
between the race as it is, and the race as it existed in God's
creative idea when he pronounced it very good.

In Christ, therefore, God beholds Humanity; in Christ He sees
perfected every one in whom Christ's spirit exists in germ. He to whom
the possible is actual, to whom what will be already _is_, sees all
things _present_, gazes on the imperfect, and sees it in its
perfection. Let me venture an illustration. He who has never seen the
vegetable world except in Arctic regions, has but a poor idea of the
majesty of vegetable life,--a microscopic red moss tinting the surface
of the snow, a few stunted pines, and here and there perhaps a
dwindled oak; but to the botanist who has seen the luxuriance of
vegetation in its tropical magnificence, all that wretched scene
presents another aspect; to him those dwarfs are the representatives
of what might be, nay, what has been in a kindlier soil and a more
genial climate; he fills up by his conception the miserable actuality
presented by these shrubs, and attributes to them--imputes, that is,
to them--the majesty of which the undeveloped germ exists already.

Now the difference between those trees seen in themselves, and seen in