Now remember, dear brethren, that in this wondrous representation
there lie, plain and distinct, two things which to me, and I pray they
may be to you, are the very foundation of the Gospel to which we have
to trust. One is that on Christ Jesus, in His life and in His death,
were laid the guilt and the consequences of a world's sin. I do not
profess to be ready with an explanation of how that is possible. That
it is a fact I believe, on the authority of Christ Himself and of
Scripture; that it is inconsistent with the laws of human nature may
be asserted, but never can be proved. Theories manifold have been
invented in order to make it plain. I do not know that any of them
have gone to the bottom of the bottomless. But Christ in His perfect
manhood, wedded, as I believe it is, to true divinity, is capable of
entering into--not merely by sympathy, though that has much to do with
it--such closeness of relation with human kind, and with every man, as
that on Him can be laid the iniquity of us all.

Oh, brethren! what was the meaning of 'I have a baptism to be baptized
with,' unless the cold waters of the flood into which He unshrinkingly
stepped, and allowed to flow over Him, were made by the gathered
accumulation of the sins of the whole world? What was the meaning of
the agony in Gethsemane? What was the meaning of that most awful word
ever spoken by human lips, in which the consciousness of union with,
and of separation from, God, were so marvellously blended, 'My God! my
God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?' unless the Guiltless was then loaded
with the sins of the world, which rose between Him and God?

Dear friends, it seems to me that unless this transcendent element be
fairly recognised as existing in the passion and death of Jesus
Christ, His demeanour when He came to die was far less heroic and
noble and worthy of imitation than have been the deaths of hundreds of