plies as to the footing on which we are to draw near to God, and the nature of the confidence which Christ desires to quicken in us. Yet I feel it necessary thus to insist upon the faith of the sonship in humanity, which is revealed in Christ, as the necessary supplement and complement of the faith of the fatherliness, revealed to be in God: and I must often recur to this because, in truth, my hope of helping any out of the perplexities and confusions which I feel to prevail on the subjects of justification and sanctification, is simply the hope of helping them to see the contradiction between coming to God in the spirit of sonship, with the confidence which the faith of the Father's heart sustains, and coming to God with a legal confidence as righteous in His sight, because clothed with a legal righteousness, or at least accepted on the ground of such a righteousness.

In speaking of that which he had come to experience through knowledge of the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested in the Son-that experience into the fellowship of which he desired to bring others, the Apostle says, "And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.” "Father" and "Son" here do more than indicate persons: they indicate that in these persons with which the fellowship is experienced. Eternal life is to the Apostle a light in which the mind of fatherliness in the Father, and the mind of sonship in the Son, are apprehended and rejoiced in. This teaching as to the nature of salvation is the same which we receive from the Lord Himself when He says, "This is eternal life, to know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent;" as also when he says, "If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him."

Let the reader think of this, and take his own experience to this light. To me it appears that the temptation to stop short of the light that shines to us in the communion of the Son with the Father in humanity is strong, and greatly prevails. But this light is the very light of

life to us; for this communion is the gift of the Father to us in the Son. In the experience of this communion in our nature and as our brother, did our Lord look forward to our partaking in it as what would be our salvation. The seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of S. John most fully declares this. Indeed the evidence abounds that it was this which was ever in the contemplation of Christ in glorifying the Father on the earth; while of anything like the consciousness of being working out a righteousness to be imputed to men to give them a legal ground of confidence towards God there is no trace.

I have already referred to President Edwards' legal representation of the righteousness of Christ, assumed to be imputed in faith, as perfected in His obedience unto death, and that of which God manifested His acceptance when He raised Christ from the dead. But the testimony to the Saviour was deeper and higher. Christ was declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead. The righteousness then acknowledged was none other than what the Father had previously borne testimony to when He said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased;" on the sonship, the life of sonship that was in Christ, was attention thus fixed, and not on the legal perfection of the righteousness which it fulfilled. How then can we think of the Father's testimony to the Son as other than a commending of sonship to us, or think of the Father's delight in the Son otherwise than as what justifies His imparting the life of sonship to us?

Let us in this light regard Christ's being delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification. The offences for which He made expiation were ours,—that expiation being the due atonement for the sin of man -accepted on behalf of all men. His righteousness, declared in His resurrection from the dead, is ours-the proper righteousness for man, and in Him given to all men: and that righteousness is NOT the past fact of legal obligation discharged, but the mind of sonship towards the Father; for in the beloved Son is the Father seen to be well pleased, and in our being through Him to the Father

dear children will it come to pass that the Father will be well pleased in us.

II. All that we thus learn as to the prospective reference of the atonement in considering Christ's own manifested life in humanity as His witnessing for the Father to men, is confirmed, and further light shed upon it, when we consider with the same prospective reference the atonement as the Son's dealing with the Father on our behalf.

We cannot conceive of our Lord's dealing with the Father on our behalf without passing on to its prospective reference. We could not formerly speak freely of that intercession for sinners which the Prophet has conjoined with his bearing of their sins, because that intercession could not be conceived of as stopping short of the prayer for our participation in eternal life, to which the expiatory confession of our sins, and prayer for the pardon of our sins necessarily led forward, and in connexion with which alone they could have existed. We now approach the subject of this dealing of Christ with the Father in the light of Christ's own perfection in humanity, and connect His laying hold of the hope for man which was in God with the Father's testimony that He was well pleased in the Son. What we have thought of Christ as necessarily desiring for us, was the fellowship of what He Himself was in humanity. This, therefore, was that which He would ask for us; and we can now understand that He would do so with a confidence connected with His own consciousness that in humanity He abode in His Father's love and in the light of His countenance. Thus would His own righteousness be presented along with the confession of our sins when He asked for us remission of sins and eternal life.

And this is the right conception of Christ pleading His own merits on our behalf. Our capacity of that which He asked for us was so implied in these merits, and the Father's delight in these merits so implied His delight in their reproduction in us, that the prayer which proceeds on these grounds is manifestly according to the will

of the Father-to offer it as a part of the doing of the Father's will-to offer it in the faith and hope of an answer is a part of the trust in the Father by which He declared the Father's name, and is to be contemplated as completing that response to the mind of the Father towards us in our sin and misery, which was present but in part in the retrospective confession of our sin.

And these the confession and the intercession-so harmonise, are so truly each the complement of the other, that we feel in passing from the one to the other our faith in the Father's acceptance of each confirmed by seeing it in connection with the other; that is to say, we more easily believe in the Father's acceptance of Christ's expiatory confession of our sins when we see that confession as contemplating our yet living to God-our partaking in eternal life; and we more easily believe in the gift of eternal life to those who have sinned, when we see it in connection with that due and perfect expiation for their past sin.

It is in the dealing of the Son with the Father on our behalf, thus in all its aspects before us, that the full light of the atonement shines to us. In the life of Christ, as the revelation of the Father by the Son, we see the love of God to man-the will of God for man-the eternal life which the Father has given to us in the Son-that salvation which the gospel reveals as the Apostle knew it when he invited men to the fellowship of it as fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. Proceeding from this contemplation of the light of eternal life as shining in Christ's own life on earth, to consider the Son in His dealing with the Father on our behalf, and contemplating Him now as bearing us and our sins and miseries on His heart before the Father, and uttering all that in love to the Father and to us He feels regarding us -all His divine sorrow-all His desire-all His hopeall that He admits and confesses as against us-all that, notwithstanding, He asks for us, with that in His own human consciousness, in His following the Father as a dear child walking in love, which justifies His hope in

making intercession-enabling Him to intercede in con scious righteousness as well as conscious compassion and love, we have the elements of the atonement before us as presented by the Son and accepted by the Father, and see the grounds of the divine procedure in granting to us remission of our sins and the gift of eternal life. We are contemplating what the Son, who dwells in the bosom of the Father, and whom the Father heareth always, offers to the Father as what He knows to be according to the Father's will, which, receiving the Father's acknowledgment as accepted by Him, is sealed to us as the true and perfect response of the Son to the Father's heart and mind in relation to man, the perfect doing of His will— the perfect declaring of His name.

In the light of what God thus accepted when Christ through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, we see the ultimate ground-the ultimate foundation in God-for that peace with God which we have in Christ. I say the ultimate ground in God for that peace with God which we have in our Lord Jesus Christ; for, while the immediate ground is the atonement thus present to our faith, that is to say, the purpose as fulfilled which our Lord expressed, when coming to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, He said, "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God;" yet clearly it is, that eternal will itself which He thus came to do, and which by doing it the Son has revealed, even that name of God which the Son has declared, which is itself the ultimate peace and rest of our spirits.

In this full light of the atonement our first conviction is, that in this divine transaction in humanity through which we have the remission of our sins and the gift of eternal life, there has been nothing arbitrary. We see a righteous and necessary relation between the remission of our sins and Christ's expiatory confession as the due and adequate confession of them-a perfect expiation in that it was divine,-perfect in relation to us in that it was human. We see a righteous and necessary relation between the gift of eternal life, and Christ's righteousness;