the aspect of the atonement as a dealing of the Son with the Father on our behalf—a mediation, an intercession. I have spoken of the nature and ground of this intercession, of its combination with the confession of our sins and of its relation to our Lord's own consciousness in humanity -His experience of sonship in humanity-His experience of abiding in humanity in the Father's favour. But a more close consideration of what is implied in intercession as intercession seems called for a more close consideration, that is, of the hope for man in which the Son of God made His soul an offering for sin, as that hope was a hope in God, sustained by faith and prayer.

We are so much in the way of looking on the work of Christ as the acting out of a pre-arranged plan, that its character as a natural progress and development, in which one thing arises out of another, and is really caused by that other, is with difficulty realised. Yet we must get deliverance from this temptation, the painful temptation to think of Christ's work as almost a scenic representation, -otherwise we never can have the consciousness of getting the true knowledge of eternal realities from the atonement. All light of life for us disappears from the life of Christ unless that life be to us a life indeed, and not the mere acting of an assigned part. Unless we realise that in very truth Christ loved us as He did Himself, we cannot understand how near an approach to a personal feeling there has been in His feeling of our sins, and of our misery as sinners. Unless we realise that His love to Himself and to us was the love of one who loved the Father with all His heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, we cannot understand the nature of the burden which our sins were to Him, what it was to His heart that we were to the Father rebellious children, or how certainly nothing could satisfy His heart as a redemption for us, but that we should come to follow God as dear children in the fellowship of His own sonship. Unless we contemplate His sense of our sin and His desire to accomplish for us this great salvation as livingly working in Him and practically influencing Him, we cannot understand how

truly He made His soul an offering for sin, when, receiving into Himself the full sense of the divine condemnation of sin, He dealt on behalf of man with the ultimate and absolute root of judgment in God, presenting the expiation of the due confession of sin, and in so doing at once opening for the divine forgiveness a channel in which it could freely flow to us,—and for us a way in which we could approach God. And, finally, unless we apprehend the encouraging considerations by which the love of Christ was sustained in making this expiatory offering unless we have present to our minds His faith in the deep yearnings of the Father's heart over men His offspring, joined with His own conscious experience in humanity which testified that these yearnings could be satisfied, unless we conceive to ourselves how naturally and necessarily these thoughts took the form of prayer, laying hold of that hope for man which was in God,-unless, as it were, we hear the intercession thus made for man, and see the grounds on which it proceeds, we cannot understand what is made known to us of the Name of God by the success of this pleading on our behalf,—we cannot see how this appeal to the heart of the Father becomes, in being responded to, the full revelation of the Father to us; and that in proportion as we apprehend the nature and grounds of that intercession, and realise that it has been perfectly responded to, we know the grace wherein we stand, what that faith in God is to which we are called, what the grounds are on which we are to put our trust in Him. Faith must make us present to the work of our redemption in its progress as well as in its result, so that the love which is working for us the difficulties which that love encounters—the way in which it deals with them—the salvation which it accomplishes-all may shed their light on our spirits and be to us the light of life.

But the faith that makes this history a reality to our spirits, while difficult as to every part of this realisation, is most difficult when we are occupied with that intercession of Christ which is the perfecting element in the atonement, -making it literally an offering. It is not so difficult to

realise how to the perfect holiness and love which were in Christ our sins should be so heavy a burden,-nor is it difficult to realise His intercourse with the Father while He bore our sins on His spirit as that response to the Father's mind concerning them which has now been represented as an expiatory confession of our guilt. We also easily see how the Saviour's own conscious experience in humanity, doing His Father's commandments, and abiding in His love, would both determine the character of the redemption which He would seek for us and be an element in His hope towards God for us,-a hope which He would cherish in conscious oneness with His Father. But when we consider Christ's hope for man as taking the form of intercession, and see that His knowledge of the Father's will is so far from suggesting an inactive waiting in the expectation that all will necessarily be as the Father wills, that on the contrary, that knowledge only moves to earnest pleading and entreaty,—the hope cherished seeking to realise itself by laying hold in a way of prayerful trust on that in the heart of the Father by which it is encouraged, then the difficulty that always haunts us as to the ordinance of prayer-the difficulty, I mean, of the idea of God's interposing prayer between His own loving desire for us and the fulfilment of that desire instead of fulfilling that desire without waiting to be entreated--this difficulty is felt to be present with our minds in this highest region in which the Son is represented as by prayer, and intense and earnest and agonising prayer, obtaining for us from the Father what the Father has infinitely desired to give -what He has given in giving Him to us as our Redeemer to whose intercession it is yielded. Here we have the divine love in Christ pleading with the divine love in the Father, and thus obtaining for us that eternal life, which yet in giving the Son to be our Saviour the Father is truly said to have given. The difficulty is that which haunts us in our own prayers; but it is the same, and no other and if we are enabled to deal rightly with it as it meets us here it will be an increase of practical freedom to us in our individual walk with God.

What I have now been attempting has been to see and trace the atonement by its own light, viz. the light of the life which was taking form in it according to the words, "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men." Proceeding in this way the intercession of Christ has presented itself as a form which His love must naturally take. That it would take the form of desiring for us what His intercession asked for us was quite clear. But we could not conceive of that desire as cherished in conscious weakness and dependence on the Father and yet in conscious oneness with the Father, without conceiving of it as uttering itself to the Father in prayer. With all the weight of all our need upon His spirit-bearing our burden-that He should cast this burden upon the Father appeared the perfection of sonship towards the Father and brotherhood towards us. And as this intercession seemed a natural form for the love of Christ to take, so did it seem what must be to the Father a sacrifice of a sweet-smelling savour; and we felt that no aspect of the perfect sonship in humanity which the life of Christ presented to the Father could be more welcome to the heart of the Father than that of love to men, His brethren, as thus perfected in intercession; especially as being intercession for brethren who also were enemies, making the intercession to be the perfection of forgiving love. This indeed was to God, who is love, a sacrifice of a sweet-smelling savour from humanity which must have been infinitely grateful in itself; while as part of the perfection that was in Christ this intercession was a most excellent part of that promise for humanity in respect of which Christ's perfection is to be contemplated as pleading for humanity. Any father who has ever been privileged to have one child pleading for forgiveness to another child for an offence which has been unkindness to the interceding child himself has here some help to his faith in his own experience.

But though all this is felt by us to be natural and what arises out of the life of love which was in Christ, yet, approaching it not by this path but by the path of

meditation on Christ as the gift of the Father,—meditation on all that interest in us which Christ's love is feeling, and under the power of which it is interceding, as already in the Father and already desiring to impart all that Christ is asking for us-nay, as having really bestowed it in the gift of Christ-the difficulty of which I have spoken suggests itself. We ask, how has this intercession been necessary ? We ask, how Christ should have felt it necessary? A Christian philosopher of our own time has said that whereas once he had thought of prayer as the expression of a want of faith in God's goodness he afterwards came to understand that prayer was the highest expression of faith in God's goodness. Assuredly He who came to make known the goodness of God and that towards us men it is the highest form of goodness, even fatherliness, which on a superficial view might seem most to supersede all prayer,-leaving room only for thanksgiving and praise has been as distinguished by the depth and intensity of His praying to the Father as of His faith in the Father's fatherliness: nor is there any part of His testimony for the Father as He was the witness for God more marked than His testimony that God is the hearer and answerer of prayer. In Him we see that knowledge of the Father's will and confidence in His love supersede not prayer, but, on the contrary, only move to prayer, giving strength for it-making it the prayer of faith and hope and love-love perfected in thus flowing back to its own fountain. The fact of Christ's "intercession for the transgressors" accords with and confirms what we feel in meditating on the life of love that was in Him, viz. that such intercession was the fitting form for His bearing of our burdens to take, what in the light of the knowledge of the hope that was for us in God it must take; while to give place to the thought of anything dramatic-the acting out of a pre-arranged part-in regard to that recorded intercession, (and the intercession indicated is infinitely beyond what is recorded,) would be to lose all sense of life and reality in Christ.

But let us try to approach this great and fundamental