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this pleading cost her nothing. The shadow of it hangs over her all day. ,
(3) But no sooner do you carry the process to this point than you become aware that more is wanted, that the principle on which you have been acting must have other and larger applications, or else it exists in vain. For your own heart has not fire enough to melt the heart of ice with which you accept the chill of contact. Your best hope is to become a conductor, by which a stronger compassion may minister healing through His stripes. Try, then, this experiment. Speak of Jesus, of His love, of those keen fleshly sufferings which were the symbol, the outward and visible sign, the sacrament, of His wounded heart. Do this, and the pettish child and the hardened criminal alike will be made aware of the powers of the world to come. They may resist, being free agents, but only by a great and fatal effort. And what draws all men to Him is that sublime and awful sorrow endured for us. Tell me only that He was a sufferer, and His story is still pathetic ; but merely as one old, old tragedy among the many which afflict the world. Say even that He loved me ; and I may fail, though striving, to return His love. But tell me that He suffered for my sake, because He crossed the fatal circle of my sins, and drew down, like electricity flashing out in lightning, the bolt on His own head ; tell me that He intended this, and, for love of me, deliberately broke the bar which severs man from man, made my penalty His own, took my stripes and the chastisement of my peace, and, if I can believe it, I will adore Him.^
IF Wherever there is love, true unselfish love, there is vicarious suffering. I remember at one time being entertained by some friends of mine. Their home was a palatial building amongst wonderful hills, below which wound a broad and majestic river, and beyond the river a splendid city. The house was filled with every evidence of wealth and culture and pleasure. We had spent the day in various delights — in woods and gardens, with music and jest. At night-time, when all the others had gone to rest and the great house was still, and only the candles lightened the gloom of the old panelled room in which we were, my host and I sat together. A great change had come over him. The cheerful smile was put off like a mask. The easy careless talk was stilled.
» G. A. Chadwick.
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Sad lines marked his mouth, and his head seemed suddenly bowed with age. He told me of a tragedy in that beautiful home — of the wayward child far away, whose sins and sorrows her parents unceasingly raourjied. Notliing could make up to the father for the love of his daughter, and in the background of his life he suffered and wept. We all know what that means. The innocent every- where suffer for the guilty, the loving for the loveless. We form a web of humanity, closely woven, not a series of unknitted threads, and where guilt enters, a quiver of pain passes through the race. It was thus that Jesus suffered. His love, beyond the love of women, made Him susceptible to all the sorrow of the world. As the lightning conductor draws the electric flash to itself, so in the bosom of Christ the flashes and bolts of the world's wickedness buried themselves.^
4. The iniquity of us all. — Whose iniquity is it ? It is that of us all — all of us, poor self-destroyed sheep, if only we look to Jesus for ourselves. I vex myself sometimes by questioning whether I can possibly be among the elect whom God has chosen. But did I ever hear of a case in which His sovereignty has hampered His love ? Did I ever know of a seeker who came to the Saviour and was refused, because God had not ordained him to everlasting life ? The one thing which keeps me from the Shepherd is my unbelief ; it never is the Divine decree. I am one of us all, and Christ has room for me.^
1. The work of Christ is potentially as universal as the sin to which it is addressed. In this our Lord stands separated from every one, who, possessed of an inspiration, sought to aid, to enlighten, to elevate his fellows. One man addresses his best energies to abolish slavery ; another to mitigate the humbling pressure of poverty ; another to the dispersion of the fogs of ignorance, superstition, prejudice ; another to the alleviation of disease and to the advancement of the public health. These are beneficent enterprises, but they are partial, transient, and mainly material. Christ compasses the infinities. He walks amid the immensities of the spiritual, the permanent, the universal, the eternal. These are factors in a conception which never dawned upon the loftiest intellectual day. They were as natural to Christ as His sinlessness.
^ N. H. Marsliall, Atonement and Progress, p. 80. * A. Smellie.
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Our text begins and ends with the word " all." Now, what each of us has got to do is to go in at the one " all," and to come out at the other. I must go in at the " all " of condemna- tion, by acknowledging that I have gone astray like a lost sheep. And I must come out at the " all " of justification, by believing that the Lord has made my iniquity to light on the head of Jesus Christ.