ST. MATTHEW xxvi. 28 431
3. Theology has long laboured to explain the death of Christ on the theory that God, not man, was the problem : God's anger rather than man's cleaving to his sin. God was thought of as caring supremely for His outraged law, as indeed being bound by His law, as though law were a Divine Being with independent rights and a claim to compensation, as though a father could love a rule more than his own child. The difficulty lies in what we have made of ourselves. God's task is not to overcome His own resentment and say " I forgive," but to forgive so as to heal us of our self-inflicted wounds, to inspire us to forgive ourselves, to trust and hope for ourselves by trusting and hoping in His eternal love and patience. His forgiveness is not a word, or an act, but a self- communication. God Himself is the Atonement. "He is the propitiation for our sins." We may have done badly, shamefully. Good men may condemn us, suspect and distrust us, justly, for we condemn and distrust ourselves. But One believes in us and for us, hopes for us. God in Christ stands by the soul forsaken of all others. We " were redeemed, not with corruptible things, with silver or gold, . . . but with precious blood . . . even the blood of Christ."
Tf No one that has ever read Tennyson's Guinevere can have forgotten the great forgiveness scene with which it closes. The guilty wife lies prostrate at her husband's feet, and grovels with her face against the floor. " Lo ! I forgive thee as Eternal God forgives," said Arthur. " Do thou for thine own soul the rest." Ah ! but one who forgives like God should do and say something more. A husband mediating God's forgiveness should show him- self able to trust a wife that can no longer trust herself, love one that loathes herself, hope for one that can only despair for herself. So the atoning love of God takes hold of Arthur, and he pours the ointment of love on the golden hair that lies so low, and he pours hope like oil into the dark soul and lights the promise of future days:
"Hereafter in that world where all are pure We two may meet before high God, and thou Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know I am thine husband."
And while she grovell'd at his feet, She felt the King's breath wander o'er her neck, And in the darkness o'er her fallen head, Perceived the waving of his hands that blest.
432 THE BLOOD OF THE COVENANT
Does not the human truth of that come to you ? Do you not see that beyond the wrong done to Arthur was the wrong done to herself? The task of forgiveness was not to slake the king's wrath, but to redeem the queen's soul and cure her of being the thing she had made of herself.1
4. The blood speaks of a life infused. " The blood is the life," says the physiology of the Hebrews. The blood is the life, and when men drink of that cup they symbolize the fact that Christ's own life and spirit are imparted to them that love Him. " Except ye eat the flesh, and drink the blood of the Son of man, ye have no life in you." The very heart of Christ's gift to us is the gift of His own very life to be the life of our lives. In deep, mystical reality He Himself passes into our being, and the "law of the spirit of life makes us free from the law of sin and death," so that we may say, " He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit," and the humble believing soul may rejoice in this ; " I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." This is, in one aspect, the very deepest meaning of this Communion rite. As physicians sometimes tried to restore life to an almost dead man by the transfusion into his shrunken veins of the fresh warm blood from a young and healthy subject, so into our fevered life, into our corrupted blood, there is poured the full tide of the pure and perfect life of Jesus Christ Himself, and we live, not by our own power, or for our own will, or in obedience to our own caprices, but by Him and in Him, and with Him and for Ilim. This is the heart of Christianity — the possession within us of the life, the immortal life, of Him who died for us.
^| Whatever life had anywhere been found and lost, whatever life had never been found, was given to man in Christ. It may be that this or that portion of the vast inheritance of life has never as yet been claimed, or has been but doubtfully claimed, because faith in Him has been too petty or wilful in its scope as well as too feeble in its energy. But in Christ life was given in its fulness nevertheless, and in that due subordination which alone secures that nothing be lost. This is the one character of the Gospel which takes precedence of all others ; its many partial messages are unfoMings of its primary message of life. Salvation according to Scripture is nothing less than the preservation, restoration, or exaltation of life : while nothing that partakes or can partake of