^ It is a false supposition that the ideal of infinite perfection cannot be a guidance for life, and that, looking at it, it is necessary to dismiss it with a motion of the hand, saying that it is useless to me because I can never attain it, or to degrade the ideal to the level on which my weakness wants to stand. To reflect in this manner is the same as though a navigator should say : " Since I cannot go in the direction indicated by the compass, I shall throw away the compass or cease looking at it, that is, I will abandon the ideal or will fasten the needle of the compass to the place which at a given moment will correspond to the direction of my vessel, that is, I will degrade the ideal in accordance with my weakness."
The ideal of perfection which Christ has given us is not a dream or a subject for rhetorical sermons, but a most necessary, most accessible guide of moral life for man, just as the compass is a necessary and accessible implement guiding the navigator ; all that is necessary is to believe in the one as in the other. In whatever situation a man may be, the teaching about the ideal, given by Christ, is suflicient in order to obtain the safest indica- tion of those acts which one may and which one may not perform. But it is necessary completely to believe in this teaching, this one
4o8 THE SINLESSNESS OF CHRIST
teaching, and to stop believing in any other, just as it is necessary for the navigator to believe in the compass, and to stop looking at and being guided by what he sees on both sides. One must know how to be guided by the Christian teaching, how to be guided by the compass, and for this it is most important to understand one's position, and to be able not to be afraid precisely to indicate one's own deflection from the one, ideal direction. No matter on what round man may stand, there is always a possibility of his approach- ing this ideal, and no position of his can be such that he should be able to say that he has attained it and no longer can strive after a greater approximation.^)
3. Christ is the Reconciler between God and man. — Christ's sinlessness affects the value of His sacrifice. The sinbearer, as all the types of the Mosaic law prefigured, must be himself sinless — "a lamb without blemish and without spot." The eternal, im- mutable, inevitable law of God claims an entire fulfilment. Who is to fulfil it ? One has said, " Lo, I come to do thy will, 0 God." Did He do it, or did He not ? He twice says of Himself that He did do it ; and at the supreme moments of His life. Once in His High Priest's prayer, after the Paschal supper — " I have glorified thee on the earth ; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do." Once, just before He died — " It is finished."
11 Let us conceive (if we may without irreverence) that some one single sin, untruthfulness, or vanity, or cruelty, could be really charged on Him, and what becomes of the atoning char- acter of His Death ? How is it conceivable that He should even have willed to die for a guilty world ? For while, if we look at it on one side, His death appears to have been determined by circumstances, on the other, it was as certainly the result of His own liberty of action. " No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself : I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." At once Priest and Sacrifice, Christ is represented in the Epistle to the Hebrews as "offering himself without spot to God." It was the crowning act of a life which was throughout sacrificial ; but had He been conscious of any inward stain, how could He have desired to offer Himself in sacrifice to free a world from sin ? Had there been in Him any personal evil to purge away, His Death might have been endured on account of His own guilt : it is His absolute Sinlessness that makes it certain that He died for others.^
^ Tolstoy, Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata ( Works, xviii. 431). * H. P, Liddon, Passiontide Semions, 14.
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A Time to Work,
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