502 FRUITFULNESS THROUGH DEATH
elevation of mankind. In His brief public career He suggested much to the influential men of His time, set all men who knew Him a-thinking, aided many to reform their lives, and removed a large amount of distress and disease. He communicated to the world a mass of new truth, so that those who have lived after Him have stood at quite a different level of knowledge from that of those who lived before Him. And yet how little of the proper results of Christ's influence, how little understanding of Chris- tianity, do you find even in His nearest friends until He died. By the visible appearance and the external benefits and the false expectations His greatness created, the minds of men were de- tained from penetrating to the spirit and mind of Christ. It was expedient for them that He should go away, for until He went they depended on His visible power, and His spirit could not be wholly received by them. They were looking at the husk of the seed, and its life could not reach them. They were looking for help from Him instead of themselves becoming like Him.
^ When Jesus was upon the earth, the Spirit of God was in some peculiar sense associated with, and confined to, His person • and He taught His disciples that He must needs depart from them, that the Spirit might be poured out in larger measure. " I tell you the truth ; It is expedient for you that I go away ; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I depart, I will send him unto you." And, therefore. He departed from the world, that He might come nearer to it ; inasmuch as a spiritual presence is nearer than a bodily presence. The one living temple of God was broken down and removed out of sight, that every Christian might be a temple of the Holy One.^
^ This truth is not here spoken for the first time. It is the truth wrapt up in the first promise respecting the woman's seed, the man with the bruised heel. It is the truth to which Abel's sacrifice pointed so explicitly. It is the truth coming out in all the Levitical sacrifices and rites. It is the truth uttered by prophets : " When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days." It is the truth announced by apostles : " Without shedding of blood is no remission." It is the truth to which such prominence is given in the Apocalypse, when the Son of God is seen as the Lamb slain, and when the saints sing, " Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood." «
^ Fergtu FerguDon. ' Hotatioa Bonar.
ST. JOHN XII. 24 503
2. The fruit of Christ's death. — As seed produces grain of its own kind, so Christ produces men like Christ. He ceasing to do good in this world as a living man, a multitude of others by this very cessation are raised in His likeness. By His death we receive both inclination and ability to become with Him sons of God. " The love of Christ constraineth us ; because we thus judge that if one died for all, then were all dead ; and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto^him which died for them." By His death He has effected an entrance for this law of self-surrender into human life, has exhibited it in a perfect form, and has won others to live as He lived.
^ Who shall measure the fruitfulness of that one death ? It is the source of all true thought, of all holy feeling, of all noble action, of all the heavenly graces of the Spirit. We see but the beginning of what it is designed to bear. The day alone will declare it ; that day when Jesus will appear at the head of the whole family of God, saying, " Behold I and the children which God has given me." ^
^ The voluntary death of the Son of God, His self-sacrifice put mankind in a new position. He came back from the grave with the powers of Godhead no longer in abeyance. He came back to act no longer according to the restrictions which He had imposed on Himself during those previous three and thirty years ; no longer to confine Himself to man's condition, to be seen only in one place, heard only by one company, teaching a handful of men ; but He was to act henceforth in the plenitude of Godhead. He was to give efficacy to the work of those three years of His ministry, He was to fill His sacraments with grace, to make them channels for conveying and renewing life, for imparting the life that was in Himself to His members. He was to write His new law on the heart, i.e. to work it into the mind, to make it men's pleasure to obey. He was to perform to the end of time moral miracles, corresponding to those first physical ones. The Apostles He had trained were to perpetuate a succession to the end of time. The society He founded was never to be broken up. The prayer He had issued, whenever earnestly offered, should be supported by His own intercession. The cross He died on should be for ever dear. Not only the literal cross should be honoured, be worn as an ornament and decoration, be lifted high over cities, wave in banners, be the ground-plan of cathedrals ; but, far more important