3. Yet there must be points of contact between the cross of Christ and the cross which every follower of His has to carry. Unique in its redeeming efficacy, it is yet common in its ethical demand. Without this community of interest we should certainly feel more solitary and alone than ever He did in His agony.
^ Don't you yourself feel that the sacrifice of Christ was truly the sacrifice of self at the very root of the humanity? It is written in the Epistle to the Hebrews that He " put away sin by the sacrifice of himself." Sin consists in self-seeking ; and sin can
* Editk H. Divall, A Believer's Song$, 105.
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therefore be put away by no other means than the sacrifice of self — a sacrifice, however, which must be reproduced in every soul of man before he is individually delivered from sin. Christ's sacrifice cannot be unlike anything else in the world — it is the very type of what must be done by the spirit of Christ in every human being.^
Lord, when the sense of Thy sweet grace Sends up my soul to seek Thy face, Thy blessed eyes breed such desire, I die in Love's delicious fire.
0 Love, I am thy sacrifice;
Be still triumphant, blessed eyes ; Still shine on me, fair suns! that I Still may behold, though still I die.
Though still I die, I live again, Still longing so to be still slain ; So gainful is such loss of breath,
1 die e'en in desire of death. Still live in me this longing strife Of living death and dying life; For while Thou sweetly slayest me, Dead to myself, I live in Thee.^
IL
The Eeproduction of Cheist's Death in the Christian.
1. The relation of man to the cross in the act of faith is two- fold; the cross of Christ is that from which we escape by His presence there, and yet the cross of Christ is that to which we come in identification with Him. There is an aspect of the cross of Christ concerning which we never can say, " I have been cruci- fied with Christ " ; there is, on the other hand, an aspect of the cross of Christ concerning which every Christian man or woman ought to be able to say experimentally, as well as theoretically, " I have been crucified with Christ." The substitutionary work of the cross is outside me, but the principles upon which Jesus passed to the cross and accomplished the marvellous work are
* Letters of Thomas Erakine of Lmlathen, ii. 219. ' Eichard Crashaw.
GAL. II. 20 353
principles to which, in virtue of His substitutionary work thereon, I am called into identification of life with Him.
In the devotional literature of the Middle Ages one reads much of " the process of Christ," All that has been accomplished in the Eedeemer is reproduced in the life of the redeemed. This " process," however, begins not in the manger of Bethlehem, but on the cross of Calvary, It was in the article of death that our Lord finally and completely entered into our life of demerit and liability. And therefore the first step in our process of identifica- tion with Him is our entrance into His death. If Christ died instead of us, then He rose instead of us — which is blackest despair. He died for us, not instead of us. He did not die to save us from dying ; He died that we might die with Him, He did not rise instead of us ; He rose that we might rise with Him. St. Paul's words are decisive : " I have been crucified with Christ." Paul would never place an impassable gulf between Christ and His followers. To him religion was union with Christ, in death and in life.
2. We know what St. Paul meant by being "crucified with Christ." He meant the utter renunciation of every purpose that had once kindled his fiery soul into energy — the final forsaking of all the social charms or individual ambitions for which most men care to live; the acceptance without a murmur of a life-course that was restless and homeless, beset with ceaseless peril, and crowned with sorrow ; the patient endurance of the keen shafts of ingratitude flung at him by the churches he had formed, and by men who owed their all to him — it meant, in short, a self- crucifixion 80 profoundly real that the roll of ages has not its equal.
In the Epistle to the Galatians the Apostle talks thrice of nailing ug th^old sjelf ..on the cross where the Saviour of sinners surrendered His soul to death ; and although in each case the thought of the writer reaches far beyond the immediate scope of the particular reference, his deliberate purpose is to direct our attention successively to the believer's death to law, to sin, and to the world of temptation. The law, by which St. Paul means all the irritation, the tiresomeness, of the legal religion, and all the hardness and the Pharisaism which it produces, is nailed to the
2 COR. & GAL. — 23
354 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
cross. The flesh, with its affections and lusts, the personality as developed under the influence of desire and emotion running in certain habits, illicit or unclean, is nailed to the cross. And the world — by which he means the visible order of things as organized against God — is nailed to the cross.