This view of the moral unity of the achievement of Christ's earthly activities is the truth as it was in His own thought. His thought was this : ' Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life(^7(j riffrj/ti tV i^ixh" f^""), that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father ' ( Jn lO"' ''). Now there is absolutely nothing in these words to justify any theologian in limiting the application of them to what our Lord did during the hours of His Passion. What He did then, in the exercise of His powers of moral activity, was to submit, in a way perfectly pleasing to God, to the sort of death predestined for Him. Again, for Him who was in God, and who had God in Him, 'it was not death to die.' He never was more alive, in the highest ,ind deepest sense of the word as applied to a perfect moral being, than in the very moment on the cross wlien He cried with a loud voice, saying, 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit' (Lk 23^'')- He did indeed lay down His life in submitting to His death, which He indisputably contemplated in the same way as St. Peter did in the words, ' Him ... ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain ' (Ac 2=^, cf. Mt le^', Jn 7'=' 8^"). But how did it come to pass that He was able to lay down His life in dying, doing so in such a manner that His
Father loved Him in the doing of it and for the doing of it ? It so came to pass because He had never done anything else but lay down His life (i'^Xv) in living. All the moral jiowers of holy love, self-sacritice, and service that were individ- ualized in Him as the incarnate Son of God and man's Redeemer, — these powers, which were His life. He laid down, consecrated, employed, every moment and in every situation of His life of free activity, in order perfectly to fullil His life's voca- tion as determined for Ilim liy His Father's will and purpose, and by the moral necessities of the world which He had come to save. And it was because He did all this in living that He was able so successfully and triumphantly to do it all in dying. And the effect of this truth is neither to dim the moral splendour nor to detract from the moral value of our Lord's death, but rather to reveal how great was the moral splendour and value of all the activities, words, and deeds of His life.
(2) But if His life prepared Him for dying, His death on the cross raised the moral splendour and value of His whole life to its highest powers of revelation and effect in the human soul and in the moral history of the world. The supreme distinc- tion of the cross, as our Lord Himself understood it and trusted and hoped in it, as related to man's redemption, was the unique, stupendous, tragic con- junction of sin and righteousness and judgment, a moral tragedy of which the cross was but the out- ward visilih' syiiihol. The complex event for which the ciiis^ st:ni.l-; is the most momentous and the most ( reati\e iiK.ral event in the history of the world's moi.d enurse. In the tragic moral truth of this event God and Christ and man, God's righteousness and love in Christ, man's sin and salvation, and eternal judgment, were and are all directly concerned in the highest degree. The fact of Christ's death is thus pregnant with all the inexhaustible powers necessary for the moral re- generation of the individual human soul and of the human race. Out of this fact springs the inspiration necessary to illuminate the human conscience with divinest moral ideas, and to make it live in the divinest power of moral sentiment. And it is in this internal moral renewal and its manifestations that the soul finds its true redemption and its highest life ; so Christ Himself evidently thought (Jn 16''-").
i. It now remains to note, from the standpoint of the moral order of the world, some features of our Lord's place and work therein, as the Mediator between God and men. His work of mediation in the flesh ended with His death on the cross, and it was preliminary to His mediation in the Spirit (Jn 14'---" 16'-"). His mediation in the Spirit, which will be continued until the Kingdom of God is per- fected, is dependent for its existence and efficiency on the moral and historical conditions provided in His earthly life of obedience unto death, and in the revelation of sin, righteousness, and judgment in which the completion of His work in the flesh issued. What, then, are the nature, the objects, and the methods of our Lord's mediation ?
(1) Its general object is to save individuals from their sin by reconciling them to God, to perfect them as individuals in their moral nature and life, and to unite all who are thus saved in a life of eternal oneness with God, and with one another in Him. — (2) The sphere within which the mediation of Christ is carried on with a view to that end is that of the inward and immediate moral relations of God as a moral Being to men, and of men as moral beings to God. It was so even during the time of His earthly life and ministry in so far as His media- tion took real saving effect in the moral nature and life of any of His disciples. It is so still in