LECTURE XLIV. JUNE 23, 1850. 2 CORINTHIANS, v. 14, 15. -"For 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, and rose again." IT may be that in reading these verses, some of us have understood them in a sense foreign to that of the Apostle. It may have seemed that the arguments ran thus: :- Because Christ died upon the cross for all, therefore all must have been in a state of spiritual death before; and if they were asked what doctrines are to be elicited from this passage, they would reply," the doctrine of universal depravity, and the constraining power of the gratitude due to Him who died to redeem us from it." There is, however, in the first place, this fatal objection to such an interpretation, that the death here spoken of is used in two diametrically opposite senses. In reference to Christ, death literal; in reference to all, death spiritual. Now, in the thought of St. Paul, the death of Christ was always viewed as liberation from the power of evil: "in that he died, he died unto sin once; and again, "he that is dead is freed from sin." The literal death, then, in one clause, means freedom from sin; the spiritual death of the next is slavery to it. Wherein, then, lies the cogency of the Apostle's reasoning? How does it follow, that because Christ died to evil, all before that must have died to God? Of course that doctrine is true in itself, but it is not the doctrine of the text. In the next place, the ambiguity belongs only to the English word—it is impossible to make the mistake in the original: the word which stands for were, is a word which does not imply a continued state, but must imply a single finished act. It cannot by any possibility imply that before the death of Christ men were in a state of death-it can only mean, they became dead at the moment when Christ died. If you read it thus, the meaning of the English will emerge if one died for all, then all died; and the Apostle's argument runs thus, that if one act as the representative of all, then his act is the act of all. If the ambassador of a nation makes reparation in a nation's name, or does homage for a nation, that reparation, or that homage, is the nation's act - if one did it for all, then all did it. So that instead of inferring that because Christ died for all, therefore before that all were dead to God, his natural inference is that, therefore, all are now dead to sin. Once more, the conclusion of the Apostle is exactly the reverse of that which this interpretation attributes to him he does not say that Christ died in order that men might not die, but exactly for this very purpose, that they might; and this death he represents in the next verse by an equivalent expression the life of unselfishness: "that they which live might henceforth live not unto themselves." The "dead" of the first verse, are 66 they that live" of the second. : The form of thought finds its exact parallel in Romans, vi. 10, 11. Two points claim our attention : I. The vicarious sacrifice of Christ. I. The vicariousness of the sacrifice is implied in the word "for." A vicarious act is an act done for another. When the Pope calls himself the vicar of Christ, he implies that he acts for Christ. The vicar or viceroy of a kingdom, is one who acts for the king a vicar's act, therefore, is virtually the act of the principal whom he represents; so that if the papal doctrine were true, when the vicar of Christ pardons, Christ has pardoned. When the viceroy of a kingdom has published a proclamation, or signed a treaty, the sovereign himself is bound by those acts. - The truth of the expression for all is contained in this fact, that Christ is the representative of humanity properly speaking, the reality of human nature. This is the truth contained in the emphatic expression, "Son of Man." What Christ did for humanity was done by humanity, because in the name of humanity. For a truly vicarious act does not supersede the principal's duty of performance, but rather implies and acknowledges it. Take the case from which this very word of vicar has received its origin. In the old monastic times, when the revenues of a cathedral or a cure fell to the lot of a monastery, it became the duty of that monastery to perform the religious services of the cure. But inasmuch as the monastery was a corporate body, they appointed one of their number, whom they denominated their vicar, to discharge those offices for them. His service did not supersede theirs, but was a perpetual and standing acknowledgment that they, as a whole and individually, were under the obligation to perform it. The act of Christ is the act of humanity that which all humanity is bound to do. His righteousness does not supersede our righteousness, nor does His sacrifice supersede our sacrifice. It is the representation of human life and human sacrifice - vicarious for all, yet binding upon all. That Christ died for all is true 1. Because He was the victim of the sin of all. In the peculiar phraseology of St. Paul, he died unto sin. He was the victim of sin He died by sin. It is the appalling mystery of our redemption that the Redeemer took the attitude of subjection to evil. There was scarcely a form of evil with which Christ did not come in contact, and by which he did not suffer. He was the victim of false friendship and ingratitude, the victim of bad government and injustice. He fell a sacrifice to the vices of all classes to the selfishness of the rich, and the fickleness of the poor: intolerance, formalism, scepticism, hatred of goodness, were the foes which crushed Him. In the proper sense of the word, He was a victim. He did not adroitly wind through the dangerous forms of evil, meeting it with expedient silence. Face to face, and front to front, He met it, rebuked it, and defied it; and just as truly as he is a voluntary victim whose 'body opposing the progress of the car of Juggernaut is crushed beneath its monstrous wheels, was Christ a victim to the world's sin: because pure, He was crushed by impurity: because just, and real, and true, He waked up the rage of injustice, hypocrisy, and falsehood. Now this was the sin of all. Here arises at once a difficulty: it seems to be most unnatural to assert that in any one sense He was the sacrifice of the sin of all. We did not betray Him - that was Judas's act-Peter denied Him Thomas doubted Pilate pronounced sentence - it must be a figment to say that these were our acts; we did not watch Him like the Pharisees, nor circumvent Him like the Scribes and lawyers; by what possible sophistry can we be involved in the complicity of that guilt? The savage of New Zealand who never heard of Him, the learned Egyptian and the voluptuous Assyrian who died before He came; how was it the sin of all? The reply that is often given to this query is wonderfully unreal. It is assumed that Christ was conscious, by His Omniscience, of the sins of all mankind; that the duplicity of the child, and the crime of the assassin, and every unholy thought that has ever passed through a human bosom, were present to His mind in that awful hour as if they were His own. This is utterly unscriptural. Where is the single text from which it can be, except by force, extracted? Besides this, it is fanciful and sentimental; and again, it is dangerous, for it represents the whole atonement as a fictitious and shadowy transaction. There is a mental state in which men have felt the burden of sins which they did not commit. There have been cases in which men have been mysteriously excruciated with the thought of having committed the unpardonable sin. But to represent the mental phenomena of the Redeemer's mind as in any way resembling this to say that His conscience was oppressed with the responsibility of sins which He had not committed is to confound a state of sanity with the delusions of a half lucid mind, and the workings of a healthy conscience with those of one unnatural and morbid. There is a way, however, much more appalling and much more real, in which this may be true, without resorting to any such fanciful hypothesis. Sin has a great power in this world: it gives laws like those of a sovereign, which bind us all, and to which we are all submissive. There are current maxims in Church and State, in society, in trade, in law, to which we yield obedience. For this obedience every one is responsible; for instance, in trade, and in the profession of law, every one is the servant of practices the rectitude of which his heart can only half approve every one complains of them, yet all are involved in them. Now, when such sins reach their climax, as in the case of national bankruptcy, or an unjust acquittal, there may be some who are, in a special sense, the actors in the guilt; but evidently, for the bankruptcy, each member of the community is responsible in that degree and so far as he himself acquiesced in the duplicities of public dealing; every careless juror, every unrighteous judge, every false witness, has done his part in the reduction of society to that state in which the monster injustice has been perpetrated. In the riot of a tumultuous assembly by night, a house may be burnt, or a murder committed; in the eye of the law, all who are aiding and abetting there, are each in his degree responsible for that crime; there may be difference in guilt, from the degree in which he is guilty who with his own hand perpetrated the deed, to that of him who merely joined the rabble from mischievous curiosity-degrees from that of wilful murder to that of more or less excusable homicide. The Pharisees were declared by the Saviour to be guilty of the blood of Zacharias, the blood of righteous Abel, and of all the saints and prophets who fell before He came. But how were the Pharisees guilty? They built the sepulchres of the prophets, |