which had ever existed in the divine mind. It was thus fashioned, transformed, and spiritualized, at his ascension. When he rose to take his seat at the right hand of God-just, probably as he was lifted from the earth-" in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," all the attributes of his being were altered. "He put on incorruption." "He now dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him." Having "died once," ," and "risen again," he now "liveth forever"-the nature he assumed being at once filled and invested with a divine, glorious, and incorruptible life!

Now, the whole of what we thus ascribe to the Redeemer had never before been combined and exhibited in the same person. Others had been raised from death to life-some had been translated without dying -yet he was "the first-begotten from the dead," "the first-fruits of them that sleep." In "all things" he was to have "the pre-eminence ;" and he has it in this, as well as in others, that he was the first of the race (as yet the only one), who was "made perfect" in respect to all that was possible to humanity. Enoch and Elijah had been miraculously translated, but they did not die. Lazarus and others were raised from the grave, but they came forth to die again. In Christ alone the entire process was successively passed through in all its parts, and carried on to its ultimate completeness. He died and was buried—he was raised and changed-he ascended into heaven and was glorified there! It was meet and fitting that it should thus be, with him who is at once the model and the Master. "He died, rose again, and re-lives, and is the Lord alike of the dead and the living."

Moses, it is true, of whom it is said that he was "buried," appeared on the mount of transfiguration; but as we have no reason to believe that he was raised from the grave for the purpose, but only assumed the appearance, for the sake of visibility, of a glorified man, this does not subvert the position we have taken. The case of Elijah was different from his; and you observe, in passing, that the event we are referring to, when connected with a remark formerly made, strikingly shows how literally it might be said that Christ "illustrated," or "threw light on," life and immortality. The sons of the prophets thought and suggested, "that the Spirit of the Lord might have thrown Elijah on some mountain, or into some valley." Christ, if we may so speak, produced Elijah, -brought him forth from his mysterious abode, and set him before the disciples invested with the luster of a beatified immortal, and thus showed to the three, and through them to the church, what the upper life really is! Low, carnal, and mistaken conceptions were thus at once corrected and rebuked; althongh it still remained for the Lord himself to exhibit the perfect in his own person.

5. In the last place, the life, which was thus authenticated by the doctrine, and exemplified in the person of Christ, is further "illustrated" through the gospel," as the gospel, properly so called, explains, in some

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degree, in what way the blessing has been secured for us, and is brought within our reach.

Christ came-it may without affectation or paradox be said—not so much to "preach" the gospel, as to be the gospel. He came to do some. thing; to do that which should constitute the essence of the “ 'glad tidings" which others were to go forth to preach and to proclaim. If the gospel consisted merely in the assurance of the efficacy of repentance, a call to reformation, and the authoritative announcement of "life and immortality," it is sufficiently obvious that any well-attested prophetic teacher would have been competent to the task;-the whole thing, in fact, was, in this view of it, already done, before the Messiah appeared in the flesh. When he did appear, though he confirmed and enlarged existing truth, and added many important discoveries, still he did not so much appear to speak, as to act; his work was not so much to teach, as to accomplish; and what he had to accomplish was to be effected more by his death than by his life; he was the only being that ever visited our world of whom it could be said, that the grand object of his mission was to die!

If the gospel be regarded as only the verbal (though divine) authentication of immortality, Jesus must be reduced, in almost all respects, to the ordinary prophetic standard, as nothing more would have been necessary; but if the New Testament representations (or the obvious, or popular, import of those representations) of the Person and Work of The Christ are admitted, it will then follow that the gospel must be something more than didactic preaching or dogmatic discovery, since it required the wonders of incarnation and sacrifice. "Eternal life" is the gift of God, "through Jesus Christ." The gospel is "the promise of life, through Jesus Christ." He is not a voice merely, announcing a fact; but a power and a personality achieving an accomplishment. He effectuates something-something which, if it had not been done, the "promise" brought could not have been made-the "fact" declared would not have existed! To attempt fully to grasp this subject, in a discourse like the present, would be useless and vain; it would be to go over, or to pretend to go over, the whole field of evangelical interpretation of the Christian writings, and to discuss the rationale of the plan of redemption, and the heights and depths and varied aspects of the New Testament representations of the Redeemer. We purpose, therefore, to confine ourselves to one thing; to select one statement out of the multitude of Scripture statements on this subject; a single utterance—a far-sounding and deeply suggestive utterance we admit-one, however, recommended to our selection by its direct bearing on the topic in hand. We shall take this, confine ourselves to it, and out of it bring forth what, we trust, will be a sufficient exposition of the point or principle which, in this last particular, we wish to elucidate.

The manner, then, in which Christ delivers us from death, and is at

length to confer upon us an incorruptible life, may be gathered, in some measure, from the comprehensive words in which the apostle concludes his discourse on the resurrection, in the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, 15th chapter, 55th, 56th, and 57th verses: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

Now, venturing to follow the flight of the apostle as he rises into the regions of passion and poetry-which are only, however, those of truth and argument when instinct with life and invested with beauty; the reason helped by the imagination to apprehend spiritual objective realities, or to trace the course of a logical process-rising with the apostle thither, and using the PERSONIFICATIONS which he has fixed glowing and alive in his language, the general import, we should say, of these pregnant expressions might be given, sufficiently for our present purpose, in the following form: Man has four enemies opposing his entrance on immortal life-the Grave, Death, Sin, and the Law. The Law is violated by Sin; Sin is punitively succeeded by Death; the Grave receives the dead. Now, to make humanity immortal, the remedy for its condition must appropriately reach every step of the process, and must conquer, or conciliate, each of the adversaries. It might be thought that omnipotence had nothing to do but to take the matter into its own hand, and to make man immortal, good, and happy, if it so willed. It is forgotten often, that omnipotence has its limits-that there are objects which it can not touch, and regions into which it can not enter.

Observe its action in relation to the four adversaries of humanity as now standing before us, and mark where it would be stopped, if it acted alone, in seeking to secure or achieve our deliverance. By mere power God could raise the dead to life. He could thus conquer the Grave, and compel it to "yield up" its dead. Supposing Death stood ready to meet them as they returned, and to inflict upon them his stroke again; then, by mere power, God could subdue him, and could continue men forever on the earth. But this would not be a desirable immortality, nor is it that either of the Christian Scriptures or of human speculation. The two other adversaries must be met, if man is to attain such an immortality as his nature craves and the Bible predicts; and the question is, whether these, also, can be got out of the way by mere power?-or whether, should it advance as far as we have supposed, and triumph alike over the Grave and Death-Sin and the Law would not resolutely confront it, and stand in its path, like the armed cherubim, bearing and flashing the flaming sword that guards the way to the tree of life? Advancing, then, to the third of the four adversaries, we ask, Could God by power destroy Sin? Could he, by a physical act, annihilate it? Could he, which is substantially the same thing, by pure prerogative pass it by -treating it with indifference, and showing that by him it was "nothing

accounted of?" Could he make a seraph out of a Tiberius or a Borgia, each retaining his memory and consciousness, as he can make an angel or an archangel out of nothing? Now, we mean to say, without going at present into the proof of the assertion, that the Bible teaches that the same stroke by which God, if it were possible, should by mere power, destroy Sin, would be a stroke that would fall equally on the Law. The third and fourth of the adversaries are so inseparably united, that they must be treated on the same terms, and met with the same weapons, as they must stand or fall together. But the Law is the mirror of God, the emanation of his perfections, the element of order to all worlds. To destroy that by a stroke, would be to annihilate the rule and standard of obedience, would be an injury, so to speak, to God's own nature, and an injustice to the virtuous universe.

God has the physical power to do many things which yet we say he can not do; that is, he has the physical power to do wrong; for right and wrong are not things that he can make for himself or unmake, but have an existence distinct from his will, except as that will is the expression of his own eternal and necessary rightness. He could throw the whole material universe into confusion; could suspend the laws of all planetary harmony, and dash suns and worlds against each other, as if all the stars were drunk or mad. But it would not become him to do this. It would not be fitting in him. It would not exalt his character in the view of created intelligence, or be in consistency with what he owed to himself. Therefore, we say, he could not do this; he could not throw the material universe into disorder. But much less can we conceive it possible that he should throw the moral universe into disorder! and he would do this, if, by physical omnipotence, he destroyed sin, because, this would amount to the virtual or actual destruction of the law -moral law. It follows, therefore, that after all that power is capable of effecting to secure our immortality-an immortality of virtue as well as life-two of our adversaries out of the four remain untouched, and incapable of being touched, by such weapons as it wields. The grave and death may both, in some sort, be discomfited by force, but sin and the law can not be reached by it; they still live; and, to secure our deliverance in a way at once suited to our natue and honorable to God, they must, as moral opponents, be met and overcome by a moral pro

cess.

That process is the redemptive work of the Son of God-his propitiatory sacrifice and mighty mediation; it is not merely the repentance of the sinner and his return to virtue, together with the divine pity and love. All that can be conceived of as alike passing in the experience of the human, or in the depths of the divine, paternal mind, is recognized by the gospel-but the gospel itself is something more; it is something additional to the feelings respectively of both God and man, and consists in the facts accomplished in Christ-emphatically the cross on which

he died, where, meeting together, men and God can be reconciled or at-oned. By means of this (the sacrifice of the cross), a foundation is laid for the forgiveness of sin, in those who trust in it and plead it with God, on a reason which, however, in most respects, inexplicable to us, is admitted by the law to be appropriate and sufficient; it approves and accepts it, as at once preserving its honor, establishing its claims, and aiding its rule, at the very time that it provides escape from its penalties. The law, therefore, consents to the delivery of the sinner from the power and consequences of sin-by which, of course, sin is, to all intents and purposes, destroyed; but this being done by what, so to speak, has conciliated the law, not destroyed it-for law must remain untouched, and be itself immortal-the law is changed from an adversary to a friend; its opposition is not only taken away, but that which it opposed while sin was alike, it can now itself forward and facilitate.

By a moral process, sin and the law, our moral adversaries, are thus overthrown--the one conquered, the other conciliated-through that great redeeming act, which emphatically constitutes "the glorious gospel of the blessed God." The penitent at first may mournfully say, "The sting of death is sin-the strength of sin is the law." "O, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this double destruction?" but, becoming a believer as well as a penitent, and awaking up to the apprehension of the gospel and the hope it inspires, his tone changes from mourning to music, from despair to exultation, as he bursts forth, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Thanks be unto God that giveth ME the victory-through our Lord Jesus Christ." True, "the sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the Law," but Christ, by his atonement, takes away for every penitent that believeth on him, the sting from death and the strength from sin, by procuring for him pardon, in harmony with the principles of that LAW, which is itself the strength of the one, and which causes it to become the sting of the other.

The two moral adversaries of man being thus disarmed, by being respectively destroyed or transformed by moral means; the other two, which are in their nature physical, and which, as we have seen, can be discomfited by force, may now be contemplated as destined to destruction by there ultimately being brought to act upon them that sort of agency which is of a nature with themselves. He who redeems the soul from sin, is able to redeem the body from the grave; he who satisfies and propitiates the law, is able to deliver from the grasp of death. He is able to accomplish these latter results-these confessedly lower and secondary achievements-" by the operation of that mighty power, by which he can subdue all things unto himself." Our physical degradation shall be removed by the force of a physical omnipotence; that is sufficient to overcome at once, by a single act, the grave and death, by transforming the living and reanimating the dead, "changing our vile