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 He 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 sin 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 burthen of sins which they
did