titude of
different ways of example, appeal to our pity and compassion and the
like, His death was of use to mankind. But when he says 'He died
_for our sins_,' I take leave to think that that expression has
no meaning, unless it means that He died as the expiation and
sacrifice for men's sins. I ask you, in what intelligible sense could
Christ 'die for our sins' unless He died as bearing their punishment
and as bearing it for us? And then, finally, 'He died and rose ...
according to the Scriptures,' and so fulfilled the divine purposes
revealed from of old.

To the fact that a man was crucified outside the gates of Jerusalem,
'and rose again the third day,' which is the narrative, there are
added these three things--the dignity of the Person, the purpose of
His death, the fulfilment of the divine intention manifested from of
old. And these three things, as I said, turn the narrative into a
Gospel.

So, brethren, let us remember that, without all three of them, the
death of Jesus Christ is nothing to us, any more than the death of
thousands of sweet and saintly men in the past has been, who may have
seen a little more of the supreme goodness and greatness than their
fellows, and tried in vain to make purblind eyes participate in their
vision. Do you think that these twelve fishermen would ever have
shaken the world if they had gone out with the story of the Cross,
unless they had carried along with it the commentary which is
included in the words which I have emphasised? And do you suppose
that the type of Christianity which slurs over the explanation, and
so does not know what to do with the facts, will ever do much in the
world, or will ever touch men? Let us liberalise our Christianity by
all means, but do not let us evaporate it; and evaporate it we surely
shall if we falter in saying with Paul, 'I declare, first of all,
that which received,' how that the death and resurrection were the
death and resurrection of the Christ, 'for our sins, according to the
Scriptures.' These are the facts which make Paul's gospel.

II. Now I ask you to look, in the second place, at what establishes
the facts.

We have here, in this chapter, a statement very much older than our
existing written gospels. This epistle is one of the four letters of
Paul which nobody that I know of--with some quite insignificant
exceptions in modern times--has ever ventured to dispute. It is
admittedly the writing of the Apostle, written before the