ward sufferings of our
Lord should sometimes form the subject of our thoughts as a motive, and
one of the strongest motives, to penitence and love. But to lay such
stress on these as to exalt them into the real meaning of the sacrifice
of Christ, as constituting its value as a sacrifice, to regard them as in
some way changing the Mind of God towards us, is contrary to the whole
spirit of the New Testament. What the real teaching of the gospels is in
the matter, is made plain by two significant facts.

(i) While it is quite clear that the inspired writers regard the Death
of Christ, and the Christian life, as being, each of them, in a real
sense, a sacrifice, direct sacrificial language is applied sparingly to
the former, but without stint or hesitation to the latter. This is a
point which has been strikingly brought out by Professor Loftus in his
recent work on _The Ethics of the Atonement_.

(ii) While devoting a large portion of their narrative to the account of
the Death of Christ, they exercised a very great and marked reserve as
regards the physical details of the Crucifixion. In this respect the
gospels are in harmony with the earliest Christian representations, as
distinguished from the repulsive realism in which the medieval artists
revelled.

To ask, then, in what sense the Death of Christ was a sacrifice, is to
ask how far that Death realised the moral and spiritual truths which
underlay the ancient institution of sacrifice, and to which all
sacrifices ultimately pointed.

1. The first of these ideas, as we have seen, is that death is necessary
to the fulness of life, that life can only be won by the surrender of
life. That ancient conception constitutes the fundamental teaching of
Christ: "He that willeth to save his life, shall lose it, and he who
willeth to lose his life . . . shall save it unto life eternal." And of
that great truth, which is nothing less than the formative principle of
the Christian life, the Cross was the supreme expression "Herein have we
come to know what love is, because He laid down His life for us, and we
ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."

The laying down of life, self-sacrifice, of which the Cross is the
highest manifestation, alone brings life, alone is fruitful. "Except a
grain of corn fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone: but if it
die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

Selfishness, whether as self-assertion or self-seeking, is essentially
ba