capable of being
imparted to each man, when it had passed through Death to Resurrection.
If the grain die--only if it die first--"it bringeth forth much fruit."
"If I go not away, the Comforter, the Paraclete, will not come unto you."
Only by virtue of that "going away" of Christ, which includes His Death,
Resurrection, and Ascension, could the Spirit which indwells His
glorified manhood, come to impart the life of Christ to the members of
the Body of Christ. Pentecost is the final consummation of man's
atonement and redemption.

We may still more briefly summarise these two fundamental principles
which constitute the sacrificial aspect of the Death of Christ.

1. Christ died, not that we should be excused from offering, but that we
might be enabled to offer the one acceptable sacrifice to God, that is,
the sacrifice of ourselves in that service of God which is the service of
our fellow-men.

2. Christ died, in order that we might receive His Divine Life into
ourselves, through the indwelling Spirit of Christ bestowed by the
Ascended Lord.

Thus the Death of Christ is not merely a sacrifice, one out of many, or
(as has been so mistakenly taught) simply the last of a series. It is
rather the one sacrifice which alone realises the ideas of which all
other so-called sacrifices were but the faint adumbrations. As the one
true sacrifice it stands at the end of an age-long spiritual evolution.
In the physical evolution, the first protoplasmic cell was not man,
though it pointed forward to man, and implied man. So the _totem_ feast
and the old Jewish rites, were not truly and genuinely sacrifices, though
both pointed forward to and implied the realisation of sacrifice in the
Death of Christ. That Death was the fulfilment of the universal human
aspiration, the assurance of the truth of that ancient dream of mankind,
that man was capable of being, and might attain to be "partaker of the
Divine nature."

And this whole teaching of ancient ritual as fulfilled and accomplished
on the Cross of Jesus Christ, is summed up for us in our Christian
Eucharist where on the one hand we, in union with the sacrifice of
Christ, "offer and present ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a
reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice "to God; and, on the other hand,
by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of man, become
partakers of Him Who, in the words of St. Athanasius, "was made man, that
we might be made God," became pa