as the Lord Jesus Christ, took a
cell from the substance of the virgin Mary, made it a mould and with
generating power wrought from it a real humanity--a new and distinct
humanity--and united it to his eternal personality; so that he
stands forth as the eternal God endowed with a human nature--with
two natures, human and divine, in one body and one person forever--
the infinite God-man.

Never do the apostles present him as a mere man. They present his
humanity as the background for his deity. His humanity in its most
literal revelation is always declared by them to be the revelation
and the manifestation of God. Never do the apostles attempt to
reason about the incarnation, with superb affirmation and sublime
dignity they declare, "Without controversy, great is the mystery of
godliness; God was manifest in the flesh."

And it is this God whom Christianity presents as coming down from
the heaven of glory, and clothing himself with a new, a distinct,
but a mortal humanity in which to die as an infinite substitute for
guilty men, that through death, he might abolish death for men.

Having died as a sacrificial substitute, death considered as a
penalty, and the guilt and demerit of sin which induced the penalty,
have been set aside for all for whom his substitution avails.

Nor does Christianity leave us long in doubt as to those for whom
the substitution obtains. In full and precise statement of doctrine
it tells us that this substitution is on the behalf of, and for, all
who individually claim our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross as a
personal sacrifice for sin, and who by faith offer him to God as the
sacrifice and sin offering which God himself has provided.

Thus it follows, that for every believer--death as a penalty has
been abolished, brought to nought.

This is the first great and joyous proclamation of Christianity,
_Death has been abolished as a penalty for every believer_.

It has been abolished _de jure_, not yet _de facto_.

The Christian still dies, but his death is no longer penal, it is
providential and provisional.

In the hour of death the Christian is not seized as a culprit and
hurried away to execution. On the contrary, when the hour of death
sounds for him, a voice inspired from heaven assures him that he has
reached the threshold of the "far better"; he arises and "departs,"
that he may be "absent from his home in this body and present at his
home with the Lord." His death is not a defeat,