ve that it ever
needed to be done at all. The idea of fellowship with Christ, for
example, is constantly urged against the idea that Christ died for us,
and by His death made all mankind His debtors in a way in which we
cannot make debtors of each other. The New Testament itself is pressed
into the service. It is pointed out that our Lord called His disciples
to drink of His cup and to be baptized with His baptism, where the
baptism and the cup are figures of His passion; and it is argued that
there cannot be anything unique in His experience or service, anything
which He does for men which it is beyond the power of His disciples to
do also. Or again, reference is made to St. Paul's words to the
Colossians: 'Now I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf, and fill up
on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my
flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church'; and it is argued that
St. Paul here represents himself as doing exactly what Christ did, or
even as supplementing a work which Christ admittedly left imperfect.
The same idea is traced where the Christian is represented as called
into the fellowship of the Son of God, or more specifically as called
to know the fellowship of His sufferings by becoming conformed to His
death. It is seen pervading the New Testament in the conception of the
Christian as a man _in Christ_. And to descend from the apostolic age
to our own, it has been put by an American theologian into the
epigrammatic form that Christ redeems us by making us redeemers. What,
it may be asked, is the truth in all this? and how is it related to
what we have already seen cause to assert about the uniqueness of
Christ's work in making atonement for sin, or mediating the divine
forgiveness to man?

I do not think it is impossible or even difficult to reconcile the two:
it is done, indeed, whenever we see that the life to which we are
summoned, in the fellowship of Christ, is a life which we owe
altogether to Him, and which He does not in the least owe to us. The
question really raised is this: Has Jesus Christ a place of His own in
the Christian religion? Is it true that there is one Mediator between
God and man, Himself man, this man, Christ Jesus? In spite of the
paradoxical assertion of Harnack to the contrary, it is not possible to
deny, with any plausibility, that this was the mind of Christ Himself,
and that it has been the mind of all who call Him Lord. He knew and
tau