ght, what they have learned by experience as well as by His word,
that all men must owe to Him their knowledge of the Father, their place
in the Kingdom of God, and their part in all its blessings. He could
not have taught this of any but Himself, nor is it the experience of
the Church that such blessings come through any other. Accordingly,
when Christ calls on men to drink His cup and to be baptized with His
baptism, while He may quite well mean, and does mean, that His life and
death are to be the inspiration of theirs, and while He may quite well
encourage them to believe that sacrifice on their part, as on His, will
contribute to bless the world, He need not mean, and we may be sure He
does not mean, that their blood is, like His, the blood of the
covenant, or that their sinful lives, even when purged and quickened by
His Spirit, could be, like His sinless life, described as the world's
ransom. The same considerations apply to the passages quoted from St.
Paul, and especially to the words in Colossians i. 24. The very
purpose of the Epistle to the Colossians is to assert the exclusive and
perfect mediatorship of Christ, alike in creation and redemption; all
that we call being, and all that we call reconciliation, has to be
defined by relation to Him, and not by relation to any other persons or
powers, visible or invisible; and however gladly Paul might reflect
that in his enthusiasm for suffering he was continuing Christ's work,
and exhausting some of the afflictions--they were Christ's own
afflictions--which had yet to be endured ere the Church could be made
perfect, it is nothing short of grotesque to suppose that in this
connection he conceived of himself as doing what Christ did, atoning
for sin, and reconciling the world to God. All this was done already,
perfectly done, done for the whole world; and it was on the basis of
it, and under the inspiration of it, that the apostle sustained his
enthusiasm for a life of toil and pain in the service of men. Always,
where we have Christian experience to deal with, it is the Christ
through whom the divine forgiveness comes to us at the Cross--the
Christ of the substitutionary Atonement, who bore all our burden alone,
and did a work to which we can for ever recur, but to which we did not
and do not and never can contribute at all--it is this Christ who
constrains us to find our representative with God in Himself, and to
become ourselves His representatives to men.