), or of S. Paul's
statement, "Him Who knew no sin, He made to be sin on our behalf" (2
Cor. v. 21)? Such words as these contain more than the mere bearing of
the punishment of sin; they imply some inward connection between the
Sufferer and the sin. Indeed, rightly understood, they help to {64}
remove the difficulty that many have felt as to the apparent injustice
or unreality of a vicarious Atonement. Christ was not merely a Victim
suffering for human sin; He was man's Creator taking that sin upon
Himself. Thus these expressions of penitence in the Psalter may be
regarded as the voice of the sympathetic love of the Sin-bearer, the
love which stands by the sinner's side, and feels with him so
intimately that it makes its own what is not its own but utterly alien
and hateful, makes it its own that it may burn it up in the flame of
love. So in these Psalms we may hear the Son of Man confessing and
making reparation for all the age-long sin of man; speaking of it as if
it were His own sin, so closely has He made Himself one with us in our
extremest need.

Cardinal Newman, in one of the most eloquent of his sermons, "The
Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion," has developed this
thought in language whose daring is only justified by its devotion. It
is a description of Christ kneeling alone in Gethsemane:

His very memory is laden with every sin which has been committed since
the Fall, in all regions of the earth, with the pride of the old
giants, and the lusts of the five cities, and the obduracy of Egypt,
and the ambition of Babel, and the {65} unthankfulness and scorn of
Israel. Of the living and the dead and of the as yet unborn, of the
lost and of the saved, of Thy people and of strangers, of sinners and
of saints, all sins are there.... It is the long history of a world,
and God alone can bear the load of it.... They are upon Him, they are
all but His own. He cries to His Father as if He were the criminal,
not the victim. His agony takes the form of guilt and compunction. He
is doing penance, He is making confession, He is exercising contrition
with a reality and a virtue infinitely greater than that of all saints
and penitents together; for He is the one Victim for us all, the sole
satisfaction, the real penitent, all but the real sinner.[1]

Connected closely with these confessions of sin, these outcries of
suffering and expiation, with the _Miserere_ and the _De Profundis_,
are those solemn