indisputable truth on this subject, which must be recognised by all who believe in the Scripture, and who can exercise those spiritual faculties by which God enables us to form a right judgment on Divine things. True and correct, simple but very glorious, is that couplet of a well-known hymn, enhancing, as it does, all the attributes of God, as manifested in redemption, and thereby harmonized:

""Twas great to speak a world from nought:

'Twas greater to redeem."

And if in all the attributes of God, so specially in the attribute of love, it cannot but appear a conspicuous thing that love marks the Atonement more than any mere creation, preservation, gift, or endowment could possibly have done. It stands on a separate, on a higher range.

This preliminary exercise of a spiritual judgment on a general, indisputable truth, may fitly prepare us for meeting those very details on the Atonement, as the pre-eminent manifestation of God's love, which the Scripture contains throughout. Perhaps in no passage of the Old Testament does it all appear with more full and exact illustration (I use no stronger word) than in Abraham called on by God to offer up his own son. We need not recapitulate all the typical marks and characteristics of that narrative, corresponding to that infinitely and incomparably more wondrous event which took place on the same Mount. No more is requisite than to recal those parts where it represents God's love towards us-the love of the Father in giving up His Son, and the love of the Son in giving up Himself as a willing sacrifice on our account, in substitution for us. And even as we read, in the parable of the prodigal son, of a greater One than any earthly father receiving each sinner who turns unto Him in repentance and faith, so too we may read, in this history of Abraham, what is the extent and excellency of God's love, and what we owe to Him for the Atonement (as not only proving, but also realizing and exemplifying it), when we hear Abraham thus praised and blessed: -"By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord; for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me, that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven." We may read and perceive in all this (so far as the type allows) the very praise, honour, and glory due from us to God for His love in the Atonement. A greater than Abraham is here! I may also add, that all those passages in the Old Testament, where God is told of as purchasing or buying His people to Himself— "Is He not thy Father which hath bought thee?" (Deut. xxxii. 6), "Remember the congregation which Thou hast purchased" (Ps. lxxiv. 2), and all such like, are coloured and imbued with hues of the deepest love. "Ye are bought with a price," is not

a truth of the New Testament alone, but of the Old also. In order to see it, feel it, and apply it, as there revealed, with any fulness, the doctrine must doubtless be known as revealed in the New Testament. But in those pages it is made known to us in all fulness and clearness; and being made known, it throws and reflects back a glorious flood of light on all such expressions in the Old Testament, when God employs them of Himself. Yes, as they tower up and shine before the eye of faith, they attract and delight it; just as the traveller looks up with admiring gaze at some gorgeous palace or cathedral, or some Alpine pinnacle, first dimly seen in the early haze of dawn, but now lit up in all the glory of the rising sun. And not only so; but wheresoever the sufferings of Jesus, and His humiliation of body and of spirit, are foretold in the Old Testament-e.g., in the 22nd Psalm and in the 69th, in the 53rd of Isaiah and in the 50th, with words like these, "I gave my back to the smiters, and my checks to them that plucked off the hair; I hid not my face from shame and spitting"- wherever such things are told, we see that which nothing but the infinitude of Divine love could ever have originated or fulfilled. Yes, in all such prophecies on a suffering Saviour, God's love is proclaimed in the very loudest, and at the same time in the tenderest, accents which God could utter, or the human heart could hear and distinguish.

Still, however, as we have observed, and, as a priori we might have expected, it is in the New Testament that "the love of God, in connexion with the Atonement," is set before us in all its fulness, substance, and details. Take, for instance, our Lord's exposition of the Gospel to Nicodemus. How mighty is that short word "so"-ourw-to such a degree, to such an extent, or infinity: "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotton Son." And all this succeeds the passage on His own crucifixion, as set forth by the serpent lifted up; and all is an account of the Atonement! I have noticed the force of one single word on this subject; and stronger perhaps, even stronger still, is the testimony of another single word, describing what God did for us in giving us His dear Son to die for our sins: "He that spared not His own Son," &c. (Rom. viii. 32.) Let us dwell a little on the word "spared." May it not be enforced and explained by the intense desire to retain or refuse something or some one, which man often feels, though he may have to make the surrender, and does make it. The word épeioaro is the same as that of the Greek Septuagint in the narrative of Abraham on Mount Moriah. It is rendered in our version "withheld"—" because thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son," &c.,-a passage on which Bengel says that Paul probably had it in his mind, when he wrote the verse on God not sparing His Son. His comment is:

"Deus paterno suo amori quasi vim adhibuit." And now to pass on to the special love of Jesus, shown by the Atonement, in His own person, in His own experience, in His own sufferings and work for us. It is shown in the utmost brilliancy, wherever we see the more intense trouble or agony of His mind, as in the garden of Gethsemane,-" My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death;" or when He saith," Now is My soul troubled and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I to this hour." (John xii. 27.) And, again, whenever the fitness and the needfulness of our Lord's humiliation and sufferings is told, e. g. in His own. words in the 24th of St. Luke: "Ought not Christ" (the anointed, the appointed Messiah) "to have suffered”—i.e. first; "and to enter into His glory," then, but not till then ;or when He saith again, in the same chapter, "Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer"-ède, the same word being used as rendered by the "ought not" of the passage already quoted; or when, in the Acts, we hear that Paul went about "opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered," I just ask, Whence all this need and necessity? Whence all this fitness and propriety? Not for our creationnor for our preservation, had we been unfallen creatures-not for any gifts which, as such, we could have received; but for our redemption, for the Atonement. It was the constraining necessity of love; it was the moral and divine fitness of that love, as originating from, and inseparably joined with, the loving purpose of God, in our redemption. But to pass on; for it must suffice briefly to suggest such topics of thought, -such claims on our love and devotion towards Him who first loved us, devised the means for our redemption, and in our nature went through them all, fulfilled them all, endured them all, even to the death on the Cross. Therefore there need be no limit to our sense of God's love, and to our "joy in God, by whom we have now received the Atonement." Jesus Himself speaks, in the 15th chapter of St. John's Gospel, "Greater love hath no man," (rather no oneovdels—no one in heaven or earth) "than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Here is the Atonement again; and I might, if it were needful, dwell on many other and most attractive passages of the New Testament, all in connexion with our subject; such as that where we hear of "the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things than that of Abel;" and of the songs of the saved in the Revelation, who give glory to the "Lamb that was slain." How much this title tells! I must pass quickly these and many other testimonies to the love of God, as shown in the person of a suffering Redeemer, and end with two or three quotations from the Epistle of St. John-that beloved one, who lay in the bosom of Him

who came out from the bosom of the Father. How does the disciple whom Jesus loved write? Hereby perceive we the love [of God], because He laid down His life for us." (Chap. iii. 16.) Not, by any means, that he would exclude our perception of God's love in the multitude of other sights, mercies, and gifts, whereby we may see it; but in comparison with God's love, for our redemption-in comparison with this, he passes all others by, in this passage, as proofs and evidences of God's love. Again, he writes that the love of God was "manifest to us"-épavepóon-in the gift of His Son." (Chap. iv. 9.) And he shows in the next verse what it was in the gift which made it so párepos-so manifest, conspicuous, and brilliant. "Herein is love; not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins"—i. e. for the atonement. Yes, let us ever be assured that the Atonement is the one grand central truth, of which the aged and beloved Evangelist not only tasted at the first, but on which he fed and lived to the end of his days. That which he learned in the beginning he ever retained and proclaimed. Nor between him and Peter and James and Paul was there any variation in their embrace and application of it; nor has there been any, I believe, between him and any others whom the Holy Spirit has taught, taking the things of Christ, and testifying of them to their souls. The beauty and the glory of all beautiful and glorious things of an outward visible kind, with the beauty and the glory of God Himself in all His gifts, has been ever open to them, and ever felt by them. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handywork." They have recognized and seen God's love in them all. They have praised and blessed Him for them all. But they have not hesitated, they have not been backward or ashamed, to look straight, fixedly, and joyfully on the Atonement, in itself, by itself, for itself, as the chief and preeminent sign-rather, I would say, not the onμetov, but the Tekμηpiov of God's love to man. They have not admitted any such thing as a confused, indistinct, vague contemplation of it, nor merely and meanly viewed it as a part or sequence of a system in which many other parts claim equal regard, or as one from which the inward eye might withdraw itself, if inclined so to do. No! They would ever have held such notions as mere device of the enemy, leading men to shun the offence of the Cross, and to hide from them God's love in its highest form. Let us follow in their path-in that path which is old, and therefore true: for no new path can possibly be true or right! Let us first adequately realize, by the help of God the Holy Spirit, the character of this love as incomparably great beyond all other which could have been set upon us by our God! Let us just give full weight and

strength to all which Scripture has declared on the subject; and the sense and recognition of this love will and must be to us a practical thing-a mighty principle and motive for living unto Him who died for Himself for us. and us, gave The love of Christ will constrain us to such a life. And we may rest fully satisfied and assured that the more, if ministers, we feel and realize the love of God, specially displayed in the Atonement, in the light of a definite fact, and not vaguely-the more we regard it as the central point of all service and worship acceptable unto God-the more we shall please, honour, and glorify Him; and in the strength of that love we shall and must keep His commandments better far than on any other principle.

I.

OUR PRESENT POSITION: A LETTER TO A FRIEND.

MY DEAR SIR,

You tell me that, in your far-off Tasmania, seeing English papers only now and then, and scarcely ever any but the secular ones, you find it very difficult to imagine, and impossible to gain any certainty as to, our present position in England in matters connected with religion. You beg me, therefore, to spare you a leisure hour, now and then, in order to give you a rapid sketch of the changes which have taken place since you left England ten years ago, and to estimate, as well as I am able, the advance or retrogression of the cause of Christ in England during those years. I will now try to comply with your request, and to accomplish, if I can, the difficult task of weighing, balancing, and valuing our loss and gain, in things concerning which no ordinary system of appraisement will render us any assistance.

One obvious division of the subject will be that which places the favourable circumstances on one side, and the unfavourable ones on the other. This course I shall naturally adopt; taking, I think, the perils and losses of the Church of Christ as the first branch of my subject; and the advance and gains of that Church as my second.

I. And beyond all doubt, the leading feature in the Church's history during the last ten years has been, the rise, formation, and establishment of a great party within her pale, by which a refined and purified system of infidelity is openly advocated. I am aware that the term "infidel" would be indignantly and honestly rejected and resented by many of their number. We cannot doubt, and ought not to question, the fact, that many who follow Mr. Maurice, Dean Stanley, and Mr. Jowett, do intend to be sincere believers in Christianity. They do not