with these high and glorious acts of grace and obedience in Jesus Christ, that He smelled, as it were, a savour of rest towards mankind, or those for whom He offered Himself, so that He would be angry with them no more. It was not by the outward suffering of an outward and bloody death, which was inflicted on Him by the most horrible wickedness that ever human nature broke forth into, that God was atoned; nor yet was it merely His enduring the penalty of the law that was the means of our deliverance; but the voluntary giving up of Himself to be a sacrifice in these holy acts of obedience was that upon which, in an especial manner, God was reconciled to us.

"3. All these things being wrought in the human nature by the Holy Ghost, who in the time of His offering acted all His graces unto the utmost, He is said thereon to 'offer Himself unto God through the Eternal Spirit,' by whom, as our High Priest, He was consecrated, spirited, and acted thereunto."

NOTE G, p. 91.-HÄRING ON THE DEATH OF CHRIST AS A DEMONSTRATION OF THE EVIL OF SIN

It is a peculiarity of Häring's treatment of the subject, that he apprehends Christ as aiming, by what He did and suffered, at awakening in His Church a consciousness of guilt that answers to its greatness. For without this forgiveness is ethically impossible. There are two ways in which, he says, we may conceive Christ as having accomplished this. Either by His death on the cross, regarded as the supreme manifestation of the wickedness of man. We can conceive Christ as willing to submit to such a death at the hands of men, because He recognised it to be the object of God, in allowing the sin of man thus to exhaust itself on His Son, to convince men of their great guilt, and awaken the consciousness of their demerit. Or, by enduring the death of the Cross in obedience to the Will of the Father, we may think of Him as having practically acknowledged the divinely ordained connection between sin and evil, and thereby the inviolability of God's law; and the Church

as led by Him to the same knowledge and recognition. "The fact that the Father surrenders the Son to deathand to this death forces on us, as it did on the early Church, the thought that Jesus Himself saw in this death of His a direct manifestation for the condemnation of sin, the most powerful sermon on the inviolable earnestness of the Divine love 'which made Him to be sin who knew no sin.'" Häring contends for this interpretation as fitted directly to awaken that consciousness of guilt which is a condition of forgiveness. But he admits also the efficacy for this object of the Death of Christ when apprehended simply as the manifestation of the sin of men, and without the higher meaning attributed to it, when it is regarded as an act of submission on Christ's part to the majesty of the inviolable order of God.

NOTE H, p. 96.—ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE FALL IN JEWISH LITERATURE

The prevailing view in the Talmud is that Adam was not originally destined to die, and that it was his sin that is the cause of the mortality of the race. How far his sin also involved the moral ruin of mankind, as Paul teaches, is a point that is not quite so clear. Weber sums up the general result in these words: "Free will, even in reference to our disposition toward God, remained even after the Fall. There is hereditary guilt, but not hereditary sin. The fall of Adam has occasioned death to the whole human race, but not sinfulness in the sense of a necessity to sin. Sin is the result of the decision of every individual, as experience shows, but the Fall has not made it necessary" (Lehren d. Talmud, 217).

In the Apocalypse of Esdras we have express statements that Adam's sin has involved the human race both in sin and death: "O Adam, what hast thou done? for though it was thou that sinned, the evil has not fallen on thee alone, but on all of us that come of thee" (viii. 48); "the first Adam, being a wicked heart, transgressed and was overcome; and not he only, but all that are born of

him" (iii. 20); “for a grain of wickedness was sown in the heart of Adam from the beginning, and how much wickedness hath it brought forth unto this time" (iv. 30). This is identical with the Pauline view, but great uncertainty prevails among scholars as to the date of the composition of Esdras, or at least of those portions of it from which these words are taken. We cannot positively affirm that the apostle borrowed his doctrine from this book, as it is possible that those who refer its composition to the latter years of the first century may be right. In this case, it would be nearer the truth to say that Esdras was dependent on Paul, and not Paul on Esdras.

In his Book of Baruch (1896), Mr. Charles insists that the author of the Book of Esdras, though a Jew, and writing in the interests of Judaism, was strongly influenced by Christian writings. In the Book of Baruch, which in its earlier portions is referred by him to the year 55-70 A.D., there are two different ideas on the subject in different constituents of the book. The one is that Adam's sin brought in physical death; but the responsibility for sin is fastened on each individual. "Each one of us has been the Adam of his own soul" (54, 19) (chap. xxiii. 4). The other refers the universality of sin as well as of death to Adam's sin. "O Adam, what hast thou done to all those who were born from thee, for all this multitude are going to corruption? nor is there any numbering of those whom the fire devours" (48, 42). In another passage (54, 15) Adam's sin is declared to have brought premature death on all. Mr. Charles thinks the more pessimistic passages betray the influence of the darker views of Esdras on the mind of the writer. He regards the Book of Baruch as reflecting more faithfully than Esdras, except in that one passage, the views of the synagogue. It is then at present impossible to say with certainty that the view of transmitted sin and death that Paul teaches was taken from the Rabbinical teaching of his day. It was a common tenet that physical death had come with Adam's sin; but there is no direct evidence that it was the opinion of the age that spiritual death had also followed: the likelier view

is that it was his deeper apprehension of sin and the bondage of human nature to sin, that led him to believe in original sin, and in its proceeding from the same centre as that from which physical death had come.

NOTE I, p. 104.-ST. PAUL AND THE IMITATIO
CHRISTI

The apostle's doctrine of the Imitation of Christ is very different from the view of those who have held that the earthly life of Jesus is intended to be copied by His followers. It is the Inner Spirit of that Life that remains for him the principle of true character and the law for all. He is the Indwelling life of those who are united in the roots of their being to Him, and He works in them, freely reproducing in them His mind and disposition; but being now released from the conditions of the flesh, He does not manifest Himself in them in the same forms of action or exhibit the same concrete features that His earthly course presents. "As the way," says Hort, "He is meant to transform us; but the transformation is not into the fashion of Jesus of Nazareth, but into a fashion shaped out of our own materials.”1 There are only four passages in which the historical Christ is referred to by Paul as an Example. The first is Rom. xv. 2-7, where he inculcates the duty of the strong to bear with the infirmities of the weak, and not to please themselves by following a course of action that would be an offence to others. "For even Christ pleased not Himself," he adds, "but bore the reproaches of others." And then, in bringing his argument to a close, he says, "receive ye one another as Christ also received you." The mind of Christ, seen in His gracious fellowship with all men irrespective of what they were, is to be manifested by Christians extending fellowship to those from whom they may differ on points of belief or practice. The love of Christ is commended to their imitation in its unselfishness and indiscriminate bestowal of His fellowship. Again, Eph. v. 2, "Walk in love, as Christ loved us, and gave Himself 1 The Way, the Truth, and the Life, p. 205.

for us," where the generosity of His love to man is the point singled out ("He gave Himself for us ") as the characteristic of the love which Christians are to exhibit to one another. Once more, we have the great passage in Phil. ii. 5, etc., where the mind of Christ, who descended from a Heavenly Life to a life on earth for our sakes, is enjoined on us for imitation in a passage where it is Paul's object to exalt the grace of humility; and it is as a wonderful example of the spirit of condescending love that Christ is thus brought before us. Now, in all these instances it is one and the same spirit of love that is spoken of under a variety of aspects. Christ is held up to us as the Supreme Example and illustration of Love to Man. And in the way in which the apostle brings Christ before us in this character there is a studied absence of reference to historical instances in the life of Christ; it is that life as a whole that is present to the mind of the apostle as the incarnation and embodiment of the principle of love. When Paul speaks of himself as under law to Christ (I Cor. ix. 21), and bids us bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ (Gal. vi. 3), he means the law of love that Christ our Life illustrates. He himself, he tells us, is an imitator of Christ in this subordination of self to the good of others (I Cor. x. 33), and he does not hesitate to bid the Corinthians to imitate him, as he himself imitated Christ. Recognising the supremacy of Christ as the Perfect Exemplar of human love, he is conscious of himself as acting habitually from the same principle and worthy of being followed by others, in so far as he had successfully patterned his own life on that of his Master.

To Paul, then, the historical Christ was the Ideal of Love, and as such the object of his imitation if not in the particulars of His earthly life, yet most certainly in the spirit that ruled that life from first to last. If it was to that Ideal as realised in Christ who had died and had risen again that he habitually looked, rather than to its historical setting in the earthly Life of Jesus, the reason was that the Risen One alone, he knew well, through the Spirit proceeding from Him, enabled His followers to die