(verse 12); when his sons came into question, he is with them, and then the blood of consecration is put on him and them (verses 23, 24), as the righteous ground for their being anointed with Him (verse 30). So Jesus alone could be and was anointed (and as man, mark, it was) without blood-shedding. The Holy One of God, He needed no offering to receive the Holy Ghost thus. But if He would have us enjoying the fellowship of that unction from on high, blood there must be and was. So He, first anointed before His death, enters the holiest for us by virtue of His blood; and being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, shed forth what was seen and heard at Pentecost and thenceafter. What a testimony first to His holy manhood, next to the value of His blood for us!

The doctrine of Irving in its worst shape was, not that the Lord was ever guilty of sin, nor that He ever yielded to the overtures of Satan, but that, having all the frailties within that we have, His triumph over them by the Holy Ghost becomes the ensample to us that we too should gain the victory over the same evil in our nature by the self-same Spirit dwelling in us. Irving insisted loudly on the holiness of Christ's person. His heresy lay in imputing fallen humanity to Him; and Christ's holiness was simply therefore what any saint's might be in kind, if not degree, through the energy of the Holy Ghost, and not in the speciality of His person.

That Christ was made "in the likeness of sinful flesh," scripture declares; but even this shows that fallen nature, peccable humanity, was not in Him, though truly a man, without anything to single Him before the outward eye from others; a man who could be buffeted, spit upon, crucified, and slain. The Lord Jesus, thus viewed, had nothing apparently to mark Him out from the crowd. It could not have been said that He was in the likeness of flesh, any more than that He was in the likeness of God; for this would have denied the truth of His humanity and of His Deity. "The word was God;" "the word was made flesh." The one was and is His eternal glory; the other, what He deigned to become in time and will not give up for evermore. But it could be and is said also, that He was made in the likeness of sinful flesh, which, as far as it goes, proves that He had not the reality of sinful flesh, but only the likeness of it. Otherwise, He could not have been a sacrifice for sin; He could not have been made sin, as He was, on the cross. In "a body hast thou prepared me" the same truth is indicated, as we have already Christ's body, though as much a human body as that of any man, was not generated and made after the same fallen fashion as ours. Even in this His humiliation God prepared Him a body as for none else, that it should have a specific character, suited for the singular work He had to do (Heb. x.). It is all a blunder to suppose that the reality of the incarnation involves the condition of either Adam fallen or of Adam unfallen.

seen.

The dilemma is not only fallacious but heretical, that Christ must have been limited to the one condition or the other. I deny the alternative, which depends on the profound mistake of shutting us up to the condition of the first Adam, utterly ignoring the glorious contrast of the Second man. The assumption is that if Christ took neither unfallen nor fallen humanity, He could not have taken man's nature at all. Fatal oversight of the Christ of God! It is agreed that bare unfallen humanity, such as Adam originally had, is not true of Christ; but what an abyss of evil is the conclusion, that therefore His was fallen manhood! How plain too that the error goes very deep: for if simple unfallen humanity be exploded, and if Christ, in order to be man, can only take fallen humanity into union with His Deity, it must be fallen humanity still, or He has ceased to be man. This was just the dilemma in which Irving involved himself ("Human Nature," p. 135) in attempting to fix it on those who challenged his heterodoxy. But Christ is contrasted with Adam as a fresh stock and a new head, the Second man and last Adam, not a mere continuation of the first, unfallen or fallen. He is not a mere living soul (as Adam was before he fell), but a quickening or life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. xv.). "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John x. 10). Was Adam unfallen either righteous or holy Scripture never says so, and it

* It is an error common to Irving and the theologians in general to confound with the general state of unfallen Adam that which

cannot be broken. But I go farther: what scripture does say is inconsistent with such a standing. Absence of evil, creature good, is not holiness. There was this positive intrinsic superiority to evil in the Lord Jesus even from His very birth and before it. We are conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity; the Lord's flesh was neither conceived nor made thus, but holy by the power of the Spirit.

It is not true that a fallen man has merely flesh and blood; he has "the flesh" besides, as we see in the Epistle to the Romans and elsewhere. All do not distinguish rightly between "the flesh," and "flesh and blood." In us there is both, but Christ never had the flesh in this moral sense of the expression: because He had not, indeed, God condemned it morally in His life-executed sentence on it judicially (but in grace to us) in His death. Not only for our sins did Christ suffer, but for sin. He took on Himself, as our substitute, not merely the acts and ways and workings, but the root of evil. Him who knew no sin, God made sin for us, as it is written, that we might become God's righteousness in Him. Thus it is not all the truth that sins were laid upon Him, but He was dealt with as to the subtle principle of sin. God did what the law could not do. The law could only take up positive

was true of Christ here below and is true of the Christian now as standing in Him. Thus the former says "Manhood in Adam was sinless, set up in righteousness and true holiness by the Creator." It were invidious to specify the latter, who have made the same mistake; for their name is legion.

transgressions, but the bottom of the evil the law could not reach, still less in grace to us. The law, even the holy and just and good commandment of God, could not do what God did in sending His own Son-could not get hold of this hidden spring of evil to deal with it summarily and for ever, and in mercy withal to us. Christ both manifested the total absence of the flesh in His life (for He never did anything but the will of God, and thus detected the rebellious ruined condition of every other man), but in His death bore its judgment, that we might stand before God in His risen life, free from all condemnation. God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh." This was precisely the impossibility of the law. The law could condemn the sinner; it could work wrath; it could put sin to account; it could give knowledge of sin; but it could neither blot out and forgive sins, nor execute God's sentence on the root of sin, so as to deliver the believer. God in Christ condemned the whole principle of fallen humanity or "sin in the flesh," and "for sin," i.e., sacrificially the cross was the divine condemnation of it all, root and branch.

Thus in our Lord personally, besides His being the eternal Word, the Son of the Father, there were these two distinct things: first, that which answered to the type of the mingling of the oil with the pure flour unleavened (Lev. ii. 5); next, that which corresponded