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death and sufferings before the soul of a poor sinner who deserves eternal judgment, and, Himself the appointed judge to point out how grace provided Himself as a victim, that whosoever believeth might, accepting the judgment He bore to have been in place of their own, escape the judgment themselves. And what will the poor sinner say? Is God indeed willing to reckon that the Judge has borne the prisoner's penalty; is He, the Judge, waiting, as in an acceptable time, to see what effect such a message has upon the wretched lost one's heart? O the news is but too good! though, blessed be his name! not more good than true. It is finished! bow to the blessed word of God's grace, through Christ, proclaimed to the chiefest of sinners. Through grace it has reached me; through grace it has bowed down my soul. Be it so: let God be just and the justifier of me a sinner. Let Him have the honour of having reckoned all my sins to Jesus; let Him have the glory of having found the way, through that Son, of reckoning me crucified together with Him, dead together with Him, buried together with Him. God thus sets honour upon the work of His Son, done for us: the work by which He meets and through which He moves out of the way all that belonged to us as in fallen human nature.

The work of Christ while upon earth was for us,and is reckoned to us. He, the Son of Man, the Lamb of God was crucified, died and was buried. God reckons that the all that a Saul of Tarsus, a John of Bedford, and such like, had and were, meets its answer in the crucifixion, death and burial of the Lord Jesus; that is, when they, chiefest of sinners, come to believe. Yet it is reckoned so. But those parts of the blessing which follow are not merely reckoned, but have a real, essential portion in them. Quickened together with Christ, is more than what is reckoned merely. Christ, in all His perfectness, was crucified, died and was buried. God reckons to me in all my imperfectness and positive evil, the full benefit of this. He, Christ, the Just One, endured all that, according to God's good pleasure, for and instead of me, an unjust one. God so far counts it to me, that it is His epitaph for me, according to what I

was. But this epitaph, or inscription on the tomb and final resting-place of the old man in me, is still a perfect Christ,perfect though He bear (display of His perfectness) the marks of the judgment which He received once for me. He, in the richest grace, was stigmatized. in my stead. Yet the I, that deserved to be stigmatized of God, am not actually in Him. What God reckons, faith reckons also; and so, reckoning ourselves to be penally dead to sin, we reckon that we have ceased from (and not only have to cease from), acting in sin. Now in some sense there is a contrast to this in what follows; for "LIFE" is a very positive, actual thing. And life is not merely reckoned to us, but has been absolutely given to us that believe and is positively possessed in Christ, and enjoyed by us in ourselves. A clear view of this difference is important. Let us pause upon it for a

moment.

To Christ all that was due to us, as sinners, has been reckoned; and He has borne the punishment of it, and still retains the marks of the judgment so borne. Now just as we see on the walls of chapels and churches, sometimes, a tablet erected in memory of some one that fell in a foreign land, and whose body still rests in that foreign land; even so, in one point of view, may the tokens of the passion which still remain, and may be seen by faith in the person of the Lord, be looked at. My wicked self is not in Him. The memory of all my guilt, all that God had against me, did once find its final resting-place in the person of Christ when He drank the cup of wrath upon the cross. And when I now, by faith, look up to Him, I see in Him the record, the remembrances of what He bore in my stead. This, while the question is of how I, a guilty creature in myself can find peace with God, is of all importance. The Just One, who is to judge all, bore on the cross the judgment due to me the unjust. I do not fear or doubt, whether He will or will not remember His own sufferings, whereon He has made my soul to rest. But this is not all. Not only is the penalty and power and being of the old man thus met, but another, a new man, having a being, and power, and liberty, is introduced to supplant the old

man. And this is a positive thing, and a new thing altogether. Adam, as set in the Garden of Eden, had not that which the weakest believer in Christ now has: "Born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever (1 Pet. i.23), "The word of the Lord.... the word which by the Gospel is preached" (ver. 25), is the instrumental means of communicating this, but the thing communicated is a new thing itself. Christ is the Giver -"the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" — such a portion is not of human nature, but of God. Well now, when we come to the Scriptures what do we find as to this Life? First: If Adam was a living soul, Christ is a life-giving Spirit: "The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam a quickening Spirit"(1 Cor. xv. 45). Then, again, not only is His glory thus described: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made," but also another glory is His: " In Him was life; and the life was the light of men" (John i. 1—4). "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory" (Col. iii. 3, 4). "God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son" (1 John v.11) I cite these passages as showing that "Life" is, to us that believe, not merely moral order restored in the elements of the old man, but that it points to something which not only fallen but, which unfallen humanity, as first set in the Garden of Eden, did not possess; to something which fits us, not only for heaven, its native place, but for "fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. Such a fellowship is ours" (1 John i. 4). But many are the lessons Scripture gives us in details connected with the subject.

Our attention is called to much, if we can taste and see it, in these words, "Quickened together with Christ." I have heard expositions of this expression (which while

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they contained much truth in them, and blessed truth too), were not expositions of what our text contains. For instance, "Quickened together with Christ," does not mean that as He was quickened who lay dead and buried in the grave, in the garden, so our souls which were morally dead become morally alive if we have believed. That, if we substituted "spiritually, as well as morally, alive," for "morally alive," would be true; but it clearly would give no stress to the words together with. And such a truth would have been better expressed by, "have been quickened in soul, as Christ was in body." The text really leads back to the hour in which Christ was quickened, and points out a special glory as attaching to him when so quickened, and a glory which connects itself now with the believer. Having laid down His life as a substitute for sinners, He took it again as the second Adam, life-giving Spirit, Head of a race. In redemption nothing is before God, or will be found to abide, save what comes forth from Christ. He is the Rock. He alone. He was smitten in death. life after death-a life which was in itself beyond death, and was shown to be so by His passing through death the life-giving waters flowed forth, token of the Life which was in Him, which He was. It was necessary for Divine glory and for the conscience of the sinner, that the insults to God offered by sin, and the sin itself should be fully met by Him who alone could meet it. This he did by His death. But everything as to sin, past, present or to come, having had provision made for it in His.death, - His life anew was with the avowal of Headship. No life ever flowed save from Him. Whence else could it flow? Quickened together with Christ! Then I am to go back in thought, as to this life which I know I have in the Son, to Him in whom is life; and to go back to Him, not only as one of whom this was true as the Word of God,—but as the one of whom this is declared by Scripture to be shown in the very hour when he was quickened as Son of Man, who was dead but could see no corruption. A simple view of this changes everything to a soul that believes; because it brings the mind down upon the very

out as true

point of time and circumstances in time which God had arranged as the testimony to man. He knew who His Son was, and what His Son was and would do: He needed not, in His infiniteness, in order that He might see what He could know and understand, the developed accomplishment of His plans and counsels. But, in grace, He has presented, in time and in circumstances which are suited to man, great overt facts, such as appeal to man as man, and such as man, when under grace and in the light, can understand. The crucifixion, the death, the burial of the Christ were awful overt acts. Wrought by man and in grace and mercy's sake permitted by God, and endured by the Christ for our sakes, they, first, told out man's wickedness, and the end thereof to the believer through God's grace. The quickening, raising up, elevation and glorification of Christ are great overt facts also, acts wrought by God to the confusion of sinful man, and for the salvation of the believer. And they tell out (oh how blessedly) the wellspring of God's providing, full of every blessing.

Have I eternal life? Yes: in the Son. How do I know it? 1st. Because God identifies faith and life together inseparably; and, 2ndly, I through faith, know those things which the word declares cannot be known save where there is life- - Divine life. In the Son and from the Son is this life. But to what point, to what circumstances does the word of God point me as the birth-place, as the scene of the coming forth into light, first, of this my life? To the quickening and raising from the dead of the God-honoured, though man-rejected, Christ of God. He was quickened, and He was quickened as a Head. Directly I believe and understand the word, the tomb of Christ, bursts into light, not now closed and dark as the resting-place of Him that was buried, but open and full of light (for the Son of God, the Word, and the Jesus of Nazareth were there, just proved to be but one and the same)-that-that is the scene to which the word leads me back. I fear few of us go back simply enough to that scene, as the scene from which our new life has its date and the manifestation of its origin. Man (we ourselves according to what