the selfishness of the rich and the fickleness of the poor:—­intolerance, formalism, scepticism, hatred of goodness, were the foes which crushed Him.

In the proper sense of the word He was a victim.  He did not adroitly wind through the dangerous forms of evil, meeting it with expedient silence.  Face to face, and front to front, He met it, rebuked it, and defied it; and just as truly as he is a voluntary victim whose body opposing the progress of the car of Juggernaut is crushed beneath its monstrous wheels, was He a victim to the world’s sin:  because pure, He was crushed by impurity; because just and real and true, He waked up the rage of injustice, hypocrisy, and falsehood.

Now this sin was the sin of all.  Here arises at once a difficulty:  it seems to be most unnatural to assert that in any one sense He was the sacrifice of the sin of all.  We did not betray Him—­that was Judas’s act—­Peter denied Him—­Thomas doubted—­Pilate pronounced sentence—­it must be a figment to say that these were our acts; we did not watch Him like the Pharisees, nor circumvent Him like the Scribes and lawyers; by what possible sophistry can we be involved in the complicity of that guilt?  The savage of New Zealand who never heard of Him, the learned Egyptian and the voluptuous Assyrian who died before He came; how was it the sin of all?

The reply that is often given to this query is wonderfully unreal.  It is assumed that Christ was conscious, by His Omniscience, of the sins of all mankind; that the duplicity of the child, and the crime of the assassin, and every unholy thought that has ever passed through a human bosom, were present to His mind in that awful hour as if they were His own.  This is utterly unscriptural.  Where is the single text from which it can be, except by force, extracted?  Besides this, it is fanciful and sentimental; and again it is dangerous, for it represents the whole Atonement as a fictitious and shadowy transaction.  There is a mental state in which men have felt the burthen of sins which they did not commit.  There have been cases in which men have been mysteriously excruciated with the thought of having committed the unpardonable sin.  But to represent the mental phenomena of the Redeemer’s mind as in any way resembling this—­to say that His conscience was oppressed with the responsibility of sins which He had not committed—­is to confound a state of sanity with the delusions of a half lucid mind, and the workings of a healthy conscience with those of one unnatural and morbid.

There is a way however, much more appalling and much more true, in which this may be true, without resorting to any such fanciful hypothesis.  Sin has a great power in this world:  it gives laws like those of a sovereign, which bind us all, and to which we are all submissive.  There are current maxims in church and state, in society, in trade, in law, to which we yield obedience.  For this