In Christ, therefore, God beholds Humanity; in Christ He sees perfected every one in whom Christ’s spirit exists in germ.  He to whom the possible is actual, to whom what will be already is, sees all things present, gazes on the imperfect, and sees it in its perfection.  Let me venture an illustration.  He who has never seen the vegetable world except in Arctic regions, has but a poor idea of the majesty of vegetable life,—­a microscopic red moss tinting the surface of the snow, a few stunted pines, and here and there perhaps a dwindled oak; but to the botanist who has seen the luxuriance of vegetation in its tropical magnificence, all that wretched scene presents another aspect; to him those dwarfs are the representatives of what might be, nay, what has been in a kindlier soil and a more genial climate; he fills up by his conception the miserable actuality presented by these shrubs, and attributes to them—­imputes, that is, to them—­the majesty of which the undeveloped germ exists already.

Now the difference between those trees seen in themselves, and seen in the conception of their nature’s perfectness which has been previously realized, is the difference between man seen in himself and seen in Christ.  We are feeble, dwarfish, stunted specimens of Humanity.  Our best resolves are but withered branches, our holiest deeds unripe and blighted fruit; but to the Infinite Eye, who sees in the perfect One the type and assurance of that which shall be, this dwindled Humanity of ours is divine and glorious.  Such are we in the sight of God the Father as is the very Son of God Himself.  This is what theologians, at least the wisest of them, meant by “imputed righteousness.”  I do not mean that all who have written or spoken on the subject had this conception of it, but I believe they who thought truly meant this; they did not suppose that in imputing righteousness there was a kind of figment, a self-deception in the mind of God; they did not mean that by an act of will He chose to consider that every act which Christ did was done by us; that He imputed or reckoned to us the baptism in Jordan and the victory in the wilderness, and the agony in the garden, or that He believed, or acted as if He believed, that when Christ died, each one of us died:  but He saw Humanity submitted to the law of self-sacrifice; in the light of that idea He beholds us as perfect, and is satisfied.  In this sense the apostle speaks of those that are imperfect, yet “by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.”  It is true again, that He died for us, in that we present His sacrifice as ours.  The value of the death of Christ consisted in the surrender of self-will.  In the fortieth Psalm, the value of every other kind of sacrifice being first denied, the words follow, “then said I, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God.”  The profound idea contained, therefore, in the death