II.  The influence of that Sacrifice on man is the introduction of the principle of self-sacrifice into his nature,—­“then were all dead.”  Observe again, not He died that we might not die, but that in His death we might be dead, and that in His sacrifice we might become each a sacrifice to God.  Moreover, this death is identical with life.  They who in the first sentence, are called dead, are in the second denominated “they who live.”  So in another place, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live;” death, therefore—­that is the sacrifice of self—­is equivalent to life.  Now, this rests upon a profound truth.  The death of Christ was a representation of the life of God.  To me this is the profoundest of all truths, that the whole of the life of God is the sacrifice of self.  God is Love; love is sacrifice—­to give rather than to receive—­the blessedness of self-giving.  If the life of God were not such it would be a falsehood, to say that God is Love; for even in our human nature, that which seeks to enjoy all instead of giving all, is known by a very different name from that of love.  All the life of God is a flow of this divine self-giving charity.  Creation itself is sacrifice—­the self-impartation of the divine Being.  Redemption too, is sacrifice, else it could not be love; for which reason we will not surrender one iota of the truth that the death of Christ was the sacrifice of God—­the manifestation once in time of that which is the eternal law of His life.

If man therefore, is to rise into the life of God, he must be absorbed into the spirit of that sacrifice—­he must die with Christ if he would enter into his proper life.  For sin is the withdrawing into self and egotism, out of the vivifying life of God, which alone is our true life.  The moment the man sins he dies.  Know we not how awfully true that sentence is, “Sin revived, and I died?” The vivid life of sin is the death of the man.  Have we never felt that our true existence has absolutely in that moment disappeared, and that we are not?

I say therefore, that real human life is a perpetual completion and repetition of the sacrifice of Christ—­“all are dead;” the explanation of which follows, “to live not to themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again.”  This is the truth which lies at the bottom of the Romish doctrine of the mass.  Rome asserts that in the mass a true and proper sacrifice is offered up for the sins of all—­that the offering of Christ is for ever repeated.  To this Protestantism has objected vehemently, that there is but one offering once offered—­an objection in itself entirely true; yet the Romish doctrine contains a truth which it is of importance to disengage from the gross and material form with which it has been overlaid.  Let us hear St. Paul, “I fill up that which is behindhand of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for His body’s sake, which is the Church.”  Was there then, something