the way, who is the guide of our path, the chief of our warfare, the pattern of our lives, the champion of our salvation, our hope, our strength, our crown, and our exceeding great reward!

SERMON XIX.

THE ATONEMENT.

[Preached at Lincoln's Inn, May, 1823.]

COLOSS. iii. 3.

Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

THE image conveyed in these words seems to have been a favourite one with St. Paul; he frequently compares the condition and habits of a Christian to the state of those spirits who have shaken off the chains of mortality; who have left behind them, in their coffins, the desires and anxieties of the world, and are now expecting, in the residence of departed souls, the return of their Lord, and their own resurrection into glory. This illustration is remarkably calculated to reconcile the privileges with the duties of a Christian; to establish our salvation through Christ alone, while it preserves inviolate our obligations to personal holiness, to exclude our boasting, and to stimulate and encourage our diligence.

But the use which I now intend to make of this fertile topic is to extract from it still further illustrations of the leading peculiarities of our religion,

and more particularly of that which is its cornerstone and master-key, the vicarious and expiatory nature of the Christian sacrifice.

And, in pursuance of this design, I shall examine, first, in what sense we may most reasonably understand those expressions which thus speak of living men as if they were deceased already; secondly, what peculiar advantage this fictitious and figurative death can communicate to those of whom it is predicated; thirdly, what manner of persons those are who are said to partake in the death of Christ; and, lastly, what moral and practical consequences may be further derived from a comparison which is, with St. Paul, so frequent and so favourite.

In the first place, then, it will hardly have escaped your notice that the death which, in all these passages, is predicated of persons yet alive, is predicated of them as a consequence and concomitant effect of the death and sufferings of the Messiah. We are dead in Him, that is, when He died we died also, or were accounted thus to die. It is not said merely that He died for our sakes, for our instruction, for our example, for the establishment of our faith in that doctrine of immortality, which, if He were not the first to discover, He was certainly the first to demonstrate and render familiar to all mankind. Though all these beneficial ends, and many besides these, were brought to pass by His innocent death and meritorious sufferings, yet more than this is surely implied in the expression that we are dead in Him; nor am I aware of any manner in which

the action or suffering of one person can thus be placed to the account of another, except when that first person is the substitute or representative of the other.

It is thus that, in the common affairs of life, and in the ordinary language of mankind, we are often ourselves understood to do or suffer whatever is done or endured by another on our behalf, by our procurement, or for our advantage. If a friend pays a debt for us, it is we ourselves who have discharged it. If a substitute serves for us in the army, we ourselves have performed whatever duty the military conscription imposed on us; if our representatives impose a tax, we, that is the whole nation, are supposed to have consented; and when our friends or kindred answer on our behalf in baptism, it is ourselves who, by this means, are understood to become parties to the privileges and engagements of Christianity. If Christ, then, have been in any circumstances of His life or death, the representative of another, that action or passion, whatever it shall have been, may, in this form of speech, be imputed to the person represented; and if, on the other hand, we are declared, as in the words of my text, to have paid the debt of mortality when Christ died, it must be that our Lord in His agony and His bloody sweat, in His cross, His passion, and the rest of those affecting details which are familiar to the devout recollection of every believer, was the representative and substitute of all those who look, through Him, for salvation.

And thus, and thus only can we understand those other texts of Scripture in which the Son of God is represented as made a curse for us, as bearing our sins in His body on the tree, as performing that for us by His own sacrifice of Himself, which the sin-offering of the elder world professed, though vainly, to accomplish; expressions, all of them, which, by any other method of explanation, are as unsatisfactory and as unintelligible as those passages, without this clue, would be, which speak of living men as virtually and in law deceased, through the death of another person.

It is true that all these expressions are confessedly and highly figurative. But the object of all scriptural metaphors, I might say of all metaphorical language, when it occurs in grave and serious writings, is to illustrate and render more vivid, not to perplex and obscure the subject of which it treats. It is the collation of familiar objects with objects less known, in order that the one may enable us to understand the other; and when the effects of Christ's death are described in terms taken from the Roman law of debtor and creditor, from the forms of Jewish jurisprudence and the institutions of Jewish sacrifice, it is in vain to deny that a resemblance must subsist between the objects thus brought together. It must follow, then, that the death of our Lord was strictly vicarious and propitiatory; that He suffered in order that we might escape; and that we all, but for Him, must have been liable to the same sorrows, or sorrows