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accepted in the holy place. The place of the Mosaic incense is supplied in the Christian scheme of the intercession of Christ, by 66 that intercessory will of His, that willingness to be offered, that desire to save, which, using the sacrifice as its instrument or plea, wrought the redemption and sanctification of the world." In the ritual of heaven, described in the Apocalypse, the Lamb as it had been slain stands before the Majesty of God, in the midst of the throne, and in the midst of the elders, so uniting the Church and the Father. The sacrifice took place once on Calvary, and it is not repeated, but continually offered up in heaven. There it stands as an abiding plea, and gives effect to the much incense which the Angel of the Covenant, Christ Himself, is offering on the golden altar which is before the throne.-Ibid.

[See "MOSAIC ECONOMY," Vol. III., Section XI.]

XII. IMPORTANCE OF THE DOCTRINE. I As an expository agent.

For

[13765] We are deeply persuaded that the doctrine and fact of the intercession-the culminating glory of a true Christology-may be used as an Ithuriel's spear to detect and expose all those false views of the sacrifice of the cross now so rife; and we are not sure that theologians have been careful to make that effective use of it which it is so fitted easily to serve. to the whole tribe of theologists who represent the sacrifice of Christ as self-denial, self-sacrifice, surrender of self-will, and so forth-to all, in fact, who fail to see in Christ's death a true and proper propitiation, an endurance of penal wrath and expiation of sin, we may well put the question, What ministry, what function do you assign to Christ, as, in scriptural language, He maketh intercession for us? Not founding His requests on the plea that He hath satisfied Divine justice, redeemed His people, and purchased for them all saving blessings, securing for the gifts of Divine love, without impairing its freeness, all the inevitable certainty of Divine law itself— what sort of office do you think Christ, as Intercessor, is fulfilling? What, on your views, can it be but a ministry of apology and indulgence, aiming at securing concessions on either side or both; seeking to effect a compromise; smoothing down hostile feeling; pleading for kindlier constructions and suppression of differences; paving the way for an interview without the risk of an explosion? And in how dishonourable a light would such a kind of intercession present the character of God! Retaining an anger for which there is, on your view, no moral necessity; unnecessarily retaining anger, which can, in that case, be nothing but personal hostility and dislike to the sinner, and needing to be mollified and pleaded with to entertain kindly feeling-how could such a God, in His anger, command the veneration of His creatures; and how could His laying it aside indicate a love that should render Him worthy of

[CHRIST'S MEDIATORIAL INTERCESSIOS. profound gratitude, confidence, and praise? There is a whole heaven of difference between this and the truth. God's anger is not inconsistent with love, as unnecessary anger inevitably is.-British and Foreign Evangelical Review.

2 As a protest against rationalistic selfsufficiency.

[13766] The doctrine of our Lord's intercession is a protest against that rationalism which would make each man in himself, and each man's prayers by themselves, acceptable to God. This would destroy our dependence upon Christ, and our humility and self-abasement, when we think of what we are in ourselves.-Blunt's Doctrinal and Historical Theology.

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As a protest against the virtual denial that there is but one prevailing Mediator between God and man.

[13767] The rendering of Divine worship to one Infinite Being must of necessity exclude the idea of rendering Divine worship, no matter how modified and excused, to any other being, dependent upon and created by the Supreme Being. . . . The invocation of the created, instead of the Creator, is . . . irreconcilable with Scripture, "which holds Him forth as the sole object of worship, and the only fountain of mercy." The worship of saints and of the Virgin Mary in the Roman Catholic Church has largely taken the place of the worship of Christ, the only legal intercessor between God and man, and thus virtually ignored the Mediatorship of Christ. Encyclopædia (Drs. McClintock and Strong).

[13768] Idolatry, in the scriptural application of the term, is of two sorts, and consists (1) either in giving the honour due to the one true God, as Maker and Governor of the world, to any subordinate being, (2) or in giving the honour due to Christ, as the sole Mediator between God and man, to any subordinate mediator. The former is the idolatry forbidden by the Jewish law, and by that of nature. The latter is Christian idolatry properly so called. . . . This species of idolatry is, without doubt, chargeable on any Christian Church that shall adopt, in its religious addresses, another mediator besides Jesus Christ.... Enjoining the worship of saints and angels, under the idea of mediators and intercessors, though not, indeed, in exclusion of Christ as the one or chief Mediator, is in manifest defiance of His sole mediatorship.-. Elliott.

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diseases, and crush all the evils of the world. He is on the throne in order to wipe away all tears from all faces, and to make the world happy, with the happiness of God Himself. "He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new." A new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Love, amazing love, is this.-Rev. David Pitcairn.

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The intercession of Christ furnishes a ground for the sublimest catholicity and the strongest confidence.

[13770] Let us rejoice in the authority of Christ. The race for whom in love He died is now under His control. His love for it now on the throne is as strong as when He bled for it on the cross. He is using His vast authority for its restoration, and it is getting better and brighter. Its moral agriculture is improving. A layer of loam is being spread over the world in which the old weeds and thistles wither and die, and new plants of heavenlier climates are springing up in every direction. Governments, religious institutions, and customs, that once grew here luxuriantly, are losing their root-hold, and are rotting away. Every plant which His heavenly Father hath not planted He is plucking up. Its moral atmosphere is becoming more salubrious, the lungs of conscience breathe freer, old diseases are gradually disappearing, and souls are getting stronger in resolve and deed. Its moral firmament is growing more luminous, new lights break through the clouds, new constellations rise on the horizon, and fresh rays come down from the sky of thought upon regions where mental midnight has long prevailed. Thus, under the masterhood of Jesus, humanity is advancing. To us, the impatient children of a day, the progress may appear slow. But time to Him is nothing, and He has a far higher estimate of moral achievements than we have. The conversion of one soul is not much to us; but to Him it is a stupendous event, producing a thrill of rapture through His holy universe. "There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." Oh, the perfect security of His Church and kingdom! Whilst the Head lives, the body can never be destroyed.-Rev. G. S. Bowes, B.A.

[13771] It is not with Christ as with other testators, who die, and must trust the performance of their wills with their executors. But as He died to put it in force, so He lives again to be the executor of His own testament.Flavel

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[CHRIST'S MEDIATORIAL INTERCESSION.

The intercession of Christ lays a strong engagement on God to bring His whole force and power for His saints' defence. [13772] In Hebrews vii. 25, the words, "He liveth to make intercession," might with strictness be rendered or expounded as follows: "He interposes, He acts as a representative and defender (ivrvyxavыiv)."-Dr. Saphir.

[13773] One special end of His journey to heaven, and abode there, is, that He might (as the saints' solicitor) be ever interceding for such supplies and succours of His Father, as their exigencies call for; and the more to assure us of the same before He went, He did (as it were) tell us, what heads He meant to go upon in His intercession, when He should come there; one of which was this, That His Father should keep His children while they were to stay in the world, from the evil thereof (John xvii. 15). Neither doth Christ take upon Him this work of His own head, but hath the same appointment of His Father, for what He now prays in heaven, as He had for what He suffered on earth. He that ordained Him a priest to die for sinners, did not then strip Him of His priestly garments (as Aaron), but appoints Him to ascend in them to heaven, where He sits a priest for ever by God's oath. And this office of intercession was erected purely in mercy to believers, that they might have full content given them for the performance of all that God had promised; so that Jesus Christ lies lieger at court as our ambassador, to see all carried fairly between God and us according to agreement: and if Christ follow His business closely, and be faithful in His place to believers, all is well. And doth it not behove Him to be so, who intercedes for such dear relations? Suppose a king's son should get out of a besieged city, where he hath left his wife and children (whom he loves as his own soul), and these all ready to die by sword or famine, if supply come not the sooner; could this prince, when arrived at his father's house, please himself with the delights of the court, and forget the distress of his family? Or rather would he not come post to his father (having their cries and groans always in his ears), and before he eat or drink, do his errand to his father, and entreat him if ever he loved him, that he would send all the force of his kingdom to raise the siege, rather than any of his dear relations should perish? Surely, sirs, though Christ be at the top of His preferment, and out of the storm in regard of His own person, yet His children, left behind in the midst of sins, Satans, and the world's batteries, are in His heart, and shall not be forgotten a moment by Him.-Gurnall.

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[13775] In the orderliness of the Divine counsels the Divine will acts now through one, now through another of the Divine Persons. As it is said of the Second Person that "All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made" (John i. 3), and that by Him God made the worlds (Heb. i. 2), so "the Spirit of God" appears to have "moved upon the face of the waters," to bring forth light and order from darkness and chaos, and thus to have complemented the creation of matter.Ibid.

[13776] As in the material world, at its first creation, the torpid elements demanded a quickening which could alone be given by the incumbent Spirit; so, analogously, the new creation by which the disorders of the now chaotic soul were to be subdued, and its whole nature and faculties harmonized to the Divine principle, belongs to the same holy Person.Canon Garbett.

[13777] When the Holy Ghost had been revealed, no further counsel remained to be unfolded for the recovery of fallen man; no more to be done for the vineyard.-A. Short, M.A., 1846.

[13778] To effect an entire restoration to the love of our heavenly Father, more was required than the forensic satisfaction for the sins of the VOL. V.

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whole world, which the blood of the Redeemer had once for all offered; inasmuch as if it remained still outward, even if it had the power of warding off the penal consequences of sin, it still would leave the soul itself incapable of "the inheritance of the saints in light." For, on the one hand, it never could consist with the essential attributes of Him who is "of purer eyes than to behold iniquity," and is as "a consuming fire" to all wickedness, to admit into His actual presence the spirits of unpurified transgressors, merely on the strength of a reputative righteousness in its reality untransferred to the soul-and on the other hand, even if we were admitted into the company of heaven, with our natural dispositions unchanged, the beatific vision which is the bliss and glory of the saints would be misery to us. Men must be saved from the inward power of sin over the soul, as well as its penal consequences, and obtain an actual purification of nature from those corruptions, the odiousness of which in the sight of their Maker originally drove them from His spiritual presence, and would still exclude them as effectually as the fiery sword prevented their re-entrance into the earthly garden; hence the necessity of the work of the Holy Ghost.-Canon Garbett.

[13779] The Lord the Spirit, the Giver of life was to regenerate the deadness of man's soul; and by those subtle and inscrutable operations by which He penetrates the spirits of men, and works outwardly from the will till the whole is new fashioned, to restore to it the image which it had lost. Fresh affections, fresh desires and perceptions, those spiritual senses by which God is discerned, and His perfections and graces appropriated by the inward man, that puois πvɛvμatikń which man lost by the fall, and the super-addition of which was indispensable to restoration, all required His influences.—Ibid.

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regenerating mankind, that they may become partakers of the new nature, sanctifying them that the new nature may abide with them in the kingdom of grace, and eventually reach that abode where the Incarnate God has gone to prepare a place for those whose sanctification reaches its final stage.-Blunt's Doctrinal and Historical Theology.

[13781] Our psychological inquiries bring us face to face with the fact that man's purely spiritual will can become an antecedent to a purely material sequent. And how much less strange is the belief that an all-pervading Intellect interweaves its influences with our thoughts and our desires-thus to regulate our judgment and suggest and foster our emotions! We may with as much reason exclude the Divine presence and activity from amid the formless and self-inert atoms of visible life, as give up the truth that, over and around and among our impalpable wishes and motives, the moral power of the Omnipresent is in action.Joseph Sortain, B.A.

II. ITS RELATION TO THE WORK OF GOD THE SON.

As both coincident with and proceeding from work.

[13782] According to the New Testament, the action of the Spirit in the Church is the prolongation of Christ's work into Christian history. It is the extension, it is, with due limitations we may say, the perpetuation of the incarnation, in its power of making humanity partakers of the Divine Nature. Therefore, "if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." Along with this Spirit comes the gift of a new moral being, a new capacity and direction to the affections and the will, a clear perception of truth by the renewed intelligence. "If any man be in Christ, he is the new creation." "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus makes free from the law of sin and death." "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." All this is but the result, the accompaniment of the gift of gifts itself, of the great characteristic gift of the New Covenant, of the Divine indwelling really vouchsafed to each faithful Christian soul.-Canon Liddon.

[13783] If Christ be the head, and His Church the body, the Holy Spirit is the soul which animates the body; if Christ be the vine, and His people the branches, the Holy Spirit is the vital principle, which, through the juices of the tree, communicates life to the branches; if Christ be the chief corner-stone, and His Church the temple which that chief cornerstone supports and holds together, the Holy Spirit is the Shekinah, by which God manifests His presence in the temple. And, lastly, as Christ, when He became incarnate, was conceived by the Holy Ghost, so likewise His

people, when they are born again into that new life which they live in Him, are born of the Spirit.-C. A. Heurtley, B.D.

[13784] May we not suppose that the influences of the Divine Spirit, after having gradually interpenetrated the human nature of Jesus, carrying it forward from one degree of glory to another through the various stages of birth, life, and resurrection, at length, the process being by the ascension completed, overflowed their receptacle-like the precious ointment on the head that ran down upon Aaron's beard, even unto the skirts of his clothing-and descended in plentiful effusion on the members of His mystical body?—E A. Litton, M.A.

III. INESTIMABLE VALUE OF THE SPIRIT'S GIFT.

I Its general value.

(1) The work of the Spirit is, in its own place, as needful and as important as the work of Christ Himself.

[13785] We are too apt, in modern times, to overlook the necessity, or to underrate the value of the Spirit's grace; we talk much of the Saviour, but little of the Sanctifier; yet a consideration of the words which Christ addressed to His disciples in the immediate prospect of His leaving them should teach us that the agency of the Spirit is so essential and so important, that His advent would more than compensate for the departure of the Saviour. "It is expedient for you," says our Lord, "that I go away; for if I go not away, the Spirit will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send Him unto you" (John xvi. 7).—J. Buchanan, D.D.

[13786] How transcendent a gift this is, we can best understand when we remember that Christ, who would not and could not deceive, proffered it to His mourning disciples as a substitute for Himself, as a sufficient compensation for His own absence. He was Himself one Comforter, and the Holy Ghost, whom the Father would send in His name, should be another; yea, in some sort it was expedient that He should go away, for the presence of that other Comforter with them should more than make up for His own absence from them. -Abp. Trench.

[13787] The charm of His personal presence, of His voice, of His touch, was to be transcended. Something was to be given to them not only as precious, but more precious than His loving assurance was to Peter, to Thomas -something more precious than the "Neither do I condemn thee" was to the frail penitent on the temple floor; more precious than the " This day is salvation come to this house" was to Zaccheus ; more precious than the "Thy faith hath saved thee" was to the weeping outcast in Simon's house. What could be more precious; what could compensate for the loss of His