past, all the hope of eternity, as it has been given us, to pass away? What has become of the atonement between God and man, for which God became man, and learned man, and sorrowed and suffered and died, realising the nature and the sins and the sorrows and the sufferings of all the human race, and identifying Himself with the race and every individual of the race, as if He Himself were those whom He died for, their sins and their sufferings and their deaths His own. For He was made sin for us who knew no sin, as He learned obedience by suffering, whose will is one with His Father's, so that He need not have suffered to learn to obey, and who in His divine impassibility is beyond suffering, only in His divine love draws near to us and draws us to Him.

Is it not the surpassing mystery of the Incarnation, as the divine mystery of the atonement, that our Lord God, the word, the effulgence of the Father's glory and the express image of His person, becoming man in the ineffable conception, becomes man with the whole forces of Godhead applied to the consummation of His work; not merely becomes a man, to be a representative man, or a pattern man, or an ideal man, or a glorified man, one lamb for one offering of propitiation for representative sins or exemplar sins,

for typical restoration, or even for a transcendental illustration of the love of the Father? The Son of God becomes man; He by whom all things consist, and who upholds all things by the word of His power, in whom are hid, not annulled or suspended, all the treasures of the Godhead, wisdom and knowledge, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead, bodily condescends to go through human experience to fit Himself for a certain end; condescends to learn human learning through the alphabet of childhood, the discipline of boyhood, the experience of manhood; to learn to think as man thinks, to speak as men speak, to love as men love, to hear as men hear, to feel as men feel, to come close to all human experience of sin without sinning. Can there be a greater wonder than for the pure God to be so brought close to human uncleanness, the strong God to be so taught human weakness, the loving God to be so tried with human hatreds, and jealousies, and low aims, and the vanity of vanities? And having so learned us, so identified Himself with us, He offers Himself for us in His great love to the Father, who in the same one great love has given Him for us. Offers Himself, still as the all-knowing and all-seeing, pervading the humanity in which He suffers; offers Himself for you and me and all men, seeing there on the

Cross our several souls, our several sins, our several lives and deaths; identifying Himself as if, in His love, our souls, our sins, our lives and deaths were His own. Did He not then and there bear our sins and carry our sorrows, knowing them as ours, as if they were His own, and in the very plenitude of divine consciousness, experiencing the plenitude of human abjection: My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? And now, He ever liveth, making intercession for those whose lot He has borne and bears.

It is but in a distant way that we can at all taste of the cup that He drank of; it is when we realise the sins and sorrows of those whom we love as life itself, and whose sins are a burden to us greater than our own. Can we, with this idea of the atoning work of the Son, and of the power of the Incarnation by which He made it possible-can we, so taught, bear to think of Him as so limited. in His humanity, that He could be ignorant, or forgetful, or confused, or inconsistent, deceived or self-deceiving? Or how, when, and where does the limitation end, and within what terms beyond that of the self-conditioning of constant self-restraint does it affect that region of His work? If He were incarnate once, is He not incarnate still; if He were ignorant ever, how has His humanity come to the perfection of

knowledge which those who believe and pray trust in and have trusted ever since St. Stephen saw the heaven opened? If He even could forget, may He forget us still? Nay, if in this life only we have hope in Him we are of all men the most miserable, for His teaching has led us, by the development of all that seems to be best in us, to what is neither more nor less than a delusion or disappointment. Could our loving God, for there must be a loving God, treat us so?

I make no apology for treating this matter thus. I cannot rationalise the atonement; I cannot weigh or analyse the blood of the covenant. I cannot draw the articles of the everlasting covenant of the Incarnation. It is only in a very distant way that I can fashion to myself my idea of what my Lord has done, and is doing, and will do, as I trust, for me. I cannot read the Incarnation as I would a book of Euclid, or a poem of Ovid or Milton. But I think that I know whom I have believed; I would that all men could think of Him as I do ; but I cannot bear to anticipate a day when the Church shall cry out to Jesus of Nazareth, "Thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived;" or to the Unknown and Unknowable, "Why didst Thou let Him deceive Himself and us ?"

THE REAL PRESENCE

IN a previous address 1 I ventured to sketch out what to me the doctrine of our Church, as interpreting and interpreted by Holy Scripture, and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit through the ages of the undivided Church, seems to be, on the subject of the Holy Sacrament. I pointed out the ideas of the sustaining power of the bread of life, the virtue of that sustenance as being the body and blood of the atoning sacrifice, the perpetual offering of the victim by Himself the High Priest, and our share in the priestly presentation as memorial before the Father, and the eucharistic joy in which we unite these characteristics. And I commented on the points in which I thought that the Church of Rome and some Protestant communities also, have by disproportionate and disconnected expansions of one part or another of this great idea, led men into mistakes of doctrine and hazardous superstition in practice.

I began by speaking of the mischievous controversy into which a supposed intention, on the part of some of our brethren, to imitate some of 1 Not preserved.