God’s love to his Son was inconceivably greater than that which any creature ever bore to himself or to any other; and, consequently, by offering him up as a substitute for guilty mortals, in order that he might save them without doing violence to his administrative justice, he manifested the infinite energy of his determination to destroy sin. No account of the indescribable odiousness and deformity of evil, nor of the inconceivable holiness of God, could have made so deep an impression of his implacable abhorrence of sin, as is made by the cross upon which his Son was permitted to expire amid the scorn and contempt of his enemies. The human imagination has no power to conceive of a more impressive and appalling enforcement of the great lesson, “Stand in awe, and sin not,” than that which is presented to an astonished universe in the cross and passion of the Son of God. And besides, it possesses this other unspeakable advantage, that while it manifests an infinite abhorrence of sin, it displays the most heart-subduing love of the sinner. If Zaleucus had exhausted the penalty of the law upon his son, this would have had little or no tendency to reform his heart, or to induce him to acquiesce in the justness of the law. It would have been more apt to lead him to regard the king as an unfeeling father. But when he was made to see, by the manner in which the king had dispensed the law, that he cherished the warmest feelings of affection for him, there was no cause left for a murmur on the part of any, but for the highest admiration on the part of all.