(1) Christ was intended for the whole world. Let us see the Divine intention in one incident of the crucifixion. In that are mingling lines of glory and of humiliation. The King of humanity appears with a scarlet camp-mantle flung contemptuously over His shoulders; but to the eye of faith it is the purple of empire. He is crowned with the acanthus wreath; but the wreath of mockery is the royalty of our race. He is crucified between two thieves; but His cross is a Judgment-Throne, and at His right hand and His left are the two separated worlds of belief and unbelief. All the Evangelists tell us that a superscription, a title of accusation, was written over His cross; two of them add that it was written over Him "in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew" (or in Hebrew, Greek, Latin). In Hebrew--the sacred tongue of patriarchs and seers, of the nation all whose members were in idea and destination those of whom God said, "My prophets." In Greek--the "musical and golden tongue which gave a soul to the objects of sense and a body to the abstractions of philosophy;" the language of a people whose mission it was to give a principle of fermentation to all races of mankind, susceptible of those subtle and largely indefinable influences which are called collectively Progress. In Latin--the dialect of a people originally the strongest of all the sons of men. The three languages represent the three races and their ideas--revelation, art, literature; progress, war, and jurisprudence. Beneath the title is the thorn-crowned head of the ideal King of humanity. Wherever these three tendencies of the human race exist, wherever annunciation can be made in human language, wherever there is a heart to sin, a tongue to speak, an eye to read, the cross has a message. The superscription, "written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin," is the historical symbol translated into its dogmatic form by St. John--"He is the propitiation[156] for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world." FOOTNOTES: [153] Observe in the Greek the μη ἁμαρτητε, which refers to single acts, not to a continuous state--"that _ye may not sin_." [154] 1 John ii. 2. As a translation, "towards" seems too pedantic; yet προς is _ad-versus_ rather than _apud_, and with the accusative signifies either the direction of motion, or the relation between two objects. (Donaldson, _Greek Grammar_, 524). We may fittingly call the preposition here προς _pictorial_. [155] The various meanings of κοσμος are fully traced below on 1 John ii. 17. There is one point in which the notions of κοσμος and αιων intersect. But they may be thus distinguished. The first signifies the world projected in _space_, the second in _time_. The supposition that the form of expression at the close of our verse is elliptical, and to be filled up by the repetition of "for the sins of the whole world" "is not justified by usage, and weakens the force of the passage." (_Epistles of St. John_, Westcott, p. 44.)