The answer leads us to a consideration of decisive importance. God works by law, in the spiritual, no less than in the physical region. The Death of the Christ, at the hand of lawless men, came about in virtue of the working of those laws. As we have said, sin is the alienation and estrangement of man from the Divine life which is in him, and by virtue of which he is man. Now, in the human character of Jesus Christ, we see, for the first time, the perfect, genuine, uncaricatured humanity, in which the human will is at every point in absolute agreement and fellowship with the Divine Will. Shortly, He represents the complete and absolute contradiction and antithesis of sin. It could not have been, that that Life should have been realised in a world of alienation from the Divine, without the result, which followed as necessarily and inevitably as any of the physical happenings of nature, of the death of the Sinless. "He became obedient unto death." A deeper meaning lies in these words of St. Paul, which contain the whole secret of the Atonement. But, for the present, we may understand them to mean, that death was the natural issue of the Life of perfect obedience lived in a world permeated by the spirit of disobedience. Thus we gain a clear knowledge of the manner in which the death of Jesus Christ happened in accordance with the determined counsel of God. That which takes place, in the spiritual or in the physical world, as the result of the working of those laws of God which are the constant expression of His will, may be said to have been determined by Him. There is a yet more profound meaning in the Death of Christ as the result of sin, than any which we have as yet considered: that Death is the outward sign and sacrament of an inward and spiritual fact. When we sin we are, in a measure proportioned to the deliberateness and heinousness of our sin, doing to death the Divine life, the Christ within us. That which happened once on Calvary is renewed time after time in the inward experience of men. The outward fact is an historical drama representing an ever-repeated spiritual tragedy. Daily, by the hands of lawless men, by ourselves in our moments of wilfulness and disobedience, Christ is being put to death. There is no sin which, in its measure and degree, is not a rejection and crucifixion of the Christ. The Cross of Christ, viewed in the light of its historical and spiritual causes, is (i) the revelation of the malignity of sin. There we see our favourite sins stripped of all pleasing disguise, and revealed in their true horror, and cruelty, and selfishness. The Incarnate Son of God put Himself at the disposal of sinful men, and His violent and shameful death was the result. There is the true meaning of the sins in which we delight. (ii) It reveals the disastrous result of sin, the death of the Divine Man within each one of us. There is no sin which is not an act of spiritual suicide.