"I do not know any word that conveys the truth of this if 'vicarious' or 'substitutionary' does not; nor do I know any interpretation of Christ's death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners, if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied. There is much preaching _about_ Christ's death which fails to be a preaching _of_ Christ's death, and therefore to be in the full sense of the term Gospel Preaching, because it ignores this. The simplest hearer feels that there is something irrational in saying that the death of Christ is a great proof of love to the sinful unless there is shown at the same time a rational connection between that death and the responsibilities which sin involves, and from which that death delivers. Perhaps one should beg pardon for using so simple an illustration, but the point is a vital one, and it is necessary to be clear. If I were sitting on the end of a pier on a summer day, enjoying the sunshine and the air, and some one came along and jumped into the water and got drowned to prove his love to me, I should find it quite unintelligible. I might be much in need of love, but an act in no relation to any of my necessities could not prove it. But if I had fallen over the pier and were drowning and some one sprang into the water and at the cost of making my peril, or what but for him would be my fate, his own, saved me from death, then I should say, 'Greater love hath no man than this.' I should say it intelligently, because there would be an intelligible relation between the sacrifice which love made and the necessity from which it redeemed."--_Denny, in "The Death of Christ."_ "Christ died for sins once for all, and the man who believes in Christ and in His death has his relation to God _once for all determined not by sin but by the atonement_."--_Denny, in "The Death of Christ."_ "One who knew no sin had, in obedience to the Father, to take on Him the responsibility, the doom, the curse, the death of the sinful. And if any one says that this was morally impossible, may we not ask again, What is the alternative? Is it not that the sinful should be left alone with their responsibility, doom, curse, and death?"--_Denny, in "The Death of Christ."_ "Redemption, it may be said, springs from love, yet love is only a word of which we do not know the meaning till it is interpreted for us by redemption."--_Denny, in "The Death of Christ."_ "Unless we can preach a finished work of Christ in relation to sin, a reconciliation or peace which has been achieved independently of us at infinite cost, and to which we are called in a word of ministry of reconciliation, we have no real gospel for sinful men at all."--_Denny, in "The Death of Christ."_ "If the evangelist has not something to preach of which he can say, 'If any man makes it his business to subvert this, let him be anathema,' he has no gospel at all."--_Denny, in "The Death of Christ."_