The representative character of Christ is manifested in a different aspect, according as He is regarded as the victim or as the priest offering the sacrifice. As the victim He must be the sin-bearer, for the transfer of guilt--which under the Mosaic system was merely symbolised by the act of laying hands on the victim's head--must for a true propitiatory sacrifice be more than external and artificial. That is to say, there must be a real meaning in S. Paul's tremendous words, 'Him Who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf,' in the passages in which He is described as bearing our sins[229], in the great prophecy which told that 'the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.' How can we find an explanation of the paradox so boldly stated by S. Paul, that He who knew no sin was yet made sin? We may not surely take all these plain phrases to mean that He bore the _punishment_ of our sins: it would have been easy to say that had it been meant. No, the relation typified by the Mosaic offerings must be real, and yet the expression 'He made Him to be sin' cannot without blasphemy be understood to mean that God the Father actually made His Son to sin. The solution of the difficulty can only be found in the truth of the Incarnation. In order that the sacrifice might be representative, He took upon Him the whole of our human nature, and became flesh, conditioned though that fleshly nature was throughout by sin[230]. It was not only in His death that we contemplate Him as the sin-bearer, but throughout His life He was, as it were, conditioned by the sinfulness of those with whom His human nature brought Him into close and manifold relations. The Crucifixion does not come as the unexpectedly shameful end of a glorious and untroubled life, though it was undoubtedly in a special sense the manifestation of the 'curse' under which He laid Himself. We cannot say that at a given moment in His life, as when the sinner's hands were laid upon the victim's head and his guilt was transferred, He began to bear our iniquity, for the very nature which He took, freed though it was in Him from hereditary guilt, was in itself, by its necessary human relations, sin-bearing. Nor did His personal sinlessness make this impossible or unreal; rather it intensified it. As S. Matthew tells us, even in relation to bodily sickness and infirmity, that He bore what He took away--'Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases'--so it was with our redemption from sin. In taking it away, He had to bear its weight, intensified by reason of that very self-sacrificing love which made Him realize with more than human keenness the sinfulness of the human nature into which He had come. There is thus nothing artificial or external in His sin-bearing, for His human nature was so real and so perfect that He was involved, so to speak, in all the consequences of the sin which is so tremendous a factor in human life, even to the