enduring of the very sufferings and death which in us are the penal results and final outcome of sin, but in Him were the means of His free self-sacrifice. Once more He was our representative as the Priest who offered the sacrifice. The requisite conditions of such an office are stated, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to be complete human sympathy, and yet such separateness from sin, and from all limitations of incompleteness, as can only be Divine. 'It behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest;' 'but He, because He abideth for ever, hath His priesthood unchangeable ... for such a high priest became us, holy, harmless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the heavens;' 'for the law appointeth men high priests, having infirmity; but the word of the oath, which was after the law, appointeth a Son, perfected for evermore[231].' In these and similar passages the doctrine of the Priesthood of Christ is developed, and it is obvious that quite as much stress is laid on His unlikeness, as on His likeness to us[232]. He is our representative as Priest, because He is both man and more than man, and can therefore perform for us what we could not and cannot perform for ourselves, in offering the perfect propitiatory sacrifice. Here is the true vicariousness of the Atonement, which consisted, not, as we shall see later, in the substitution of His punishment for ours, but in His offering the sacrifice which man had neither purity nor power to offer. From out of the very heart and centre of the human nature which was so enslaved and corrupted by sin that no human offering was acceptable to God there is raised the sinless sacrifice of perfect humanity by the God-Man, our great High Priest: human in the completeness of His sympathy, Divine in the unique power of His Priesthood. So is the condition of the law of righteousness fulfilled, and the sacrifice of obedience unto death is offered by His submission to all that constitutes in sinners the consummation and the punishment of their sin, which He transformed into the occasion and the manifestation of His perfect holiness. And it is a representative sacrifice, for unique though it is, it consists of no unheard-of experience, of no merely symbolical ceremony, unrelated and unmeaning to us; but of just those universal incidents of suffering which, though He must have felt them with a bitterness unknown to us, are intensely human--poverty, misunderstanding, failure, treachery, rejection, bodily anguish, spiritual desolation, death. 'Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.... The chastisement of our peace was upon Him,' and therefore 'by His stripes we are healed.'