which has been offered for him, and therefore with Christ's attitude towards God and towards sin, and though it is but the first step, yet it is emphatically that by reason of which we are justified. For since we are thus identified with the sacrifice, God accepts the first step for the whole course, of which it is the pledge and anticipation. We are justified because we believe in God, but also because God believes in us[240]. Faith, being what it is, a complex moral act whereby Christ's propitiation is accepted by man, implies an attitude of mind towards sin so right that, though it is but the first movement of the soul in Christ, God takes it for the whole, sees us as wholly in Him, reckons it to us as righteousness. But only because it is as a matter of fact the first, the hardest, perhaps, and the most necessary, but still only the first step towards complete sanctification. And, if we now ask what is the further course of sanctification, the answer will shew the full relation of the sacrifice of Christ to man's will and conscience. For the life of sanctification is nothing else but the 'imitation of Christ' in that task of 'learning obedience' to which His life was devoted, and which His death completed. In us, too, as in Him, that task has to be accomplished by suffering. 'He learnt obedience by the things which He suffered.' 'It became Him ... in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.' That same path towards perfection lies before all who are justified by faith in His atoning sacrifice. For justification is a spiritual act answering to the spiritual act of faith. The spiritual germ of vitality thus implanted in us has to be developed in the sphere in which the consequences of sin naturally and inevitably work themselves out, in the bodily nature of man. 'Even we,' says S. Paul, 'which have the first fruits of the Spirit,' even we are waiting for the further process, for 'the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.' And the process consists in so following 'the Captain of our salvation' that, like Him, we accept every one of those sufferings which are the consequences of sin, but accept them not as punishment imposed from without upon unwilling offenders, but as the material of our freewill sacrifice. From no one pang or trial of our nature has He delivered us, indeed, He has rather laid them upon us more unsparingly, more inevitably. But the sufferings from which He would not deliver us He has transformed for us. They are no longer penal, but remedial and penitential. Pain has become the chastisement of a Father who loves us, and death the passage into His very presence. And this He has done for us by the bestowal upon us of spiritual vitality. The germ is implanted by the act of forgiveness which removes the wrath and the impending death, and this germ of life, cherished and developed by the gifts which flow from His