the place of sin-bearing--when He anticipated the horrors with which, in this point of view, it stood invested, He exclaimed, "Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me." (Luke xxiii. 42.) He shrank from that which His work, as a sin-bearer, involved. His pure and holy mind shrank from the thought of contact with sin, and His loving heart shrank from the thought of losing, for a moment, the light of God's countenance. But then, the cross had another aspect. It stood before the eye of Christ as a scene in which He could fully tell out all the deep secrets of His love to the Father--a place in which He could, "of His own voluntary will," take the cup which the Father had given Him, and drain it to the very dregs. True it is that the whole life of Christ emitted a fragrant odor, which ever ascended to the Father's throne--He did always those things which pleased the Father--He ever did the will of God; but the burnt-offering does not typify Him in His life--precious, beyond all thought, as was every act of that life,--but in His death, and in that, not as one "made a curse for us," but as one presenting to the heart of the Father an odor of incomparable fragrance. This truth invests the cross with peculiar charms for the spiritual mind. It imparts to the sufferings of our blessed Lord an interest of the most intense character. The guilty sinner, no doubt, finds in the cross a divine answer to the deepest and most earnest cravings of heart and conscience: the true believer finds in the cross that which captivates every affection of his heart, and transfixes his whole moral being: the angels find in the cross a theme for ceaseless admiration. All this is true; but there is that in the cross which passes far beyond the loftiest conceptions of saints or angels, namely, the deep-toned devotion of the heart of the Son presented to and appreciated by the heart of the Father. This is the elevated aspect of the cross which is so strikingly shadowed forth in the burnt-offering.