and in the inestimable First Epistle of St. Peter, is presented to us, is the expiation of Christ. [Footnote 91: II _Cor._, viii, 9; _Is._, liii, 5; I _Pet._, ii, 21; _Is._, liii, 12.] [Footnote 92: I _Pet._, i, 18, 19.] [Footnote 93: II _Cor._, v, 21.] The notion, therefore, of _satisfying and appeasing an angry God's wrath_, does not come into Paul's real conception of Jesus Christ's sacrifice. Paul's foremost notion of this sacrifice is, that by it Jesus died to the law of selfish impulse, parted with what to men in general is most precious and near. Paul's second notion is, that whereas Jesus suffered in doing this, his suffering was not _his_ fault, but ours; not for _his_ good, but for ours. In the first aspect, Jesus is the _martyrion_,--the testimony in his life and in his death, to righteousness, to the power and goodness of God. In the second aspect he is the _antilytron_ or ransom. But, in either aspect, Jesus Christ's solemn and dolorous condemnation of sin does actually loosen sin's hold and attraction upon us who regard it,--makes it easier for us to understand and love goodness, to rise above self, to die to sin. Christ's sacrifice, however, and the condemnation of sin it contained, was made for us while we were yet sinners; it was made irrespectively of our power or inclination to sympathise with it and appreciate it. Yet, even thus, in Paul's view, the sacrifice reconciled us to God, to the eternal order; for it contained the means, the only possible means, of our being brought into harmony with this order. Jesus Christ, nevertheless, was delivered for our sins while we were yet sinners,[94] and before we could yet appreciate what he did. But presently there comes a change. Grace, the goodness of God, _the spirit_,--as Paul loved to call that awful and beneficent impulsion of things within us and without us, which we can concur with, indeed, but cannot create,--leads us to _repentance towards God_,[95] a change of the inner man in regard to the moral order, duty, righteousness. And now, to help our impulse towards righteousness, we have a power enabling us to turn this impulse to full account. Now _the spirit_ does its greatest work in us; now, for the first time, the influence of Jesus Christ's pregnant act really gains us. For now awakens the sympathy for the act and the appreciation of it, which its doer dispensed with or was too benign to wait for; _faith working through love towards Christ_[96] enters into us, masters us. We identify ourselves,--this is the line of Paul's thought,--with Christ; we repeat, through the power of this identification, Christ's death to the law of the flesh and self-pleasing, his condemnation of sin in the flesh; the death how imperfectly, the condemnation how remorsefully! But we rise with him, Paul continues, to life, the only true life, of imitation of God, of putting on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness,[97] of following the