Does not this thought open at least an intelligible vista into the mystery of the Atonement? Christ is the Son of Man. He is to inaugurate the true manhood. But first He must deal with the manhood that has gone {150} astray, and make an act of reparation to the Father for all the outrage that our sins have done Him. Thus in contrast to all our self-pleasing, self-indulgence, self-excusing, in contrast to all our clamorous insolence towards God and indifference to His laws, we behold the Son of Man recognizing the Father's strict requirements, and lifting before His eyes, in the name of the manhood which He represents, the great reparation of an unshrinking obedience and loyalty unto death. The Father spared not His only Son the natural consequences of obedience in a world of sin. The Son spared not Himself, but shed His blood--the 'blood which is the life'--at the Father's will. This is the one full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It is the sacrifice offered in the power of nothing less than 'eternal spirit.' Henceforth, then, no man can come to God in faith in Jesus, in the faith which even at its root is moral allegiance, and think lightly either of God's holiness or of his own or others' sin. God forgives him his sin, but it cost Him much to forgive it. The Cross is the measure of the antipathy between God and sin. And it is well to notice how the great {151} thought of this passage is made intelligible to the ordinary English reader again, only by the Revised Version. In the old Bible the word signifying 'passing over' of sins is translated 'remission'--the very thing with which it is in fact contrasted. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in this and very many places of the epistles, the Revised Version for the first time renders the thought of the apostles again intelligible to the English reader. And if the Revised Version is not popular, as the booksellers tell us it is not, this is, I fear, only a sign that the majority of English Christians do not really care to _understand_ the meaning of the message with which, as a matter of words, they are so familiar. iii.