Still, we are individuals, as you said, not lost after all in the world’s solidarity. Here your personal right and will must come in. What Christ has done for you is yours, so far as you accept it. He has died your death beforehand, trusting that you would not repudiate His act, that you would not let His blood be spilt in vain. But He will never force His mediation upon you. He respects your freedom and your manhood. Do you now endorse what Jesus Christ did on your behalf? Do you renounce the sin, and accept the sacrifice? Then it is yours, from this moment, before the tribunal of God and of conscience. By the witness of His Spirit you are proclaimed a forgiven and reconciled man. Christ crucified is yours--if you will have Him, if you will identify your sinful self with the sinless Mediator, if as you see Him lifted up on the cross you will let your heart cry out, “Oh my God, He dies for _me_!” Coming “in one Spirit to the Father,” the reconciled children join hands again with each other. Social barriers, caste feelings, family feuds, personal quarrels, national antipathies, alike go down before the virtue of the blood of Jesus. “Neither passion nor pride His cross can abide, But melt in the fountain that streams from His side!” “Beloved,” you will say to the man that hates or has wronged you most,--“Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” In these simple words of the apostle John lies the secret of universal peace, the hope of the fraternization of mankind. Nations will have to say this one day, as well as men. FOOTNOTES: [89] See to this effect such passages as Rom. i. 16 (_to the Jew first_), ix. 4, 5; and especially xi. 13-32. [90] Gal. iii. 28; Col. iii. 11. Comp. John x. 16, xi. 52. See _The Epistle to the Galatians_ (Expositor’s Bible), Chapter XV. CHAPTER XI. _GOD’S TEMPLE IN HUMANITY._ “So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God, being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the chief corner stone; in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.”--EPH. ii. 19-22. Not unfrequently it is the last word or phrase of the paragraph that gives us the clue to St Paul’s meaning and discloses the point at which he has aimed all along. So in this instance. “For a habitation of God in the Spirit”: behold the goal of God’s ways with mankind! For this end the Divine grace has wrought through countless ages and has made its great sacrifice. For this end Jew and Gentile are being gathered into one and compacted into a new humanity.