+No Old Testament prophecy of Atonement of Jesus.+--It can hardly be necessary to point out that there is therefore no direct reference in the Old Testament to the atoning work of Jesus. All the beautiful passages with which we are so familiar, and which have become the language of devotion in reference to such sacred seasons as Christmas Day and Good Friday, can only be associated with Jesus in an ideal sense. The noble fifty-third of Isaiah, for example, and all similar passages about the prophetic conception of the suffering servant of God, have, literally understood, nothing whatever to do with Jesus. But the striking thing about such passages is that the men who wrote them were able to realise and express the very essence of the spiritual Atonement, the giving of the individual for the race. The pathetic and inspiring description, "He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from him, he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed," is perhaps the grandest presentation of the atoning life, the Christ man, that exists in literature. The ideal fulfilment of it was Jesus, as primitive Christianity quickly saw; but had the original writer no specific example in mind belonging to his own day when he wrote? To be sure he had; the case of Jeremiah would furnish it if no other. This brave and faithful advocate of the moral ideal, after standing alone in his resistance to the materialising tendencies of his time, was scorned and hated by his fellow-countrymen, flung into prison, beaten, tortured, and probably murdered in the end. He shared the captivity of the Jews under Nebuchadnezzar, a captivity against which he had warned them in vain. "Despised and rejected of men," he died, but in later days his name came to be reverenced as perhaps none had ever been before. For centuries afterwards he was referred to by the returned exiles as _the_ prophet, in contradistinction to all other prophets. He had lived the atoning life and died a sacrificial death. It was not wonderful that the author of the fifty-third of Isaiah should have such a noble example in mind when he penned his deathless words, but these words were meant to have an impersonal meaning too. They stand as a description of the ideal manhood, the true servant of God, the saviour of the race in any and every generation. This kind of manhood, just because it is the true manhood, the eternal or divine manhood, must inevitably suffer in a selfish world, but these sufferings are never in vain; they are the Calvary from which the eternal Christ rises in redeeming might over the power of sin and death. Let any man ask