to him to sanctify its commencement, and to mark the transition from the old religion to the new. But where was the victim of this Christian passover? The Jewish passover was essentially a sacrifice, and the idea of vicarious atonement was clearly stamped on it. The Jews believed that, when the first-born sons of the Egyptians had been destroyed, the first-born sons of their ancestors had escaped, through the sprinkling on their doorways of the blood of a _first-born_ lamb or kid of their flocks.[58] Sacrificial substitution is unmistakable here. Now, as mentioned above, Christ at this time had probably taken as his ideal the suffering Messiah thought to be referred to in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. There the supposed Messiah is spoken of as becoming “an offering for sin,” and as bearing “the sin of many.”[59] To Christ’s mind, we must remember, the idea of atonement for sin by sacrifice was thoroughly familiar, rooted as it was in the Jewish law. If, then, he believed that for him as Messiah a death at the hands of others was ordained, he would at this moment naturally see in his death an atonement offered for sin. Though he must have regarded the sacrificial system of the law as only decreed for a time, he would still feel that underlying it there was a divine principle. Recognizing this principle, with the passage of Isaiah pressing on him a sense of a connection between it and his death, he would be sure to find in himself the victim of the Christian passover. The idea that his death was an atonement for sin may have occurred to him before. But whether it did or not, it must have been fully developed in his mind by the circumstances under which he kept this passover. It fitted like a key into the peculiarities of his religion. As already explained, his object as Messiah was to found a system which should secure the happiness of those who accepted him; on his second coming, they were to enjoy the felicity of the Messianic period on earth, as well as the everlasting joys of heaven. If they were to enjoy felicity, to escape punishment, through his death, which necessarily preceded his second coming, how readily would that death appear to him, as a Jew, an atoning sacrifice for their sins! Just as the lamb of the passover had borne, as a substitute for the Israelites, the penalty that had fallen on the Egyptians, so he, as their substitute, would bear for his followers the penalty that would fall on the rest of the world, the time at which his death was to take place heightening the parallel and making it seem to be providentially designed.