ement that Christ having come, a high
priest of good things to come, 'through His own blood, entered in,
once for all, into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption
for us.'

There were limits to the unanimity, as I have already said. Paul and
Peter had a great quarrel about circumcision and related subjects.
The Apostolic writings are wondrously diverse from one another. Peter
is far less constructive and profound than Paul. Paul and Peter are
both untouched with the mystic wisdom of the Apostle John. But, in
regard to the facts that I have signalised, the divinity, the person
of Jesus Christ, His death and Resurrection, and the significance to
be attached to that death, they are absolutely one. The instruments
in the orchestra are various, the tender flute, the ringing trumpet,
and many another, but the note they strike is the same. 'Whether it
were I or they, so we preach.'

II. Now, let me ask you to consider the only explanation of this
unanimity.

Time was when the people, who did not believe in Christ's divinity
and sacrificial death, tortured themselves to try and make out
meanings for these epistles, which should not include the obnoxious
doctrines. That is nearly antiquated. I suppose that there is nobody
now, or next to nobody, who does not admit that, right or wrong,
Paul, Peter, John--all of them--teach these two things, that Christ
is the Eternal Son of the Father, and that His death is the Sacrifice
for the world's sin. But they say that that is not the primitive,
simple teaching of the Man of Nazareth; and that the unanimity is a
unanimity of misapprehension of, and addition to, His words and to
the drift of His teaching.

Now, just think what a huge--I was going to say--inconceivability
that supposition is. For there is no point, say from the time at
which the Apostle who wrote the words of my text, which was somewhere
about the year 56 or 57 A.D.,--there is no point between that period,
working backwards through the history of the Church to the
Crucifixion, where you can insert such a tremendous revolution of
teaching as this. There is no trace of such a change. Peter's
earliest speeches, as recorded in Acts, are in some important
respects less developed doctrinally than are the epistles, but
Christ's Messiahship, death, and Resurrection, with which is
connected the remission of sins, are as clearly and emphatically
proclaimed as at any later time. So these points of the Apostolic
test