d
imagery, but as one of the many voices in which God speaks, bringing
strength and gladness from His Holy Place.

Can we not trace the sign of the Cross in the first hint of the new
spring's dawning? In many cases, as in the chestnut, before a single
old leaf has faded, next year's buds may be seen, at the summit of
branch and twig, formed into its very likeness: in others the
leaf-buds seem to bear its mark by breaking through the stem
blood-red. Back in the plant's first stages, the crimson touch is to
be found in seed-leaves and fresh shoots, and even in the hidden
sprouts. Look at the acorn, for instance, as it breaks its shell, and
see how the baby tree bears its birthmark: it is the blood-red in
which the prism ray dawns out of the darkness, and the sunrise out of
the night. The very stars, science now tells us, glow with this same
colour as they are born into the universe out of the dying of former
stars.[Footnote*:Prof. Huggins. Brit. Asso. 1891.]

Be it as it may in nature, it is true, at any rate in the world of
grace, that each soul that would enter into real life must bear at
the outset this crimson seal; there must be the individual
"sprinkling of the Blood of Jesus Christ." It must go out through the
Gate of the Cross.

And here is the needs-be. Death is the only way out of the world of
condemnation wherein we lie. Shut into that world, it is vain to try
by any self-effort to battle out; nothing can revoke the decree "the
soul that sinneth it shall die."

The only choice left is this. Shall it be, under the old headship of
Adam, our own death, in all that God means by the word, or shall it
be, under the headship of Christ, the death of another in our place?

It is when we come to self-despair, when we feel ourselves locked in,
waiting our doom, that the glory and the beauty of God's way of
escape dawns upon us, and we submit ourselves to Him in it. All
resistance breaks down as faith closes on the fact: "He loved me and
gave Himself for me." We receive the atonement so hardly won, and we
go out into life not only pardoned, but cleared and justified.

Death to Sin's Penalty is the Way Out into a Life of Justification.

And as we go out free, we find that on the other side of the Cross a
new existence has really begun: that the love of the Crucified has
touched the springs of our being--we are in another world, under an
open heaven. "Christ hath suffered for sins, the Just for the unjust,
that He