s. By faith and
sacraments, that which is potentially ours becomes our own in actual
fact.

In simpler language, and in more familiar but not less true words, we who
are members of Christ's Body, in all our weak attempts after repentance
and faith, are not left to our own unaided resources, but are at every
point aided and enabled to advance to final, complete reconciliation and
union by the Spirit of the Christ working in us.

He is no merely external reconciler. He reconciles us from within,
working along with our own wills, to create that changed mind which is
His own Mind revealed upon the Cross for no other reason than that it
might become our mind, the most real and fundamental thing in us, that
"new man, which is being renewed after the image of Him Who created him."

VI
REDEMPTION

"Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is
perfect."--MATT. V. 48.

"Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver from the body of this
death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord."--ROM. VII.
24, 25.

We have studied the meaning of reconciliation through the Cross. We have
said that to be reconciled to God means to cease to be the object of the
Wrath of God, that is, His hostility to sin. We can only cease to be the
objects of this Divine Wrath by identifying ourselves with it, by making
God's Mind in regard to sin, and our sins, our own mind. The Cross gives
us power to do this. For it reveals to us in the terms of humanity, that
is, in the only way in which it could be made intelligible to us, the
Divine Mind in its relation to sin. By faith, which is personal
surrender to Christ, His mind thus revealed becomes our mind. Thus we
attain to "repentance," in the New Testament sense of the changed mind
and outlook upon sin. And the motive power to faith and repentance is
supplied by our union with Christ.

But all this is not yet enough. We have not exhausted the glory, the
full meaning of the Cross. If this were indeed all, the work of our
salvation would be incomplete. For I may indeed have, in Christ, died to
sin; in Him I may have repudiated it; but the task of life still lies
before me to be fulfilled, and that task is nothing short of this: the
complete putting off of sin, the complete putting on of holiness, the
final achievement of that union with God which is life eternal.

For this I was made. "Ye shall therefore be perfect, as your Father in
heaven is per