the vindication of our faith on
the one hand, and as the ground of the possibility of the benefits of
His death being world-wide on the other--viz. the Son of God--then we
shall not stumble at the thought that He died for all, because He died
for each. I know that if you only regard Jesus Christ as human I am
talking utter nonsense; but I know, too, that if we believe in the
divinity of our Lord, there need be nothing to stumble us, but the
contrary, in the thought that it was not an abstraction that He died
for, that it was not a vague mass of unknown beings, clustered together,
but so far away that He could not see any of their faces, for whom He
gave His life on the Cross. That is the way in which, and in which
alone, _we_ can embrace the whole mass of humanity--by losing sight of
the individuals. We generalise, precisely because we do not see the
individual units; but that is not God's way, and that is not Christ's
way, who is divine. For Him the _all_ is broken up into its parts, and
when we say that the divine love loves all, we mean that the divine love
loves each. I believe (and I commend the thought to you) that we do not
fathom the depth of Christ's sufferings unless we recognise that the
sins of each man were consciously adding pressure to the load beneath
which He sank; nor picture the wonders of His love until we believe that
on the Cross it distinguished and embraced each, and, therefore,
comprehended all. Every man may say, 'He loved me, and gave Himself for
me.'

II. So much, then, for the first central fact that is here. Now let me
say a word, in the second place, about the faith which makes that fact
the foundation of my own personal life.

'I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself
for me.' I am not going to plunge into any unnecessary dissertations
about the nature of faith; but may I say that, like all other familiar
conceptions, it has got worn so smooth that it glides over our mental
palate without roughening any of the _papillae_ or giving any sense or
savour at all? And I do believe that dozens of people like you, who have
come to church and chapel all your lives, and fancy yourselves to be
fully _au fait_ at all the Christian truth that you will ever hear from
my lips, do not grasp with any clearness of apprehension the meaning of
that fundamental word 'faith.'

It is a thousand pities that it is confined by the accidents of language
to our attitude in reference