ur identification with Him, but that identification
depends on ourselves and is only an accomplished fact through our faith.
When we trust in Him it is true that all His--His righteousness, His
Sonship, His union with the Father--is ours, and that all ours--our
sins, our guilt, our alienation from God and our dwelling in the far-off
land of rags and vice--is His. In His voluntary identification with us,
He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. It is for us to
determine whether we will lay on Him our iniquities, as the Father has
already laid the iniquities of us all. Are we by faith in Him who was
born of a woman, born under law, making our very own the redemption from
the law which He has wrought and the adoption of sons which He bestows?

WHAT MAKES A CHRISTIAN: CIRCUMCISION OR FAITH?

'In Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any
thing, nor uncircumcision, but faith which worketh
by love.'--GAL. v. 6.

It is a very singular instance of imaginative misreading of plain facts
that the primitive Church should be held up as a pattern Church. The
early communities had apostolic teaching; but beyond that, they seem to
have been in no respect above, and in many respects below, the level of
subsequent ages. If we may judge of their morality by the exhortations
and dehortations which they received from the Apostle, Corinth and
Thessalonica were but beginners in holiness. If we may judge of their
intelligence by the errors into which they were in danger of falling,
these first congregations had indeed need that one should teach them
which were the first principles of the oracles of God. It could not be
otherwise. They were but just rescued from heathenism, and we need not
wonder if their spirits long bore the scars of their former bondage. If
we wish to know what the apostolic churches were like, we have but to
look at the communities gathered by modern missionaries. The same
infantile simplicity, the same partial apprehensions of the truth, the
same danger of being led astray by the low morality of their heathen
kindred, the same openness to strange heresy, the same danger of
blending the old with the new, in opinion and in practice, beset both.

The history of the first theological difference in the early churches is
a striking confutation of the dream that they were perfect, and a
striking illustration of the dangers to which they were exposed from
the attempt, so natural