he service of the whole
involves pain, although it is also the deepest joy that the human heart
can know. The sacrifice of Jesus is the central and ideal expression
of this principle on the field of time, but it only possesses meaning
and value as it is repeated in our lives; the Christ has to be offered
perpetually on the altar of human hearts. There is no justification
except by becoming just, and no imputed righteousness which means
availing ourselves of merits that are not ours. We are "justified by
faith," indeed, but only in the sense that no man can become good
without believing in goodness, and no man can really believe in the
Christ revealed in Jesus without gradually becoming like Him. Here is
Atonement, Justification, Sanctification, and all else that is needed
to unite mankind to the life eternal which is to know God and Jesus
Christ whom He has sent.

+No Old Testament prophecy of Atonement of Jesus.+--It can hardly be
necessary to point out that there is therefore no direct reference in
the Old Testament to the atoning work of Jesus. All the beautiful
passages with which we are so familiar, and which have become the
language of devotion in reference to such sacred seasons as Christmas
Day and Good Friday, can only be associated with Jesus in an ideal
sense. The noble fifty-third of Isaiah, for example, and all similar
passages about the prophetic conception of the suffering servant of
God, have, literally understood, nothing whatever to do with Jesus.
But the striking thing about such passages is that the men who wrote
them were able to realise and express the very essence of the spiritual
Atonement, the giving of the individual for the race. The pathetic and
inspiring description, "He was despised and rejected of men, a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from
him, he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our
griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken,
smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our
transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of
our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed," is perhaps
the grandest presentation of the atoning life, the Christ man, that
exists in literature. The ideal fulfilment of it was Jesus, as
primitive Christianity quickly saw; but had the original writer no
specific example in mind belonging to his own day when he wrote? To be
su