s of Jesus has also been
noticed by the skeptic, and an argument has been founded upon it to prove
that He was soured by ill-success, and, like other merely human reformers
who have found the human heart too hard, for them, fell away from the
gentleness with which He began His ministry, into the anger and
denunciation of mortified ambition with which it closed. This is the
picture of Jesus Christ which Renan presents in his apocryphal Gospel.
But the fact is, that the Redeemer _began_ with law, and was rigorous
with sin from the very first. The Sermon on the Mount was delivered not
far from twelve months from the time of His inauguration, by baptism, to
the office of Messiah. And all along through His ministry of three years
and a half, He constantly employs the law in order to prepare his hearers
for grace. He was as gentle and gracious to the penitent sinner, in the
opening of His ministry, as he was at the close of it; and He was as
unsparing and severe towards the hardened and self-righteous sinner, in
His early Judaean, as He was in His later Galilean ministry.

It is sometimes said that the surest way to produce conviction of sin is
to preach the Cross. There is a sense in which this is true, and there is
a sense in which it is false. If the Cross is set forth as the cursed
tree on which the Lord of Glory hung and suffered, to satisfy the demands
of Eternal Justice, then indeed there is fitness in the preaching to
produce the sense of guilt. But this is to preach the _law_, in its
fullest extent, and the most tremendous energy of its claims. Such
discourse as this must necessarily analyze law, define it, enforce it,
and apply it in the most cogent manner. For, only as the atonement of
Christ is shown to completely meet and satisfy all these _legal_ demands
which have been so thoroughly discussed and exhibited, is the real virtue
and power of the Cross made manifest.

But if the Cross is merely held up as a decorative ornament, like that on
the breast of Belinda, "which Jews might kiss and infidels adore;" if it
be proclaimed as the beautiful symbol of the Divine indifference and
indulgence, and there be a studious _avoiding_ of all judicial aspects
and relations; if the natural man is not searched by law and alarmed by
justice, but is only soothed and narcotized by the idea of an
Epicurean deity destitute of moral anger and inflicting no righteous
retribution,--then, there will be no conviction of sin. Whenever th