death! the vague, shadowy, and awful name of the king of terrors.

The Holy Ghost, who knows all things, well knew that this mighty term, and its no less mighty synonymes, were more calculated to intimate to mortal apprehension the viewless, nameless, inconceivable sufferings of the Redeemer of the world, than any other terms which human ears could hear and live. The name of the king of terrors must have been selected, not only for its transcendent potency, but for the affinity between the spiritual or second death which awaited the redeemed and the vicarious agonies borne for them by their great Redeemer. Eternal death awaited them. Death was the name of the penalty of their transgressions. Their Redeemer took on himself the penalty. The name went along with it, as the shadow follows the substance. The term death, or either of its synonymes, then, when applied in scripture to the second person of the Trinity, meant not to intimate the cessation of his existence, even for a moment. It meant to shadow forth to the imagination and impress on the heart the image of those vicarious sufferings, equivalent to the eternal death of the redeemed, which the uncreated Son endured for their redemption.

The Bible has given a mysterious prominence

148 ATONING DEATH BEGUN NOT ON CROSS.

to the death of Christ, representing it as the vital element of the mediatorial sacrifice. We have seen that the blood of Christ, according to its scriptural import, means the totality of the merits of his expiatory sufferings. The body of Christ has the same comprehensiveness of signification. When, at his sacramental supper, our Lord distributed among his disciples the symbolical bread and wine, and called them his body and his blood, they typified and represented, not merely his physical body and blood, but the whole infinitude of his mediatorial merits. The death of Christ, in its scriptural import, has the same vast amplitude of signification. It was not confined to his expiration on the cross. The mediatorial death, which wrought the salvation of the world, began when the second person of the Trinity "emptied himself" of the glory and beatitude of his Godhead. It descended with him to the manger of Bethlehem. It followed him to the workshop of Joseph. It clung with a vulture's grasp to the bosom of the houseless God, through his terrestrial pilgrimage. It included the totality of his expiatory humiliation and sufferings. Calvary witnessed its consummation, not its inception.

To limit the redeeming death of the Bible to the visible expiration between the two thieves would, by narrowing the extent and depreciating

Without it, the smoke

the value of the atoning offering, lower the awful standard of divine justice, and thus dim one of the brightest gems of the celestial diadem. Terrible indeed was the consummation of the atoning death. It was the outpouring of the full cup of God's wrath. Awful beyond what creatures on earth, or, probably, creatures in heaven, can express or conceive, was the concluding scene of the mediatorial drama. We would not underrate its transcendent value. Without it, not a soul could have been saved. of the torment of the redeemed must have ascended up forever and ever. The tremendous consummation on Calvary, however, consisted not chiefly in the physical death of Christ. That was but its finite element. His physical death was but the demolition of "the temple of his body, that it might be reared again more gloriously on the third day. The astonished centurion apprehended not that secret, yet almighty cause which darkened the sun, rent the rocks, and convulsed the earth.

But the hidden pavilion, in which were accomplished the sufferings of the Prince of life in his ethereal essence, witnessed throes and spasms sufficient to have dissolved the material universe, had it not been upheld by the power of its agonized Creator. The darkened pavilion, where the

sword of the Lord of Hosts inflicted on God the Son "the chastisement of our peace," was the scene of that concentration and sublimation of unearthly agonies which inspiration could but faintly intimate to our mental vision even by the vague, and shadowy, and appalling figure of the king of terrors.

That the term death, when applied to represent the expiatory sufferings, was satisfied by the physical expiration on Calvary, is a theory opposed to the letter and spirit of scripture. There were sufferings behind the veil which shut out mortal vision, unseen and nameless. Those sufferings formed the true consummation of the mediatorial death of the Bible. Of that death of deaths, the visible extinction of life on Calvary was but the shadow. The physical expiration on Calvary was the death of the redeeming man. The expiatory sufferings of the redeeming God, included, too, under the awful name of the king of terrors, and constituting the infinite portion of the redeeming sacrifice, were viewless-unseen by mortals, perhaps seen only by the Sacred Three. The strong, yet seemingly unsatisfied desire of angels to look into them intimates that they were not open, palpable, and familiar to the angelic vision.

CHAPTER XI.

Death of Eternal Son continued-His Suffering Substitute for Spiritual Death of Redeemed-Hence said to have "tasted Death for every Man"-Consisted in outpouring on him of God's Wrath against Sin-Comments on second Chapter of Hebrews.

THERE is a physical death, and there is a spiritual death, sometimes called, in scripture, the second death. There is a death for mortals to die, and a death of which immortals are capable of dying. When Christ said, "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death;" and again, when he said, "And whosoever liveth, and believeth in me, shall never die," he did not mean to exempt from physical death him who believed in him and kept his saying.-John, viii., 51; xi., 26. He left physical death as he found it, the common inheritance of humanity. It was from spiritual death only that our Lord promised to protect those who yielded him their belief and their obedience. When Paul declared that Christ had "abolished death," he spoke only of the death of the redeemed soul.-2 Timothy, i., 10.

It was, then, to save us, not from physical, but from spiritual death; not from the death of time,