THE INTERCESSION OF CHRIST.

"Wherefore he is able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them."-HEB., vii., 25. THE Savior is held up to the hope and confidence of men because he is immortal-ever-living-never growing old, like the priest; and because he is an intercessor. It is of this intercessorship of Christ that I wish to speak, and in the same spirit in which it is here introduced; not as a fertile theme for ingenious speculation, but as a ground for hope and consolation.

An interceding Savior is a theme much used by Paul, though not alone by him. In the ninth chapter of Hebrews it is brought out very strongly:

"For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.”

In the eighth chapter of Romans, in that triumphant outburst that almost preludes the rejoicings of heaven, Paul

says,

"Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us."

The same truth is signified by the term Mediator, though perhaps with some shade of difference in its applications, but it covers substantially the same ground that the term intercessor does.

The benefit of the view which you derive from the intercessorship of Christ will depend largely upon your own ac

ceptance and interpretation of it. If you associate it with polemical disputes of times past; if you attach to it prejudices because it has been held by men with whom, generally, you do not agree; or if you have been accustomed to defend it against enemies, surrounding it like a fort with all means of defense, until the doctrine suggests mainly ideas of controversy, not consolation, then it can be of little use to you.

If, however, you have been accustomed to look at the intercessorship of Christ from the side of human want and weakness, and their relation to the heart of God; if in your imagination there has been kindled a glowing vision rather than a positive philosophic idea; if you accept an interceding Christ as the surety that there is in heaven living pity, sympathy, thought, superintendence, divine providence, unfailing love and remembrance-in short, grace to help in time of need, so that you shall not be left to your own wisdom in selecting the things most needed in spiritual development (like a man that, being sick, should be put into an apothecary's shop, and left to pick out his own medicines), but that there is a Physician, a Mediator, an Intercessor, a Care-taker, who undertakes to do for you all the things that you need to have done, whatever they may be-things that you do not know enough to do for yourself, whether your not knowing arises from your sinfulness, or from the limitation of your faculties, or from your imperfect knowledge; and that your highest interests will be attended to, not by your own circumscribed empirical knowledge, but by One whose life, I had almost said, is divinely professional for that purpose-then in the faith of such an intercessorship of Christ you will have comfort of believing, consolation in trouble, joy and peace for the present time, and hope for the time to come.

It is into this last spirit that I shall endeavor to induct you. This topic, however, has been so much discussed, and there are so many doubts in different minds concerning it, that perhaps we may profitably make some exclusions and advance some suggestions which shall clear away difficulties,

and form a basis on which your affections and your spiritual emotions may work.

In transferring to the divine mind, in our conception, any human relation or character, we must carefully avoid ascribing that which is purely secular, and subject to human or material limitations. Thus the Scriptures teach us that our God is Judge; and yet it will not do to take all our experience of judgeship, and ascribe the whole to the divine nature. The methods by which men come to a knowledge of facts, and to a just judgment, arise in part from the limitations of the human mind; and these limitations can not be supposed to exist in a Being whose mind transcends the bounds of time and of space. It is only an ideal element, derived from human life, that we ascribe to God. The purest human love is too coarse for the Perfect One. By our imagination we refine it, we lift it above those impairing conditions which exist in every human experience, and, rubbing out the narrow lines of weakness, we behold it infinite and divine! The Fatherhood of God, if taken in a large way, not too minutely and critically, embodies a transcendent truth. And yet, if you go into an examination of precisely what a father is in human experience, and transfer that bodily to the divine mind, you will embarrass more than help.

Many stand in doubt on the subject of the intercessorship of Christ because they have attempted to apply to the divine mind those features of intercessorship which are human -the incidents of weakness, ignorance, and of physical forms and necessities. Failing in that, they have either abandoned the subject in disappointment, or, holding to it, stumbled into errors.

We are not, therefore, to understand the intercessorship of Christ as implying any strangeness, unacquaintance, or indifference in the Eternal Father respecting our affairs. If we send an embassador to England, it is because we suppose that the government or people have not knowledge or interest enough in our affairs to act justly toward us, or that they

will lack motives for acting, or that their motives for right action will need to be intensified. Hence in foreign courts we have ministers to intercede for us. They are mediators; they are intercessors. You must drop all such notions of the intercessorship of Christ as that he is to convey information not now possessed, to adjust facts, or to make things clearer in the divine mind than they were already, otherwise you ascribe to God elements of intercessorship which are purely the result of the limitations of the human condition.

Still less must we imagine any reluctance, any unwillingness in the divine mind, whether from just anger or from reasons of state, which, though insuperable without persuasion, may be pleaded away. Many persons have said, "We can not conceive of a God who, sitting in a kind of prejudice of anger, will not do things that are loving and benefi cent to the human family in its sin-beset condition until reasoned with. We can conceive of a proud parent whose feeling has been wounded by the misconduct of a child, who needs persuasion to induce him to do right, and to help him bring his own best feelings into the judgment seat, and to keep down his worst feelings; but to suppose that the divine Father requires any such intercession as this; to imagine that there is wrath, burning hot; an unquenched, an unslaked zeal of justice in his bosom, which will down when Christ comes before him, but on which no effect is produced when men, in all the generations of time, and in myriad numbers, suffering, weeping, and wailing, lift themselves up before him, is simply awful! We could not worship such a God.” Neither could I. There is no such God. Nothing of this is taught in the Word of God. To be sure, there is an attempt, by figures and intensifications, to show that God, whether men do right or wrong, is a conservator of justice, but nowhere is there an attempt to show that God has such a love of abstract justice that he is without sympathy for concrete life and suffering, and that a second person, a new element, is

needed to bring him, as it were, to consent to the exercise of his attributes of kindness and mercy.

The effect of such a view would be to render the divine nature less earnest and benevolent without Christ than with him, whereas the Bible teaches us that God was always infinitely benevolent and earnest. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to die for it. Christ is represented, not as indifferent, nor as sped, like a silver arrow from a golden bow, without his own volition. He is always shown as concurrent and accordant with the divine mind. The Bible is emphatic in this-that Christ is the gift of God; that, beholding the world in wickedness and sorrow, God was moved by his characteristic benevolence to the work of saving mankind through Jesus Christ; and any view that contradicts these representations of Scripture must be wrong, and will mislead us in forming our conceptions of the nature of Deity.

Nor are we to suppose it necessary that there should be an intercessor because the whole work of redemption and salvation was a work that required more aid than naturally belonged to one mind.

While we exclude these elements of weakness and limitation known to be human, we must not, on the other hand, exclude too much, nor assume an undue degree of knowledge.

No man is prepared to show that the mind of God is not affected by the intercessions of friendship and love. It is true that God is in and of himself just and good, and that there is no conflict between his justice and benevolence. It is true that he needs not to take counsel with any. But we are not prepared to say that there is not in the divine disposition a great pleasure in being pleaded with; that God does not prefer to act in the atmosphere of personal sympathy, and in the warmth of desires presented to him by others, rather than in the silence and seclusion of absolute superiority.

In forming a conception of God, men have sometimes lifted.