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www.million-books.comwww.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. THE FACT OF THE ATONEMENT: THE TESTIMONY OF OUR LORD. WE have now to inquire whether our Lord gave any account of His Death which at all explains the mysterious facts which we considered in the previous Lecture, and to which the Evangelists give so much prominence. Had He been silent on the relation of His sufferings to human redemption, it would have remained true that His Death was present to His mind from the very commencement of His ministry; that when it came near, it filled Him with dismay; and that on the cross He was forsaken by the Father. But He was not silent. Nor are we left to discover His inner thought concerning His Death from obscure allusions to it of ambiguous meaning, or from words spoken incidentally and suggested by circumstances which we might call accidental, or from parables which might be of doubtful interpretation, or from illustrations derived from Jewish institutions about whose precise significance there might be interminable controversy. It was of infinite importance that there should be no misapprehension of His meaning, and He therefore selected for the full andfinal explanation of the nature and intention of His Death an hour of pathetic solemnity. The explanation was not drawn from Him by any request of His disciples or by any taunts of His enemies: it came altogether from Himself, and as the result of a deliberate purpose. It was veiled under no metaphor. It was expressed plainly, directly, explicitly. As if to save it from all the chances and perils which are inseparable from the transmission of thought to remote countries and remote generations, He connected it with the institution of a new and peculiar sacred rite, which was to be celebrated by His disciples to the end of time. We have four accounts in the New Testam...
