the event of His resurrection, or rather of His readmission into paradise, though not so frequently yet is clearly set forth as related to the other, that exaltation being conferred on Him as the reward of His obedience, by which He opened the door of heaven both for Himself and for all His followers. It is thus that He who is said to have reconciled us by His death, is also said by His life to have consummated our salvation. And thus if, as we have already said, the fruit or final object of His descending movement was His being delivered for our offences-so the fruit or final object of His ascending movement is His being raised again for our justification.

There are other passages in Scripture which intimate the same relation that we have now stated -between, on the one hand, the death and resurrection of our Saviour; and, on the other, the two distinct points, of that salvation, (removal of the penalty and a right by service to the positive reward) which He hath achieved for us, and by which He hath completed our title-deed to an entry and a purchased possession in the paradise of God. But that I may come at once to the lesson of our text, I would only now bid you think of these two great movements, from heaven to earth and from earth to heaven, and of the illustrious Person who had to make them-ere the high demands of the divine jurisprudence could be fulfilled or a way of access be again opened for guilty man to the Lawgiver whom he had offended. It was a question in

the policy of Heaven which angels desired to look into; and the highest wisdom as well as highest strength of these upper regions had to be put forth for its settlement. For this, the Eternal Son had, from amid the wondering hosts of the celestial, to leave the bosom of His father; and He, whose forthgoings were of old, even from everlasting, had to veil all His primeval glories in an earthly tabernacle; and, when God manifest in the flesh, did He partake to the full in the infirmities of our assumed and associated nature; and beyond the ken of mortal eye, were their sufferings unknown of which we read a few mysterious outbreakings in the agonies of the garden; and unknown struggles too in still deeper passages of His history, as when He engaged in conflict with the forces of darkness, and spoiled principalities and powers and made a show of them openly. And after a death of deep and dreadful endurance, an equivalent sacrifice for the guilt of a world; and a descent into the lower parts of the earth, the purpose whereof, from the imperfect glimpses which revelation gives of it, is to us an unsolved enigma-did the once crucified, retrace His way to the position and pre-eminence which He at present occupies of the now exalted Saviour -First by the reanimation of His body, then by His resurrection from the grave, then by His sublime ascension above the world, where He slowly withdrew from the gaze of chosen witnesses; and last of all by His entrance into heaven, and the assumption of His Mediatorial place at the right hand of

the Father-and that, we may well believe, amid the hosannas of an angelic host, who, in numbers without number, welcomed and did Him homage as the Author and the Finisher of a mighty enterprise -Even the enterprise by which He brought in an everlasting righteousness in the merit and investiture of which, the guiltiest sinners of our fallen, our dishonoured species, may, without disparagement either to the law or to the Lawgiver, stand with acceptance before the throne of God. We ask you to ponder on these things. Slighted, disregarded, scarcely recognised at all in the hazy atmosphere of earth-we ask you to think of the movement and the stir, if I may so express myself, which they made in heaven, and of the lofty estimation in which they are held by the intelligences there. Above all, keep a fast and firm hold of this consideration. To reinstate our fallen world, the Son of God had first to descend and die for sin; and then to ascend even to the place which He now occupies-where, as the fruit of the travail of His sonl, He completes and effectuates our salvation.

With this fully in your mind, we are in a fit condition both for your understanding and for our enforcement of the lessons in the text. And first, as a lesson of rebuke to those of whom we read in the preceding context, who, refusing to take up with this righteousness of God, vainly and presumptuously sought to establish a righteousness of their own. Other foundation, the Bible tells us, than that which is laid already, can no man lay; but

they, unchecked and unhumbled by any sense of their own utter impotency, labour with all their might to construct and lay over again a foundation of merit and of dependence for themselves. In other words, they would usurp the office of the Saviour; or, as if that office had been imperfectly fulfilled, and left unfinished, they would lay aside His work and substitute their own work in its place -in the proud imagination that their own strength was commensurate to the mighty enterprise, that enterprise of toil and conflict and suffering and at length of triumph which brought Christ down from heaven, and brought Him up again from the deep and secret places of the earth. In despite of this great achievement, their constant inclination is for another basis of acceptance on which to lean than that which Christ hath so laboriously reared; or as if to supersede and set at nought the plea of His righteousness-which alone is adequate to the dignity of Heaven's jurisprudence-would they thrust forward their own puny and polluted righteousness as being good enough for God. You may now understand the principle on which this self-dependence of man becomes so high an offence in the sight of Heaven. It implies the disparagement and the mockery of all that has already been done for the world's salvation. We read of Christ as the Captain of this salvation-and that He trode the winepress alone and that of the people there were none with Him. Say not then in thy heart, that thou canst make atonement or amends for thine own

disobedience—a work so arduous, as to have brought down Christ from heaven for the achievement of it. And say not in thine heart that thou canst substantiate a right by thine own services to the rewards of immortality-a work of Christ's also, and for the victorious fulfilment of which He was brought up from the dead, and highly exalted to a place of advocacy and intercession at God's right hand, where even within the precincts of that august sanctuary of which justice and judgment are the habitation, He, on the single strength of his own righteousness, can make good the claims of all who believe on Him. To turn from such a salvation as this, and labour for the achievement of it with one's own arm, is indeed to stumble at a stumbling-block. It is affronting to God. It is ruinous to man. But this is not all. There is in this passage not only a lesson of rebuke to the proud-but the far kindlier and more congenial lesson, and the one we are most anxious to impress, a lesson of highest encouragement to the humble. For it is not always pride that actuates a man, when seeking to establish a right to heaven by his own righteousness. Apart from this, there is the natural legality of the human heart-a most natural imagination, and upheld by a thousand analogies in the transactions of man with man, that obedience is the work and heaven is the wages-the one the purchasemoney, the other the purchase-related to each other like the counterpart terms of any contract or bargain in the numerous exchanges of human so