luding us with charitable presumptions, perhaps there is no passage of St. Paul more full of comfort and delight than these eleven verses of this chapter. But of course I am not ignorant of the thought that has occurred to many an earnest student of these ancient writings. "These letters of St. Paul," he thinks, "were addressed to that first generation of Christians, who, in their manhood, by the power of the Word and the Spirit, had been converted to the true God and Jesus Christ whom He had sent; and who had then been baptised for the remission of their sins; and who had then, by the laying on of the apostles' hands, received gifts of the Holy Spirit :-as we read in the book called The Acts of the Apostles.' Of course St. Paul, writing to them, could say boldly,- We, brethren, having been justified by faith, have peace with God through Christ we have had our admission into this favour of God in which we are standing:' but would he, could he address this language to us now, who, before faith in Christ was possible, were baptised in unconscious infancy?" I am not, I say, ignorant of this train of thought, nor do I deny its apparent reasonableness. The opening of the sixth chapter will give us an opportunity of looking into it more : closely. And, in the meanwhile, the remainder of this fifth chapter will open to us the reality of the guilt of that birth-sin which is upon every child of Adam, the forgiveness of which is as much free justification by God's grace as is the forgiveness of actual sin against all the law of God. SERMON XIII. 1 Cor. xv, 22.-"As in Adam ALL die, even so in Christ shall ALL be made alive." IN these words to the Church in Corinth the apostle expresses the substance of that parallel between Adam and Christ, which he has drawn out most fully and distinctly in the fifth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, beginning at the twelfth verse. They convey especially the fact of the universality of Christ's redemption, which seems to be the central. subject of the argument in the passage which we have now to consider. The apostle has already in this epistle taken occasion more than once to vindicate for every race of human kind their equal right of admission to the blessings which are in Christ Jesus. He now places this right upon the broad and intelligible basis of our common descent from one man, and our common inheritance from him of sin and death. The argument was necessary, not only because the Jews disputed the admission of others into the kingdom of God, but also for the satisfaction of the heathens themselves. In those days he who passed into the Church of Christ had to submit himself to much tribulation, to insult and slander, to persecution, and often to torture and cruel death. Our Lord often warned His disciples that so it would be. But it required very great faith in God, on the part of the sufferers with Christ, to believe, in the midst of the fires, that they had been adopted into God's family and were objects of His everlasting love. This faith. St. Paul, in all his epistles, labours to confirm. In this place he declares that we "rejoice in our tribulations." They do not cause us to doubt the love of God; for how can we, who have been reconciled to God, now doubt the love of Him, who, before that reconciliation, "when we were enemies," so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son to die for it! "Christ died for the ungodly." "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." "Being enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son." The apostle, therefore, following on the same train of thought into which his demonstration of the certainty of the love of God had led him, contrasts sin and its atonement,-Adam and Christ, their acts, and the consequences of those acts to the whole human race. And the main point contended for seems to be the universality of the effects : of those acts that, by reason of the death of Christ, which was a propitiation "for the sins of the whole world," (1 John ii, 2,) there remains no obstacle between God and man. The work of Adam has been counteracted by the work of Christ. Their effects are coextensive. Volumes have been written on this passage. Some of the earliest fathers differed in their interpretation of parts of it. Later divines are far from unanimous. We can only speak of it very diffidently, as a place of the Sacred Scriptures full of mystery, full of difficulty; full of mystery by reason of the nature of the subject itself; full of difficulties of language and of composition. "Wherefore," it begins-or rather, " for this cause;" but the passage is so complex and broken by parentheses, that the cause spoken of in verse 12 is not declared till verse 21. The mission of Christ was for this cause or end; in order that as sin reigned (through Adam's transgression) even so might grace reign through Jesus Christ our Lord. For this cause then, "as by (or through) one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and thus death passed through unto all men, for that all were sinners". even so (we expect to hear) through one man, Christ |