and Life, and Death of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, the hand of faith grasping the offered blessing, the indwelling in believing souls of the Divine Spirit, and the consequent admission of man into a life of sonship, power, peace, victory, glory, the child’s place in the love of the Father from which nothing can separate.  These are the teachings which make the staple of this Epistle.  These are the explanations of the weighty phrases of my text.  These are at least the essential elements of the Gospel according to Paul.

But he was not alone in this construction of his message.  We hear a great deal to-day about Pauline Christianity, with the implication, and sometimes with the assertion, that he was the inventor of what, for the sake of using a brief and easily intelligible term, I may call Evangelical Christianity.  Now, it is a very illuminating thought for the reading of the New Testament that there are the three sets of teaching, roughly, the Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine, and you cannot find the distinctions between these three in any difference as to the fundamental contents of the Gospel; for if Paul rings out, ’God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us,’ Peter declares, ’Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree,’ and John, from his island solitude, sends across the waters the hymn of praise, ’Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood.’  And so the proud declaration of the Apostle, which he dared not have ventured upon in the face of the acrid criticism he had to front unless he had known he was perfectly sure of his ground, is natural and warranted—­’Therefore, whether it were I or they, so we preach.’

We are told that we must go back to the Christ of the Gospels, the historical Christ, and that He spoke nothing concerning all these important points that I have mentioned as being Paul’s conception of the Gospel.  Back to the Christ of the Gospels by all means, if you will go to the Christ of all the Gospels and of the whole of each Gospel.  And if you do, you will go back to the Christ who said, ’The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.’  You will go back to the Christ who said, ’And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.’  You will go back to the Christ who said, ’The bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.’  You will go back to the Christ who bade His followers hold in everlasting memory, not the tranquil beauty of His life, not the persuasive sweetness of His gracious words, not the might of His miracles of blessing, but the mysterious agonies of His last hours, by which He would have us learn that there lie the secret of His power, the foundation of our hopes, the stimulus of our service.