Still further, our text brings out the contents of this gospel as being the declaration of the Resurrection.  On that I need not here and now dwell at any length.  But these are the points, the Person, the two facts, death and resurrection, and the great meaning of the death—­viz. the expiation for the world’s sins:  these are the things on which the whole of the primitive teachers of the Apostolic Church had one voice and one message.

Now, I do not suppose that I need spend any time in showing to you how the extant records bear out, absolutely, this contention of the Apostle’s.  I need only remind you how the opposition that was waged against him—­and it was a very vigorous and a very bitter opposition—­from a section of the Church, had no bearing at all upon the question of what he taught, but only upon the question of to whom it was to be taught.  The only objection that the so-called Judaising party in the early Church had against Paul and his preaching, was not the Gospel that he declared, but his assertion that the Gentile nations might enter into the Church through faith in Jesus Christ, without passing through the gate of circumcision.  Depend upon it, if there had been any, even the most microscopic, divergence on his part from the general, broad stream of Christian teaching, the sleepless, keen-eyed, unscrupulous enemies that dogged him all his days would have pounced upon it eagerly, and would never have ceased talking about it.  But not one of them ever said a word of the sort, but allowed his teaching to pass, because it was the teaching of every one of the apostles.

If I had time, or if it were necessary, it would be easy to point you to the records that we have left of the Apostolic teaching, in order to confirm this unbroken unanimity.  I do not need to spend time on that.  Proof-texts are not worth so much as the fact that these doctrines are interwoven into the whole structure of the New Testament as a whole—­just as they are into Paul’s letters.  But I may gather one or two sayings, in which the substance of each writer’s teaching has been concentrated by himself.  For instance, Peter speaks about being ’redeemed by the precious blood of Christ as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot,’ and declares that ’He Himself bare our sins in His own body on the tree.’  John comes in with his doxology:  ’Unto Him that loved us, and loosed us from our sins in His own blood’; and it is his pen that records how in the heavens there echoed ’glory and honour and thanks and blessing, for ever and ever, to the Lamb that was slain, and has redeemed us unto God by His blood.’  The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, steeped as he is in ceremonial and sacrificial ideas, and having for his one purpose to work out the thought that Jesus Christ is all that the ancient ritual, sacerdotal and sacrificial system shadows and foretells, sums up his teaching in the statement that Christ having come, a high priest of good things to come, ’through His own blood, entered in, once for all, into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.’