But I would make another remark.  If misapprehension came in, if these men, in their unanimous declaration of Christ’s death as the Sacrifice for sin, were not fairly representing the conclusions inevitable from the facts of Christ’s life and death, and from His own words, is it not an odd thing that the same misapprehension affected them all?  When people misconceive a teacher’s doctrine, they generally differ in the nature of their misconceptions, and split into sections and parties.  But here you have to account for the fact that every man of them, with all their diversity of idiosyncrasy and character, tumbled into the same pit of error, and that there was not one of them left sane enough to protest.  Does that seem to be a likely thing?

And what about the worth of the teacher’s teaching, that did not guard its receivers from such absolute misapprehension as that?  If the whole Church unanimously mistook everything that Jesus Christ had said to them, and unwarrantably made out of Him what they did, on this hypothesis, I do not think that there is much left to honour or admire in a teacher, whose teaching was so ambiguous, as that it led all that received it into such an error as that into which, by the supposition, they fell.

No, brethren; they were one, because their Gospel was the only possible statement of the principles that underlay, and the conclusions that flowed from, the plain facts of the life and the teaching of Jesus Christ.  I am not going to spend time in quoting His own words.  I can only refer to one or two of them very succinctly.  ‘Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’  ’As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.’  ’My flesh is the bread which I will give for the life of the world.’  ’The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.’  ’This is My body broken for you; take, eat, in remembrance of Me.’  ’This is My blood, shed for many for the remission of sins; this do ye, as often as ye drink it, in remembrance of Me.’  What possible explanation, doing justice to these words, is there, except ’Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures’?  And how could men who had heard them with their own ears, and with their own eyes had seen Him risen from the dead and ascending into heaven, do otherwise than eagerly, enthusiastically, at the cost of all, and with unhesitating voice of unbroken unanimity, ‘so preach’?

I quite admit that in Christ’s teaching in the gospels you will not find the articulate drawing out into doctrinal statement of the principles that underlay, and the conclusions that flow from, the historical fact of Christ’s propitiatory death.  I do not wonder at that, nor do I admit that it is any argument against the truth of the divine revelation which is made in these doctrinal statements, to allege that we find nothing corresponding to them in Jesus