the whole fabric of evangelical truth rests.  On any other supposition, the sacrifice of the cross was a very ordinary affair.  If the Saviour of sinners be not God—­if he be a created being, of whatever grade,—­where is the mystery of Godliness?—­Where those unfathomable depths of divine love, into which the angels desire to look?  If Christ be only a servant of God, however exalted, what was there, in his appearance on our world, to constitute a new era in heaven, and to fill its inhabitants with astonishment and ecstasy?  Did the heavenly host descend in rapture, and cause the mountains of Judea to reecho with their acclamations, because a dependent creature had consented to do his Maker’s will?  Whence the ascription of glory to God in the highest, and why do the courts above resound with a new song of praise to God for his redeeming mercy, if this redemption was effected by the labours and sufferings of one inferior to the Deity?  Was such a dispensation as that of Moses, designed simply to prepare the way for a messenger of God to declare his will, and to seal the testimony with his blood, as many good men have done, both before and since?  Why did patriarchs and prophets foretell his coming, and celebrate his praises?—­Why did the continual offering of divinely appointed sacrifices, for many centuries, typify his sufferings?—­And why did nature shudder, and shroud herself in darkness, at the consummation of those sufferings?  All these things are utterly inexplicable, on the supposition that Christ is a created dependent being.

But view him as God manifest in the flesh—­view him as voluntarily laying aside his glory, and descending from the throne of infinite majesty, to assume the nature, and expiate the guilt of a ruined race;—­and we are struck with the appropriateness of all the attending circumstances.  The splendid ceremonials of the Jewish ritual, and the raptured songs of prophets and of angels were well employed to prepare the way for the visible manifestation of Deity among men.  The annunciation of the divine nature of the Redeemer must, therefore, be an essential part of the preaching of the cross.

Equally indispensable is a decided testimony to that perfect atonement for sin, which was made by this great offering.  Here is the only foundation of human hope.  This was the grand object accomplished by the Saviour’s sufferings.  Thus was completely solved the mysterious problem, which all created intelligences had deemed inexplicable—­how sin could be remitted, without infringing the rights and tarnishing the honour of the divine government—­and how the guilty could be rescued from wrath, without a forfeiture of the divine veracity.  Never indeed was the divine law so completely vindicated, or the claims of justice so awfully asserted, as when the Lawgiver offered himself as a ransom.  And no other possible manifestation of the malignity and atrocity of sin, of the divine abhorrence of all iniquity, and, at the same time, of the exhaustless treasures of redeeming mercy, could equal that which was witnessed on Calvary.  As, therefore, Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so is the cross to be held up now, by its heralds, to a perishing world.  Its atoning sacrifice is to be proclaimed, and its purchased blessings offered to lost sinners, as their only hope—­their only remedy.