i. Christianity asserts that it effects its aim through nothing short of an entire change of the whole man, and a complete renovation of his nature. The means hy which this renovation is effected may he described as a kind of mutual transfer or sulwtifutiox, leading- to a reciprocal interchange and co-operation between God and man's nature acting upon each other. Man—the Bible affirms—was created in the image of God, but his nature became corrupt through a taint, derived from the fall of the first representative man and parent of the human race, which taint could only be removed by a vicarious death.
Hence, the second representative man—Christ—whose nature was divine and taintless, voluntarily underwent a sinner's death, that the taint of the old corrupted nature transferred to him might die also. But this is not all. The great central truth of our religion lies not so much in the fact of Christ's death as in the fact of His continued life (Rom. viii. 34). The first fact is that He of His own free will died; but the second and more important fact is that He rose again and lives eternally, that He may bestow life for death and a participation in His own divine nature in place of the taint which He has removed.
This, then, is the reciprocal exchange which marks Christianity and distinguishes it from all other religions—an exchange between the personal man descended from a corrupt parent, and the personal God made man and becoming our second parent. We are separated from a rotten root, and are grafted into a living one. We part with the corrupt will, depraved moral sense, and perverted judgment inherited from the first Adam, and draw re-creative force — renovated wills, fresh springs of wisdom, righteousness, and knowledge1—from the ever-living divine stem of the
1 It has been objected to Christianity that it discourages increase of knowledge; but the only knowledge it condemns is the empty knowledge which ' puffeth up' (i Cor. viii. I, 2). ' God is Light' or knowledge itself. The more a Christian man becomes Godlike, the more he aims at increase of light, whether in religion or science. It is said of Christ that ' in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge' (Col. ii. 3). Truth must be one, and all truth is declared to come by Him, as well as grace (St. John i. 17). Other religious systems, on the contrary, are interpenetrated with so much that is false in every branch of knovvledge, that a simple lesson in geography tends to undermine every thoughtful person's faith in such creeds.
