As we have followed the paper that have been read to us the words of Jesus Christ have been always in my mind, how he said that "I come not to destroy the law but to fulfil it."

In the religious history of our country there have been times when men have to some degree substituted parts of the Old Testament revelation for the fulness of grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ. that is no reason why we should throw the lessons of the Jewish revelation on one side in contradiction to the teaching of our Divine Master.

I wish to emphasise the religious value of the Old Testament in the face of certain tendencies of the present, which are, I believe, dangerous especially in view of the fact that we cannot assume to-day, to that extent to which we could make the assumption in the past, the England believes in God. Our Blessed Lord came to a people prepared; to a people that believed intensely in God, and that he is holy, and that he had created man to know him and to worship him. And Jesus Christ did not take away the foundations that had been laid by revelation. He built on them.

Thus it is not less true than before he came into the world, that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God: it is more true. The consequences of sin are not arbitrarily imposed by Almighty God, and capable of removal by him at his pleasure; they arise from the nature of sin and can only be changed by a change of heart. And whatever is due from us men to the Lord of Creation is due in a higher degree from those who know him to be their heavenly Father to whom they owe the obedience and service of sons. The demand of loyalty from a son is greater than from a subject. Again, Almighty God has not ceased to be the judge of all the world because, through the fulness of the revelation which he has given to using the Person of the Eternal Son, his everlasting love has been made known to us. For with this knowledge has come the obligation of responding to its burning holiness, and of rising to the truth that our neighbour is the brother for whom Christ died. The true nature of love is love in holiness.

As herald-messengers of the Gospel we are bound to teach men to believe in God, and to fear him, in order that in Jesus Christ the fulfiller they may go on to unfold the true fear of God in the love of obedient sons.

In closing the first part of our subject, and in preparation for what is to follow, I must attempt to express the world's need of redemption. what the progressive Jewish revelation has taught us historically, the missionaries of Christ's Church, who prepare the way of Christ, and bring the knowledge of him to the non-Christian world, confirm experimentally. And in the unity of the body of Christ they uphold us at home. If ever we should be in danger of thinking that a redemptive revelation of God is out of date, and that a different Gospel will be more attractive, it is to our missionary fathers and brethren that we shall look for deliverance; for they know the power of God unto salvation.

The world needs redemption, because man's need is for forgiveness, for the revelation of God in human life, and for the help of God against man's own weakness. Man's life must be cleansed and started anew; man must see attractively the possibilities of his life; he must have the power to unfold his life progressively.

In the simplest expansion of these three elements of the world's need I will try to summarise the conditions which made redemption necessary, as they have been unfolded through the religious experience of the Jewish people.

Under revelation the Jew came to know that God is righteous. Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? To know this is to have begun to know God. And if for "burnt offerings and sacrifices" the Christian will substitute words of equal sacredness to him with those words on the lips of a Jew, his heart will tell him that he is expressing the fundamental reality of man's relation to God.

To know this, not by giving it lip service, but as the heart's conviction, is to have been taught by God the nature of sin.

Two experiences unite in the education of the heart to know its deepest need. One of these is the social aspect of sin, dependent on the fellowship of man. there can be no satisfying doctrine of sin which is merely individual. If I am myself and not another, if the very aggravation of my burden is that I have sinned through my own fault, yet I can never understand myself except in fellowship with man, and I cannot plumb the depth of evil within me apart from my oneness with world-evil. The Jewish Church as a religious national life under divinely progressive revelation learned the need of the world's Saviour, while of necessity it could only offer a partial and inadequate suggestion before the coming of the Word made flesh.

The other experience is that the growing realisation of personality, depressingly brought home through individual experience of communion with God, led to a deeper consciousness of individual sin. I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. Man is alive to the need of a personal Saviour.

These two aspects of sin-the corporate and the individual-cannot be separated if man is to understand himself and to know his need. They express in combination the need of the Saviour of the World, who can also say to each one of us "Go in peace, thy sins be forgiven thee."

Now in the second place the need of forgiveness, which is the need of new life, is inseparable from the world's need of fuller revelation. Not even Judaism could anticipate the Incarnation. Jesus Christ himself is the full revelation,. Apart from his resurrection the conviction of immortality could not pass beyond a daring speculation. The greatest of Jewish prophets must fall short of "Love your enemies," because he could not say "Forgiven your 10,000 talents, how can you refuse to forgive your brother the 100 pence?" The apocalyptist struggled to co-ordinate and to harmonise; but until Christ came the various lines of revelation could not converge. In him they meet.

Further, only he who knows Jesus Christ and him crucified can express the full character of sin's thraldom. O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver my from this body of death? is the heart cry of one who can add, I thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. It is only the divine Saviour who can illuminate the heart with new desires, and deepen those already felt. It is Jesus Christ known and received as Saviour who reveals to man his true nature. "The Cross of Christ condemns me to holiness" said the Bechuana Christian woman.

Thirdly, inseparable alike from the need of redemptive salvation and the revelation of Jesus Christ is the need of strength. And these three aspect of the world's need must be satisfied in one Person; for they are not three needs, but three expressions of the one need of redemption.

We cannot pass over two great lessons of the Jewish law. One of them is that under it the Jew could say that the substance of its teaching is "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself." That is the highest testimony to the divine revelation of the law.

The other lesson could only be learned fully under the illumination of the Gospel; "What the law could not do, in that it was weak." The weakness of the law was that it could educate the conscience but could not relieve it. The world's need is not less for power to live the life of man than for the removal of sin's burden and for a realised fellowship with God which shall be open to the sinner who turns to him with all his heart. And Jesus Christ who came to fulfil the law has not made sin less sinful, but he has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers and given to us the power of a progressive and endless life. It is the glory of the Gospel that the Christian can say, what the Jew could not say, "I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God."

And we, to whom the Jewish revelation has been given that we may study it in the knowledge of Jesus Christ, must do justice to both these lessons. The law takes its stand upon the truth of man's greatness as created by God. He is made capable of loving God, and of loving his fellow man as himself; his true nature is to love God, and therefore he is called upon to do so. He seeks after God; he can commune with him, and find his delight in him. But the law, Jewish or other, cannot give life. It condemns by the self-accusation of an aroused conscience. It is our schoolmaster, and a hard one, until Christ comes to us. Man knows that he is made for God, and for fellowship with his brother man; but he only enters hopefully and progressively into this fellowship through his fellowship with God. The Christian life is the fulfilment of human life. But man is separated from God by sin, in the corporate fellowship of life and in his individual history. He cannot eradicate this evil or undo his own past. He needs God that he may fulfil his nature: and he cannot do the good that he sees and that even he may will to do. He wants to be taken up out of the state in which he knows himself to be: he wants a power whereby out of weakness to become strong, out of selfishness to develop into service and sacrifice, out of isolation to enter into the fellowship of human life.

And to be alike true to the facts of human nature and to the teaching of the Jewish revelation, the minister of Christ must boldly declare the awful end of tolerated sin, must face frankly the aspiration of man for God, and offer fully the gift of the power of God which can heal the broken life of man and make it to unfold according to its true nature.

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