freely by His grace, and, though here on earth they are not freed from the punishment and death which their past sins have deserved, yet to them their sufferings and all other things 'work ¹ together for good,' because they now love God. Thus temporal punishment, and even undeserved suffering inflicted upon true Christians by the enemies of God, cause them to draw nearer to Him and in Him find help and rest and peace. Having received the new birth, having turned from Satan to God and become spiritual children ² of God, they are therefore delivered from the final and hopeless destruction and the outer darkness ³ which would otherwise have been their let in the day of judgement, and are made heirs, through God's grace, of eternal holiness and endless bliss in that abode where nothing that defiles can enter.⁴ Therefore it is that John the Baptist, when he had learnt that the Lord Jesus Christ was the Saviour of the whole world, said: 'Behold,⁵ the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.' By calling Christ the Lamb of God, John meant that He was the true Paschal ⁶ Lamb, the true sacrifice for men's sins, who would lay down His most precious life as a ransom ⁷ for sinners, in order to bring them to repentance and to cleanse them from their sins. So also St. John

in his first Epistle says: 'My ¹ little children, these things write I unto you, that ye may not sin. And if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.' So also in another place it is written of God that He 'foreordained ² us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved: in whom we have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.'

Now; since it was contrary to the requirements of God's infinite holiness and complete justice that sin should be forgiven and that men should escape from eternal ruin and misery in any way but one, and since it was impossible for men to become acceptable to God and heirs of everlasting salvation, and to enjoy pure and perfect happiness in His holy presence, in any other manner than in that one, therefore the Most Merciful God has provided that way of salvation for His creatures to walk in, and has revealed it to us in the holy Scriptures. Hence it is that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has said in the Gospel: 'I ³ am the way, and the truth, and the life.' For Christ, being without sin, and possessing perfect manhood as well as perfect Godhead, being better