Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 3.pdf/186

Spirit of God as renewing the image of God in our hearts, as raising us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness. Indeed, the whole privilege of justification by faith could have no existence; there could have been no redemption in the blood of Christ: neither could Christ have been made of God unto us, either "wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, or redemption."

And the same grand blank which was in our faith must likewise have been in our love. We might have loved the Author of our being, the Father of angels and men, as our Creator and Preserver: we might have said, "O Lord, our Governor, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth!" But we could not have loved Him under the nearest and dearest relation "as delivering up His Son for us all." We might have loved the Son of God as being the "brightness of His Father's glory, the express image of His person" (altho this ground seems to belong rather to the inhabitants of heaven than earth). But we could not have loved Him as "bearing our sins in His own body on the tree," and "by that one oblation of Himself once offered, making a full oblation, sacrifice, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world." We could not have been "made conformable to His death," not "have known the power of His resurrection."

And as our faith, both in God the Father and the Son, receives an unspeakable increase, if not its very being, from this grand event, as does also our love both of the Father and the Son; so