and lived before their eyes. Their rejection of my Father is as complete as their rejection of myself.

Paul saw himself joined to Christ as an ambassador and perceived the double effect of his work in that capacity. As it had been with Jesus so was it with him. He was wholly devoted to God's will in the premises, and he yearned over the sinful men to whom he had been sent. He wished them saved from their rebellion and all its terrible consequences, but only on God's terms. He had no dream that these could or should be changed. It was his to present the Truth and along with it the Life. So was it also with every other apostle and evangelist whom God had associated with him in the work. The choice of accepting or rejecting the things they offered lay with those whom they addressed. And Paul saw that in many cases rejection was only too fatally easy and sure. So we find him joining his Master in quoting from Isaiah—

"Go to this nation and say—

'You will hear with your ears without ever understanding,

And, though you have eyes, you will see without

ever perceiving.'

For the mind of this nation is grown dense,

And their ears are dull of hearing,

Their eyes also have they closed;

Lest some day they should see with their eyes,

And with their ears they should hear,

And in their mind they should understand and should turn-and I should heal them."

(Matt. 18:14, 15; Acts 28:26-27.)

We find him also voicing his vision, and his feelings thus:

"We are the fragrance of Christ ascending to God-both among those who are in the path of Salvation and among those who are in the path to Ruin. To the latter we are an odor which arises from death and tells of Death; to the former an odor which arises from life and tells of Life. But who is equal to such a task?" (II Cor. 2:15, 16.)

It is to Paul that we owe the clearest possible statement of the way in which the office of intercessor found itself linked with the work of the ambassador or mediator, in his own case. After showing how the mediatorship of Jesus had already established itself as a transforming and re-creating agency among men, and declaring of every one who had thus been brought into union with Christ, that "he is a new creation—a new being"-he continues—

"But all this is the work of God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and gave us the Ministry of Reconciliation. It is, then,

on Christ's behalf that we are acting as ambassadors, God, as it were, appealing to you through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf -Be reconciled to God." (II Cor. 5:17, 18, 20.)

To intercede is to entreat one person or set of persons on behalf of another. Here "Christ" and "God" are the persons on behalf of whom the entreaties or intercessions are represented as being made; while the persons entreated, or interceded with, are sinful men, the end aimed at being their reconciliation to God. It was God who was appealing and imploring, and he was doing this through men whom he had already reconciled to himself. To fit these men for this work, he had brought them through their union with Christ into such active participation with his saving desire and purpose, that they had definitely joined him in his love for their unsaved fellow-men, his yearnings over them and his efforts to reconcile them in both character and life to himself. Thus Paul and his co-workers found themselves in the place of "God's fellow-workers!" (1 Cor. 3:9.) They were God's ambassadors to men and God's intercessors among men.

Here it can be seen very plainly that the office and work of the intercessor grows directly out of God's love for sinful men. Their sinfulness had made them blind so that they could not see, unless their eyes were opened; deaf, so that they could not hear, unless their ears were unstopped; and callous of heart, so that they could not feel, unless their hearts were touched in some sovereign way. Then Jesus came as the great physicianambassador, to open blind eyes by means of a stupendous vision, to unstop deaf ears by a touch

of the divine finger, and to melt human hearts by the oxy-hydrogen flame of divine love. And Jesus the ambassador became also Jesus the intercessor, who pleaded for God with men, entreating them not to give further pain to God's heart by longer persistence in the sins which were burdening them more and more, and would bring upon them overwhelming disaster. "Come to me, all ye who toil and are burdened and I will give you rest!" (Matt. 11:28). My Father sent me to you because he loves you, and he looks upon you as his straying sons and daughters and asks you home. And Paul, as I have already shown, looked upon himself and his fellow evangelists as associate ambassadors and intercessors, who had been called upon to take the place upon the earth which Jesus had occupied while here in the flesh; so that they were doing their work "on Christ's behalf," as well as for God.

Here, then, we have God, Jesus and the apostles and evangelists of the primitive Christian Church all set forth as pleading with men to become reconciled to God by embracing the life of obedience to truth to which he has always been inviting them. To this we may add two words. The first is this. These agencies are all still at work upon the unfinished task. And the second is that another name must be added, namely, that of the Holy Spirit, who Jesus declared would come to guide into all truth, on the one hand, and to "bring conviction to the world as to Sin, and as

to Righteousness and as to Judgment" on the other. So the purely divine unites with divinely filled men in the work of interceding or pleading with men still unsaved to "be reconciled to God." Such is the work of intercession man-ward. Can we discover its nature God-ward, if, indeed, there is an intercession with God for men, as well an intercession with men for God.

That there is an authorized intercession with God on the behalf of men is a clear teaching of the New Testament. Such intercessions find their roots in human love and the divine love alike. To love is to wish well, and to wish well is to ask all besides one's self to aid in making it well with the one who is loved. The more widely, therefore, love is diffused the more intercession will move out towards universality. This is the thought which Tennyson expressed when he wrote in his "Passing of Arthur”—

"For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by golden chains about the feet of God."

And if God pleads with men why should not men plead with God? If God needs the co-operation of men and must find intercessors to secure it for him, why should we find it different on our side?

Taking up now some New Testament passages