Atonement in the Old Testament.—As I have already said above, it is usual for writers on the Atonement to begin by taking scripture for granted and presenting an examination of the principal passages in which the Atonement is thought to be presumed or declared. But if what I have just said be true, we have to get behind even the language of scripture and ask how the writers of the Old and New Testaments came to use these particular symbols and what they originally meant. The word "atonement" is not an exact translation of any one Old Testament term, but connotes a group of related religious ideas. In its Christian use other elements enter into it from Greek thought which are not to be found in the Old Testament. But the Old Testament source of the ideas as well as the term is much older than the Greek, and therefore we are right in looking to the Old Testament for the origin of the doctrine which has taken such an important place in Christianity. But here again modern research has opened up an enormous field of investigation. Israel was a member of a vast family of nations all of which had sprung from one stock, and of which the Babylonians and Assyrians were the most powerful representatives. The Israelites were, politically speaking, a comparatively insignificant folk surrounded by mighty empires which had attained a high degree of civilisation. The excavations which are now proceeding in oriental lands, especially the territories occupied by ancient Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt, are bringing much valuable and interesting matter to light. We find that the civilisation of these peoples was much older than up to now scholars have believed. The communities inhabiting the land of Canaan, for example, had developed a complex political and commercial organisation long before the Israelitish invasion; Canaan was in fact the highway along which passed the commerce of Egypt with the mighty nations to the north. The painstaking efforts of expert explorers are bringing vast forgotten literatures to light and reconstituting for us the religious ideas and modes of life of these people of the ancient world. One result of these researches has been to prove that Hebrew religious ideas were closely allied to those of other Semitic peoples, and even the way in which they were expressed owed not a little to older civilisations. In nothing was this more clearly the case than with the ideas included afterward in the doctrine of Atonement. The word translated Atonement in our version of the Old Testament scriptures played an important part in the Old Testament sacrificial system, and this again was closely connected with Semitic modes of worship in general.

The Day of Atonement.—There was one great day in the Jewish religious year called the Day of Atonement, when a special ritual was gone through and special offerings made to God on account of the sins of the people as a whole. The ceremonial was very elaborate and the occasion was observed with great solemnity by the whole nation. As described in the Old Testament the prescriptions for this Day of Atonement, the Good Friday of the Levitical system as it has been called, probably owe a good deal to Babylonian influences. It should be remembered that the outstanding event in later Jewish history was the carrying away of the flower of the nation by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon, where they remained for more than two generations. It is quite likely that, in spite of their exclusiveness and their hatred of their conquerors, the Jews may have borrowed some of their religious ritual from the Babylonians, but, whether they did or not, the ideas underlying their respective modes of worship were much the same. Primitive religious sacrifice among Semitic peoples appears to have been mainly of a joyous character; worship and sacrifice went hand in hand. The worshippers were accustomed to offer to their gods sacrifices of everything which the votaries themselves valued,—the fruits of the earth, their material possessions, their flocks and herds, the prisoners they had taken in war, and occasionally even the children of their own body. It was only on great and solemn occasions, such as the necessity for staying a pestilence, or averting defeat in war, that the offering of the more terrible kinds of sacrifice was made. It would be instructive, therefore, for us to inquire what were the underlying ideas assumed in Semitic religious sacrifice.

Underlying ideas in Semitic sacrifice. 1. The solidarity of man with God.—In the first place there was the idea of community of life between the worshipper and his god. It is doubtful how far this can be pressed, but it is clear that in the Semitic mind there was always a conviction that the deity of the clan or tribe was the giver as well as the sustainer of its life. This did not apply to the minor divinities, the demons of wood and stream, but to the tribal deities, the Chemosh of Moab, the Dagon of the Philistines, the Jehovah of Israel. Probably the Philistines were not Semites, but no doubt ancient worship in general took for granted this community of life between any particular people and their deity. In the offering of the best of their possessions to the god the worshippers thought they were rendering to him of his own. As he was at once the giver and the guardian of life, they felt bound to render him the best of the fruits of life. This was a true thought, a principle essential to all true spiritual life, and implied in all spiritual aspiration. The reader will have already seen that it is fundamental to the New Theology. However crude and even repellent some of its expressions may have been in ancient modes of worship, it is the same truth all ages through—the truth that God and man are essentially one.

2. The solidarity of the individual with the community.—A further idea underlying primitive sacrifice was that of the solidarity of the individual with the community as a whole. In the Chaldean tribes out of which Israel arose personality as we know it had not even emerged. Readers of the Old Testament will not need to be reminded that in the earlier stages of Israel's existence as a people the whole nation was repeatedly said to be punished for the behaviour of individuals, and families perished for the transgression of a father, as in the case of Achan. No particular attention was ever paid to the individual as such. A man had no life of his own, and no value, apart from the life of the community. He belonged to it, not to himself. Hence, when any communal act of worship was performed, when any tribal sacrifice was made to the deity, the organic unity of the individual with the whole was specially emphasised. Physically and spiritually the unit was held to belong to the whole, and to exist for the sake of the whole. Here again we have a great truth, the foundation truth of all morality, and a truth which reaches its highest in the life of Jesus. The deepening of individual self-consciousness, and the increased perception of individual value, have neither weakened nor destroyed it, for it is written in the very constitution of the universe. Mankind is fundamentally one; here is morality. We are individually fulfilled in God; here is religion. These are the cognate ideas underlying all modes of sacrificial worship, ancient or modern. These are the ideas which find elaborate ceremonial expression in the Israelitish Day of Atonement as described in the Old Testament. The main purpose of these observances was the desire to assert as solemnly and emphatically as possible the essential oneness of the community with God, and of every individual with all the rest. Everything which tended to separate between Israel and her God was ceremonially put away on this great occasion. From the religious point of view it was the beginning of a new year. The Babylonian new year began about the same time. It was supposed that a man's good or evil fortune was appointed on new year's day and settled past all possibility of revision on the tenth day after. The intervening nine days were therefore kept as a sort of Lenten season; the tenth day was the grand occasion for the making sure of the harmonious relations of the community with the deity. It will be seen, therefore, that psychologically the idea of Atonement takes precedence of the idea of sin. Most westerners are accustomed to think exactly the reverse, and that is why the various theories of Atonement which have appeared and disappeared in the course of Christian history have so generally obscured the truth. The root principle of Atonement is not that of escaping punishment for transgression, but the assertion of the fundamental oneness of God and man. This may or may not be accompanied by feelings of guilt and contrition, but it is the very marrow of religion. Atonement implies the acting-together of God and man, the subordination of the individual will to the universal will, the fulfilment of the unit in the whole.

Sense of sin not originally essential to atonement.—It ought to be recognised that in Semitic modes of worship the idea of sin did not originally hold the place it has since come to hold in the Christian consciousness. The Babylonian and the early Israelite were greatly afraid of offending God, but they do not seem to have thought of such a transgression as being morally culpable. The profound sense of sin which characterises so many of the psalms and prophetic writings of the Old Testament was a comparatively late development. The primitive Semites had a markedly anthropomorphic idea of their deities. They thought of any divine being as more or less like an ordinary man and liable to take umbrage at little things. It was even possible to offend him without knowing it, and therefore to be left without protection against the ills of life. It was to make sure of smoothing away all possible misunderstandings that covering sacrifices were offered from time to time; but the offering of these sacrifices did not necessarily mean that the worshipper thought he had done anything to be ashamed of and which required to be put right. He was simply treating his god as he would have treated a powerful earthly patron or potentate, that is, he was apologising for anything he might have done to alienate his favour. This notion of the necessity for placating God is to be found in close association with the worthier spiritual instincts to which I have already referred, and it has not even yet disappeared from our thinking. Unbiassed readers of the Old Testament will find abundant justification for this statement. We are told repeatedly therein that the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel or against this or that individual, and that the whole community had in consequence to humble itself before Him in order to avert plague, or pestilence, or some other form of general calamity. Not only was Jehovah thought of as a kind of larger man who was at once protector and tyrant to his people, he was but the God of Israel in contradistinction to the gods of other nations, one God out of many. It was only gradually, and after the lapse of ages, that Israelites came to think of their God as the God of the whole earth and a being who must be worshipped in righteousness. Israel was fortunate in possessing what other nations had not in the same degree, a succession of specially inspired men, teachers of moral and spiritual truth called prophets. The best of these—for no doubt the generality of them spoke only the language of their time—earnestly protested against material ideas of sacrifice and inadequate notions about God. They declared that God and the moral ideal were one and that the best way to serve the former was to be true to the latter. True sacrifice, they maintained, was of a spiritual kind and ought never to be thought about in any other sense. Thus in the fifty-first psalm the writer, one of the prophetic school, thus contrasts mere ceremonialism with spiritual worship:

Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.

Or take the prophet Micah, chapter vi., verse 6. Here is a reference to human sacrifice, to which the Israelites were prone from time to time, following the example of their neighbours:

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the Most High God? shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

And the answer of the prophet is:

He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

Here we have a declaration in unmistakable terms that the moral ideal and the religious ideal are one, and that to worship God properly the worshipper must treat his fellow-men properly. We now get the idea that sin against God is not something into which a man may fall without knowing it, but the living of a selfish life.

Atonement never an equivalent for penalty.—We ought to recognise too that the sacrifices of the Day of Atonement were never held to secure a complete amnesty for all kinds of sin. If a man committed theft or murder, he had to bear the appropriate penalty of his misdemeanour because he had been guilty of an action directed against the well-being of the community and the community had to take measures to protect itself; the Day of Atonement availed nothing in such a case. Here is where many who see in the Old Testament sacrificial system a type and anticipation of the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus frequently go wide of the facts. The Day of Atonement was a ceremonial and symbolical assertion of the willingness of the individual and the nation to fulfil their true destiny by being at one with God. If some particular man had been so living as to cut himself off from the communal well-being, he had to suffer.

The significance of the blood.—Many people seem to think that some actual saving efficacy was supposed to attach to the shedding of the blood of the victims offered on the altar of sacrifice, but that never was so. No doubt in the ignorant popular mind material sacrifices came to be looked upon as possessing some virtue in themselves, but the intelligence of the nation never regarded them in this way. In the offering of a victim the worshipper symbolically offered himself. The Semites thought that the life of any organism was in the blood. Thus in Numbers we read, "The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the soul (or life)." When, therefore, a man offered the blood of a victim upon the altar, he was symbolically declaring his recognition of the truth that the individual life belongs to the whole and must give or pour itself out to the common life and to God the source of all. Only in this way could individuality realise itself; apart from the whole it was meaningless and valueless.

The truth beneath all sacrifice, however barbarous.—This helps us to see how, even underneath the most horrible and repellent modes of ancient religious sacrifice, there was something essentially great and noble. When a heathen mother passed her child through the fire to Moloch, did the sacrifice cost her nothing? To be sure it did. It must have been much harder to give her baby than to give herself. She did it because she had been taught to believe that to give one's best and dearest possession for the life of the whole was an action acceptable to God and worthy of our relationship to Him. We have deepened and purified that ideal, but we have not lost it; we never can. As time went on men came to see that there was a higher way of giving the self to the whole than that of immolating a physical life, and a better way of symbolising that offering than by shedding the blood of bulls and goats; but the essential truth beneath all the intricate sacrificial systems of ancient Israel and her neighbours is one that can never perish.

To sum up. Atonement is the assertion of the fundamental unity of all existence, the unity of the individual with the race and the race with God. The individual can only realise that unity by sacrificing himself to it. To fulfil the self we must give the self to the All. This is the truth presumed in all ancient ideas of Atonement. The idea of placating a manlike God for offences committed against his dignity has been a concomitant of this perception, even a hindrance to it, but it has never wholly obscured the truth itself. That truth is constant and essential to all religion and morality, and is the coordinating principle to all between them.



CHAPTER X

THE ATONEMENT

III. The Doctrine in Christian History and Experience

Antiquity of the essential truth.—From what has now been said it will, I hope, be clear that the roots of the Christian doctrine of Atonement lie far back in history, especially Semitic history mediated through the Old Testament, and that its fundamental truth is one with which the world can never dispense; it is both simple and sublime. Nothing worth doing in human history has ever been done apart from it or ever will be. It is no paradox to say that even a morally earnest agnostic believes in the Atonement; at any rate he believes in the all-essential truth without which there would never have been such a thing as a doctrine of Atonement.

No consistent theory in the New Testament.—But now we come to the consideration of this truth as it has passed over into Christianity. I do not propose to give an accurate and exhaustive analysis of the principal things that have been said about it, from the writings of St. Paul downwards; that would only be wearisome to my readers and lead to no particular result. But if I have succeeded in making clear the psychological necessity for the existence of the idea of Atonement, it will serve us as a guiding principle when we come to consider it in relation to the sacrifice of Jesus. Many exegetes have undertaken to show that the various New Testament writers held one and the same theory of the relation of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of sins; never was a task more hopeless. The Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine theories, and that of the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, are not mutually consistent, and Paul is not always consistent with himself. The principal thing they have in common is their belief that the death of Jesus was of vital efficacy in the doing away of sin. The symbolism in which they set forth this truth is borrowed mainly from the Old Testament, and we have already seen what underlay that symbolism even in its earliest use. Old Testament language about sacrifice supplies the mental dialect of the New, and now that we have the key to it we need neither be puzzled nor misled by it. Beneath all that the New Testament writers have to say about the death of Jesus there is the same grand old spiritual truth of Atonement which makes religion possible. Before we resume our examination of the connection between the death of Jesus and the doing away of sin, let us look for a moment at what post-apostolic thought has had to say about it.

The Fathers.—From the beginning of the second century onwards the Fathers of the church and their theological successors attempted a variety of explanations of the way in which the death of Jesus achieved potentially the redemption of mankind. It is not easy to say just when one period of Christian thought closes and another begins; but, broadly speaking, we can for convenience classify them into the period of the Fathers, the mediaeval period, the Reformation and afterwards up to the eighteenth century, and the period of modern thought. The Fathers may be divided into two groups, the ante-Nicene and the post-Nicene writers, and also into the Greek and Latin Fathers. But as I am not writing for theological students, I will not attempt any further analysis of the various patristic schools. Those who wrote previous to 325 A.D. belong to the ante-Nicene group; those who wrote after that date, to the post-Nicene group. The ante-Nicene writers, generally speaking, avoid giving any theory of the atonement at all; but two of their greatest thinkers, Origen and Irenaeus, held that mankind had fallen under the dominion of Satan, and that Jesus by His sufferings paid a ransom to Satan in order that we might be freed from his power. Post-Nicene Fathers for the most part adopted this view without attempting to justify it. Amongst their statements we find the ideas that the Atonement was a ransom to Satan and also a sacrifice to God, but they offer no explanation of the necessity of either. Later on Augustine anticipated subsequent Christian thought by maintaining that the atoning work of Jesus was part of an eternal purpose.

Anselm and after.—The scholasticism of the Middle Ages finds its first important expression in the illustrious Anselm, an acute thinker and a beautiful soul. Anselm rejected the idea of a ransom to Satan, declaring that Satan had no rights over humanity; in place of this notion he put forward the theory that Jesus made to God an infinite satisfaction for an infinite debt. According to this theory the majesty of God had suffered indignity because of human sin, and yet man was unable by himself to offer an adequate satisfaction for the offence. Hence the eternal Son of God became man in order that He might offer the only satisfaction that could be considered adequate. This theory did not go unchallenged. Abelard, for example, asked the very reasonable question how the guilt of mankind could be atoned for by the greater guilt of those who put Jesus to death. Abelard's famous opponent, Bernard of Clairvaux, also repudiated Anselm's main contention and fell back upon the theory of a satisfaction to Satan.

Reformation theories.—At the time of the Reformation the question of the Atonement formed the subject of considerable controversy, and, on the whole, the Reformers were less reasonable than the Catholics, as is the case to some extent even to-day. The Roman Catholic doctrine of Atonement is much nearer to the truth than conventional Protestant statements about the "finished work" and so on. One considerable section of sixteenth-century Protestantism held and taught the doctrine of the total depravity of human nature, and insisted on the idea that Jesus bore the actual penal sufferings of sinners. Calvinists held that these sufferings had value for the elect only. Against these views Socinianism arose as a protest, but tended to reduce the Passion of Jesus to a sort of drama enacted by God in the presence of humanity in order to excite men's contrition and win their love.

The modern lack of a theory.—Modern evangelical thought has done very little with all these theories except to make them impossible; it has no consistent and reasonable explanation to put in their place. The popular kind of evangelical phraseology is that which continues to represent Jesus as having borne the punishment due to human sin; salvation is spoken of as though it meant deliverance from the post-mortem consequences of misdoing.

More about sin.—In all these theories it is evident that the death of Jesus is closely connected with the forgiveness of sin and that the forgiveness of sin is the vital element in the Atonement. In order to understand the truth about this let us return to what has already been said on the subject of sin and pursue it a little farther. I have already pointed out that sin is selfishness pure and simple, and that that definition will cover all its manifestations. There is no sin that is not selfishness, there is no selfishness that is not sin. All possible activities of the soul are between selfishness on the one hand and love on the other. If people would only accept this simple explanation of a great subject, it would get rid of most of the confusion of thought that exists in regard to it. The life of love is the life lived for impersonal ends; the sinful life is the life lived for self alone. The life of love is the life which does the best with the self for the sake of the whole; the sinful life is the life which is lived for the self at the expense of the whole. The desire for gratification at some one else's cost, or at the cost of the common life, is the root principle of sin. Sin against God is simply an offence against the common life; it is attempting to draw away from instead of ministering to the common good. The sinful man thinks it will pay him to be selfish; his impulse is to suppose that he can gain more happiness, can drink more deeply of the cup of life, by doing it at the expense of other people. We all do it more or less, and yet the world might have learned by this time that selfishness does not pay; the thoroughly selfish man is an unhappy man, for he has not drawn upon the source of abiding joy. Like love, selfishness is a guest for life, but whereas love obtains more abundant life by freely giving itself, sin loses hold on life by trying to grab and keep it. Every man is seeking life and seeking it in one or other of these opposite ways; he is either fulfilling the self by serving the whole, or he is trying to feed the self by robbing the whole. But life is God, and there is no life which is not God. God is the life all-abundant, the life infinite and eternal, the life that never grows old, the life that is joy. Every man, consciously or subconsciously, wants that life; he is wanting it all the time. Why does the man of business spend so many hours in his office in the effort to make money? It is because money represents power, power that can purchase "more life and fuller." Probably he does not want it all for himself; he works for love of his family or love of the community, and his desire to serve them makes his work gladder, so that already he has more abundant life than he would otherwise possess. Analyse human action, no matter what, and it will be seen to point in one or other of these two directions, self-ward or all-ward. If the former, it will shrivel the soul, it makes for death; if the latter, it will expand the soul, it makes for life. This is a spiritual law which knows no exception; in the long run the loving deed brings larger life and joy, the selfish deed brings pain and darkness. "Be not deceived, God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap eternal life."

It is evident from the foregoing that even the sinful life is a quest for God, although it does not know itself to be such, for in seeking life saint and sinner alike are seeking God, the all-embracing life. And the sinner must learn that to seek life selfishly is to lose it; to seek it unselfishly is both to gain and to give it. The good man and the bad man are seeking the same thing in opposite ways.

During the recent New Theology controversy the editor of the British Weekly, in the course of an attack upon my teaching, printed a number of extracts from my sermons in order to convince his readers that that teaching was objectionable and false. In every case the extract was carefully removed from its context and therefore conveyed quite a misleading impression to the mind of the reader. One of these extracts was from a sermon on "More Abundant Life," preached in the City Temple on Sunday morning, March 18, 1906. As this extract has been widely circulated, perhaps I may be pardoned for giving it here along with the context. All that the editor chose to print was a part of the paragraph in which sin was described as a quest for God, and yet he must have known perfectly well that to take that paragraph out of its setting was to do an injustice both to the preacher and to the subject.

Observe the sharp antithesis between the "thief or the robber" on the one hand, and the "Good Shepherd" on the other. These two stand for two opposing tendencies that have run through all nature and all human life. All nature through, all history through, two conflicting tendencies have been discernible. These are ever at war, and they ever will be until the whole world has been subdued to Christ, and is filled with the fulness of the life of God. These two tendencies we may describe as the deathward and the lifeward respectively. The words are not very satisfactory because the deathward tendency masquerades as the lifeward tendency, and the lifeward tendency, before fruition, looks like the deathward one. In nature, as Romans viii. tells us, "We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Nature is cruel, "red in tooth and claw." The deathward tendency is what I may call the self-ward tendency in the upward struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism only exists at the expense of other organisms. Yet at a certain stage in evolution this principle of the survival of the fittest at the expense of the rest gives way to a counter principle, that of the fitting of as many as possible to survive. The thief tendency gives way to the shepherd tendency, self-love to mother-love, the struggle to survive to the struggle for the life of others. I do not pause at the moment to account for these two antithetic tendencies, there they are; all through the history of this sad old world of ours these two tendencies have been in sharp conflict. Both are cosmic, both probably resolvable in that higher unity which is too mysterious for us to penetrate, but to our minds they are in flagrant opposition to each other. The thief cometh to steal and to kill and to destroy; mother-love, Christ-love, that it may give life, and that more abundantly.

In human history the antithesis is even more plainly marked. From one point of view, history is little else than the story of the crimes and follies of mankind. If it were entirely that, the study would be too saddening to enter upon; but it is not all of that character, and yet it is sufficiently so to cast a shadow over the optimism of any man who investigates human evolution as told in song and story. The principle that "they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can" has ruled in human concerns from the dawn of history until to-day. It is strong enough in our midst even now. Out industrial system is founded upon it, and is essentially unchristian. Commercialism is saturated with it; all men suffer from it, but often they know not how to get free from it. Ruskin has a grimly amusing paragraph on the parallel between an earlier civilisation and that of to-day, and the identity in principle of the self-ward tendency in both. In mediaeval times, as he would say, the robber baron was wont to possess himself of a mountain fortress, whence he swooped down upon hapless passers-by to rob them of their possessions and their lives. To-day the successful financial magnate does the same by effecting corners in corn and such like. The great writer adds, with characteristic irony, "I prefer the crag baron to the bag baron." Yet with all this we see at work in history another tendency which we can recognise as plainly as the former, but which fills us with great hope for the future of humanity,—it is that which is summed up in the one word "Christ." That word stands all the world over for the things that make for more abundant life. Just as in the text the word "thief" stands for everything that makes for separateness, selfhood, cruelty, so the word "Christ" stands for everything that makes for union, mutual helpfulness, brotherly kindness. The thief stands for the tendency to grasp and draw inward, and the Christ stands for the tendency to give, and live outward. The former tendency is what I call the deathward—deathward for all else but itself; and the Christ is the lifeward, life for all else but itself. Yet—curious inversion of earlier experience—the deathward tendency results in death to itself in the spiritual region, and the lifeward tendency results in life to him who gives life. "I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." I want you to realise here, then, that the Christ in humanity is the life-giver of the soul. They who are possessed of the Christ spirit are they who have and can give the more abundant life.

We have briefly examined the two tendencies of which I have spoken; have you realised that in the things of the spirit the deathward tendency is what we call sin? Sin is selfishness; it is the attempt to misuse the energies of God; it is the expansion of individuality at the expense of the race. I do not know that you can arrive at a much more thorough explanation of the nature of sin than that. Men blunderingly attempt to classify virtues, and think of sin as simply the failure to attain them. It is not that, it is something deeper; sin is the attempt to minister to self at the expense of that which is outside self. It lives by death to others, or seeks to do so.

When I was away a few weeks ago I paid a visit to Monte Carlo to see what it was like, and went into the famous gambling saloon, and stood for a while looking at the faces of the players. I could not see anything very different from what I see now; the people who were engaged in that all-engrossing pursuit might have been in church, they were so quiet, so orderly, and so apparently passionless. Yet I felt—it may have been a preacher's prejudice—that the moral atmosphere of that place was one in which I did not want to remain; there was something bad there, and I think I could discern what it was. The gambler is essentially a man who is trying to get something for nothing; he is drawing to himself that which he supposes will give him more satisfying and abundant life. Let who will suffer; it is not his concern. What is lifeward for him may be deathward for them; he is willing that it should be so—that is the sin. Sin is always a mistake,—a soul's mistake; it is the carrying up into the spiritual region of that stern and terrible law of the physical world, the survival of an organism at the expense of its fellow. That law is reversed in the spiritual world; it is replaced by something else. If a soul is to gain more abundant life, it must rise above the desire to grasp and hold. The gambler is selling that beautiful thing which came fresh from the hand of God, and is at once God's life and his; he is destroying the present possibility of attaining to that higher life which is the destiny of the soul. The Christ in him can find no expression. And yet, my friends, realise this, however startling it may seem, sin itself is a quest for God—a blundering quest, but a quest for all that. The man who got dead drunk last night did so because of the impulse within him to break through the barriers of his limitations, to express himself, and to realise more abundant life. His self-indulgence just came to that; he wanted if only for a brief hour to live the larger life, to expand the soul, to enter untrodden regions, and gather to himself new experience. That drunken debauch was a quest for life, a quest for God. Men in their sinful follies to-day, and their blank atheism, and their foul blasphemies, their trampling upon things that are beautiful and good, are engaged in this dim, blundering quest for God, whom to know is life eternal. The roue you saw in Piccadilly last night, who went out to corrupt innocence and to wallow in filthiness of the flesh, was engaged in his blundering quest for God. He is looking for Him along the line of the wrong tendency; he has been gathering to himself what he took to be more abundant life, "but sin, when it hath conceived bringeth forth death"—death to the sinner as well as to his victim, death of what is deepest and truest in the soul. Yet—I repeat it—all men are seeking life, life more abundant, even in their selfishness and wrong-doing, seeking life by the deathward road.

"Whatever crazy sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death. 'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, O life, not death, for which we pant, More life and fuller than I want."

On the following Sunday I preached a sermon entitled the "Nature of Sin," in which the same point was reemphasised with even greater distinctness, as the following extract will show:—

I think I startled some of you last Sunday morning when I happened to remark that sin was, after all, a quest for God—a mistaken quest, but none the less a quest for God, for all that. I want to explain to you to-night somewhat more in detail what I mean by this, because the more clearly we can see the truth the more clearly we can perceive sin to be a soul's blunder. There are two tendencies discernible throughout nature and in human history. These two tendencies are essentially opposed, are ever in conflict, and ever will be until the whole world is subdued to Christ, and God is all in all. I called them last Sunday morning from the pulpit the deathward and the lifeward respectively. The terms are not very satisfactory, because the deathward tendency usually masquerades as the lifeward, and the lifeward often looks like the deathward. That is why sin is ever possible. A man thinks to get something by it, and though he finds out his mistake afterward, yet he supposes it to be for him the lifeward road. On the other hand, the utterly unselfish deed often looks as though it were a deed that would bring destruction upon the doer. Not so. Jesus Christ saw right to the heart of things when He said, "He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My sake the same shall find it." If you substitute for the words "for My sake," "for truth's sake," or "for life's sake," you will get just the same meaning,—"he that keeps back his life shall lose it, and he that gives forth his life shall find it."

Here, then, are two tendencies sharply contrasted. Now observe their operation in nature and in human experience. You are all aware of, and frequently have been saddened, no doubt, by what you regard as the cruelty of nature. There is a tragedy under every rose leaf, there is unceasing conflict to the death going on in every hedgerow. Nature is indeed cruel. I have often watched, during this winter which is now drawing to a close, the little birds feeding outside the window of my breakfast room in the morning. Like many of you, we put out a few crumbs for these feathered friends who share the same garden with ourselves, and I have always noticed that there is a battle royal fought round those crumbs. There is enough for everyone, and yet the instinct of these little creatures is to try and grab and keep all, each one for itself. The instinct of the lower creation appears to be that a form can only preserve itself, and only expand and express itself, at the expense of other forms. It is a stern and terrible law, as you well know. Forms, by a slow, upward progress in the unfolding of the purpose to which nature exists, have become what they are at the expense of earlier and weaker forms. There is a tendency to grasp and hold, a tendency to kill and to destroy, and this, to some minds, appears to be the strongest tendency in nature or in man. I question it,—in fact, I deny it,—and I want that you and I should arrive at the same conclusion respecting it. For there is another tendency observable working from the very earliest throughout the processes of nature, too. It is that which Henry Drummond describes as the struggle for the life of others. If you like, we will call it mother-love. I saw it illustrated only yesterday. A mother sheep, standing in her place amongst the flock, was surprised with the rest at the incursion of a mongrel dog. The flock fled instantly, but the ordinarily timid mother stood her ground. The reason was not far to seek. There was a little lamb cowering behind her, and she, overcoming her natural instinct of self-preservation, turned her face to the dog to draw his attention, if possible, to herself and deflect it from her young one. Now, that instinct represents the tendency of which I speak, the antithetic tendency to the other already described. It is the stronger of the two. It indicates the goal toward which nature herself is moving. "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now," but mother-love is a prophecy of a higher yet to be. It is the forth-going instinct, the all-ward, lifeward tendency.

Now turn to humanity. I think you will agree with me that right through human history the same two tendencies are observable. The farther back we go, the stronger seems the self-ward tendency. The natural state of uncivilised man is a state of war. Man in primitive communities only exists and flourishes by destroying other communities. A most curious thing it is, too, that apparently our domestic and civic virtues have grown out of this state of war. A man used to carry his wife off by main force. She become his property. He exerted his brute force, he magnified his own personality, as it were, in crushing other personalities. His children were in his hands for life and death. If he afterwards learned to love them, it was in contradistinction to the children that were not his. That which was his, so to speak, gratified his egotism; and, although a more beautiful relationship grew out of it, such was the unpromising beginning. To-day when you hear a man speaking loudly about "my country," or "my family," or "my society," as the case may be, you may be perfectly sure that he is projecting himself into his patriotism, or into his loyalty to family or society; and indeed this was the lowly beginning of what has come to be an excellent virtue. We have had to learn benevolence by concentrating unselfish attention upon the few rather than the many. The farther back you go in history, the sterner does the operation of that law appear, and the less promising the future of mankind. If people tell me the world is not getting better, I suggest that it might be worth their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive history. In the "Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches for us the career of a strong and remarkable man. His hero, supposed to be a paragon of virtue, is capable of things you would call scoundrelism to-day. He and his band of storm-tossed companions land upon an island of the Grecian Archipelago and find a city there. They promptly sack it and kill all the inhabitants—men, women, and children. It seemed to be the proper thing to do, and found its way into verse, and they boasted about such heroic exploits. It was brutal murder, and the men who were capable of it were nothing more or less than pirates. Yet that stern, terrible tendency thus illustrated is just one with that inscrutable law under which nature herself has come to be what she is. It is what I call the self-ward tendency, the desire to grasp and keep at the expense of other individualities other societies than our own.

But in history, and from those very earliest times down to our own, another tendency has shown itself at work, a counter tendency. The two have been so intertwined frequently—as I have indicated in showing where patriotism comes from—that it has been difficult to dissociate them; but they are quite distinct. Take, for instance, the magnificent devotion of Arnold von Winkelried on the field of Sempach. Switzerland has not existed as a political unit for many centuries, but during that time her roll of heroes has been large. In the formative hour of Swiss independence, when that tiny folk were struggling for their liberty against the overweening power of Austria, it must have seemed a hopeless undertaking—this group of mountaineers against the chivalry of an empire. The great battle of Sempach was fought. The Swiss, armed with nothing but their battle-axes, hurled themselves in vain all day long against the serried ranks of Austrian mail-clad warriors, armed with spears, through which the shepherd men could make no way. They fell before them, but could not pass through them, till Winkelried called to his countrymen, "Provide for my wife and children and I will make a way," and, rushing unarmed upon the spearmen of Austria, clasped in his embrace as many of them as he could and bore them to the earth. A dozen spears passed through his body, but through the gap his devotion had made, his countrymen leaped to victory. That one act made possible, humanly speaking, the Swiss independence, which is an object-lesson for us to-day. Such acts as these form part of the cherished lore of nations. We feel they are the light-centres of the world. Something tells us that an act like that, the giving of a life for the sake of an ideal, a cause, a country, was a great thing. It represented the counter tendency to what was going on at that moment. In that very battle Austria was trying to grasp and hold, Switzerland was trying to get free and live her own life, and here was a man who, for the sake of his country's ideal, gave all that he had—his life. Will you tell me where to look for the focus and centre of that ideal? I know what your answer would be. It was at Calvary. The one thing which, consciously or subconsciously, men have recognised in Jesus that has given Him His supreme attraction for the world, is this—He was absolutely disinterested. It is the disinterestedness of Jesus, His utter nobleness, His power of projecting Himself into the experience of others, and trying to lift humanity as a whole to His experience of God, that gave Him His power with mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed, but lived, the counter tendency to the law of sin and death.

Now, when we have brought the two together, you see the essential distinction between working for self and its deathward look, and working for all with its lifeward gaze. These two are antithetic, and must be in opposition until the latter absorbs the former, and God is all in all, and love reigneth world without end.

We are now able to see what sin is more plainly than before. Sin is the tendency to grasp and draw inward, and everything that feeds that tendency makes for death. Sin is the expansion of the individuality at the expense of the race; sin is acting on the belief that the soul can increase at another's cost, can increase by destroying what is another's good. Apply that explanation or definition of sin to what you know about life, and you will soon see when a man is facing the deathward road, and how differently he acts when he is choosing the lifeward road. There are men in this congregation who do not realise, as they should, that lifewardness is God-wardness; but so it is. The soul and the source of all things is God, and, consciously or unconsciously, all men are seeking God in that they are seeking self-expression, seeking life. The man, for instance, who is trying to become rich is a man who is seeking to express himself, seeking power, seeking life, seeking to thrust through the barriers that surround the soul. They are all doing it; the veriest materialist among you is seeking by his daily activities more abundant life. The young man here who feels a burning ambition within his heart, a desire to exploit the world and make a name for himself, to occupy a high station, is not conscious of anything essentially unworthy. It all depends on what he does with the impulse. What you are seeking, young man, is more abundant life, and that is equivalent to seeking God. Life is God. "Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." And when the tendency goes round and works havoc and ruin in the world, it still remains a quest for God, although a blundering one. It is a misuse of divine energy. The man who got drunk last night and gratified his lower nature in that delirious hour would be surprised if you were to tell him when you see the result that he was really seeking God, but so it is. He wants life, and thinks he can get it this way. This is the reason why morbid excitement and the craving for amusement have such power in human lives to-day. Your roue in Piccadilly who went out to destroy innocence was seeking life while spreading death. It seems almost blasphemy to say it, but he was seeking God and thinking—O woful blunder!—that he would find Him by destroying something that God has made beautiful and fair. So with all acts of selfish gratification of which men are capable—they are the turning of the current of divine energy the wrong way, and seeking self-gratification at the expense of something else that God has made. It is a failure to see that we only obtain life by giving life. When an engine goes off the line there is a smash, as a rule, and the greater the power that was driving the engine, the worse is the wreck when it leaves the line. The lightning directed rightly becomes the luminant by which we look on each other's faces to-night. That same power might have brought havoc and destruction if it had not been harnessed in the service of man. And so with the power that God has given you; all desire for self-expression, all seeking of which you are conscious for larger and better and richer life, is God-given; but it may mean ruin and destruction unless you see that it is yours, not that you may draw inward, but that you may give outward, yours not to keep and hold, but yours wherewith to bless mankind. Sin is the tendency to keep for self that which was meant for the world. "The wages of sin is death," the death of soul. He who is guilty of sin is guilty of soul murder. "All they that hate Me love death," and he that spreads pain and ruin over other lives in the gratification of his own lower instincts is using something which is God-given—yea, which is essentially God's own life—in the wrong way. The only hope for him is to realise that no act of sin was ever yet worth while, that it does punish itself, must punish itself, for it shrivels and fetters the soul. No eleventh-hour repentance will ever save you, and no cowardly cry for relief will ever bring God's forgiveness into your soul, until you have realised that sin and selfishness are one, and that what you have failed to give forth of love and service represents the measure of your soul poverty.

Even at the risk of prolixity and repetition I have thought it right to insert these lengthy extracts from sermons which have been animadverted upon. My readers will be able to judge of the fairness of the criticism which, by abstracting a few lines, strove to make it appear that my teaching denied the reality of sin. Here are the actual words seen in their proper setting. If one were on the lookout for a good illustration of the sinfulness of sin, perhaps the controversial methods of the editor of the British Weekly might furnish it. This kind of criticism is on a par with that of the gentleman who once startled an audience by declaring, "The Bible says there is no God." He was right, of course, if it be legitimate to suppress the former part of the passage, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God."

It is time we had done with unreal talk about sin. Sin is the murder spirit in human experience. "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" Strong language, but I suppose the man who first used it must have known what he was talking about. Pomposity is sin, because it is egoism; self-complacency and contemptuousness are sin for the same reason. Cupidity is sin whether in a burglar or a Doctor of Divinity. A bitter, grasping, cruel, unsympathetic spirit is sin, no matter who shows it. The scribe and the Pharisee are too much with us, and the religious ideal needs to be rescued from their blighting grasp to-day as much as ever it did. Of all forms of sin an arrogant, malignant, self-satisfied assumption of righteousness is the worst and the hardest to eradicate, as Jesus found to His cost. The terrible damning lie which is stifling religion to-day is the lie which crucified Jesus, the lie that spiritual pride can ever interpret God to a needy world. There is something grimly amusing in the suggestion that prosperous people should pay for sending gospel missions to the poor. If sin is selfishness, the poor had better missionise the rich. Imagine how it would be if things were reversed in this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers took their stand in Belgravia and began a house-to-house visitation, with all the theological terms carefully eliminated from the mission leaflets they thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered footmen. Instead of, "Flee from the wrath to come," etc., they might have: "Don't be selfish! it is hurting you and your neighbours and making you unhappy. Don't pretend! It is poor business in the end. Try to do as much as you can for other people and you will know what God is." The attempt would be startling and unwelcome, but it would be far less impudent than the religious exhortations of the prosperous to the poor commonly are. For the truth is that if sin is selfishness,—and it is nothing else,—the degraded habits of people at the lower end of the social scale are no more sinful than the ordinary behaviour of most of their preceptors at the other end. Most of the talk about sin is unreal; that is the trouble; so verily the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before us. In church a man will profess himself to be a miserable sinner, but if we were to address him in the same way out of church he would sue us for libel—if he thought we meant it. For heaven's sake let us have done with the sham of it all and face the truth. What mankind is suffering from is selfishness. Get rid of that and there would be little left to trouble about.

Atonement and sin.—It should now be plain why the doctrine of Atonement has been so closely associated with the doing away of sin; it is because, as we have seen, the root idea of Atonement is the assertion of the fundamental oneness of man with man and all with God. Sin is the divisive separating thing in our relations with one another, and with God the source of all, so the assertion of our oneness involves getting rid of sin. If we ask how this is to be done, the answer is simple enough: the only way to get rid of selfishness is by the ministry of love. What is it that is slowly winning the world from its selfishness to-day and lifting it gradually into the higher, purer atmosphere of universal love? There is but one thing that is doing it, and that is the spirit of self-sacrifice. Wherever you see that, you see the true Atonement at work. There can be no doubt about the final issue, for behind the spirit of love is infinity, whereas the spirit of selfishness is essentially finite. On the field of human history the death of Jesus is the focus and concentrated essence of this age-long atoning process, whereby selfishness is being overcome and the whole race lifted up to its home in God. Until Jesus came no self-offering had been so consistent and so complete. No selfish desire could find lodgment in His pure soul. He showed men the ideal life by living it Himself, the life which was perfectly at one with God and man. In a selfish world that life was sure to end on a Calvary of some kind, but the very fact that it did so demonstrated the completeness of its victory over all considerations of self-interest. Selfishness lost the battle by seeming to gain it. God was behind the life of Jesus just because it was the life of perfect love, the life which was a perfect gift to the whole, therefore that life immediately arose in power in other lives and has gone increasing its benevolent sway over human hearts ever since. This is the Atonement and it is rightly associated with the cross of Jesus in the minds of men, for the cross is the sum and centre of it all.

The increasing Atonement.—But the Atonement to be effective has to be repeated on the altar of human hearts, and so it is, to a far greater extent than most people stop to think. The same spirit that was in Jesus and governed His whole career was the spirit of the true humanity, "The light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." The spirit of Jesus was the spirit of Christ, the ideal or divine manhood as it exists eternally in God. But that ideal or divine manhood, that Christ nature, is also potentially present in every human being. What needs to be done is to get it manifested or brought forth into conscious activity. The immediate effect of the life and death of Jesus upon His followers was to make them more or less like Him, and to fill them with a similar desire to get men to live the life of love which is the life of God. They felt themselves inspired by the same spirit, the Holy Spirit of truth and love, and exalted above all fear for their own safety and all desire to live for themselves alone. They loved their Lord so much that their lives became one with His in the work of saving the world. They could see no difference between serving their Master and serving mankind. This love force of theirs, this intense loyalty to Jesus, was, and still is, the redeeming thing in the life of mankind. There is not and never has been any other Atonement. The divine power that is breaking down selfishness, and transforming human desires in accordance with the eternal truth of things, is the spirit of self-sacrificing love. It is but a step from sinner to saviour. To cease to be a sinner is perforce to be a saviour. To escape from the dominion of selfishness is forthwith to become a power in the hand of God for the uplifting and ingathering of mankind to Himself; this is the Atonement.

Ask yourself whether this is not so. What other force for good is there in the world to-day than the spirit which governed the whole life of Jesus and rendered Him willing to brave the worst that evil could do in His desire to get men to realise the true life? There is no other. If you want to see the Atonement at work, go wherever love is ministering to human necessity and you see the very same spirit which was in Jesus, the spirit which heals and saves. Dogma is doing nothing to save the world; the gospel of self-sacrifice is doing everything. Show me a Christlike life and I will show you a part of the Atonement of Christ. Show me a noble deed and I will show you something worthy of Jesus. His self-offering, and the love and devotion it awoke in human hearts, are a perpetual sacrifice, a cumulative assertion that in the presence of need love can never do anything other than give itself until the need is supplied and love is all in all. There is even a possibility of substitution here. Vicarious suffering willingly accepted becomes irresistible in the long run as a means of lifting a transgressor out of the mire of selfishness. Many a noble wife has saved her husband by remaining at his side and patiently accepting the disabilities caused by his wrong-doing. It is even possible in such a case for the saviour to bear more than the sinner, and for the sinner to be relieved of some of the consequences of his sin; he would have to suffer more if there were no loving helper to stand by him. But to speak of one as bearing another's punishment is untrue; such a thing cannot be. All that love can do is to share to the uttermost in the painful consequences of sin and by so doing break their power What other Atonement is needed than this? It requires no defence, and a child could understand it. Everyone already believes in it, whether he stops to think about it or not. While I am writing these words a fierce storm is raging outside. This is the second day we have had of it, and there seems likely to be some loss of life on the dangerous rocks outside the bar which forms the entrance to the bay below. A visitor has just been telling me of a wilder storm in this same bay some years ago, and of which he says to-day's gale reminds him. On that previous occasion three ships were wrecked together within a few yards of this house. It must have been a dreadful, awe-inspiring scene. No boat could live on the surf, so every survivor had to be dragged ashore with ropes fastened to the cliffs and hauled by willing hands. Hundreds of townspeople and fisher folk came pouring over from St. Ives and all the hamlets round about in order to take part in the work of rescue. According to my informant the scene was enough to stir any heart, and even grown men were crying with excitement and compassion as some of the poor fellows in the rigging of the doomed vessels were washed away before they could be got ashore. The few who were actually snatched from the jaws of death found no lack of willing helpers as one by one they were passed insensible into the kind keeping of the many who stood waiting for an opportunity to be of service. No one grudged anything; every home and every bed would have been cheerfully placed at the disposal of the shipwrecked mariners if they had been wanted. Brave women, the wives and daughters of men who were risking their lives on the sea every day, willingly encouraged their husbands and sons in battling against the tempest in the endeavour to save other husbands and sons whom they had never seen or heard of until that hour of distress and need. And what a fight it was to be sure! Never was a braver. Again and again these humble Cornish heroes dashed into the raging billows to grasp and guide the ropes that bore a flickering human life, and every time they returned with their helpless burden a cheer went up from the watchers that drowned for a moment the violence of the blast. No one thought of enquiring into the theology of saviours or survivors. No doubt there were some among the former who were oftener to be found at the public-house bar than at church, but no one could have distinguished them from the orthodox Christians who fought the waves shoulder to shoulder beside them; they were there to save life, and in doing so their deeper manhood shone out with divine splendour. But the most of the rescuers were good sound, earnest Methodists who perhaps believed, or thought they believed, in the eternal damnation of the unregenerate. But what became of their doctrine in the face of an urgent human need and the call for self-sacrifice to supply that need? It was utterly forgotten. There is both humour and pathos in the fact that these convinced believers tugged and tore at the ropes, and freely jeopardised their own lives in a magnificent endeavour to save perishing bodies from temporal water. There is the truth for you, the real Atonement. The heart creed is usually better than the head creed, and in great moments buries the latter out of sight. Here was the spirit of Christ, the true and eternal manhood, the spirit that seeks to save at its own cost. Here was the instinctive perception of the fundamental oneness of all life and the recognition that the godlike thing is to seek to deliver life from the clutch of death.

All men instinctively believe in the Atonement.—This is the deepest and truest impulse of the human heart, as all men already know if they would only trust their better nature to tell them what God wants from his children. Here is an explosion in a coal-mine, and forthwith every mother's son above ground volunteers to go down into the choke-damp to snatch his buried comrades from the sleep of death. A few months ago one such disaster took place in a Durham colliery. Most of my readers will remember that in the newspaper reports of the incidents that took place at the pit mouth were the following: A father who was brought to the surface was asked whether he lost hope during the long hours of his imprisonment below without food or light. "No," was the reply, "for I knew my boy would be in the rescue party, and that nothing would turn him back until he found his father, dead or alive." The suffragan bishop of the diocese, along with a number of other clergymen and nonconformist ministers, remained all night amid the scene of sorrow at the pit mouth, doing his best to comfort the mourners as their loved ones were brought up dead. As morning broke he mounted a heap of cinders and, without making any attempt to conceal his emotion, spoke a few manly words of brotherly exhortation and Christian love to his deeply moved congregation of toilers and sufferers. One poor woman, with unconscious irony, exclaimed to the bystanders: "He doesn't seem like a bishop! He is just like one of ourselves." That servant of God has never preached the Atonement more effectually in all his life—by getting together of man and man, and man and God, through the spirit of self-sacrifice. He stands in the true apostolic succession, the succession of men like Saul of Tarsus, the erstwhile persecutor, who, under the inspiration of the love of Jesus, lived to say, "Who is weak and I am not weak? Who is offended and I burn not?"

Go into any home where the spirit of self-sacrificing love is trying to do anything to supply a need or save a transgressor, and you see the Atonement. Follow that Salvation lassie to the slums, and listen to her as she tries to persuade a drunken husband and father to give up the soul-destroying habit which is such a curse to wife and child, and you see the Atonement. Go with J. Keir Hardie to the House of Commons and listen to his pleading for justice to his order and you see the Atonement. Hear the prayer of mother-love for the erring, wandering son, and you have the Atonement. See that grey-haired father patiently pleading with selfish, hot-headed youth, or yielding up his own hard-won possessions to pay the gambler's debts and save the family name, and you have the Atonement. Nothing can stir the human heart so much. All the great deeds of history derived their inspiration from it; all the little heroisms of our common everyday life are the declaration of it. There is not a single one of all our thoughts and activities but has some relation to it; we are either living for ourselves individually and separately or we are living for the whole. If the former, we are the servants of sin; if the latter, our lives are already part of the Atonement.

Jesus and the Atonement.—It is easy to see how much the world owes to Jesus in this regard. I cannot tell what the world might have been if there had never been a Jesus, but certain it is that the sacrificial life and death of Jesus have meant the inpouring of a spirit into human affairs such as had never been known in the same degree before. Here for the first time men saw a perfect manifestation of the life that is life indeed, the life that pleased not itself, the life that entered into and shared human disabilities as though they were its very own, the life that in the presence of selfishness must inevitably become sacrifice, the life of Atonement. In a sinful world that life had to come to a Calvary, but in so doing in refusing to shield and save itself it became the greatest moral power and the greatest revelation of God that the world has ever known. What we succeed in doing some of the time, Jesus did all the time; when all men are able to do it all the time the Atonement will have become complete and love divine shall be all in all. "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!" cried Julian the apostate; and Christian faith can reverently add—

"Jesus is worthy to receive Honour and power divine; And blessings more than we can give Be, Lord, forever thine."

Faith in Jesus is faith in the Atonement and faith in our own Christhood. It means the upraising of the true life, the eternal life, within our own souls. Until His spirit becomes our spirit, His Atonement has done nothing for us, and when it does we, like Him, become saviours of the race. It must be so, for the spirit of love is the same both in God and man; in the presence of need, no matter what the need may be, that spirit must continue to give itself without stint until the need is supplied and all that would tend to separate between the individual soul and the eternal perfect whole is done away.

But then, someone will say, what has the death of Jesus effected in the unseen so as to make it possible for God to forgive us? Nothing whatever, and nothing was ever needed. God is not a fiend but a Father, the source and sustenance of our being and the goal of all our aspirations. Why should we require to be saved from Him?

Divine satisfaction in Atonement.—But in what sense is the death of Jesus a satisfaction to the Father? In no sense at all, except that the sacrifice of Jesus is the highest expression of the innermost of God that has ever been made. If it affords an artist satisfaction to express himself in a beautiful picture, or a great thinker to express his noble thought in a book, surely the highest satisfaction that God can know must be his self-expression in the self-sacrifice of his children. At its best, the intensest joy that can be known is the joy of giving one's self for the good of the whole. In everything grand and good in human thought and achievement God is doing just this. It is the satisfaction he receives from the Atonement and the only one.



CHAPTER XI

THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE

Atonement and New Testament language.—It will have been observed that in my examination of the subject of the Atonement I have said almost nothing about the New Testament evidence for the doctrine. This, I admit, is an entire departure from the method usually followed by those who write upon it, and may be thought by some to vitiate my whole argument. But the omission is of set purpose, for I am convinced that New Testament language about the Atonement, especially the language of St. Paul, has been, and still is, the prolific source of most of the mischievous misinterpretations of it which exist in the religious mind. To an extent this is the same with the Old Testament, but to a far less degree, for the language of the Old Testament is only liable to misapprehension when interpreted by the New. In a previous chapter I have endeavoured to show the imperishable truths which underlie Old Testament symbolism in regard to the Atonement, and I trust I have shown that these truths are as fresh and indispensable to-day, and play as great a part in human affairs as they ever did. But before I proceed to say anything about the New Testament symbolism, which has been largely derived from the Old, let us consider the question of the authority of scripture as a whole.

Tendency to bow to external authority.—There is always a tendency in the ordinary mind to rely upon some form of external authority in religious as in other matters. With one man it is the authority of an infallible church; with another the authority of an infallible book; with another the authority of some infallible statement of belief which ought to hold good for all time, but never does. At the best, external authority is only a crutch, and at the worst it may become a rigid fetter upon the expanding soul. The true seat of authority is within, not without, the human soul. We are so constituted as to be able to recognise, little by little, the truth of God as it comes to us. It may come from any one of a thousand different quarters, but to be recognised and felt as truth it must awaken an echo within the individual soul. If it does not awaken such a response, it is of no effect so far as the growth of the soul is concerned. What is true in this book will not be received as true by the readers merely because I say it, but because they feel it to be true and cannot get away from it. Why should we be afraid of trusting the human soul to recognise and respond to its own truth? All truth is one, and all earnest truth-seekers are converging upon one goal. It is the divine self within everyone of us which enables us to discern the truth best fitted to our needs, and this divine self is, as has already been pointed out, fundamentally one with the source of all truth, which is God.

If men could only come to see this more clearly and to trust their own divine nature to enable them to follow and express the truth as well as to receive it, they would not suffer themselves to be hampered by formal and literal statements of belief whether in the church, the Bible, or anywhere else. But this is what they seldom do. Your devout Anglican or Roman Catholic will tell you that the church teaches this or the church teaches that: as though that fact ever permanently settled anything. One cannot really begin to appreciate the value of united continuous church testimony until one is able to stand apart from it, so to speak, and ask whether it rings true to the reason and the moral sense. Suppose the Christian church enjoined or permitted rape and murder, would the devout Catholic believe and obey? "But it is inconceivable that the church could ever do that," he might answer. Yes, but suppose it did, would he obey? If not, why not? He would not obey because he would know quite well that the higher law within his heart would forbid and render impossible any such obedience. That is all the answer I want. Why should we not apply it all the way round? The real test of truth is to be found in the response it awakens within the soul.

The supposed authority of the letter a great hindrance to truth.—Now one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of many devout and intelligent minds to-day is that of the supposed binding authority of the letter of scripture. When a good man hears some inspiring or common-sense statement of truth,—for instance, that of universal salvation,—he often replies in some such way as the following: "Yes, I know it seems very plausible, and my heart desires to believe it; but then, you know, it says in the scripture, 'These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteousness into life eternal.' I cannot get behind that." He will go on stringing together, passage after passage, often without the slightest suspicion that the original meaning had nothing whatever to do with the subject under discussion; as, for example, that well-known sentence in Ezekiel, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." Whatever Ezekiel originally meant by that saying,—and it is well worth examination,—he was not thinking of a modern revival meeting. The plain, average, level-headed business man of religious temperament will sometimes bother himself in this way until he thinks of giving up religion altogether. The letter of scripture often seems to say one thing and the Christlike human heart another. Take, as one example out of many, that pungent passage in Psalm cxxxvii, "Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." That passage does not breathe the spirit of Jesus, nor is it true to the best in human nature; no follower of Jesus wants to see a little one dashed against a stone. But even to do justice to a passage of this kind we have to get into intellectual and moral sympathy with the man who wrote it. It was written by one of the poor Jewish prisoners carried away captive into Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar six centuries or more before Jesus was born. Try and picture the scene. Across eight hundred miles of desert that melancholy procession winds its way, leaving the highland home behind and going into slavery in the cruel city of the plain. One by one the weakest fall and die; and where a baby is left without a mother, or the mother cannot walk with the weight of the helpless child, the cruel Babylonian ruffians riding at the side will snatch it from the anguished bosom and dash its brains out against the rocks. Should we be likely to forget that if we had ever formed part of such a procession of prisoners of war? Hence when Psalm cxxxvii came to be written by some poor suffering father who had lost maybe both wife and child, he gave vent to his feelings in one of the most plaintive patriotic songs ever sung:—

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down—yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof, for there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.... O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones!

One can feel deep sympathy with this unknown poet and his suffering people without adopting the absurd view that this passage represents God's word to our souls. It is a cry of suffering mingled with a desire for vengeance, and that is all. But when a preacher declares that he takes his stand and bases his gospel on the infallible Book, he is either a fool or—a rhetorician.

Belief in the infallible Book impossible.—There are many good people who maintain that they believe the Bible from cover to cover, and they seem to think that this is something to be proud of. But they credit themselves with an impossible feat; no one can believe contradictions, in the sense of accepting them, whether intellectual or moral. The very same people who will read with unction the most sanguinary exhortations from scripture are usually people who themselves would not hurt a fly. The Bible is not like a parliamentary blue book, an exact and literal statement of facts; it represents for the most part what earnest men belonging to a particular nationality in a bygone age thought about life in relation to God. Many good people talk as though the Bible were written by the finger of God Himself and let down from heaven; on the other hand there are those who think that when they have shown the inconsistencies of scripture, they have destroyed its value. But they are both mistaken. The Bible is not one book, but a collection of books, a slow growth extending over centuries. It has come to be reverenced not because of any supernormal attestations of its authority, but because we have found it helps us more than any other book. The fact that the best part of it was written by good and serious men, men who were living for the highest they were able to see, does not necessarily give binding authority to the opinions of these men. I question whether we should ever have heard of the Old Testament if it had not been for Jesus, and the New is only a statement of what some good men thought about Jesus and his gospel at the beginning of Christian history. Jesus knew and loved the Old Testament scriptures, but whenever He found a statement therein that jarred upon His moral sense, He rejected it in the name of the higher truth declared by the Spirit of Truth within His own soul: "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment. But I say unto you that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause"—and even "without a cause" seems to have been interpolated in later days—"shall be in danger of the judgment." "Again ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths. But I say unto you, Swear not at all, neither by the heavens, for it is God's throne, nor by the earth, for it is His footstool. Let your communication be Yea, yea, nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." "Ye hath heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thine neighbour and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you." Jesus knew what He was doing. In all these instances He was quoting from the Old Testament, and deliberately superseding in the name of truth certain prescriptions of the very law which He said He had come to fulfil. Everyone was taken by surprise at His daring to do this. Matthew vii. 28, 29, says, "And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as one having (in Himself) authority, and not as the scribes." No doubt some people would say to-day that this authority came from His Godhead. But the people on the hillsides of Galilee knew nothing about the Godhead of Jesus. To them He was a heaven-sent teacher, a great and inspiring master, whose words carried weight. His authority, therefore, must have been self-evident in contradistinction to that of the scribes, who always began their discourses by saying, "It is written." They never seem to have thought of appealing to anything else than the authority of the letter. But we see that Jesus, notwithstanding His reverence for the scripture, handled it with perfect freedom. His authority was that of the Spirit of God speaking within His own soul, the only authority that has ever mattered in the history of religious thought. He did not deny the authority of Scripture, but He claimed to be able to see when it rang true to His own inner experience and when it did not.

The true seat of authority.—If we could grasp this principle clearly and strongly, it would give us a new and higher sense of freedom and of confidence in the word of God as declared in the Bible and revealed in human hearts. God has never stopped speaking to men. He speaks through us collectively and individually. "The word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thine heart, that thou mayest do it." If we are only in earnest to listen for the divine voice and to trust it when we hear it, we shall not listen in vain. To realise that God is speaking to us just as He spoke to earnest souls in the days of old will send us to the sacred scriptures with an even greater appreciation and reverence for the men of whose experience they are the expression. But they will no longer bind us; they can only help and encourage us. We shall feel that these men of faith of an earlier day and a different race were our brothers after all, men who lived a life much like our own, and who were trying to understand God as we are trying to understand Him. The Bible is not infallible for the simple reason that the human nature, even of wise and great men, is not infallible. It helps us because these men were struggling with the same problems as ourselves, and therefore what they have to say about them is valuable. But the best of them had their limitations and shortcomings. They did not know all the truth that was to be known, but they kept their faces to the light. If we allow ourselves to be fettered by their actual words, we shall be in danger of losing sympathy with them in the spirit which animated those words. We are writing a Bible with our own lives to-day, a Bible which may never be read in its fulness by human eyes, but every letter of which is known and read in heaven. Every noble life is a word of God to the world; every brave, unselfish deed is a ray of eternal truth. Our characters ought to become living epistles known and read of all men while we strive to express the best that God has given us to see; for the same eternal Spirit of Truth, the Spirit who has been the teacher of all the Elijahs, Isaiahs, and Pauls of history is with us to-day as He was with them.

The unity of truth.—But, someone will remonstrate, What then are we to believe? For by speaking in this way you erect as many standards of truth as there are individuals. What the ordinary man wants is to be told just what to believe, so that he can settle down and be at rest. It is small comfort to tell him that every scripture statement may be more or less fallible, and that he must trust to his own perception, or perhaps to his own fancies, as to what is true. I know all that kind of argument. It is as old as, or older than, Christianity itself. It was used in all sincerity against Jesus by some earnest people of His time. It was used again at the Reformation. It is still used by sacerdotal controversialists, and looks very plausible on the face of it. A devout and earnest Roman Catholic will tell you that in Protestantism there are a thousand different creeds, all claiming to be authoritative, and that the principle of private judgment can only lead to intellectual and moral chaos. Your Protestant literalist will tell you that the Romanist criticism has a good deal in it, and that you must have a final standard of authority, either the infallible church, the infallible Book, or the infallible Confession of Faith. But notwithstanding the dogmatists the supposed infallible Confession of Faith is almost universally discredited, and common honesty is compelling Protestants to abandon the theory of an infallible Book. The supposed infallible church has by no means been invariably self-consistent. Besides, the important point is this; no man really believes or can believe a thing until it becomes, so to speak, part of himself. Holding propositions is not necessarily believing them, no matter how tenaciously they may be adhered to. But all truth is really one and the same. I may be unable to take exactly my neighbour's point of view about some aspects of it, but if we are both in earnest and faithful to what we have seen, we shall arrive in the end at the same goal. Religious thinkers and teachers are never really so far apart as seems to be the case. It is in the expression of the truth that they differ, not in the truth itself. Language is never more than approximately convenient expression of the reality it is meant to declare. The man of the future will realise this better than the man of the present or the past. He will replace all external authority by the principle of spiritual autonomy. He will no longer be afraid of trusting the human spirit to recognise and respond to truth from whatsoever source it may come, for he will know that that spirit is one with the universal Spirit of all Truth, and needs not to look beyond itself for anything stronger or more divine. He will know that the Spirit of Truth in himself is the Spirit of Truth in all men, and that therefore in the end all men must know, and be, and do the Truth.

The New Testament and the Atonement.—Now let us apply this principle to the New Testament writings about the redeeming work of Jesus. The same principle, of course, would apply to anything that the New Testament has to say about the gospel of Jesus, but perhaps the failure to recognise it has done more mischief in connection with the doctrine of Atonement than in anything else. At present Paul's opinion on this great subject is by many people supposed to be decisive: Paul says this, and Paul says that, and when Paul has spoken, there is no more to be said. But why should it be so? Paul's opinion is simply Paul's opinion, and not necessarily a complete and adequate statement of truth. It is entitled to be considered weighty because it is the utterance of a great man, and a great seer of truth, as well as being the earliest writing on the subject which we possess. Any man of the moral and intellectual eminence of Paul is entitled to reverence when he speaks, whether his views are in the Bible or not. It is one of the ironies of history that the words of this Paul who strove so hard against literalism and legalism in his day have since come to be regarded as a sort of fixed and final authority for Christian thought. He would be the first to denounce it. To him the Spirit of Christ operating within the individual soul was the true guide in matters of faith. He even made a point of the fact that in thinking out the truth about Jesus and His gospel he had "conferred not with flesh and blood."

Inconsistency of New Testament writers with one another.—Again, it is somehow taken for granted that Paul and all the other New Testament writers agree together in their theology of the Atonement. That is quite a mistake, and the curious thing is that people should have been so slow in finding it out. It may be instructive to some to give a brief survey of the main points in Paul's theory of the Atonement, and compare them with some of the others.

The fundamental principle of its Atonement always the same.—It would simplify our acquaintance with Paul's modes of reasoning if we could recognise that the truth of Atonement which he has to declare, and which he associates so closely with the life and death of Jesus, is in principle precisely the same as that which the writers of the Old Testament had in mind. What that was we have already seen. It was the assertion of the fundamental oneness of God and man, and the means to it was the principle of self-sacrifice. This is just what St. Paul set himself to proclaim to the world, and to him the whole process centred in Jesus, just as it does for Christian experience. But to his presentation of the subject Paul almost of necessity had to bring the whole apparatus of his rabbinical training. This it was which supplied him with the most of his figures, symbols, and illustrations; but his gospel was no more dependent upon these than—as I trust I have shown in a previous chapter—the ancient spiritual truth of Atonement depended upon Semitic ritual sacrifices. Paul's thought-forms were supplied by the Old Testament and his Pharisaic education, just as the forms in which we ordinarily express our thoughts to-day belong to the mental atmosphere of our time. Most of the allusions in a Times leading article, for example, would be lost upon an English reader five hundred years hence unless they were carefully explained. To me one of the most remarkable things about Jesus is the fact that He was able to escape so completely the mental environment of the time in which, and the people among whom, He lived His earthly life. How He managed to deliver His peerless teaching while making so little allusion to current Jewish modes of thought and worship is a mystery, and marks His greatness as perhaps nothing else does. It was utterly different with Paul; he spoke the language of his time, and never tried to do anything else. When, therefore, we want to get at what he meant about the death of Jesus, we have first of all to get behind the symbolism by which he illustrates it, and even when we have done this we have to make allowance for some limiting Pharisaic conceptions about justice and the punishment of sin. Every now and then he breaks through these and rises into a rarer, purer region without troubling about consistency. Paul never dreamed that he was writing theological treatises which would be numbered off into chapters and verses and lectured upon in class rooms, or perhaps he would have been more careful about being exact. How many of us could afford to have our letters, written at different times and to different readers, analysed and dissected and taken as a full and permanent statement of our thought upon any particular subject or group of subjects?

Paul's view of the death of the Saviour and the forgiveness of sins.—The first important thing to be noted in Paul's thought about sin and salvation is his view that there was a vital connection between the death of the Messiah and God's forgiveness of sins. But we should be mightily mistaken if we were to understand this view to be the same as that of a modern evangelical who talks about the "fountain filled with blood," for it was quite different. The modern evangelical, of so-called orthodox opinions, believes that Jesus died to save all men from hell; but this was not what Paul was thinking about at all. According to Paul, the wages of sin were actually and literally death. But for sin there would have been no death, and to break the power of sin would also be to break the power of death. But in this Paul was wrong, in company with a good many of his contemporaries, and there is no reason why we should not frankly say so, for, as we shall presently see, the great apostle did not confine himself to the literal statement of this view, but gave it also a mystical form in which it becomes indisputably true. In his thought the Messiah of Jewish national expectation was the head and representative of the nation in its relation to God. For ages men had been dying because of sin—"in Adam all die"—and so when the Sinless One came into human conditions and in the likeness of sinful flesh, He also had to pass through death. But there was a difference between His death and all other deaths in that, being sinless, death could not hold Him, and so He rose again from the tomb triumphant over it. His triumph then becomes potentially the triumph of humanity—"in Christ shall all be made alive"—if only we unite ourselves to Him by faith. God will remit the death penalty to all who are "in Christ" and "justified by faith"; that is, we shall all rise from the dead as He rose. Apparently Paul's belief was that no one would ever have died but for the sin of Adam, a taint which has affected all Adam's descendants. Death in his view was synonymous with annihilation.

The next thing to be noticed is the juridical nature of Paul's conception of the relationship of man and God. God is a lawgiver and man a transgressor, a rebel against his sovereignty. In accordance with God's law of righteousness sin is punishable by the death of the whole race. "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." But when the eternal Son of God, the head and representative of the race, submits to this penalty and in so doing acknowledges the righteousness of God, justice is satisfied. "If one died for all, therefore all died." Those who claim by faith the benefits of Messiah's submission to death on behalf of the race are at peace with God. Henceforth they are not to live to themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again.

Anyone who reads Paul's words without dogmatic prejudice will see that this is not the present-day doctrine of Atonement. It takes for granted certain ideas which were current among the Jews of Paul's day, but which have since sunk into the background of Christian thought or been abandoned altogether. Paul's use of them in the framing of his theology is ingenious but not convincing, and was not essential to his gospel; in fact the juridical and the ethical elements in Paul's teaching stand in irreconcilable contrast. His theology is saved by his mysticism, for no sooner has he enunciated these unbelievable propositions about the death penalty of sin, the judicial sovereignty of God, justification by faith, the imputed merits of the Redeemer, and such like, than he proceeds to use them as symbols to illustrate a subjective change in the sinner and a mystical union between the soul and Christ. He does this so beautifully that the reader can hardly discern where Paul quits the region of literalism and takes us into that of mysticism. Hence he talks about dying with Christ, being crucified with Christ, dying to sin, and so on, evidently meaning that the whole redeeming process has to take place within the soul of the sinner who seeks God. Even the conception of the resurrection ceases to be literal and becomes the uprising of the divine man within the human soul by faith in the risen Lord. "If any man be in Christ there is a new creation; old things are passed away; behold all things are become new." "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit." We see from these expressions that in practice Paul transfers the whole drama of redemption from without to within the individual soul. What a pity it is that his interpreters in Christian history have so seldom thought of doing the same!