and Blood = His Humanity; and especially in respect of its The position, then, set out in the ninth Chapter, is entirely corroborated in the Church of Christ, and the sacraments which characterize the Church. The whole sacramental system means nothing else than personal identification, Atonement cannot be a fictitious transaction, nor punishment a merely retributive pain: real penitence is not compatible with continuance in evil, nor real forgiveness with condona- tion of evil. But ideally, on analysis, punishment is found to involve the idea of penitence; and penitence that of perfect holiness; and forgiveness to be love's embrace of Christ is whole God in whole man. His life and death were the actual holiness (holiness as responsive obedience, and the holiness of ideal penitence), in, and of, human nature The Pentecostal Spirit is the perpetuation of Christ's Presence in human nature, which is the Church. This is the atone- The realization of Christ's Spirit in us is not the loss, but the OUR PRESENT IMPERFECTION The real difficulty of our exposition is its apparent failure in life Shall we acquiesce in lowering our ideal? No. The view of the world is wrong in fact. To spiritual insight the atonement is not a failure. What the real drama of life and history Immense value, for practical life, of ideal beliefs in general, and The power of any fearless appeal to the standard of Christ. The indirect witness of spiritualism Mysticism, its indispensable positive truth; only out of propor- tion when treated as an exceptional compartment of The consciousness of saints. Their faith is the real insight of ex- always helpful, as history 324 Irenæus and Origen. Their illustrations, so far as untenable, The misconceptions which sometimes seem to us immemorial, grew into Christian thought very gradually. Not for a thousand years did they constitute a serious burthen to Anselm's Cur Deus Homo? Its value. Its failure—a necessary Abælard. Conforms largely to current language; though his own real thought is different. "The love of Christ in us." Abælard to Heloissa. The injustice of Bernard. How near Abælard's thought comes to the truth. Why it fails Present thought. Mr Maurice. The late Master of Balliol. Dr Dale. His real work the assertion, against Latitudi- narianism, of the objective reality of the Sacrifice. His failure to correlate objective and subjective. The Cry on the Cross, and the "actual penalty of sin." Total omission of Dr Macleod Campbell. Atonement not the cause, but the effect, of God's love. Forgiveness-Punishment. Christ's death the perfect repentance of humanity—the Amen in Yet the identification of Christ with humanity imperfectly conceived. The very statement of it lays too much stress on distinctness, and contrast. Minimizing phrases- "dealing with the Father"-"confessing our sins." Minimiz- ing explanations of the "shame" and the Cry on the Cross. ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY CHAPTER I PUNISHMENT AN obvious preliminary to any serious attempt to give an explanation of the doctrine of Atonement is a careful examination of the terms which are, and cannot but be, freely used in any discussion of the subject. Some of these claim a place at once so immemorial in human experience, and so fundamental to any conception of the doctrine itself, that it is apt to be assumed that they are, as it were, already current coin; that is to say, that they may be made use of, on all hands, without examination or definition, as having already stamped on them an indisputable meaning or value, which will at once be intelligible, and intelligible in the same sense, to all who use them. It seems worth while to begin by an attempt to crossexamine, one after another, three such primary terms or thoughts, so as at least to be clear, for further purposes, what we do, or do not, understand them to mean. The three are Punishment, Penitence, and Forgiveness. In each case it will perhaps be obvious to thoughtful people that it is easier to use these words, with general acceptance, than to define them exactly,-to others, or even to ourselves. In each case it may be no rashness A to suggest that current thought is apt to be confused in respect of the teaching which makes use of these words, in great measure at least because it is first confused as to its own meaning in the words themselves. There is one general suggestion, which equally applies to all three, which may be stated here. It is this: that whereas, in our experience, we are familiar with every one of these three things, punishment, penitence, and forgiveness, in a certain inchoate or imperfect condition, but with none of them in its own consummation of perfectness; we are apt to frame our notions of what the words even ideally and properly mean, on the basis of our imperfect realization of them; and so to introduce elements and aspects, which belong only to their failure, into our ideal conceptions of what they themselves, in their own true nature, really are. No doubt, if all our experience is of their imperfectness, and all our conceptions must be based on experience; it may be said, with a certain verbal exactness, that all our conceptions must be framed on the basis of imperfectness. But if we realize the fact of imperfectness; if, even within the imperfect experience, we discern the tendency and direction in which (though we fail to attain it) the consummation of these experiences would ideally be found; we may, on the basis of imperfect experience, approximately attain a true conception of what perfect realization would mean. This is the true use to make of imperfect experience. It is indeed only thus that we can discern the true meaning of free will, of love, of personality;-of everything, indeed, to which our own consciousness bears inherent witness, but whose perfectness none of us has attained. This is to distinguish, in our experience, what it is that belongs to the lines of our true nature, and what to our own imperfect realization of it. This is the precise distinction which it is the aim of the present inquiry to make. But this is a widely different |