punishment of some other, who has no connection with the guilt, no wonder that the transaction, so conceived or described, profoundly shocks the conscience of godlike men. If this is all that we have to say about the Christian doctrine of atonement, much that is deepest and best in human nature will continue to cry out against it with a cry which will certainly not be silenced or appeased.

But we passed beyond this first childish conception of atonement, not so much by treating the conception itself with contempt, as by finding, on analysis, to how much it really bore witness beyond its own first imperfect statement of itself. We recognized that a vindictive punisher, who will not be satisfied without punishing somebody, is no part of the diviner truth of punishment. If in cases in which punishment has failed of its proper object and character-cases which we dare not deny or exclude as impossible, it is capable of acquiring a character with some superficial resemblance to this; at all events in its proper truth, when it has not morally failed, punishment is itself a method, or stage, towards penitence. The consummation of its proper work is not to be looked for so much either in the form of eternal damnation, on the one side, or of cancelling of penalty on the other; rather, in proportion to its true working, it is itself superseded and absorbed. It becomes an aspect or mode of something which is beyond, yet is characterized by, itself. The proper goal of penal pain is the consummation of penitence.

And penitence, when we examined it, we found to be an attitude towards sin,-on the part indeed necessarily of one whose nature was burdened with the disabilities, and was accessible to the insulting challenge, of sin;—which yet, in its true ideal completeness of meaning, was nothing less than the attitude of the absolute holiness of God. In its ideal significance, which alone is the measure of what it really signifies, we found it to be only a possibility of the

personally Sinless: even while it also was the only condition on which the sin of the sinful could be really

dissolved and destroyed. It was the indispensable necessity of the personally sinful. It was only conceivable as a property of the personally sinless.

And meanwhile if, whether with logic or without it, we so far bowed to the universal voice of all Christian experience as to assume that there is some reality of penitence, we found that, on the assumption of reality of penitence, forgiveness ceased to wear its first aspect as either arbitrary, or purchased, favour; it became a spontaneous, inherent, necessary aspect of love: it was love's natural embrace of that which was, or was capable of being, really lovable; until, if it were conceivable that penitence should be ever consummated perfectly, forgiveness would more and more completely lose all its distinctive aspect as "forgiveness"; -it would more and more be merged and lost in the fulness of the love of God, embracing no longer sinners though they were sinful, but saints because they were sanctified, embracing the very living beauty of holiness in those who were really once more themselves holy and beautiful.

Then, turning aside to notice that Jesus Christ was no irrelevant third between God and man; not another God besides the God who was Holiness and was sinned against; nor another man besides the man who had sinned, and was bound in sin; but identical, potentially at least, with man, that is, with the whole range of humanity,-as He was absolutely identical with the whole content and meaning of the word "God"; we saw that in Him, that is, in human nature, become the expression of Deity, (yet, still expressing even Deity humanly, and remaining, none the less, human nature,) all the impossible conditions, which we had seen before to be necessary though impossible, were in fact satisfied to the full. The impossible burthen of all

that the ideal consummation of penitence had been seen to involve, was here completely realized, in a suffering, in a holiness, in a penitential consummation of holiness, which though Divinely perfect, were none the less perfectly human. How absolutely is the whole world's record transformed, by the righteousness of One, quite perfectly righteous, Man!

We saw, revealed in Him, the meaning of a life of perfectly obedient dependence on God, which is the realization of human holiness, the crown of the proper meaning of the life of man. And we saw, revealed in Him, the meaning of penal death: death which, by its very inherent contradiction of all that life means or demands, death which, in its awful surrender both of body and spirit, is itself the consummation of the sinner's contrition,-the final struggle with, the final victory over, the last and most tremendous grapple (because it is indeed the death grapple) of, sin. When the death is consummated, in that last terrible surrender inch by inch of all that sin could touch, or challenge, or hurt, sin itself was crushed, and was dead.

And all this, we insisted, was no merely past transaction, affecting, quite irrespectively of ourselves or our attitude towards it, the principles upon which God deals with us. No one could imagine this who keeps steadily in mind the truth that the word God means always Righteousness and Truth, and the Love which is the Love of Righteousness and Truth. Nothing can ever affect God's relation towards us, which does not affect the relation towards us of Righteousness and of Truth. If God loves us, they love us. If they love us not, neither does God. God deals with us, loves us, as is true, and as is righteous. Bethlehem and Nazareth, and the lake-side in Galilee, and the courts of the Temple in Jerusalem, and Gethsemane, and Calvary, all these and the awful scenes

which belong to these names, were indeed objective and historical realities first, before us, and without us: and yet the work of atonement through them is not yet consummated, until we too are ourselves in relation with it, and it is a living fact for, and in, ourselves.

This translation of the objective into the subjective, the realizing within our personal being of the things which were wrought without that they might be realized within, finds its most natural beginning and expression whenever the human thought sincerely contemplates, and the human heart is moved and drawn in sincere love towards, the work of Calvary, and the Person of Christ. Contemplation and love do wonderfully transform the very selves of those in whom they are real. Yet even contemplation and love, profoundly important though they are, are terms too superficial and precarious to express, with any real approach to accuracy, the nature of the personal relation of Christians to Christ. Or at all events contemplation and love, as we know or can conceive them in any other context, are inadequate. Their basis, their capacity, their very meaning, must be unique, before we can receive them as adequate expressions for that transcendent relation which is to overshadow and to transform the very meaning of what we ourselves

are.

And so we passed on to consider, not as a glorious sequel to the atonement, but rather as an integral part of its meaning, a necessary condition without which it would remain unconsummated after all, the doctrine of the Holy Ghost; that perpetual extension, or Spiritual realization, of the Incarnation,-of Nazareth and of Calvary, which is the breath and life, the meaning and the being, of the Pentecostal Church. The Church of Christ is much more than a sentimental emotion, a tribute of thought or affection, however sincere in itself, towards

the Person of Christ. It is the indwelling and overruling presence of the Person of Christ in the Person of the Spirit, characterizing and constituting the inmost reality of the personality of man.

Something we ventured to say in the direction of explaining, or making intelligible to our own imagination and reason, the great Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit, revealed to the Church as the Divine mode of the continuance and consummation of the life and death of Jesus Christ, which continuance and consummation constitutes the Church. Even when we tried to think of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Being of God, we ventured (without transcending the modest limits of that true Christian agnosticism which most earnestly disclaims the attempt to know fully what it is manifest that we cannot, as men, fully know) to make, at least, an especial connection between the thought of the Divine Being, as emanating Spirit, and that Response to Himself which any real intelligence of His Being compels (as it were) His creatures to render back, as reflection or echo, to Himself; that response of which the poetry of the poet, the harmony of the musician, the symmetry of the architect, the peaceful triumphs of the statesman, the atmosphere of love and gratitude wrought out for itself by the love of the Christian worker, are a parable and earnest.

We ventured to suggest that the Spirit Himself is primarily revealed as the Spirit, or perpetuity of inward presence, of the Incarnate, who is the revelation of God: that it was the master-fact of the Incarnation of God which dominated all the theological language and thought of the Epistles and the New Testament throughout: that to think of the Spirit as the Spirit of the Incarnate is to see that He is the revelation of the true meaning and character, the destiny and goal, of humanity, just as truly