as He is the revelation, within man, of Deity: and that this real presence of the Incarnate as Spirit, constituting the inmost personality of man, is the reality in man of that consummated victory of the penitence, or righteousness, of the "Atonement," which was the culmination and end of Incarnation.

For the reality of our own relation to the atonement, which is its consummation in respect of each one of us, everything unreservedly turns upon the reality of our identification, in spirit, with the Spirit of Jesus Christ In proportion to our essential distinctness, and remoteness, from Him, is our distinctness, and remoteness, from the consummation of Atonement. But in proportion as the aspiring language of the Christian Scripture and the Christian Liturgy is realized; in proportion as it approaches towards the truth to say, of ourselves, that "we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us"; the fulness of that consummation of obedient and penitential holiness which constituted in Him a perfect atonement, is, by His Presence consummated also in ourselves.

We are now hundreds of miles from the thought of vicarious punishment. Could anything be more grotesquely, or even blasphemously, irrelevant to our true meaning than the thought of an obstinate Punisher, who after venting His vengeance on an innocent substitute, should consent, because some one had suffered, to treat the wicked, untruly and unrighteously, as if they were what they are not? Even if, in a sense, we may consent to speak of vicarious penitence; yet it is not exactly vicarious. He indeed consummated penitence in Himself, before the eyes, and before the hearts, of men who were not penitent themselves. But He did so, not in the sense that they were not to repent, or that His penitence was a substitute for theirs. He did so, not as a substitute, not even as a delegated representative, but as that inclusive total of true

Humanity, of which they were potentially, and were to learn to become, a part. He consummated penitence, not that they might be excused from the need of repenting, but that they might learn, in Him, their own true possibility of penitence.

We were careful to avoid all semblance of the mistake of supposing that He was set up before men as a model mainly, or an object lesson; as an example chiefly or pattern, to be studied, and loved, and followed. Such phrases are not indeed untrue,-when the things of which they speak have first become possible. But the union with Him which is offered, and which is necessary, to men, is something far beyond the power of human admiration, or imitation, or even desire. It is not by becoming like Him that men will approach towards incorporation with Him: but by result of incorporation with Him, received in faith as a gift, and in faith adored, and used, that they will become like Him. It is by the imparted gift, itself far more than natural, of literal membership in Him; by the indwelling presence, the gradually disciplining and dominating influence, of His Spirit-which is His very Self within, and as, the inmost breath of our most secret being; that the power of His atoning life and death, which is the power of divinely victorious holiness, can grow to be the very deepest reality of ourselves.

Such identification with Christ of the very inmost personality of each several man, may sound at first, to man's confused thought about himself, as if it were the surrender of the sovereign instincts and capacities which he fancies that his own self-conscious personality means. We have endeavoured therefore to show, in some detail, that the very opposite to this is true. By some analysis of the meaning of the claim which our self-consciousness makes to free will, to reason, and to capacity of loving,— the three most prominent strands in our familiar thought

of personality, we endeavoured to make clear that, whatever be the inherent witness to, or demand for, each of these three things in every human consciousness, there is not one of them which, as matter of fact, we properly possess. We only approximate towards the actual consummation of what we ourselves cannot but mean by each one of these three words, in proportion as we really are translated into Christ, and His Spirit is the ultimate reality of our own individual being. So far from surrendering the sovereignty of our proper personality by identification with Him; it is only in proportion to our reality of identification with Him, that we ever attain at all to that true sovereign freedom, and insight, and love, which are the essential truth of personality, the consummation of the meaning of ourselves.

And finally we felt that we were at least on ground altogether incontrovertible in insisting that this identification of the several self with Him, this sovereign and overruling presence of His Spirit within the hearts and lives of Christians, was at all events the doctrine and the claim which breathe through every line of the New Testament. It is the Spirit of Christ which constitutes the Pentecostal Church. The Church means nothing but this. It is the perpetuity of the Presence, it is the living Temple, of God Incarnate-no longer in the midst of, but within, men. And the whole sacramental system, that unique characteristic of the Church of Christ, wholly means, and is, this. It is only the materialistic misconceptions and misuse of sacraments by men, because their moods and minds, even on spiritual subjects, are so often other than spiritual, which could ever have given colour, for one moment, to that most paradoxical of accusations, that the sacraments are a screen, or substitute, for Christ; or could have obscured, to any spiritual eye, the obvious fact that the sacraments simply and directly both mean, and are, the

Divine methods of the Spirit of Christ,-constituting, as such, the progressive spiritual reality of those throughout the world, who are willing to have Christ for their life.

It is Christ then who, in the fullest sense, is our atonement, and our atonement is real in proportion to the reality of Christ in us. Our atonement is no merely past transaction: it is a perpetual presence; a present possibility, of the life and of the self, the consummation of which transcends thought and desire. It is a "power that worketh in us." And the power is the power through Spirit, in Jesus Christ, of God. "Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be the glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations for ever and ever. Amen."1

CHAPTER XII

OUR PRESENT IMPERFECTION

THERE is one line of thought more in reference to which it seems to be desirable that something should still be said. In a sense our exposition is finished. But what is the relation between our exposition on the one hand, and, on the other, our familiar experience? If the lines are even approximately right on which the doctrine of the Atonement has been explained, then the real meaning of the life of a Christian man, redeemed in Christ, as a member of Christ's Body, is something of singular spiritual loftiness. He is a communicant, not ceremonially only, but vitally, and even visibly, living on Christ, and growing into the likeness and Spirit of Christ. Not in himself, but in Christ, is the focus of his life. He is himself the inspired reflection of Another. He is a Saint, in whose face, and in whose life, the very lineaments of Christ are manifestly

seen.

This is the theory, as logical, indeed, and complete, and fascinating, as it is scriptural and true. But what relation has this to experience? What is the likeness between the ideal picture, and that which we know that we are? Whether we look to the general average of the so-called Christian life, which does not so much as attempt to enter at all upon the communicant obedience or the communicant consciousness: or whether we think of those who, communicants as they are in the outward sacrament of the sacrifice of Christ, with fervour indeed