power of discernment with which they would have viewed and judged the evidence: so that, in both ways, theirs would have been an insight into the very true proportion of things, at once more penetrating and more reverent than it is; and on these terms cynicism would not even have been felt as a temptation. The sense indeed of wrong in the world, and of the power of wrong, would have been not less but greater. And yet, more impressive even than the wrong, would have been the profound realization also of the hidden working of the Spirit which can never tolerate or make compromise with wrong.

This phrase strikes a further note. For another symptom of secularized religion, is its over-complacent toleration of wrong. There is indeed a large-heartedness which is wholly Christian: and it is easy to slip, imperceptibly, from the one to the other. Largeness of heart towards evil-doers is a Christlike sign. But such largeness of heart is in fact a working of love, which yearns over them, even in their evil, because it yearns to separate them from their evil. It will do all that love can do to deliver them, and in their dimmest approaches towards contrition it is near at once to succour and strengthen them. But this is a difficult goodness: and the world has an easier substitute for this. The world's substitute simply is,-to ignore or condone the evil: to treat the evil, with a large indifference, as if it were not evil but good. It is one thing to yearn towards the persons who have fallen into evil, and to be willing to do and bear for them. It is quite another thing to make light of the evil: or embrace, without a difference, those who, having identified themselves with evil, have hardened their foreheads without shadow of relenting. "To abhor the evil" is as necessary a sign of the spirit of holiness as is to love the good. "Neither doth he abhor anything that is evil "1 is a sentence of condemnation which

"1

1 Psalm xxxvi. 4.

shows essential incapacity of any true enthusiasm for what is good. In those who cannot be stung into horror and hatred of evil the absolute antithesis between evil and good has been only too effectually melted away. They are all "more or less" this or that. Enthusiasm is dead. The whole ultimate drift is indifference. There is nothing at all like this in the new Testament. The publicans and the harlots who were drawn towards Christ were received with the gravest tenderness. But what of those who were not drawn at all? Or what of those-not harlots and publicans only but scribes and Pharisees,—to whom He and His searching tenderness, and His awful claims, were only an "offence." The wrath of Jesus of Nazareth was —and is uncompromising and very terrible. "Every one that falleth on that stone shall be broken to pieces; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will scatter him as dust." 1

Another form of the tolerance which belies religion is the total lack of enthusiasm for the mission of the Gospel of Christ. Zeal for evangelistic work throughout the world is a necessary note of belief and love towards Christ. Indifference to mission work, scepticism as to its possible value and duty, though it is painfully common in the world, and both accepted in fact, and maintained in principle, by many who think and mean themselves to be Christians, is, in simple truth, a fatal disloyalty. Of course this or that particular mission or missionary may fail, more or less glaringly, in his own ideal purpose and significance. To see, with whatever scathing clearness of view, the inadequacy of individual persons or efforts, is no disloyalty; it is rather a direct and certain result of true enthusiasm. But to disbelieve in the cause, to hesitate about the duty, to class Christianity as merely one type, amongst many more or less perfect or imperfect types of religion, to doubt its sovereign relation to all mankind, to accept imperfect

1 Luke xx. 18.

success as an excuse for desisting from enthusiasm; is utterly incompatible with any real understanding of what the Christian faith is. Such cold detachment is the opposite of zeal for the Lord. It is not the same religion at all as that of St John. It cannot, when cross-examined, escape conviction as an essential lack of the knowledge, the belief, and the love, which are characteristic and indispensable notes of the Spirit of Christ.

These things, and others like these, are illustrationsnot indeed of the defiant wickedness of the world, not even of the vices, the failures, the inconsistencies, known and recognized as such, which make a painful dualism in professedly Christian lives; but of that loss and lack of the true Christian faith and hope, which goes so far, in the midst of our modern world, to change and degrade the very significance of the Christian name. It is not vice as vice, nor failure as failure; it is the perversion of the Christian conception, the worldly slackening and loss of the ideal, the letting-slip, through indolence and distaste, of what is most vitally distinctive in Christian hope, and experience, and power, which has been the subject of the last few pages. It is this which is so fatally remote from Christ. It is acquiescent and comfortable. There is no struggle about it, and no aspiration. The life in it is smothered, and near to death.

In saying this we are very far from denouncing the conditions of common life in the world as such. There may be much of Christward aspiration and anxiety in the Court pageant, and the ball-room, and the banquet; as there may, on the other hand, amongst lives that are sordid and noisy in crowded city courts. The surroundings and temptations of luxury on the one hand, and the atmosphere on the other of fighting and pushing, of crowding and suffering, do not exclude,-on the contrary they may, in some

1 1 John i. 3, 4.

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cases, even stimulate it. In either direction there is room as well for the wistful and aspiring, as for the lawless and the grovelling, life. But what is not compatible with the living movement of the Spirit of Christ, is acceptance, by preference, of ideals that have all been tuned down to the pitch of worldly comfortableness.

This explaining away of hope and slackening of ideals, and determined acquiescence in the standard of the world as good, when the higher aim was, or might perfectly well have been, familiar, is far nearer to the direct antithesis of the Spirit, than is much wild fury of passion in those who have had but little knowledge of good. Such life is a wilful scepticism-or a flat refusal— of the light and truth of life. To acquiesce in it is not to be an image of Christ upon earth, a personal reflection of the Person of the Crucified, living upon His Humanity as spiritual food, growing into ever perfecter consummation of oneness with Him, and recognizing, in perfect oneness with Him, the one effective atonement, the one significance and goal, of the whole life of man. But in the midst of all the pitiful unrealities of Christianity, can any one doubt what a noise and a shaking and a coming together would inevitably follow from anything which (even without touching any other condition) should but reawake once more, throughout men's consciences, the true inward ideal and conviction of the meaning of the doctrine of the Atonement of Christ?

After what has been said about the power, on the one hand, which belongs to the ideal, and, on the other, the great extent, and the disastrous meaning, of its defect in conventional Christianity, it may seem almost superfluous to add anything further to intensify the conviction of its necessity. Yet the pressure of that necessity is illustrated so strikingly in one or two directions, that it really seems desirable to insist on it still. The fact is that the doctrine

of atonement, as we have endeavoured to conceive it, is no superfluous mystery, which, however wonderful it may be when men come to understand it, is yet irrelevant to their ordinary consciousness, and could, without any practical disadvantage in every-day life, be dispensed with or ignored. On the contrary, it is what the practical every-day consciousness itself absolutely needs and demands. There is that in the very constitution of human consciousness with which it perfectly fits, and to which it is wholly indispensable. Human consciousness cannot even be properly itself apart from it. And the consequence is that, however much it may be ordinarily overlaid or befogged, human consciousness is, in one way or another, constantly bearing its own witness to the truth of it. Any real appeal, straight from the Christ and the Christ-standard, strikes right home to human consciousness. We all know, at the bottom of our hearts, that there is, in real truth, but one meaning, and one standard, of human life. This is the secret of the extraordinary power of any preacher, or of any book, which without the least deflection or compromise of principle, bids men fearlessly, at every point, correct the standard of the world by the standard of Christ, and walk always and only "in His steps." For so far at least, and in respect of the central principle appealed to, there is no element of exaggeration in the appeal. The one legitimate aim and effort of every man, at every time, is to do exactly what is right. And to do exactly what is right, is to do exactly what Christ (so far as He can be conceived under similar conditions) would Himself have done. Between what is right to do, and what He would have done (so far as He could have been under similar conditions) there is no distinction at all. And at all times, in all ways, the scope and meaning of the life of a Christian, is to believe in doing, and to do, without diffidence or qualification, what is right.