their so late and faltering penitence,-for (if it be so now) their dying tears; is that even these, scanty, late, and feeble though they seem, may yet be, in them, a real beginning of capacity, seen in God's sight to be a beginning, and real,—of what, in its full development will become nothing less than a personal self-identification, in love, with the love, which is also the holiness, of God. For him, too, for the lowest in human seeming, as for the highest, our real hope of forgiveness consummated is a hope of righteousness: a hope of God's love altogether loving at last-what, through the marvellous working of God's love, has become at last altogether lovable.

CHAPTER IV

THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR

THE Christian doctrine of the Atonement has been variously expounded. The Christian doctrine of the Atonement, however expounded, has been vehemently impugned. And indeed there is one objection, often made against it, which is vital. Expound the action, or nature, of the Mediator how you will, it is said that any idea of a Mediator is impossible. Not so much anything in the detail of His work, but the very core of the idea presents itself to some minds as being, fundamentally, an immorality and an untruth.

The problem, it will be said (legitimately enough) is this. Here is man. Here is one, that is, who is immoral and unholy in fact. By what conceivable action or process can the de facto unholy become actually holy? And if the Christian answer begins to speak of a Redeemer, how is it conceivable (the mind asks) that any Redeemer's work, or endurance, or goodness, be it what it may, seeing that it is outside the personalities of men, should touch the point of pressing necessity, which is an essential alteration of what men are? What is wanted is not that there should be a wonderful exhibition somewhere of obedience, or that somebody should be holy not even that the amount or the value of holiness in the world should balance, and perhaps outweigh, the huge volume of unholiness. What is wanted is that these particular personalities should be holy, which are in fact the reverse.

How can the particular thing which is required be touched by the introduction of "another"? Here, if anywhere in the world, there can be no question of a fictitious transaction, or an unreal imagining; here, if anywhere, whatever is not vitally and personally real is both mockery and despair.

Now it may be that this is a case in which logic, by its very abstraction from experience, over-reaches itself. At all events, as a sort of preliminary reply, let us begin with a case which comes from the side of experience, rather than of logic. Consider, then, the case of a man in whose character we may happen to be interested very closely, and whose character is unmistakably bad. The daily hope and prayer in respect of him is that he may not be that which he is, and may become what he is not. But what is to be done? One thing is plain from the first. He must not be simply left alone. To leave him wholly to himself is to abandon hope. Instinctively you rather ask, who is there about him? has he a mother? a sister? a high-principled companion? a really good friend? If he has; there, you say at once, is the point of hope. Everything will probably turn upon that friend. And then comes the second thought; yes, but if parent, sister, friend, is to be his salvation, to be the living lever whereby he is himself really to become the very thing he is not, it will be no light task, no light pain, for the saving friend. What heaviness of heart there must first be, what anxious thought and care, what hoping against hope, what sense of effort disappointed, and love (as it seems) thrown away, what unwearying prayer to God, what patient bearing with folly, perverseness, and sin! If he who is the cause of all the trouble is himself without anguish, and without contrition, and will endure no discipline, and cannot entreat in prayer: how much of all the burden of all these things must the friend

bear first, in order that, and until, the man himself, who has seen and gradually felt these things in his friend, may be able, and willing, to bear them a little for himself. If the friend will not do this; if no one will enter into the grief and sin, sharing it as if it were his own; you have comparatively little hope. It is not a friend who will lecture, so much as a friend who will bear: not a friend who is ready to separate himself from, but a friend who is willing himself to enter into, the shadow of the cloud of misery and sin; who has become already, in that willingness, a hope and an earnest of the penitent character, even of the man who does not, as yet, himself, repent, or amend, or (hardly even) desire.

But this, of course, carries us but a little way. It stops very far short of the meaning of Atonement. Yet it may serve perhaps to make logic a little more cautious. The intervention of "another" is by no means so obviously irrelevant as it appeared to be. Whatever else it is, the case just supposed is at all events a most familiar experience in life. And it so far illustrates the real moral and spiritual effectiveness which may be the outcome of the voluntary suffering of another, as to make it impossible to reject beforehand any theory of moral recovery, merely because it can be said to hinge upon the idea of another's suffering.

If

But it will be felt that, even if it be not fundamentally impossible, the idea of an atoning mediator is, and must be, incompatible with any profound reality of justice. A be the judge or king, and B the culprit, under what conceivable circumstances, or upon what conceivable principle of justice, can A fail to punish B, or allow C to intervene at all?

It will perhaps be observed that our sense of the incompatibleness of any such intervention with justice

becomes rigid and absolute, the moment we begin to use the terms, or conjure up the associations, of a system of judicial administration. The fact is that tribunals of human justice mislead our thought on this subject almost as much as they inform it. Human justice is necessarily both clumsy and rigid. The judge must administer general rules. General rules involve the sacrifice of the particular, to the average, interest. Continually the judge must do, for the sake of law, that is, for the sake of the general community, what is not really the wisest, or the justest, for the merely individual case. It is almost impossible to imagine the judicial circumstances, on earth, under which either judge or king would be perfectly free to decide, in reference to the requirements of moral goodness only, what would really be the wisest and the best for the ultimate welfare of a single wrongdoer. Moreover, even if the surrounding circumstances did not make this impossible, no human insight of wisdom would be adequate for it. Human justice that attempted to be divinely just, would break to pieces altogether.

If indeed such freedom could be imagined, and wisdom withal that was adequate to wield it; we should recognise by and by that the extreme rigidity of the practical assumption that every man is, absolutely and equally, distinct from every one but himself, would begin to be at least a little less rigid. We should not indeed be in the habit of seeing guilty people let off, and others suffering in their stead: far from it: but we should perhaps be aware, of the possibility, in two different directions, of certain exceedingly dim and distant approaches towards what would look like this.

On the one side, we should recognize at least that there might be cases, in which, if no one could exactly be a substitute for the guilty, yet at least some could more nearly approach to being so than others. It is something to