would more than justify the intellectual treatment of the doctrine in every generation. But besides this more negative or apologetic necessity, it is true also positively, in every generation, that to be held at all by those who on all grounds dutifully wish to hold it, the doctrine must be, however incompletely, yet positively and really, apprehended by the intellect. We must needs, in each generation, so interpret it to ourselves as both to meet and answer intellectual objections, and also to possess, for our own lives, a positive, tangible, and living, conception of the meaning of Atonement.

The following pages would hardly have assumed their present shape, if the writer had not been, for his own part, convinced of two principles, which it may be worth while to mention here. The first is that the difficulties which are generally felt about Christian atonement arise neither from the Evangelical history of the Cross itself, nor even from anything in the original apostolic proclamation of the fact, or of the doctrine, of the Cross; but rather from the inadequacy of certain more or less current explanations, logical and inferential, of the original apostolic doctrine. Such inferential structures (the most untrue of which has considerable relation to truth) are precisely the things which ought to be closely re-examined and reconstructed. They are no part of the original tradition. They are practically almost unknown in the earliest ages of Christianity. They are the work of human intellect, honest, instructive, and visibly inadequate. They are stages in the human assimilation of a truth more fundamental and inclusive than the assimilating power of human intellect. It does not take any exceptional knowledge of the history of the doctrine, especially in the earliest Christian centuries, to detach them

from the doctrine itself; and, if not fully to correct them, at least to see the elements in them which are most obviously open to question and correction. Some rather fragmentary dealing with the history of the doctrine, sufficient, as it is hoped, for this particular purpose, has been attempted in an appended chapter, which is rather subsidiary to, than an integral part of, the effort of the present volume.

The second conviction is that, for our minds at least, current difficulties about atonement are largely bound up with, and inseparable from, current-and questionable— conceptions of personality. There are presuppositions about personality which have so aggravated the moral difficulty as to make it appear to many minds insuperable. And it is the correction of such presuppositions about personality which will be the natural solution of the difficulties. Two principles may be mentioned, which our thought is apt to assume; first, that the essentia of personality is mutual exclusiveness, or (in vivid metaphor) mutual impenetrability: and the second that (as a corollary from the first) what was done by another, being vital in him not in us, cannot make an essential contrast of content or character within ourselves. Our distinctness from one another, and from Christ, regarded as primary, essential and final, and exaggerated to a point at which distinctness becomes not distinctness only but mutual separation, exclusiveness, independence, perhaps even antithesis: this is a fundamental root of much difficulty that is felt, whether consciously or unconsciously, upon the whole subject. It is a difficulty which has grown up out of the developed assumptions of human intellect. It is hardly inherent or original. But is the assumption true? Is this really an axiom, involved in

self-conscious recognition of personality? The question is one which it concerns us, at this particular moment, to point out rather than to discuss. It belongs to the following chapters to vindicate, if they can, the position that is taken about it. For it is upon this that the real argument of the volume depends.

It has seemed therefore only right to give to these pages the title "Atonement and Personality"; and that, not only in order to emphasize the belief that no explanation of atonement can be adequate which is not, at every point, in terms of personality; but also, and perhaps even more, because it seemed to become increasingly clear, on analysis of thought, that neither could any explanation of personality be adequate, which was not, in point of fact, in terms of atonement.

If this saying sounds hard or abrupt, we may make it perhaps more intelligible by saying that personality cannot be explained except in terms of that self-identification of the Christian with the Spirit of Christ,—that constitution of Christian selfhood by the Spirit of Christ,-which is the key to the explication of atonement, and without which atonement remains incapable, not of being received, indeed, but of being explained. But if that which alone makes atonement intelligible is itself the explanation of personality; if, in explaining personality, it explains atonement; and only by that which is involved in, and expressed as, atonement, makes its explanation of personality coherent and clear; then it is hardly an audacious mode of speech to say that personality is explained in terms of atonement.

The conception of these pages as a whole is one which, as I cannot but believe, needs to be explicitly stated at the present time. And I trust they may serve at least to make

clear the coherence of the several parts of the conception At point after point in the detail of the several parts, I cannot but be painfully aware of the inadequacy of what has actually been said. But after all it is the conception as a whole, it is the relation of the parts of the thought to one another, rather than the elaborate completeness of the parts in themselves, which will probably constitute the value, if any there be, of the present contribution. And it is possible that any elaborated attempt to present the several parts in more adequate detail, even if it were in any measure successful, might rather obscure than assist the clear presentment of their relation to each other.

Slight, then, though in many ways the filling in of the outline sketch may be, yet, such as it is, I submit it—with, as I believe, a real sincerity of submission,-to the conscience and judgment of the Church of Christ.

I greatly regret that the volume on Personality, by the Rev. Wilfrid Richmond, did not appear in time for me to make any use of it in my own writing, or at least to examine my own writing in the light of it. But the general line of Mr Richmond's thought was not unfamiliar to me; and I am conscious that my debt to it is great. He speaks, no doubt, as a philosopher to philosophers: and will, in that region, be well able to maintain his own position. I will only express a hope that in the things which I have tried to say in this present volume (in a way far unlike the minuteness of an expert in philosophy) nothing may be found to be untrue in substance to that central principle of truth which I believe that I have learned from him.

Among the many obligations which I owe to the-conscious or unconscious-help of many friends, I must express my special gratitude to Dr Sanday, for the generosity with

which he has endeavoured, at certain points, to preserve me from blundering; and has been willing to lend to me some fragments of the richness of his special knowledge. He has done this none the less, although there is no single statement throughout the volume for which he is responsible; and indeed it remains to be seen whether he will, or will not, be able to look upon it as a whole with approval.

I must also thank my kind colleague of former years, the Rev. R. B. Rackham, for his ungrudging sympathy in all ways, and for not a little of the special help of his singular accuracy, in the exposure of errors in detail.

CHRIST CHURCH,

Advent, 1900