The world of people is The little shibboleths,

follow to the remote and sublime mountain the name of which is God. The preacher must be skilled in that. not much concerned in diacritical marks. over which some make so much, they care for little or nothing at all. But God, where he is and what he is, and man, and whether man and God may meet, and help to the strugglings and battlings of the soul-these big things they do care about. They want a great God for them if a God at all. Their hunger prods them toward the Infinite. They don't care much where the sky began, but they care incredibly where the sky ends. That is what they want to know.

God's muscular arm, stark naked, hand pierced and open, arm unafraid and eager, and underneath it writ in blood this one word, "Help," this earth does care for; and toward such a divine arm men will grope in their night and battle in their day.

Preacher, have you had that arm about you, and that pierced hand grip you and deliver you? Then, preacher, show them that, and your preaching will be an apocalypse.

ART. VI. THE REALISTIC VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT

ANY theory of the atonement that is adequately available for the practical interests of the religious life must carry the note of reality. To this end it must worthily recognize the ideally complete and morally perfect humanity of Jesus as a full revelation of the whole moral character of God. Without this we lose the key to a correct interpretation of the phenomena of his life, we fail to grasp its full moral significance, and the atonement becomes unreal. The late Dr. R. W. Dale, a valiant defender of the objective validity of the atonement, who found central and regulative significance for it in Christ's relation to the moral government of God, said near the close of his life: "If I were to write the lectures [on the atonement] again, I would endeavor to insist more earnestly on the necessity of reaching the objective aspect of the death of Christ through the subjective; that is, the view that the blood of Christ avails objectively for the remission of sin because of that mystical relation between Christ and humanity which is realized in the church." The redemptive significance of Christ's ideal humanity is by implication contained in this declaration, and it is in line with the best thinking of our day upon the subject. Whenever the church has failed to assign full ethical significance to the ideally complete humanity of Jesus, and has substituted for it a false, speculative conception of his divinity, it has strayed into unreality and has been led into a caricature of the facts of his earthly life. It is an interesting and important fact that, in its presentation of the person and work of Christ, the real and complete humanity of Jesus was fully recognized by the apostolic church. Despite the ease with which their thought adjusted itself to the supernatural aspect of his personality, the life of Jesus, as set before us by the New Testament writers, comes with all the freshness and reality of a truly human life. The absence of idealizing, mythical vagaries and of the tendency to sublimate the human in the divine, such as we find in the literature of some of the pagan religions, is proof of the strength of the impression which the humanity of Jesus and the simple human

facts of his life had made upon the minds of the early disciples. It is indeed true that a powerful impression of the heavenly glory of the Redeemer had already been made upon them, and a lofty conception of his divinity had modified their conception of his humanity. A flood of light upon the exalted significance of his person and work, from the story of his final conquest of death, which they conceived as the completion of his conquest of sin, was poured upon them, and all this might easily have bewildered men less firmly rooted and steadied in the historic facts of his earthly life. It might have led them into the wildest unrealities in their conception of Jesus, such as we find in the fantastic imaginings of some of the later sects. No doubt the apostolic church believed and gloried in the divinity of Christ, however they may have defined or failed to define to themselves its significance. Doubtless their conception of his divinity entered into their conception of his sacrifice. They could not eliminate the divine from his personality and conceive it as the sacrifice of an undivine humanity, but it was the perfect humanity of Jesus that furnished a basis for their conception of his divinity. It was the holy manhood that seemed to contain his divinity implicitly, and it was this that arrested the attention of the world. At this distance of time, and with all the changes of thought that have passed upon us, we can hardly estimate the importance, for the establishment of Christianity in the Gentile world, of the recognition of this aspect of the personality of Jesus. Barbarous tribes of a barbarous age were only too ready to pervert the facts of human life into a barbarous grotesqueness, to deify humanity and wholly to lose the human in the divine. What might have been the issue if the early adherents of the Christian faith had lost hold of what is human in Jesus, and put him before the world as a colossal non-natural prodigy, it is not difficult to conceive. It was the presentation of the life of a holy man, and the truth of a holy humanity, among peoples that had made grotesque work with their divinities and had lost the very idea, as well as ideal, of a holy man, that was needed, and that availed in the establishment of a pure religion. This holy man, this man who by virtue of the unique sanctity of his personality has been vindicated as the head man of his race, who in his champion

holiness has confronted and vanquished the dark and hostile powers of evil and has led the way in triumph into the invisible world, was a new and mighty revelation. The church always needs this truth of the holy humanity of Jesus to rescue it from unreal conceptions of the phenomena of his earthly life. It is this that is at the basis of his consciousness of complete identification with the interests of sinful men and of his capacity for brotherly sympathy with them in their needs. And this too interprets the possibility of his consciousness of vocation to be their champion against the forces of sin that crush them and to suffer for their deliverance. Such suffering championship is the natural and necessary result of his identification with them in his holy manhood.

But it is this also that interprets the possibility of his consciousness of moral identification with God and his holy order, as well as with men in their guilt and misery. The truth of the matter is not that Jesus found himself here on earth in the midst of its sin and corruption and that as by inward moral impulsion alone, in the consciousness of his own independent moral resources and in a procedure that had no reference to the divine will, he entered into conflict with these forces of evil. He entered upon it as a conscious mission to which he had been divinely called and consecrated. It was in his holy humanity, whatever its mystical relation to his divinity, that he knew himself as the complete revealer of God. No realistic and no available working theory of the atonement is possible that fails to recognize the fact that God hates sin. It is inconceivable that a holy God should not hate the sin that ruins his children and disorganizes his holy government, and that he should not protest and react against both the sin and the sinner. Nor is it thinkable that Jesus, who in his holy humanity reveals God, should not reveal him in the totality of his moral personality. If he reveals his love for men in the grace that would save them he will reveal also his moral reaction against their sin; else it were a mutilated revelation, and only a mutilated moral personality were revealed to us. Jesus knew that it was his mission to identify himself with sinful men and with the holy God and to enter into conflict with sin. The constraint of his own love for men and for God is one with the constraint of God's love and of

his holy hate of sin. He could not know himself as victimized. He could not delude himself with the thought that God would have him murdered for the sake of the holy blood that might appease his anger and liberate his love in saving the sinful. In his consciousness of identification with sinful men and with the holy God Jesus knew it as his mission to resist sin, and in resisting it to yield himself as a freewill offering to its tyranny, and thus to win a personal triumph over it. By this sacrifice he will prepare the way for man's victory over it, and out of the conflict he will be exalted as a "Prince and Saviour." By coming under the stroke of its murderous power he will disclose its real hideousness and open the way for deliverance. He will conquer sin by becoming its victim. It was this aspect of Christ's life that profoundly impressed the early church. Speculative theology has represented the stroke of sin as the stroke of God. The free self-surrender into the hands of wicked men has been tortured into a deliverance to the indignation of God, transferred from guilty men and with focal intensity concentrated substitutionally upon him. Rightly interpreted, we may not deny the substitutionary aspect of Christ's redemptive love. In some real sense he stood in our place, but there could have been no substitutionary indignation against him. It was only against the real sinner. The curse under which he went was in no sort punishment for him; the punishment was for man alone. He was indeed the Lamb of God. He was God's sacrifice, for it was his God-given mission to resist sin, striving unto blood. As such we need not hesitate to speak of it as having in some true sense the element of expiation, but he was man's victim. The stroke that brings him low is demoniac, not divine. It was his mission to go under it and take it, and in the doing he vanquished the power that gave the stroke.

We behold, then, this holy man, in no fiber of whose nature is there any trace of the hardness and grossness of sin, a nature alive beyond all ordinary human conception to every rude touch of sin and misery, entering wholly into the life of man and the life of God. He foresees the final conquest, and sometimes there is high joy of the prospective victory, as when in vision he "saw Satan falling as lightning from heaven" and himself as trampling