After their bland arts had failed, these evil men and women tried sterner measures. They did not wish to lose their victim. Besides, this young man's fidelity and chastity rebuked their wickedness. They must away with him. So they set upon him and beat him and left him for dead. This was their defeat; for not only had they failed to conquer his righteous and loving spirit with seductions and violence, but the sister, seeing this fidelity to the father and to her, began to hate her sin as she had never hated it-the sin that could impose a ransom such as this. Could she longer doubt the father's righteousness and love? Would this heroic brother brave such moral and physical dangers if he did not know the father's heart? In her brother's blood she sees the ugliness of her own sin, and the beauty of holiness and grace. It is enough. She renounces her sin and her companions, and returns home. Sin and hell have met a double defeat. The blood is the token of the covenant, and her faith appropriates the father's grace of which it speaks. It first awakens in the sinner deep sorrow and horror

for her sin, and then a sense of cleansing and

peace.

"My God is reconciled;

His pardoning voice I hear;
He owns me for His child,

I can no longer fear:

With confidence I now draw nigh,

And, 'Father, Abba, Father,' cry."

This parable falls short of the truth in that the father and son are not "one" in the identical mode in which the Divine Father and Son are one; but in the light of this human analogy, are not the classic words of Romans 3:24-26natural and intelligible? Why burden them with metaphysics and mechanical ethics? Why manufacture moral difficulties in the Godhead merely to fit the supposed exigencies of the text? "All have sinned:" no comment is necessary on this literal truth. That fact is the cause of all the trouble. "Being justified freely by His grace:" that is quite literal and simple. "Through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:" Jesus paid the price of our moral

reclamation in His incarnation, suffering, and death. No haggling about the meaning of "redemption' is necessary. It is simply the price paid to win us from our moral wildness, as the farmer toils and suffers to redeem his farm from miasmal swamps, tangled vines, and cockleburs, that it may bring forth useful harvests. "Whom God set forth to be a propitiation," as the father in the foregoing parable set forth his son as the pledge of his propitiousness and in lieu of all other propitiation, and as the son, in being loyal to his father's character, propitiated the demands of that character. "Through faith in His blood:" the blood of the Son is the evidence of divine propitiousness, and faith is belief in and personal appropriation of the evidence. "To show His righteousness:" Christ's fidelity to the moral law showed that. Without that firm adherence to righteousness, the "passing over of sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God" would have appeared to be immoral. Forgiveness of the unrighteous past with no reference to a righteous future on the part of the forgiven would not be a just

or moral act. "For the showing of His righteousness at this present season: that he might be just and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus:" the justice of justification is evident when the act of justification involves no deviation on the part of God from His own moral demands. In other words, justification is just when regeneration and sanctification are the end.

Objection may be raised to the adequacy of the human illustrations of fatherly forgiveness used above to represent the facts of divine forgiveness. Inadequate they are-but in degree, not in quality or kind. Is not God a Father? Is not this the message of the life and death of Christ? Is this not the meaning of the cross? The Divine Father, in the person of the Eternal Son, has suffered intensely to make Himself manifest to us, to reveal the nature of sin, and to bring us to deep repentance and to newness of life. He offered Himself in blood for our sins. His holy and loving nature demanded that He sacrifice Himself in the incarnation and the crucifixion for the manifestation and maintenance of His righteousness, and as the expression

and consequence of His love. In His human nature He died in the conflict with sin in order that He might propitiate or satisfy His divine character of holy love. What more can any theory of the atonement demand? Is not the vision of the righteous and loving Father whose name Jesus manifested (John 17:6 and 26) enough to satisfy the mind and heart of men and women? And is not the blood of Christ the certain evidence that the Father is righteous, and at the same time propitious toward the repentant sinner-both "just and the justifier?"

The principle of the cross, which is in the heart of Deity and in the creation from the beginning, is the eternal propitiation for the sins of the whole world. The suffering holy love of God is atonement. The free grace of God is the ground of forgiveness. Atonement becomes effectually operative, however, only when the sinner appropriates it by repentance and by taking up the cross as the motive-principle of his life. Reconciliation (or forgiveness) becomes actual only when the soul surrenders by an act of loving trust to the righteousness and grace of