doctrine of the Atonement is not merely superfluous but in the highest degree revolting to all our notions of justice. Thus one writer1 speaks of 'the strangely inconsistent doctrine that God is so just that He could not let sin go unpunished, yet so unjust that He could punish it in the person of the innocent.' 'It is,' he says, 'for orthodox dialectics to explain how the divine justice can be impugned by pardoning the guilty and yet vindicated by punishing the innocent.' And another writer 2 says, 'The moral perfection of God being assumed as a postulate in the very idea of a Revelation, no system of religion which contradicts it can be admitted as credible on any terms. But the doctrine of the Atonement involves a plain denial of God's moral excellence. Theologians speak as if there were some crime or at least some weakness in the clemency which freely receives a repentant creature into favour.... But how is the alleged immorality of letting off the sinner mended by the added crime of penally crushing the sinless? Of what man, of what angel could such a thing be reported without raising a cry of indignant shame from the universal human heart? What should we think of a judge

1 Gregg, 'Creed of Christendom,' p. 243.

2 J. Martineau, 'Studies of Christianity,' p. 186.

I

who should discharge the felons from the prisons of a city because some noble and generous citizen offered himself to the executioner instead?' commenced with representing the Atonement as the divine answer to the cry which is always going up from the heart of man for deliverance from its sins. Here, on the contrary, in the objections just stated there is an appeal made to the same heart of man for the rejection of the doctrine of the Atonement, on the ground of its inconsistency with our notions of justice.

As regards the first of these two objections, it must be freely acknowledged, whatever some theologians may have maintained to the contrary, that God is always ready to forgive sinners on their true repentance, though it is well here to insist upon the full significance of the word repentance, to which the world in general attaches so little meaning, simply because it is so little alive to the true nature of sin, and so little conscious of its own sins of which it has to repent. Few, very few at the present day, are found to re-echo the words of the Psalmist, 'My wickednesses are gone over my head and are like a sore burden, too heavy for me to bear' (Ps. xxxviii. 4); 'My sins have taken such hold upon me that I am

not able to look up' (Ps. xl. 15); or in the still more bitter cry of the Apostle, 'O wretched man. that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?' (Rom. vii. 24). And if we felt, as we ought to do, the full weight of our sins, we should talk less freely than we do of repentance as the means of saving us from our sins.

To proceed however with our subject, we can have no doubt that God's readiness to forgive sinners on their true repentance is again and again insisted on in the Scriptures both of the Old and New Testaments. 'I said I will confess my sins unto the Lord; and so Thou forgavest the wickedness of my sin' (Ps. xxxii. 6). The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise' (Ps. li. 17). And in our Lord's own parable we read that no sooner did the prodigal arise and go to his father, with the confession of sin ready upon his lips, than his father saw him whilst he was yet a great way off, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him' (Luke xv. 20). Whether indeed the forgiveness thus readily obtained was no more than the returning prodigal could have claimed for himself on the ground of mere justice may be very open to question. Anyhow, it is here represented

in the light, not of the judge's acquittal of a criminal upon his confession and amendment, but of the free outpouring of a father's love.

Again, if from the parable just referred to we turn back to that of the lost sheep, which precedes it, we shall find its recovery ascribed, not to any search which the sheep of its own accord makes after the fold from which it had strayed, but to the care bestowed upon it by the shepherd (Luke xv. 4); so that whilst we fully acknowledge the power of true repentance to obtain forgiveness of sins at the hands of a merciful God, we have still to ask how much of this repentance is due to the action of the sinner himself and how much to the active exertion on his behalf of One who is described by the Apostle Peter as having been exalted by the right hand of God to be a Prince and Saviour to give repentance and remission of sins (Acts v. 31), and who speaks of Himself as having come 'to seek and save that which was lost' (Luke xix. 10), and who it may be, as in the case of the lost sheep, is most active in bestowing His help upon us at times when we ourselves are quite unconscious of receiving it. And lastly, granting that the announcement of God's readiness to forgive sinners on their repentance has been the means, under

God's blessing, of saving its thousands, yet most assuredly the Gospel proclamation of the sinner's forgiveness, owing to what Jesus Christ has done for him, has been the means of saving its tens and hundreds of thousands. It has lifted a heavy weight from off the backs of the most sincere yet humble penitents, who but for this most gracious assurance that the Gospel holds out to them and brings home to their hearts, would at least have walked wearily and despondently all their days, even if they did not altogether sink under the weight of the burden from which they felt their own powerlessness to shake themselves free.

The second of the two objections stated above is easily disposed of. Its removal, however, will be found to disclose a real difficulty in the doctrine of the Atonement, to which accordingly we shall have to direct our serious attention.

In the first place, then, whatever may have been the precise character of Jesus Christ's sufferings, there can be no question that the readiness with which He submitted Himself to them forms a most essential feature of the Atonement. 'Hereby know we love, because He laid down His life for us' (1 John iii. 16). The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep' (John x. 11). 'No man taketh it from