The work of Christ

'JUL - '7 200^

HEOLOGICAL SEMIKARY

THE WORK OF CHRIST

THE EXPOSITOR'S LIBRARY

First 50 Volumes. Cloth, 2/- net each

The New Evangelism

Prof. Henry Drummond, F.R.S.E.
Fellov.'ship with Christ

Rev. R. W. Dale, D.D.. ll.d.
The Tewtsh Temple and the Chris-
tian Ch''Rch

Rev. R. W. Dale, D.D.. LL.D.
The Ten Commandments

Rev. R. W. Dale, D.D., LL.D.
The Epistle to the Ephesians

Rev. R. W. Dale, D.D., ll.d.
The Epistle of James

Rev. R. W. Dale. D.D., LL.D.
A Guide to Preachers

Rev, Prin. \. E. Garvie. M.A.. D.D,
MODERN SttSSTITUTFS FOR CHRISTLvN-
ITY Rev. p. Mc.A.dam Muir, D.D.

Ephesian Sti-dies

Rt. Rev. Handley C. G. Moulc, D.D.
Phit.tppian Studies

Rt. Rev. Handley C. G. Moule, D.D.
Colosst.vn Stud'ES

Rt. Rev. Handley C. G. Moulc, D.D.
Christ is All

Rt. Rev. Handley C. G. Moule, D.D.
The Life of the M.«iSTer

Rev. John Watson, D.D.
The Mind of the M-\ster

Rev. John Watson. D.D.
Heroes and M.\rtyrs or Faith

Professor A. S. Peake, D.D.

The Teaching of Jesus Concerning

Himself

Rev. Prof. James Stalker, M.A., D.D.

Studies of the Portrait of Christ

Vol. I. Rev. George Matheson, D.D.

Studies of the Portrait of Christ

Vol. n. Rev. Georpre Matheson, d.d.

The Fact of Christ

Rev. P. CarneRie Simpson, D.D.
The Cross in Modern Life

Rev. J. G. Greenhough. M.A.
The Unchanging Christ

Rev. Alex. McLarer., D.D., d.LITT.
The God of the Amen

Rev. Alex. McLaren, D.D., D.LITT.
The Ascent through Christ

Rev. Principal E. Griffith Jones, b.a.
Studies on the Old Te.stament

Professor F. Godet, D.D.
Studies on thf New Tf.stament

Professor F. Godet. D.D.

Studies on St. Paul's Epistles

Professor F. Godet. D.D.

OTHER VOLUMES

Christianity in the Modern World
Rev. D. S. Cairns, M.A.

Israel's Iron Age

Rev. Marcus Dods, d.d.

The City of God
Rev. A. M. Fairbairn, M.A., D.D., LL.D.

Christ's Service of Love

Rev. Prof. Hugh Black, M.A., D.D.

Humanity and God

Rev. Samuel Chadwick.

The Work of Christ

Rev. Principal P. T. Forsyth, D.D.

Sidelights from Patmos

Rev. George Matheson, D.D.

The Teaching of Jesus

Rev. George Jackson, B.A.

The Miracles of Our Lord

Rev. Professor John Laidlaw, D.D.

The Creation Story in the Light of
To-Day Rev. Charles Wenyon, M.D.

Saints and Sinners of Hebrew His-
tory Rev. J. G. Greenhough. M.A.

Via Sacra Rev. T. H. Darlow.

The Trial AND Death of Jesus Christ
Rev. Prof. James Stalker, M.A., D.D.

Aspects of Christ

Rev. Prmcipal W. B. Selbie, M.A.

The Resurrection of Christ

Rev. Professor James Orr, m.a., D.D.

The Doctrines of Grace

Rev. John Watson, M.A., D.D.

Cardinal X'irtues

Rev. Canon W. C. E. Newbolt, M.A,

Speaking Good of His Name

Ven. Archdeacon Wilberforce, D.D.

Living Theology Archbishop Benson.
Heritage or the Spirit

Bishop Mandell Creighton.

The Knowledge of God

Bishop Walsham IIow.

A Devotional Commentary on St.
Paul's Epistles to the Colos-
SIANS and Thessalontans

Joseph Parker, D.D.

h Devotional Commentary on St.

Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians

Joseph Parker, D.D.

BiELE Studies in Living Subiects

Rev. Ambrose Shepherd, D.D.

IN PREPARATION

LONDON : HODDER AND STOUGHTON.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S

THE EXPOSITOR'S LIBRARY

THE WORK OF CHRIST

( FEB 1 7 19U

PETER TAYLOR FORSYTH, D.D.

PRINCIPAL OF HACKNEY COLLEGE, HAMPSTEAD

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

PREFACE

THESE chapters need to have it said that
they were given as extempore lectures
from rough notes to a gathering, largely of
young ministers, in connection with Rev.
Dr. Campbell Morgan's annual conference at
Mundesley, Norfolk. They were taken down
in shorthand and then carefully revised. They
took place in July, 1909, immediately after
the delivery of my Congregational Lecture on
the Person and Place of Christ, which they
supplement — especially when taken with my
Cruciality of the Cr^oss a few months before.
It will be seen from the conditions that the
book cannot pretend to be more than a
higher kind of popularisation, though this is
less true of the t"v\^o last chapters, which
have been more worked over. The style ap-
proaches in parts a conversational familiarity
which would have been out of place in address-
ing theological experts. And as some of the
ideas are unfamiliar I have not been too careful

vi PREFACE

to avoid repetition. My hope is to be of some
use to those ministers who are still at a
stage when they are seeking more footing on
such matters than they have been provided
with in mere Biblical or Historical Theology.
There is no region where religion becomes so
quickly theology as in dealing with the work
of Christ. No doctrine takes us so straight
to the heart of things, or so forces on us a
discussion of the merits of the case, the dog-
matic of it, as distinct from its scriptural or
its ecclesiastical career. No doctrine draws so
directly on the personal religion of sinful men,
and none, therefore, is open to so much change
in the course of the Church's thought upon its
growing faith and life. Thus when we consider
that here we are at once where the form may
change most in time and yet the feet be most
firmly set for eternity, we realise how difficult
and delicate our task must be. And we are
made to feel as if the due book on such a
theme could only be written from behind the
veil with the most precious blood that ever
flowed in human veins.

We are in a time when a spirituality without
positive content seems attractive to many minds.
And the numbers may grow of those favouring

PREFACE vii

an undogmatic Christianity which is without
apostohc or evangelical substance, but cultivates
a certain emulsion of sympathetic mysticism,
intuitional belief, and benevolent action. Among
lay minds of a devout and social but impatiently
practical habit, this is not unlikely to spread;
and particularly among those whose public in-
terests get the upper hand of ethical and
historical insight and denude their religion of
most of the reflection it demands.

Upon undogmatic, undenominational religion
no Church can live. With mere spirituality the
Church has not much directly to do ; it is but
a subjective thing ; and its favour with many
may be but another phase of the uncompre-
hending popular reverence (not to say supersti-
tion) for the recluse religionist, the mysterious
ecstatic, and the ascetic pietist. What Christian
faith and the Christian Church have to do with
is holy spirituality — the spirituality of the Holy
Spirit of our Redemption. The Christian reve-
lation is not " God is a spirit," nor is it " God
is love." Each of these great words is now
much used to discredit the more positive faith
from whose midst John wrote them down.
Herein is love, not in affection but in pro-
pitiation (1 John iv. 10). Would Paul ever
have written 1 "Cor. xiii. if it had been revealed

viii PREFACE

to him that it was going to be turned against
Rom., iii, 25 ? And what would his language
have been to those who abused that chai3ter
so ? Christian faith is neither spirituality nor
charity. Its revelation is the holiness in judg-
ment of the spiritual and loving God. Love
if only divine as it is holy ; and spirituality is
Christian only as it meets the conditions of
Holy Love in the way the Cross did, as the
crisis of holy judgment and holy grace. If
the Cross is not simpl}" a manner of religion
but the object of our religion and the site
of revelation, then it stands there above all
to effect God's holiness, and not to concen-
trate man's self-sacrifice. And except in the
Cross we have no guarantee for the supreme
thing, the divine thing, in God, which is the
changeless reality and irresistible sovereignty
of His Holy Love.

It is upon such faith alone, given by the Cross
alone, that a Church can live — upon the faith
that founded it — upon a positive New Testa-
ment Gospel. Of that Gospel the Church is
the trustee. And the Church betrays its trust
and throws its life and its Lord away when it
says, " Be beautifully spiritual and V)elieve as
you like," or " Do blessed good and think as you
please."

PREFACE

IX

There is a timely saying of that searching
Christian genius Kierkegaard — the great and
melancholy Dane in whom Hamlet was mastered
by Christ :

" For long the tactics have been : use every
means to move as many as you can — to move
everybody if possible — to enter Christianity.
Do not be too curious whether what they enter
is Christianity. My tactics have been, with
God's help, to use every means to make it clear
what the demand of Christianity really is — if
not one entered it."

The statement is extreme ; but that way lies
the Church's salvation — in its anti-Nicene rela-
tion to the world, its pre-Constantinian, non-
established, relation to the world, and devotion
to the Word. Society is hopeless except for the
Church. And the Church has nothing to live on
but the Cross that faces and overcomes the
world. It cannot live on a cross which is on
easy terms with the world as the apotheosis of
all its aesthetic religion, or the classic of all its
ethical intuition. The work of Christ, rightly
understood, is the final spiritual condition of all
the work we may aspire to do in converting
society to the kingdom of God.

CONTENTS

I

PAGE

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOD'S SACRIFICE

AND man's . . . . . 1

II
THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK IS TO RECONCILE 31

III
RECO' .LIATION : PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 63

IV

RECONCILIATION, ATONEMENT, AND JUDGMENT 97

xii CONTENTS

V

PAGE

THE CROSS THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL . , 139

YI

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY .... 173

YII
THE THREEFOLD CORD 197

ADDENDUM 237

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOD'S
SACRIFICE AND MAN'S

WHAT I am going to say is not directly unto
edification, but indirectly it is so most
certainly. Directly it is rather for that instruc-
tion which is a need in our Christian life as
essential as edification. We cannot do without
either. On the one hand instruction with no idea
' of edification at all becomes mere academical
] discourse. It may begin anywhere and it may
( end anywhere. On the other hand, edification
; "without instruction very soon becomes a feeble
and ineffective thing. I think a great many of
1 us would be agreed that part of the poverty
and weakness of the Church at the present
moment is due to the fact that edification has
been pursued to the neglect of instruction. We
have been a little too prone to dwell upon the
-*mple side of the gospel. All our capital is in

The Work of Christ. 3

4 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

Bmall circulation. We have not put by a re-
serve, as it were. And therefore the simplicity
itself has become unsettled and ineffectual, con-
fused and confusing.

I ask your attention to certain aspects of
our Christian faith which perhaps do not lie
immediately upon the surface, but which are
yet the condition of the Church's continued
energy and success in the world. I suppose there
is nobody here who does not believe in the
Church. At any rate, what I propose to say
will be said entirely from that standpoint. We
believe in the Holy Catholic Church. My con-
tention would be that, apart from such a posi-
tion as I desire to bring to your notice — some
real apostolic belief in the real work of Jesus
Christ — apart from that no Church can continue
to exist. That is the point of view which I take
at the outset. The Church is precious, not in
itself, but because of God's purpose with it. It
is there because of what God has done for it.
It is there, more particularly, because of what
Christ has done, and done in history. It is
there solely to serve the Gospel.

It is impossible not to observe at the
present day that the Church is under a cloud.
You cannot take any division of it, in any
country of the world, without feeling that that

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 5

is so. Therefore I will begin by making quite a
bold statement ; and I should be quite prepared,
given time and opportunity, to devote a whole
week to making it good. The statement is
that the Church of Christ is the greatest and
finest product of human history. It is the
greatest thing in the universe. That is in com-
plete defiance of the general view and tendency
of society at the present moment. I say the
Church is the greatest and finest product of
human history; because it is not really a
product of human history, but the product of
the Holy Spirit within history. It stands for the
new creation, the New Humanity, and it has that
in trust. The man who has a slight acquaintance
with history is ready to bridle at a statement
like that. He says : " Consider what the Roman
Church has done ; consider how obscurantist
many sections of the Protestant Church are ;
consider the ineffectual position of the Church
in modern civilisation — and what nonsense to
talk about the Church as the greatest and
finest product of human history!" True enough,
the authority of the Church is failing in many
quarters. And that does not mean only the
external authority of what you might call a
statutory Church, a great institutional Church,
a great organised Church like Rome, for ex-

6 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

ample. It means much more than that. It
means that the authority of the whole Church is
weakened in respect of the inward and spiritual
matter which it contains and preaches, and
which makes it what it is. The Church is
there as the vehicle of the power of the Holy-
Ghost and of the authority of the saving
God— a God, that is, who is saving not groups
here and there, but the whole of human society.
But a spiritual authority for man altogether
is at a discount. Perhaps we have brought that
in some measure upon ourselves. Perhaps, too,
it was historically necessary. But, necessary
or not, it is a matter of fact that our Pro-
testantism has developed often into a master-
less individualism which is as deadly to Christian
life as an over-organised institution like Rome.
Many spiritual people to-day find it difficult to
make their choice between the two extremes.
Without going into the historic causes of the
situation, let us recognise the situation.
Spiritual authority, especially that of the
Church, is for the time being at a great
discount.

§
The Church is valuable as the organ of

Christian grace, and truth, and power. But

what do we find offered us in place of the

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 7

Church? Those who attack the Church most
seriously, and disbelieve in it most thoroughly,
are not proposing simply to level the Church
to the ground in the sense of destroying any
religious society. What they want to do is to
put some other kind of society in the place of
the Church. For they say, as we all say, that it
is impossible for religion, certainly impossible
for Christianity, to exist without a social body
in which it is cultivated and has its effect.
Therefore, those who are opposed to the Church
most bitterly are yet not prepared to make a
total desert. But they put all kinds of organisa-
tions, fancy organisations and fancy religions,
in its place. Take the great movement in the
direction of Socialism. Take the Socialist pro-
grammes that you find so plentifully every-
where. What do these various organisations
mean ? What do all these organisations mean
which profess to embody human brotherhood,
and are represented by Trades Unions, Co-
operation, Fraternities, Guilds, Socialisms ?
What is it they all confess ? That some social
vehicle there must be. You cannot promote
Anarchy itself without associations for the
purpose. So that the very existence of these
rival organisations is a confession of the one
fundamental principle of the Church, namely.

8 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

that the human ideal, that religion in the
true sense of the word, cannot do without a
social habitation. They put in their own way
what we put in our way (and we think a better
way), that there must be a Church builded
together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.
Our individualisms have been troubling and
weakening us so much that everybody is look-
ing away to some form of human life which
shall have the advantages of individualism
without its perils. The pietistic form of indi-
vidualism did in its day great service. But it is
out of date. Rationalistic individualism, again,
taking shape in political radicalism, has done
good work in its day. That also seems going
out of date. The value of the new movement
is its — shall I say — solidarity ; which is a con-
fession of that social, fraternal principle which
finds its consummation really, and its power
only, in the Church of Christ.

When we look at these rival organisations
(and they are many, and some will occur to
you which I have not named), we can, I think,
gather most of them under one head. In con-
trast with the Church the various social forms
that are offered to us to-day would build society
upon a natural basis, the basis of natural
brotherhood, natural humanity, natural good-

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 9

ness — on human nature. And the issue between
the Church and the chief rivals of the Church -^^J^y
is an issue between society upon this natural
basis, and society upon a supernatural basis.
Our Christian belief is based upon the work
of Christ ; and we hold that human society can
only continue to exist in final unity upon that
same supernatural basis. It is an issue, there-
fore, between human nature deified and human
nature saved ; between mere sympathy and
faith — faith taken in a quite positive and defi-
nite sense. We think that a brotherhood of
mere sympathy, however warm it can be at a
particular moment, has no stay in it, no eternal
promise. The eternal promise is with super-
natural faith. Do you ever believe otherwise?
I hope you have been so tempted ; because
having got over it you will be very much better
for having gone through it. I wish much more
of our belief had gone through troubled scenes
and come to its rest ; we should make far
greater impression upon men if we gave them
to feel we had fought our way to the peace and
power we have. Well, were you ever tempted
to believe that Christianity is just human
nature at its best ? That is the most powerful
and dangerous plea that is i)ut forward just
now in challenge of our Christian position

10 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

and Church. Is the Kingdom of God just our
natural spirituality and altruism developed?
Is it just the spirit of religion or self-sacrifice,
which you often find in human nature, de-
veloped to its highest ? Is that the Kingdom of
God ? I trust you believe not — that human
nature is not capable, by all the finest sacrifices
it might develop, of saving, of ensuring itself,
and setting up the Kingdom of God. Take
the best side of human nature, that side which
moves men to unselfishness and sacrifice, the side
that comes out in many a heroic battle, in the
silent battles of our civilisation, where the
victims get no applause and no reputation for
their heroism whatever. Take the best side of
human nature, illustrated in every coalpit
accident and every such thing, in countless
quiet homes of poverty, where lives are being
worked down to the bone and ground to death
toiling and slaving for others. Take the vast
mass of fatherhood and motherhood living for
the children only. Take that best side of human
nature, make the most of it, and then put this
question : " How does man's noblest work differ
from Christ's great work ? " That is the
question to which I desire to attract your
attention to-day. How does man's best work
differ from Christ's great work?

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 11

§

Let me begin with a story which was re-
ported in the Belgian papers some years ago.

Two passenger trains were coming in opposite
directions at full speed. As they approached the
station, it was found the levers would not work,
owing to the frost, and the points could not be
set to clear the trains of each other. A catas-
trophe seemed to be inevitable ; when a signal-
man threw himself flat between the rails, and
with his hands held the tie-rod in such a way
that the points were properly set and kept ; and
he remained thus while the train thundered
over him, in great danger of having his head
carried away by the low-hung gear of the
Westinghouse brake. When the train had
passed, he quietly rose and returned to his
work.

I offer you some reflections on this incident.
It is the kind of incident that may be multi-
plied indefinitely. I offer you certain reflec-
tions, first, on some of its analogies with Christ's
work, and secondly, on some of its differences.

1. This man, in a very true sense, died and
rose again. His soul went through what he
would have gone through if he had never risen

12 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

from the track. He gave himself ; and that is
all a man can give at last. His deed had the
moral value which it would have had if he had
lost his life. He laid it down, but it did not
please God to take it. Like Abraham's sacrifice
of Isaac, it was complete and acceptable, even
though not accepted. The man's rising from
the ground — was it not really a resurrection
from the dead ? It was not simply a return to
his post. He went back another man. He went
back a heavenlier man. He had died and risen,
just as if he had been called, and had gone, to
God's presence — could he but remain there.
This is a death and rising again possible to us
all. If the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ do not end in producing that kind of
thing amongst us, then it is not the power of
God unto salvation. These moral deaths and
resurrections are what make men of us. " In
deaths oft." That is the first point.

2. The second point is this. Not one of the
passengers in either of those trains knew until
they read it what had been done for them, nor
to whom they owed their lives. It is so with
the whole world. To-day it owes its existence,
in a way it but poorly understands, to the

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 13

death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That
is the permanent element in Christianity —
the Cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And
yet it is nothing to all them that pass by.
Under the feet of those travellers in Belgium
there had taken place one of those deeds that
are the very soul and glory of life, and they had
no idea of it. Perhaps some of them were at
the very moment grumbling at the staif of the
railway for some small grievance or other. It
is useful to remember, when we are inclined to
grumble thus, what an amount of devotion to
duty goes to make it possible for us to travel as
safely as we do — far more than can be acknow-
ledged by the payment of a wage. These
people were ploughing along in safety over one
of the railway staif lying in a living grave. I
say it is so with the whole civilised world. Its
progress is like that of the train; it seldom
stops to think that its safety is owing to a
divine death and resurrection, much more than
heroic. The safety of that train was not due
to the mechanism. The mechanism had gone
wrong. It was not due to organisation, or to
work done from fear of punishment. Heroic
duty raised to martyrdom saved the whole
train. And tlie world's progress is saved to-day
because of a death and resurrection of which

14 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

it knows little and mostly cares to know less.
^^ Propter Jesum non qucerimus Jesum." The
success of Christ hides Him. It is the death
of Christ that is the chief condition of modern
progress. It is not civilisation that keeps
civilisation safe and progressive. It is that
power which was in Jesus Christ and culmi-
nated in His death and resurrection. When
people read the Bible, and get behind the
Bible, and that principle comes home to them,
it may sometimes be like the shock that those
travellers would receive when they read in the
newspaper of their risk and deliverance.

3. Another point. And I am now coming on to
the difference. This man died for people who
would thrill with the sense of what they owed
him as soon as they read about it. His act appeals
to the instinct which is ready to spring to life
in almost every breast. You felt the response
at once when I told you the story. Some of you
may have even felt it keenly. Do you ever feel
as keenly about the devoted death of Christ ?
Perhaps you never have. You have believed it,
of course, but it never came home to you and
gripped you as the stories of the kind I instance
do. You see the difference between Christ's

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 15

death and every case of human heroism. I am
movmg to answer that question I put a moment
ago as to whether the development of the best
in human nature would ever give us the work
of Christ and the Kingdom of God. I have been
illustrating one of the finest things in human
nature, and I am asking whether, if that were
multiplied indefinitely, we should yet have the
effect which is produced by the death of Christ,
or which is still to be produced by it in God's
purpose. No, there is a difference between
Christ's death and every case of heroism.
Christ's was a death on behalf of people within
whom the power of responding had to be
created. Everybody thrills to that story I told
you, and to every similar story. The power of
response is lying there in the human heart
ready — it only needs to be touched. There is in
human nature a battery charged with admira-
tion for such things ; you have only to put your
knuckle to it and out comes the spark. But
when we are dealing with the death of Christ
we are in another position. Christ's was a
death on behalf of people in whom the power of
responding had to be created. We are all
afraid of death, and rise to the man who delivers
us from it. But we are not afraid of that worse
thing than death from which Christ came to

16 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

deliver us. Christ's death was not a case of
heroism simply, it was a case of redemption.
It acted upon dull and dead hearts. It was
a death which had to evoke a feeling not
only latent but paralysed, not only asleep but
dead. What does Paul say ? " While we were
yet without strength, Christ died for us " —
without power, without feeling, as the full
meaning is.

Let me illustrate. Take a poet like Words-
worth. When he began to publish his poetry
he was received, just as Browning was received
later, with ridicule and contempt. The greatest
critic of the time began an article in the leading
critical organ of the day by saying, " This will
never do." But it has done ; and it has done for
Jeffrey's critical reputation. Lord Jeffrey wrote
himself down as one who was incapable of
gauging the future, however much he might
be capable of understanding the literature of
the past. Some of you may remember — I
remember perfectly well — the same kind of
thing in the penny papers about Browning
when he was fighting for recognition. I re-
member, when I was a student, reading articles
in luminaries like The Standard which sneered
and jeered at Browning, just as smaller men to-
day would sneer at men of like originality. But

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 17

Wordsworth and Browning have conquered. I
take another case. Turner was assailed with
even more ridicule when he exposed his works
to the British public. What would have hap-
pened to Turner if Ruskin had not arisen to be
his prophet I do not know. His pictures might
not even have been mouldering in the cellars of
the National Gallery. They might have been
selling at little second-hand shops in back streets
for ten shillings to any one who had eyes in his
head. Wordsworth, Browning, and Turner were
all people of such original and unprecedented
genius that there was no taste and interest for
them when they appeared ; they had to create
the very power of understanding themselves.
A poet of less original genius, a great genius
but less of a genius, like Tennyson, comes along,
and he writes about the " May Queen " and
" The Northern Farmer," and all those simple,
elementary things which immediately fetch the
handkerchiefs out. Now no doubt to do that
properly takes a certain amount of genius. But
it taps the prompt and fluent emotions ; and the
misfortune is that kind of work is easily coun-
terfeited and abused by those who wish to
exploit our feelings rather than exalt them.
It is a more easy kind of thing than was done
by those great geniuses I first named. Original

The Work of Christ. 3

18 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

poets like Wordsworth and Browning had to
create the taste for their work.

Now in like manner Christ had to make the soul
which should respond to Him and understand
Him. He had to create the very capacity for
response. And that is where we are compelled to
recognise the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as well
as the doctrine of the Saviour. We are always
told that faith is the gift of God and the work
of the Holy Spirit. The reason why we are told
that, and must be told it, lies in the direction
I have indicated. The death of Christ had not
simply to touch like heroism, but it had to
redeem us into power of feeling its own worth.
Christ had to save us from what we were too far
gone to feel. Just as the man choked with
damp in a mine, or a man going to sleep in
arctic cold, does not realise his danger, and the
sense of danger has to be created within him,
so the violent action of the Spirit takes men by
force. The death of Christ must call up more
than a responsive feeling. It is not satisfied
with affecting our heart. That is mere impres-
sionism. It is very easy to impress an audience.
Every preacher knows that there is nothing
more simple than to produce tears. You have
only to tell a certain number of stories about
dying children, lifeboats, fire escapes, and so on,

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 19

and you can make people thrill. But the thrill
is neither here nor there. What is the thrill
going to end in ? What is the meaning of the
thrill for life ? If it is not ending as it should,
and not ending for life, it is doing harm, not
good, because it is sealing the springs of feeling
and searing the power of the spiritual life.

What the work of Christ requires is the
tribute not of our admiration or even grati-
tude, not of our impressions or our thrills, but
of ourselves and our shame. Now we are coming
to the crux of the matter — the tribute of our
shame. That death had to make new men of
us. It had to turn us not from potential friends
to actual, but from enemies into friends. It
had not merely to touch a spring of slumbering
friendship. There was a new creation. The
love of God — I quote Paul, who did understand
something of these things — the love of God is
not merely evoked within us, it is " shed abroad
in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given
to us." That is a very different thing from
simply having the reservoir of natural feeling
tapped. The death of Christ had to do with
our sin and not with our sluggishness. It had
to deal with our active hostility, and not simply
with the passive dullness of our hearts. Our
hostility — that is what the easy-going people

20 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

cannot be brought to recognise. That is what
the shallow optimists, who think we can now
dispense with emphasis on the death of Christ,
feel themselves able to do — to ignore the fact
that the human heart is enmity against God,
against a God who makes demands upon it ;
who goes so far as to make demands for
the whole, the absolute obedience of self.
Human nature puts its back up against that.
That is what Paul means when he speaks
about human nature, the natural man — the
carnal man is a bad translation — being enmity
against God. Man will cling to the last rag of
his self-respect. He does not part with that
when he thrills, admires, sympathises ; but he
does when he has to give up his whole self in
the obedience of faith. How much self-respect
do you think Paul had left in him when he went
into Damascus? Christ, with the demand for
saving obedience, arouses antagonism in the
human heart. And so will the Church that
is faithful to Him. You hear people of the
type I have been speaking about saying, If
only the Church had been true to Christ's
message it would have done wonders for the
world. If only Christ were preached and prac-
tised in all His simplicity to the world, how fast
Christianity would spread. Would it ? Do you

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 21

really find that the deeper you get into Christ
and the meaning of His demands Christianity
spreads faster in your heart? Is it not very
much the other way? When it comes to close
quarters you have actually to be got down and
broken, that the old man may be pulverised and
the new man created from the dust. There-
fore when we hear people abusing the Church
and its history the first thing we have to say
is, Yes, there is a great deal too much truth
in what you say, but there is also a greater
truth which you are not allowing for, and it
is this. One reason why the Church has
been so slow in its progress in mankind and
its effect on human history is because it has
been so faithful to Christ, so faithful to His
Cross. You have to subdue the most intrac-
table, difficult, and slow thing in the world —
man's self-will. You cannot expect rapid suc-
cesses if you truly preach the Cross whereon
Christ died, and which He surmounted not
simply by leaving it behind but by rising again,
and converting the very Cross into a power
and glory.

Christ arouses antagonism in the human heart
and heroism does not. Everybody welcomes a
hero. The minority welcome Christ. We do
resent His absolute command. We do resent

22 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

parting completely with ourselves. We do
resent Christ.

§
4. I go back to the word I spoke about the
tribute of our shame. The demand is unspar-
ing, remorseless. It is not simply that you
are called on by God for a certain due, a
change, an amendment, but for the tribute of
yourself and your shame. When you heard
about that heroism of my story, when you
thrilled to it, I wonder did you pat yourself on
the back a little for being capable of thrilling
to things so high, so fine ? When you thrilled
to that story you felt a certain satisfaction with
yourself because there was as much of the God
in you as allowed you to be capable of thrilling
to such heroisms. You felt. If I am capable of
thrilling to such things, I cannot be such a bad
sort. But when you felt the meaning of
Christ's death for you, did you ever pat your-
self on the back ? The nearer the Cross came to
you, the deeper it entered into you, were you
the more disposed to admire yourself ? There is
no harm in your feeling pleased with yourself
because you were able to thrill to these human
heroisms ; but if the impression Christ makes
upon you is to leave you more satisfied with
yourself, more proud of yourself for being able

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 23

to respond, He has to get a great deal nearer to
you yet. You need to be — I will use a Scottish
phrase which old ministers used to apply to
a young minister when he had preached a
" thoughtful and interesting discourse "—you
need to be well shaken over the mouth of the
pit. The great deep classic cases of Christian
experience bear testimony to that. Christ and
His Cross come nearer and nearer, and we do
not realise what we owe Him until we realise
that He has plucked us from the fearful pit,
and the miry clay, and set us upon a rock of
God's own founding. The meaning of Christ's
death rouses our shame, self-contempt, and
repentance. And we resent being made to feel
ashamed of ourselves, we resent being made to
repent. A great many people are afraid to
come too near to anything that does that for
them. That is a frequent reason for not going
to church.

§
5. Again, continuing. You would have gone a
long way to see this Belgian man. You would
have gazed upon him with something of rever-
ence, certainly with admiration. You would
have regarded him as one received back from
the dead. You think, If all men were like that,
the world would be heaven. Well, there are a

24 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

great many more like that than we think, who
daily imperil their life for their duty. But
supposing every man and woman in the world
were up to that pitch, and supposing you added
them all together and took the total value of
their moral heroism (if moral quantities were
capable of being summed like that), would you
then have the equivalent of the deed and death
of Christ ? No, indeed 1 If you took all the
world, and made heroes of them all, and kept
them heroic all their lives, instead of only in one
act, still you would not get the value, the equiva-
lent, of Christ's sacrifice. It is not the sum of all
heroisms. It would be more true to say it is the
source of all heroisms, the foundation of them
all. It is the underground something that makes
heroisms, not something that heroisms make
up. When Christ did what He did, it was not
human nature doing it, it was God doing it.
That is the great, absolutely unique and
glorious thing. It is God in Christ reconciling.
It was not human nature offering its very best
to God. It was God offering His very best to
man. That is the grand difference between the
Church and civilisation, even when civilisation
is religious. We must attend more to those
great issues between our faith and our world.
Our religion has been too much a thing done

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 25

in a corner. We must adjust our religion to
the great currents and movements of the
world's history. And the great issue of the
hour is the issue between the Church and
civilisation. Their essential difference is this.
Civilisation at its best represents the most
man can do with the world and with human
nature ; but the Church, centred upon Christ,
His Cross, and His work, represents the best
that God can do upon them. The sacrifice
of the Cross was not man in Christ pleasing
God ; it was God in Christ reconciling man,
and in a certain sense, reconciling Himself. My
point at this moment is that the Cross of Christ
was Christ reconciling man. It was not heroic
man dying for a beloved and honoured God ; it
was God in some form dying for man. God
dying for man. I am not afraid of that phrase ;
I cannot do without it. God dying for man ;
and for such men — hostile, malignantly hostile
men. That is a puzzling phrase where we read
in a gospel : " Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends." There is more love in the phrase
of the epistle, that a man should lay down
his life for his bitter enemies. It is not so
heroic, so very divine, to die for our friends.
Kindness between the nice people is not so

26 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

very divine — fine and precious as it is. To die
for enemies — that is the divine thing. Christ's
was grace that died for such — for malignant
enemies. There is more in God than love.
There is all that we mean by His holy grace.
Truly, " God is love." Yes, but the kind of love
which you must interpret by the whole of
the New Testament. When John said that, did
he mean that God was simply the consum-
mation of human affection? He knew that he
was dealing with a holy, gracious God, a God
who loved His enemies and redeemed them.
Read with extreme care 1 John iv. 10.

§

6. Let me gather up the points of difference
which I have been indicating.

First, that Belgian hero did not act from love
so much as from duty. Secondly, he died only
in one act, not in his whole life, dying daily.
There have been men capable of acts of sacri-
fice like this hero ; loose-living men who, after
a heroism, were quite capable of returning to
their looseness of life — heroes of the Bret Harte
type. There have been many valiant, fearless
things done on the battlefield by men who in
the face of bullets never flinched, never turned
a hair ; and when they came home they could

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 27

not stand against a breath of ridicule, they
could not stand against a little temptation, and
were soon wallowing in the mire. One act of
sacrifice is not the same thing as a life gathered
into one consummate sacrifice, whose value is
that it has the whole personality put into it
for ever.

Third, this man could not take the full
measure of all that he was doing, and Christ
could. Christ did not go to His death with
His eyes shut. He died because He willed to
die, having counted the cost with the greatest,
deepest moral vision in the world.

Fourthly, the hero in the story had nothing
to do with the moral condition of those whom
he saved. The scoundrel and the saint in that
train were both alike to him.

Again, he had no quarrel with those whom he
saved. He had nothing to complain of. He had
nothing from them to try his heroism. They
were not his bitter enemies. His valour was
not the heroism of forgiveness, where lies the
wondrous majesty of God. His act was not
an act of grace, which is the grand glory of
the love of Christ. Christ died for people who
not only did not know Him, but who hated and
despised Him. He died, not for a trainful of
people, but for the whole organic world of

28 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

people. It was an infinite death, that of His,
in its range and in its power. It was death
for enemies more bitter than anything that
man can feel against man, for such haters as
only holiness can produce. Here is the singular
thing : the greater the favour that is done to
us, the more fiercely we resent it if it does not
break us down and make us grateful. The
greater the favour, if we do not respond in its
own spirit, so much the more resentful and
antagonistic it makes us. I have already said
that we speak too often as though the effect
of Christ's death upon human nature must be
gratitude as soon as it is understood. It is
not always gratitude. Unless it is received in
the Holy Ghost, the effect may just be the
other way. It is judgment. It is a death unto
death.

§
I conclude by saying what I have often said,
and what often needs saying, that it is not
possible to hear the gospel and to go away just
as you came. I wish that were more realised.
We should not have so many sermon-hunters.
If people felt that every time they heard the
gospel they were either better or worse for it,
they would be more careful about hearing.
They would not go so often, possibly; better they

GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S 29

should not, perhaps. I am not speaking about
hearing of sermons. That is neither here nor
there. A man may hear sermons and be neither
the better nor the worse. But a man cannot
hear the gospel without being either better or
worse, whether he knows it or not. When you
come to face the last issues, it is either unto
salvation or unto condemnation. The great
central, decisive thing, the last judgment of the
world, is the Cross of Christ. The reason why
so many sermons are found uninteresting is not
always due to the dullness of the preacher. God
knows how often that is the case, but it is not
always. It is because the sermons so often turn,
or ought to turn, upon the miracle of the grace
of God, which is so great a miracle that it is
strange, remote, and alien to our natural ways
of thinking and feeling. It seems foreign to us.
It is like reading a guide-book if you have never
been in the country. I take down my Baedeker
in the winter and read it with the greatest
delight, because I know the country. If I had
not been there I should find it the dreariest read-
ing. Why do not people read the Bible more ?
Because they have not been in that country.
There is no experience for it to stir and develop.

The Cross of Christ, the infinite wonder of it

we have got to learn that. We have got to

30 GOD'S SACRIFICE AND MAN'S

learn the deep meaning of that by having been
there, by the evangelical experience whose lack
is the cause of all the religious vagrancy of the
hour. We have got to learn that it was not
simply magnificent heroism, but that it was God
in Christ reconciling the world. It was God
that did that work in Christ. And Christ was
the living God working upon man, and working
out the Kingdom of God.

THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK
IS TO RECONCILE

II

THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK IS TO
RECONCILE

Corinthians V. 14-vi. 2 ; Romans v. 1-11 ; Colossians i. 10-29 ;
Ephesians ii, 16.

THE great need of the religious world to-day
is a return to the Bible. That is necessary
for two reasons, negative and positive. Nega-
tively, because the most serious feature of the
hour in the life of the Church is the neglect of
the Bible for personal use and study by religious
people. Positively, because we have to-day enor-
mous advantages in connection with that return
to the Bible. Modern scholarship has made of
the Bible a new Book. It has in a certain sense
rediscovered it. You might say that the soul
of the Reformation was the rediscovery of the
Bible ; and in a wider sense that is true to-day
also. We have, through the labours of more
than a century of the finest scholarship in all

T?w Work of Christ, ^ 33

34 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

the world, come to understand the Bible, in
its original sense, as it was never understood
before. These instructed scribes draw forth
from their treasury things as new as old. It
is the old Book, and it is a new Book. It
remains the old Book, and the precious Book,
because of its power of unceasing self-renova-
tion. The spirit that lives within the Bible is
a spirit of constant self-preservation. One way
of describing the Reformation is to say that,
since the early Gnostic centuries, it was the
greatest effort that ever took place in the
Church for the self-preservation of Christianity.
Remember, the Church was not reformed from
the outside, but from the inside. It was the
Church reforming the Church. It was the
Church's faith that arose, under the Holy Spirit,
and reformed the Church. So it is with the
Bible. Whatever renovation we find in connec-
tion with the Bible — I do not here mean renova-
tion of ourselves, but renovation of our way of
understanding the Book — arises out of the Bible
itself. This remains true to-day, as it w^as true
in the Reformation time, although it is now
true in a somewhat different application. The
Bible is still the best commentary upon itself.
I have always done much in my ministry in
the way of expounding the Bible, and I would

IS TO RECONCILE 35

say to the younger ministers particularly who are
here, Do not be afraid of that manner of preach-
ing. I have known young ministers who were
over-scrupulous. I have known them say, " If I
take a long text people will think it is because
I am lazy and do not want the labour of getting
a sermon out of a small one." Never mind such
foolish people. Do not be afraid of long texts,
long passages. Preach less from verses and
more from paragraphs. If I had my time over
again I would do a great deal more in that way
than I have done. Read but one lesson, and read
it with elucidatory comments. Of course some
people can do that better than others. There
is always the danger that if a person try it who
has no sort of knack in that direction, the people
will feel they have been let in for two sermons
instead of one ; and, excellent as these might
be, people do not like to feel they have been got
to church upon false pretences. It might even
give an excuse to certain people for omitting
one of the services altogether, on the plea they
had put in the requisite amount of attention at
one service. I would also admit that if you do
this it will not reduce your labour. It will really
add what might amount to another sermon to
your weekly work. It is no use doing it if you
do it on the spur of the moment. If you just say

36 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

things that occur to your mind while you are
reading, you may say some banal, or some non-
sensical and fantastic things. It means careful
preparation. The lesson should be prepared as
truly as the prayer should be prepared, and as
the sermon should be prepared. You have to
work your way through the chapter with the
aid of the best commentary that you can get;
and you have to exercise continual judgment in
doing so lest you be dragged away into little
matters of detail instead of keeping to the
larger lines of thought in the passage in hand.
Then, if you do as I say, there is this other
advantage, that you can take a particular verse
out of the long passage for your sermon ; and
thus you come to the sermon with an audience
which you yourself have prepared to listen to
you. You have created your own atmosphere,
and you have done it on a Bible basis.

Now I will confess against myself that some-
times, as I preach about here and there, and
have done as I have been recommending you to
do, people have come to me afterwards and said,
as nicely as they could, that the sermon was all
very well, but in respect of the reading of the
Scripture, they never heard it after that fashion ;
they had never realised how vivid Scripture
could become. That simply results from paying

IS TO RECONCILE 37

attention to the chapter with the best help.
You will find, I am sure, that your congregation
will welcome it.

Supposing, then, we return to the Bible.
Supposing that the Church did— as I think it
must do if it is not going to collapse ; certainly
the Free Churches must — supposing we return
to the Bible, there are three ways of reading the
Bible. The first way asks. What did the Bible
say? The second way asks, What can I make
the Bible say ? The third way asks. What does
God say in the Bible?

The first way is, with the aid of these magni-
ficent scholars, to discover the true historic
sense of the Bible. There is no more signal
illustration of success here than in the case of
the Prophets. During the time when theology
dominated everything and was considered to
be the Church's one grand concern, about one
hundred years after the Reformation, when
its great prophets had passed away, and the
Church had fallen into different hands, the
whole of the Old Testament — the Prophets
amongst the rest — was read for proof passages
of theological doctrines. Now for books like

38 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

the Prophets that is absolutely fatal — fatal to
the books and to the Church ; and fatal in the
long run to Christian truth. There is no greater
service that has been done to the Bible than
what has been done by the scholars I speak
of, in making the Prophets live again, putting
them in their true historical setting and position.
Dr. George Adam Smith, for example, has done
inestimable service in this way. And what
has been done for the Prophets has also been
done for the New Testament. Immense steps
onward have been taken ; and we are coming
to know with much exactness what the writer
actually had in his mind at the moment of
writing, and what he was understood to have
had in his mind by those to whom he first
wrote. In this way we get rid, for example,
of the idea that Paul was thinking about us
who live two thousand years after him. He
was not thinking of us at all. He did not
expect the world to last a century. It is quite
another question what the Holy Spirit was
thinking about. Paul was thinking in a natural
way about his age and his Churches, about their
actual situation and needs. That is another
illustration of the principle that if you want
to work for immortality you must work in
the most relevant and faithful way amid the

IS TO RECONCILE 39

circumstances round about you. The present
duty is the path to immortality. And so also
I might illustrate in respect to the Gospels.

The second way of reading the Bible is read-
ing it unto edification. That is to say, we read
a passage, and we allow ourselves to receive
any suggestion that may come to us from it,
and we do not stop to ask whether that was in
the writer's mind, or whether it was in the
mind of the people to whom he wrote. That is
immaterial. We allow the Spirit of God to
suggest to us whatever lessons or ideas He
thinks fit out of the words that are under our
eyes. We read the Bible not for correct
or historic knowledge, but for religious and
spiritual purposes, for our own private and
personal needs. That is, of course, a perfectly
legitimate thing — indeed, it is quite necessary.
It is the way of reading the Bible which the
large mass of the Church must always practise.
But it has its dangers. You need the other
ways to correct it. All the three must co-
operate for the true use and understanding of
the Bible by the Church at large. But I am
speaking now about its use by individuals,
and the danger I mean is that the suggestive-

40 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

ness may sometimes become fantastic. Som.e
preachers fail at times in that way. They get
to taking what are called fancy texts, texts
which impress the audience much more with
the ingenuity of the preacher than with his
inspiration. For instance, a preacher in the
North, now dead, was preaching against the
Higher Criticism and its slicing up of the
Bible, and he took his text from Nehemiah,
" He cut it with a penknife " ! That is all very
well, perhaps, for a motto, but for a text it
is rather a liberty. It is not fair to the Bible
to indulge in much of that at least. If I re-
member rightly, Dr. Parker had a great gift in
this way, and more than sometimes it ran away
with him. It is a temptation of every witty
man, and every ingenious-minded man. But
there is a peril in it, the abuse of a right prin-
ciple. We are bound, of course, to vindicate
for ourselves and for others the right to use the
Bible in the suggestive way, if we are not to
make a present of it to the scholars. And that
would be just as bad as making a i)resent of it
to a race of priests. But when we read too
much in that w^ay it is apt to become a minister
to our spiritual egotism, or, what is equally bad,
our fanciful subjectivity.

Now the grand value of the Bible is just the

IS TO RECONCILE 41

other thing— its objectivity. The first thing is
not how I feel, but it is, How does God feel,
and what has God said or done for my soul ?
When we get to real close quarters with that
our feeling and response will look after itself.
Do not tell people how they ought to feel
towards Christ. That is useless. It is just
what they ought that they cannot do. Preach
a Christ that will make them feel as they ought.
That is objective preaching. The tendency and
fashion of the present moment is all in the
direction of subjectivity. People welcome
sermons of a more or less psychological kind,
which go into the analysis of the soul or of
society. They will listen gladly to sermons on
character-building, for instance ; and in the
result they will get to think of nothing else
but their own character. They will be the
builders of their own character ; which is a
fatal thing. Learn to commit your soul and
the building of it to One who can keep it
and build it as you never can. Attend then to
Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Kingdom, and the
Cause, and He will look after your soul. A
consequence of this passion for subjective and
psychological analysis, for sentimental ex-
perience and problem-preaching, is that when
a preacher begins preaching a real, objective,

42 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

New Testament gospel he has raised against
him what is now the most fatal accusation —
even within the Christian Church it has come
to be very fatal — he is accused of being a
theologian. That is a very fatal charge to
make now against any preacher. It ought to
be actionable in the way of libel. We have
come to this — that if you penetrate into the
interior of the New Testament you will be
accused of being a theologian ; and then it is
all over with your welcome. But that state
of things has to be turned upside down, else
the Church dries into the sand. There is no
message in it.

§
The third way of reading the Bible is reading
it to discover the purpose and thought of God,
whether it immediately edify us or whether it
do not. If we did actually become aware of the
will and thought of God it would edify us as
nothing else could. No inner process, no dis-
cipline to which we might subject ourselves, no
way of cultivating subjective holiness would do
so much for us as if we could lose ourselves, and
in some godly sort forget ourselves, because we
are so preoccupied with the mind of Christ. If
you want psychological analysis, analyse the
will, work, and purpose of Christ our Lord. I

IS TO RECONCILE 43

read a fine sentence the other day which puts in
a condensed form what I have often preached
about as the symptom of the present age:
" Instead of placing themselves at the service
of God most people want a God who is at their
service." These two tendencies represent in the
end two different religions. The man who is
exploiting God for the pui-poses of his own soul
or for the race, has in the long run a different
religion from the man who is putting his own
soul and race absolutely at the disposal of the
will of God in Jesus Christ.

All this is by way of preface to an attempt to
approach the New Testament and endeavour to
find what is really the will of God concerning
Christ and what Christ did. Doctrine and life
are really two sides of one Christianity ; and
they are equally indispensable, because Chris-
tianity is living truth. It is not merely
truth; it is not simply life. It is living
truth. The modern man says that doctrine
which does not pass into life is dead ;
and then the mistake he makes is that he
wants to turn it into life directly, and to
politicise it, perhaps ; whereas it works in-
directly. The experience of many centuries,

44 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

on the other hand, says that Christian life
which does not grow out of Christian doctrine
becomes a failnre. If not in individuals, it
does in the Church. You cannot keep Christian
piety alive except upon Christian truth. You
can never get a Catholic Church except by
Catholic truth. I think perhaps we all here
agree about that. It is of immense importance
that we do not think entirely about our indi-
vidual souls, and that we think more about
the Church, the divine will, the divine Word,
and the divine Kingdom in the world. It is
of supreme importance that we should know
what the Christian doctrine is on the great
matters.

Now in connection with the work of Christ
the great expositor in the Bible is St. Paul.
And Paul has a word of his own to describe
Christ's work — the word " reconciliation." But
he thinks of reconciliation not as a doctrine but
as an act of God — because he was not a theo-
logian but an experience preacher. To view it
so produces an immense change in your whole
way of thinking. It secures for you all that
is worth having in theology, and it delivers
you from the danger of obsession by theology
in a one-sided way. Remember, then, that the
truth we are dealing with is precious not as a

IS TO RECONCILE 45

mere truth but as the means of expressing the
eternal act of God. The most important thing
in all the world, in the Bible or out of it, is
something that God has done — for ever finally
done. And it is this reconciliation ; which is
only secondarily a doctrine ; it is only secondarily
even a manner of life. Primarily it is an act of
God. That is to say, it is a salvation before it is
a religion. For Christianity as a religion stands
upon salvation. Religion which does not grow
out of salvation is not Christian religion ; it
may be spiritual, poetic, mystic ; but the essence
of Christianity is not just to be spiritual ; it is
to answer God's manner of spirituality, which
you find in Jesus Christ and in Him crucified.
Reconciliation is salvation before it is religion.
And it is religion before it is theology. All
our theology in this matter rests upon the
certain experience of the fact of God's salva-
tion. It is salvation upon divine principles
It is salvation by a holy God. It is bound
of course, to be theological in its very nature
Its statement is a theology. The moment
you begin to talk about the holiness of God
you are theologians. And you cannot talk
about Christ and His death in any thorough
way without talking about the holiness of
God.

46 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

§
Christ and Him crucified, that is the historic

fact. But what do I mean when I say Christ
and Him crucified ? Does it mean that a certain
personality lived who was recognised in history
as Jesus Christ, and that He came by His end
by crucifixion ? That in itself is worthless for
religious purposes. It is useful enough if you
are writing history ; but for religion historical
fact must have interpretation, and the whole of
Christianity depends upon the interpretation
that is put upon such facts. You will find
people sometimes who say, " Let us have the
simple historic facts, the Cross and Christ."
That is not Christianity. Christianity is a
certain interpretation of those facts. How and
why did the New Testament come into being ?
Was it simply to convince posterity that those
facts had taken place? Was it simply to con-
vince the world that Christ had risen from the
dead ? If that were the grand object of the
New Testament we should have a very different
Bible in our hands, one addressed to the world
and not to the Church, to critical science and
not to faith ; and there would not be so much
argument amongst scholars as there is. The
Bible did not come into being in order to
provide future historians with a valuable docu-

IS TO RECONCILE 47

ment. It came for the purposes of interpreta-
tion. Here is a sentence I came across once :
" The fact without the word is dumb ; the word
w^ithout the fact is empty." It is useful to turn
it over and over in your mind.

Paul was almost the creator and the great
representative of that interpretation. It was
continued on his lines by Augustine, Anselm,
Luther, and many another. But what is it
that we hear about so much to-day ? We
hear a great deal about an undogmatic Chris-
tianity. And there is a certain plausibility in
it. If you have no theological training, no
training in the understanding of the Scripture
in a serious way, that is, if you do not know
your business as ministers of the Word, it seems
natural that undogmatic Christianity should be
just the thing you want. Leave the dogma
of it, you will say, to those who devote their
lives to dogma — just as though theologians were
irrepressible people who take up theology as a
hobby and become the bores of the Church !
It was not a hobby to the apostles. Why,
there are actually people of a similar stamp
who look upon missions as a hobby of the
Church, instead of their belonging to the
very being and fidelity of the Church. So
some people think theology is a hobby, and

48 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

that theologians are persons with an uncom-
fortable preponderance of intellect, who are
trying to destroy the privileges secured by
our national lack of education and to sacrifice
Christianity to mind. People say we do not
want so much intellect in preaching ; we want
sympathy and unction. Now, I am always look-
ing afield, and looking forward, and thinking
about the prospects of the Church in the great
world. And unction dissociated from Christian
truth and Christian intelligence has at last the
sentence of the Church's death within itself.
You may cherish an undogmatic Christianity
with a sort of magnetic casing, a purely human,
mystical, subjective kind of Christ for yourself
or an audience, but you could not continue to
preach that in a Church for the ages. The
Church could not live on that and do its
preaching in such a world. You could not
spread a gospel like that. Subjective religion
is valuable in its place, but its place is limited.
The only Cross you can preach to the whole
world is a theological one. It is not the fact
of the Cross, it is the interpretation of the
Cross, the prime theology of the Cross, what
God meant by the Cross, that is everything.
That is what the New Testament came to
give. That is the only kind of Cross that
can make or keep a Church.

IS TO RECONCILE 49

§
You will say, perhaps, " Cannot I go out and
preach my impressions of the Cross?" By all
means. You will only discover the sooner that
you cannot preach a Cross to any purpose if you
preach it only as an experience. If you only
preach it so you would not be an apostle ; and
you could not do the work of an apostle for the
Church. The apostles were particular about
this, and one expressed it quite pointedly : " We
preach not ourselves [nor our experiences] but
Christ crucified." " We do not preach rehgion,"
said Paul, "but God's revelation. We do not
preach the impression the Cross made upon
us, but the message that God by His Spirit sent
through a Christ we experience." And so with
ourselves. We do not preach our impressions,
or even our experience. These make but the
vehicle, as it were. What we preach is some-
thing much more solid, more objective, with
more stay in it ; something that can suffice when
our experience has ebbed until it seems to be as
low as Christ's was in the great desertion and
victory on the Cross. We want something
that will stand by us when we cannot feel any
more; we want a Cross we can cling to, not
simply a subjective Cross. That is, to put the
thing in another way, what we want to-day is

The Work of Christ. g

50 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

an insight into the Cross. You see I am making
a distinction between impression and insight.
It is a useful part of the Church's work, for
instance, that it should act by means of revival
services, where perhaps the dominant element
may be temporary impression. But unless that
is taken up and turned to account by something
more, we all know how evanescent a thing it is
apt to be. We need, not simply to be impressed
by Christ, but to see into Christ and into His
Cross. We need to deepen the impression until
it become new life by seeing into Christ. There
are certain circumstances in which we may be
entitled to declare that we do not want so many
people who glibly say they love Jesus ; we want
more people who can really see into Christ.
We do, of course, want more people who love
Jesus ; but we want a multitude of more people
who are not satisfied with that, but whose love
fills them with holy curiosity and compels them
habitually to cultivate in the Spirit the power of
seeing into Christ and into His Cross. More
than impression, do we need a spirit of divina-
tion. Insight is what we want for power —
less of mere interest and more of real insight.
There are some people who talk as though,
when we speak of the Cross and the meaning of
the Cross, we were spinning something out

IS TO RECONCILE 51

of the Cross. Paul was not spinning anything
out of the Cross. He was gazing into the Cross,
seeing what was really there with eyes that
had been unsealed and purged by the Holy

Ghost.

The doctrine of Christ's reconciliation, or His
Atonement, is not a piece of mediaeval dogma
like transubstantiation, not a piece of eccle-
siastical dogma or Aristotelian subtlety which
it might be the Bible's business to destroy. If
you look at the Gospels you will see that from
the Transfiguration onward this matter of
the Cross is the great centre of concern ; it
is where the centre of gravity lies. I met a
man the other day who had come under some
poor and mischievous pulpit influence, and he
said, " It is time we got rid of hearing so much
about the Cross of Christ ; there should be
preached to the world a humanitarian Christ,
the kind of Christ that occupies the Gospels."
There was nothing for it but to tell that man
he was the victim of smatterers, and that he
must go back to his Gospels and read and study
for a year or two. It is the flimsiest religiosity,
and the most superficial reading of the Gospel,
that could talk like that. What does it mean
that an enormous proportion of the Gospel

52 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

story is occupied with the passion of Christ?
The centre of gravity, even in the Gospels, falls
upon the Cross of Christ and -what was done
there, and not simply upon a humanitarian
Christ. You cannot set the Gospels against
Paul. Why, the first three Gospels v^ere much
later than Paul's Epistles. They were written
for Churches that were made by the apostolic
preaching. But how, then, do the first three
Gospels seem so different from the Epistles ? Of
course, there is a superficial difference. Christ
was a very living and real character for the
people of His own time, and His grand business
was to rouse his audiences' faith in His Person
and in His mission. But in His Person and in
His mission the Cross lay latent all the time.
It emerged only in the fullness of time — that
valuable phrase^just when the historic crisis,
the organic situation, produced it. Jesus was
not a professor of theology. He did not lecture
the people. He did not come with a theology
of the Cross. He did not come to force events
to comply with that theology. He did not
force His own people to work out a theo-
logical scheme. He did force an issue, but it
was not to illustrate a theology. It was to
establish the Kingdom of God, which could
be established in no other wise than as? He

IS TO RECONCILE 53

established it — upon the Cross. And He could
only teach the Cross when it had happened —
which He did through the Evangelists with the
space they gave it, and through the Apostles
and the exposition they gave it.

To come back to this work of Christ de-
scribed by Paul as reconciliation. On this
interpretation of the work of Christ the whole
Church rests. If you move faith from that
centre you have driven the nail into the Church's
coffin. The Church is then doomed to death,
and it is only a matter of time when she
shall expire. The Apostle, I say, described the
work of Christ as above all things reconcilia-
tion. And Paul was the founder of the Church,
historically speaking. I do not like to speak
of Christ as the Founder of the Church. It
seems remote, detached, journalistic. It would
be far more true to say that He is the founda-
tion of the Church. " The Church's one founda-
tion is Jesus Christ her Lord." The founder
of the Church, historically speaking, was Paul.
It was founded by and through him on this
reconciling principle — nay, I go deeper than
that, on this mighty act of God's reconcilia-
tion. For this great act the interpretation was
given to Paul by the Holy Spirit. In this con-
nection read that great word in 1 Corinthians ii. ;

54 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

that is the most valuable word in the New
Testament about the nature of apostolic in-
spiration.

§

What, then, did Paul mean by this recon-
ciliation which is the backbone of the Church ?
He meant the total result of Christ's life-work
in permanently changing the relation between
collective man and God. By reconciliation Paul
meant the total result of Christ's life-work in
the fundamental, permanent, final changing of
the relation between man and God, altering
it from a relation of hostility to one of con-
fidence and peace. Remember, I am speaking
as Paul spoke, about man, and not about
individual men or groups of men.

There are two principal Greek words con-
nected with the idea of reconciliation, one of
them being always translated by it, the other
sometimes. They are katallassein, and hilas-
kesthai — reconciliation and atonement. Atone-
ment is an Old Testament phrase, where the
idea is that of the covering of sin from God's
sight. But by whom? Who was that great
benefactor of the human race that succeeded in
covering up our sin from God's sight? Who
was skilful enough to hoodwink the Almighty ?
Who covered the sin ? The all-seeing God

IS TO RECONCILE 55

alone. There can therefore be no talk of hood-
winking. Atonement means the covering of
sin by something which God Himself had
provided, and therefore the covering of sin by-
God Himself. It was of course not the blinding
of Himself to it, but something very different.
How could the Judge of all the earth make
His judgment blind ? It was the covering of
sin by something which makes it lose the power
of deranging the covenant relation between
God and man and founds the new Humanity.
That is the meaning of it.

If you think I am talking theology, you must
blame the New Testament. I am simply ex-
pounding to you the New Testament. Of course,
you need not take it unless you please. It is
quite open to you to throw the New Testa-
ment overboard (so long as you are frank
about it), and start what you may loosely call
Christianity on other floating lines. But if you
take the New Testament you are bound to try to
understand the New Testament. If you under-
stand the New Testament you are bound to
recognise that this is what the New Testament
says. It is a subsequent question whether the
New Testament is right in saying so. Let us
first find out what the Bible really says, and then
discuss whether the Bible is right or wrong.

56 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

The idea of atonement is the covering of sin
by something which God provided, and by the
use of which sin looses its accusing power, and
its powei' to derange that grand covenant and
relationship between man and God which founds
the New Humanity. The word katallassein (recon-
cile) is peculiar to Paul. He uses both words ;
but the other word, " atonement," you also find in
other New Testament writings. Reconciliation
is Paul's great characteristic word and thought.
The great jpassages are those I have mentioned
at the head of this lecture. I cannot take time
to expound them here. That would mean a long
course. Read those passages carefully and
check me in anything I say — x^^^^^icularly, for
instance, 2 Corinthians v. 14-vi. 2. Out of it we
gather this whole result. First, Christ's work
is something described as reconciliation. And
second, reconciliation rests upon atonement as
its ground. Do not stoj) at " God was in Christ
reconciling the world." You can easily water
that down. You may begin the process by
saying that God was in Christ just in the same
way in which He was in the old prophets. That
is the first dilution. Then you go on with the
homoepathic treatment, and you say, " Oh yes,
all He did by Christ was to affect the world, and
impress it by showing it how much He loved it."

IS TO RECONCILE 57

Now, would tliat reconcile anybody really in
need of it ? When your child has flown into a
violent temper with you, and still worse, a sulky
temper, and glooms for a whole day, is it any
use your sending to that child and saying,
" Really, this cannot go on. Come back. I love
you very much. Say you are sorry." Not
a bit of use. For God simply to have told
or shown the evil world how much He loved
it would have been a most ineffectual thing.
Something had to be done— judging or saving.
Revelation alone is inadequate. Reconcilia-
tion must rest on atonement. For, as I say,
you must not stop at " God was in Christ
reconciling the world unto Himself," but go on
"not reckoning unto them their trespasses."
" He made Christ to be sin for us, who knew
no sin." That involves atonement. You cannot
blot out that phrase. And the third thing
involved in the idea is that this reconciliation,
this atonement, means change of relation be-
tween God and man — man, mind you, not two
or three men, not several groups of men,
but man, the human race as one whole. And it
is a change of relation from alienation to com-
munion— not simply to our peace and confidence,
but to reciprocal communion. The grand end of
reconciliation is communion. I am pressing

58 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

that hard. I am pressing it hard here by
saying that it is not enough that we should
worship God. It is not enough that we should
worship a personal God. It is not enough that
we should worship and pay our homage to a
loving God. That does not satisfy the love of
God. Nothing short of living, loving, holy,
habitual communion between His holy soul and
ours can realise at last the end which God
achieved in Jesus Christ.

In this connection let me offer you two
cautions. First, take care that the direct fact
of reconciliation is not hidden up by the in-
dispensable means — namely, atonement. There
have been ages in the Church when the
attention has been so exclusively centred uj)on
atonement that reconciliation was lost sight
of. You found theologians flying at each
other's throats in the interest of particular
theories of atonement. That is to say, atone-
ment had obscured reconciliation. In the same
way, after the Reformation period, they dwelt
upon justification until they lost sight of
sanctification altogether. Then the great
pietistic movement had to arise in order to
redress the balance. Take care that the end,

IS TO RECONCILE 59

reconciliation, is not hidden up by the means,
atonement. Justification, sanctification, recon-
ciliation and atonement are all equally insepar-
able from the one central and compendious
Avork of Christ. Various ages need various
aspects of it turned outward. Let us give
them all their true value and perspective. If
we do not we shall make that fatal severance
which orthodoxy has so often made between
doctrine and life.

The second caution is this. Beware of read-
ing atonement out of reconciliation altogether.
Beware of cultivating a reconciliation which is
not based upon justification. The apostle's
phrases are often treated like that. They are
emptied of the specific Christian meaning.
There are a great many Christian peoijle,
spiritual people of a sort, to-day, who are
perpetrating that injustice upon the New
Testament. They are taking mighty old words
and giving them only a subjective, arbitrary
meaning, emptying out of them the essential,
objective, positive content. They are pre-
occupied with what takes place within their
own experience, or imagination, or thought ;
and they are oblivious of that which is
declared to have taken place within the ex-
perience of God and of Christ. They are

60 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

oblivious and negligent of the essential things
that Christ did, and God in Christ. That is
not fair treatment of New Testament terms —
to empty them of positive Christian meaning
and water them down to make something
that might suit a philosophic or mystic or
subjective or individualist spirituality. There
is a whole system of philosophy that has
attempted this dilution at the present day. It
is associated with a name that has now become
very well known, the name of the greatest
philosopher the world ever saw, Hegel. I am
not now going to expound Hegelianism. But
I have to allude to one aspect of it. If you
are paying any attention to what is going on
around you in the thinking world, you are
bound to come face to face with some phase
of it or other. But I see my time is at an end
for to-day.

§
To-morrow I begin where I now leave off
and shall say something about this version of
St. Paul's idea of reconciliation, which is so
attractive i)hilosophically. I remember the
appeal it had for me when I came into contact
with it first. I did feel that it seemed to give
a largeness to certain New Testament terms,
which I finally found was a largeness of lati-

IS TO RECONCILE 61

tude only. If it did seem to give breadth it
did not give depth. And I close here by re-
minding you of this — that while Christ and
Christianity did come to make us broad men,
it did not come to do that in the first instance.
It came to make us deep men. The living
interest of Christ and of the Holy Spirit is not
breadth, but it is depth. Christ said little
that was wide compared with what He said
piercing and searching. I illustrate by refer-
ring you to an interest that is very prominent
amongst you— the interest of missions. How
did modern missions arise? I mean the last
hundred years of them. Modern Protestant
missions are only one hundred years old.
Where did they begin? Who began them?
They began at the close of the eighteenth
century, the century whose close was domi-
nated by philosophers, by scientists, by a
reasonable, moderate interpretation of religion,
by broad humanitarian religion. Of course,
you might expect it was amongst those broad
people that missions arose. We know better.
We know that the Christian movement which
has spread around the world did not arise out
of the liberal thinkers, the humanitarian philo-
sophers of the day, who were its worst enemies,
but with a few men— Carey, Marshman, Ward,

62 THE GREAT SACRIFICIAL WORK

and the like — whose Calvinistic theology we
should now consider very narrow. But they did
have the root of the universal matter in them.
A gospel deep enough has all the breadth of the
world in its heart. If we are only deep enough
the breadth will take care of itself. I would
ten times rather have one man who was burn-
ing deep, even though he wanted to burn me
for my modern theology, than I would have a
broad, hospitable, and thin theologian who was
willing to take me in and a nondescript crowd
of others in a sheet let down from heaven,
but who had no depth, no fire, no skill to
search, and no power to break. For the deep
Christianity is that which not only searches
us, but breaks us. And a Christianity which
would exclude none has no power to include
the world.

RECONCILIATION : PHILOSOPHIC
AND CHRISTIAN

Ill

RECONCILIATION: PHILOSOPHIC AND
CHRISTIAN

I PLACE on the board before you five points
as to Christ's reconciling work which I
think vital : —

1. It is between person and person.

2. Therefore it affects both sides.

3. It rests on atonement.

4. It is a reconciliation of the world as

one whole.

5. It is final in its nature and effect.

I was saying yesterday that two cautions
ought to be observed in connection with this
matter of reconciliation. First, we should not
hide up the idea of reconciliation by the idea of
atonement ; we should not obscure the end, or
the effect, by the great and indispensable means
to it. 'Second, at the other extreme we are to

The Work of Christ. g 65

66 RECONCILIATION

beware of emptying reconciliation of atonement
altogether. Two very great thinkers arose last
century in Germany — where most of the think-
ing on this subject has for the last hundred years
been done. Much of our work has been to steal.
That does not matter if it is done wisely and
gratefully. When a man gives out a great
thought, get it, work it ; it is common property.
It belongs to the whole world, to be claimed and
assimilated by whoever shall find. Well, there
were two very powerful men in Germany much
opposed to each other, yet at a certain point at
one — Hegel and Ritschl. While they preached
the doctrine of reconciliation in different senses,
they both united to obscure the idea of atone-
ment or expiation. Now we are to beware of
emptying the reconciliation idea of the idea
of atonement, whether we do it philosophically
with Hegel or theologically with Ritschl. I
mention these men because their thought has
very profoundly affected English thinking,
whether philosophical or theological. I pro-
tested yesterday against the practice, so com-
mon, of taking New Testament words, and
words consecrated to Christian experience,
emptying them of their essential content, and
keeping them in a vapid use. That is done for
various reasons. It is sometimes done because

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 67

the words are too valuable to be parted with ;
sometimes because a philosophic interpretation
seems to rescue them from the narrowness of
an outworn theology ; and it is sometimes done
for lower motives in order to produce a fictitious
impression upon people that they are still sub-
stantially hearing the substance of the old truths
when really they are not.

Especially I began yesterday to call attention
to the view which is associated with the philo-
sophical position of Hegel. Being a philosopher
he was great upon the idea. The whole world,
he said, was a movement or process of the grand,
divine idea ; but it was a process. Now please
to put down and make much use of this funda-
mental distinction between a process and an
act. A process has nothing moral in it. We
are simply carried along on the crest of a wave.
An act, on the other hand, can only be done by
a moral personality. The act involves the notion
of will and responsibility, and, indeed, the whole
existence of a moral world. The process de-
stroys that notion. Now the general tendency of
philosophy is to devote itself to the idea and
to the process. Science, for example, which is
the ground floor, not to say the basement, of
philosophy — science knows nothing about acts,
it only knows about processes. The chemist

68 RECONCILIATION

knows only about processes. The biologist
knows only about processes. The psychologist
treats even acts as processes. But the theo-
logian, and, indeed, religion altogether, stands
or falls with the idea of an act. For him an
infinite process is at bottom an eternal act. The
philosophical thinker says the world is the pro-
cess of an evolving idea, which may be treated as
personal or may not. But for Christianity the
world is the action of the eternal, divine act,
a moral act, an act of will and of conscience.
Let us see how this applies to our thoughts
about reconciliation. I have already indicated
to you that the grand goal of the divine recon-
ciliation is communion with God, not simply
that we should be in tune with the Infinite,
as an attractive but thin book has it. The
object of the divine atonement is something
much more than bringing us into tune with
God. It is more than raising our pitch and
defining our note. It means that we are
brought into actual, reciprocal communion with
God out of guilt. We have personal intercourse
with the Holy, we exchange thoughts and feel-
ings. But this Christian idea of reconciliation,
the idea of communion with the living and
holy God, is replaced in philosophic theology by
another idea, that, namely, of adjustment to

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 69

rational Godhead, our adjustment to that
mighty idea, that mighty rational process,
which is moving on throughout the world.
Sometimes the Godhead is conceived as j)er-
sonal, sometimes as impersonal ; but in any case
reconciliation would be rather a resigned adjust-
ment to this great and overwhelming idea,
which, having issued everything, is perpetually
recalling, or exalting, everything into fusion
with itself. But fusion, however organic and
concrete, is one thing, communion is another
thing. An individual might be lost in the great
sum of being as a drop of water is lost in the
ocean. That is fusion. Or it might be taken
up as a cell in the body's organic process.
That is a certain kind of reconciliation or
absorption. But moral, spiritual reconciliation,
where we have personal beings to deal with,
is much more than fusion ; more than absorp-
tion ; it is communion. It is more than placing
us in our niche. When we think in the philo-
sophic way it practically means that reconcilia-
tion is understood almost entirely from man's
side, without realising the divine initiative as an
act. But such divine initiative is everything.
It is in the mercy of our God that all our hopes
begin. Nothing that confuses that gets at the
root of our Christian reconciliation. Or, some-

70 RECONCILIATION

times, those philosophic ideas are carried so far
that God's concern for the individual is ignored.
These great processes work according to general
laws ; and general laws, like Acts of Parliament,
are bound to do some injustice to individuals.
You cannot possibly get complete justice by Act
of Parliament. It is bound to hit somebody
very hard. And it has often been doubted by
exponents of philosophical theology such as I
describe whether the individual as an individual
was really present to God's mind and affection
at all. And they think prayer is unreasonable
except for its reflex effect on us. Thus the
whole stress comes to be put upon our attitude
to God, and not upon a reciprocal relationship.
That is to say, religion becomes, as I described
yesterday, a subjectivity, a resignation. In
others it becomes a sense of dependence. People
are invited to become preoccupied with their
own attitude, their own relation, their own
feelings toward the unchangeable, but absorb-
ing, and even unfeeling God. Attention is
directed upon the human side instead of insight
cultivated into the divine side. The result of
that practically is that religion comes to consist
far too much in working up a certain frame of
feeling instead of dwelling upon the objective
reality of the act of God. Resignation is,

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 71

then, my act ; but it is not resignation to
a sympathetic act of approach in God, but
only to His onward movement. But, as I
have said before, if we are to produce the real
Christian faith we must dwell upon, we must
preach and press, that objective act and gift of
God which in itself produces that faith. We
cannot produce it. Many try. There are some
people who actually work at holiness. It is a
dangerous thing to do, to work at your own
holiness. The way to cultivate the holiness of
the New Testament is to cultivate the New Tes-
tament Christ, the interpretation of Christ in
His Cross, by His Spirit, which cannot but
produce holiness, and holiness of a far pro-
founder order than anything we may make
by taking ourselves to pieces and putting
ourselves together in the best way we can,
or by adjusting ourselves with huge effort
to a universal process. Religious subjectivity
is truly a most valuable phase ; and at some
periods in the Church's history it is urgently
called for. In the seventeenth century it was
so called for because Protestantism had de-
generated into a mere theological orthodoxy,
a very hard-shell kind of Christianity. It was
necessary that the great Pietistic movement
should arise and correct it. But this is itself a

72 RECONCILIATION

danger in turn ; and we have to rise up in the
name of the gospel, of the New Testament, and
demand a more objective religion ; and we have
to declare that if ever divine holiness is to be
produced in man it can only be produced by-
God's act through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

The philosophic kind of theology (which is
rather theosophy) often ends, you perceive,
in turning real reconciliation into something
quite different. It becomes turned into the
mere forced adjustment of man to his fate ;
and naturally this often ends in a resentful
pessimism. Supposing the whole universe to
be a vast rational process unfolding itself like
an infinite cosmic flower, you cannot have com-
munion or any hearty understanding between a
living, loving soul and that evolutionary pro-
cess. All you can do is to adjust yourself to
that process, settle down to it and make the
best of it, square yourself to it in the way that
seems best for you, and that will cause you and
others least discomfort. But reconciliation be-
comes debased indeed when it turns to mere
resignation. Of course, we have to practise
resignation. But Christianity is not the prac-
tice of resignation. At least, that is not the

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 73

meaning of reconciliation. When two friends
fall out and are reconciled, it does not simply
mean that one adjusts himself to the other.
That is a very one-sided arrangement. There
must be a mutuality. Theology of the kind I
have been describing has a great deal to say
about men changing their way of looking at
things or feeling about them. If I were
preaching a theology like that I should say :
" This mighty process, of which you are all parts,
is unfolding itself to a grand closing result. It
is going to be a grand thing for /everybody in
the long run (provided, that is, that they con-
tinue to exist as individuals and are capable of
feeling anything, whether grand or mean). It
is all going to work out to a grand consumma-
tion. You do not see that, but you must make
an effort and accept it as the genius and drift of
things ; and that is faith. You must accept the
idea that the whole world is working out,
through much suffering and by many round-
about ways, to a grand final consummation
which will be a blessing for everybody, even
though it might mean their individual extinc-
tion. What you have to do in these circum-
stances is, by a great act of faith, to believe
that this is so and to immolate yourself, if
need be, for the benefit of this grand whole ;

74 RECONCILIATION

at any rate, accommodate yourself to its evolving
movement."

The gospel of Christ speaks otherwise. It
speaks of a God to whom we are to be reconciled
in a mutual act which He begins ; and not of
an order or process with which we are to be
adjusted by our lonely act, or to which we are
to be resigned. If we have an idea of such a
Godhead as I have been describing, how does
it affect our thought of Christ ? Christ then
becomes but one of its grandest prophets, or
one of the greatest instances and illustrations of
that adjustment to the mighty order. He first
realised, and He first declared, this great change
in the way of reading the situation. What you
have to do if you accept Him is to change your
way of reading the situation, to accept His
interpretation of life, and accept it as rationally,
spiritually, and resignedly as you best can.
Accept His principle. Die to live. But what a
poor use of Christ — to accept His interpretation
of life, as if He were a mere spiritual Goethe !
That is a very attenuated Christ compared with
the Christ that is offered to us in the New
Testament. That is not the eternal Son of God
in whom God was reconciling the world unto
Himself. That is another Christ — from some
hasty points of view indeed a larger Christ ;

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 75

for the philosophers have a larger Christ, ap-
parently, one more cosmic. But it is a diluted
Christ, and one that cannot penetrate to the
centre and depth of our human need or our
human personality, cannot reach our guilt and
hell, and therefore cannot be the final Christ
of God.

Whether from the side of the philosophers, as
I have been showing, or from the side of certain
theologians like Ritschl, who was so much
opposed to Hegel, you will often hear this
said : that only man needed to be reconciled,
that God did not need any reconciliation.
Now, I have been asking you to observe that
we are dealing with persons. That is the first
point I put upon the board. Our reconcilia-
tion is between person and person. It is not
between an order or a process on the one hand
and a person on the other. Therefore a real
and deep change of the relation between the
two means a change on both sides. That is
surely clear if we are dealing with living per-
sons. God is an eternal person ; I am a finite
person ; yet we are persons both. There is that
parity. Any reconciliation which only means
change on one side is not a real reconciliation
at all. A real, deep change of relation affects

76 RECONCILIATION

both sides when we are deahng with persons.
That is not the case when we are dealing on
the one side with ideas, or one vast idea
or process, and on the other side a person
only.

When Christianity is being watered down in
the way I have described, we have to concen-
trate our attention upon the core of it. All
round us Christianity is being diluted either
by thought or by blague ; we must press to the
core of the matter. It is true the theology of
the Christian Church on this head needs a
certain amount of modification and correction
at the present day. That will appear presently.
But I want to make it clear that the view of
the Church upon the whole, especially the
great view associated with the Reformation,
preserves the core of the matter, which we
are in danger of losing either on one side or
the other.

Let me call your attention, then, to these
five points, which you will find immanent in
what I have subsequently to say.

First, you will note that the reconciliation is
between two persons who have fallen out, and
not between a failing person on the one hand
and a perfect, imperturbable process on the
other.

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 77

The second thing is a corollary from the first,
and is that the reconciliation affects and alters
both parties and not only one party. There
was reconciliation on both sides.

Thirdly, it is a reconciliation which rests upon
atonement and redemption.

Fourthly, it is a reconciliation of the world
as a cosmic ivhole. The world as one whole ;
not a person here and another there, snatched
as brands from the burning ; not a group here
and a group there ; but the reconciliation of
the whole world.

Fifthly, it is a reconciliation final in Jesus
Christ and His Cross, done once for all ; really
effected in the spiritual world in such a way
that in history the great victory is not still to
be won ; it has been won in reality, and has
only to be followed up and secured in actu-
ality. In the spiritual place, in Christ Jesvis,
in the divine nature, the victory has been
won. That is what I mean by using the
word " Final " at the close of the list.

I will expound these heads as I go along. Let
me begin almost at the foundation and say this.
Reconciliation has no moral meaning as be-
tween finite and infinite — none apart from the

78 RECONCILIATION

sense of guilt. The finished reconciliation, the
setting up of the New Covenant by Christ,
meant that human guilt was once for all robbed
of its power to prevent the consummation of the
Kingdom of God, It is the sense of guilt that
we have to get back to-day for the soul's sake
and the kingdom's ; not simply the sense of sin.
There are many who recognise the power of sin,
the misfortune of it ; what they do not recognise
is the thing that makes it most sinful, which
makes it what it is before God, namely, guilt;
which introduces something noxious and not
merely deranged, malignant and not merely
hostile ; the fact that it is transgression against
not simply God, not simply against a loving
God, but against a holy God. Everything
begins and ends in our Christian theology
with the holiness of God. That is the idea we
have to get back into our current religious
thinking. We have been living for the last two
or three generations, our most progressive side
has been living, upon the love of God, God's love
to us. And it was very necessary that it should
be appreciated. Justice had not been done to it.
But we have now to take a step further, and we
have to saturate our people in the years that are
to come as thoroughly with the idea of God's
holiness as they have been saturated with the

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 79

idea of God's love. I have sometimes thought
when preaching that I saw a perceptible change
come over my audience when I turned from
speakmg about the love of God to speak about
the holiness of God. There was a certain in-
describable relaxing of interest, as though their
faces should say, "What, have we not had
enough of these incorrigible and obtrusive
theologians who will not let us rest with the
ove of God but must go on talking about things
that are so remote and professional as His
bolmess!" All that has to be changed. We
have to stir the interest of our congrega-
tions as much with the holiness of God as
the Church was stirred-first with the justice
and then latterly with the love of God It is
the holiness of God which makes sin guilt It
IS the holiness of God that necessitates the \'^ I
work of Christ, that calls for it, and that pro- ' ^
vides it. What is the great problem? The great
problem in connection with atonement is not
simply to show how it was necessary to the
fatherly love, but how it was necessary to a holy
love, how a holy love not only must have it but "
must make it. The problem is how Christ can
be a revelation not of God's love simply, but
of God s holy love. Without a holy God there
would be no problem of atonement. It is the

80 RECONCILIATION

holiness of God's love that necessitates the
atoning Cross.

I say, then, that the reconciliation has no
meaning apart from guilt which must stir the
anger of a holy God and produce separation
from Him. That is, the reconciliation rests
upon a justification, upon an atonement. Those
were the great Pauline ideas which were
rediscovered in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries and became the backbone of the Re-
formation. They were practically rediscovered.
Look at the movement in the history of the
Church's thought in this respect. You have
three great points : you might name them — the
first from Augustine, the second from Luther ;
for the third, our modern time, we have as
yet no such outstanding name. The first great
movement towards the rediscovery of Paul
was by Augustine. Do you know that Paul
went under after the first century? He went
under for historic reasons I cannot stay to
explain. It is a remarkable thing how he was
kept in the canon of Scripture. Paul went
under, and for centuries remained under, and
he had to be rediscovered. That was done by
Augustine. Again he went under, and Luther
rediscovered him. And he is being rediscovered
again to-day. Augustine's rediscovery was this,

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 81

justification by grace alone ; Luther's side of the
rediscovery was justification by faith alone —
faith in the Cross, that is to say, faith in grace.
What is our modern point of emphasis ? Justi-
fication by holiness and for it alone. That is to
say, as I have already pointed out, reconciliation
is something that comes from the whole holy
God, and it covers the whole of life, and it is not
exhausted by the idea of atonement only or
redemption only. It is the new-created race
being brought to permanent, vital, life-deep
communion with the holy God. Only holiness
can be in communion with the holy God. We
have to be saved — not indeed from morality,
because we can only be saved by the moral ; that
is the grand sheet-anchor of our modern theories.
However we be saved, we can only be saved
in a way consistent with God's morality — that
is to say, with holiness. The rescue is not from
morality; but it is from mere moralism, from
a religion three parts conduct. We are saved
through the Spirit of a new life, an indis-
cerptible life in Jesus Christ. That is the grand
new thing in Christianity (2 Corinthians iii. 6).

Reconciliation, then, has no meaning apart
from a sense of guilt, that guilt which is in-

The Work of Christ. J

82 RECONCILIATION

volved in our justification. I am going to try to
expound that before I am done. I want to note
here that it means not so much that God is recon-
ciled, but that God is the Reconciler. It is the
neglect of that truth which has produced so much
sce'pticism in the matter of the atonement. So
much of our orthodox religion has come to talk
as though God were reconciled by a third party.
We lose sight of this great central verse,
" God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
Himself." As we are both living persons, that
means that there was reconciliation on God's
side as well as ours ; but wherever it was, it was
effected by God Himself in Himself. In what
sense was God reconciled within Himself? We
come to that surely as we see that the first
charge upon reconciling grace is to put away
guilt, reconciling by not imputing trespasses.
Return to our cardinal verse, 2 Corin-
thians V. 19. In reconciliation the ground tor
God's wrath or God's judgment was put away.
Guilt rests on God's charging up sm ; re-
conciliation rests upon God's non-imputation
of sin; God's non-imputation of sin rests upon
Christ being made sin for us. You have thus
three stages in this magnificent verse. God s
reconciliation rested upon this, that on His
Eternal Son, who knew no sin in His experience,

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 83

(although He knew more about sin than any
man who has ever lived), sin's judgment fell.
Him who knew no sin by experience, God made
sin. That is to say, God by Christ's own consent
identified Him with sin in treatment though
not in feeling. God did not judge Him, but
judged sin upon His head. He never once
counted Him sinful ; He was always well
pleased with Him ; it was part, indeed, of His
own holy self-complacency, Christ was made sin
for us, as He could never have been if He had
been made a sinner. It was sin that had to be
judged, more even than the sinner, in a world-
salvation ; and God made Christ sin in this sense,
that God as it were took Him in the place of sin,
rather than of the sinner, and judged the sin
upon Him ; and in putting Him there He really
put Himself there in our place (Christ being
what He was) ; so that the divine judgment of
sin was real and effectual. That is, it fell where
it was perfectly understood, owned, and praised,
and had the sanctifying effect of judgment, the
effect of giving holiness at last its own. God
made Him to be sin in treatment though not
in feeling, so that holiness might be perfected in
judgment, and we might become the righteous-
ness of God in Him ; so that we might have
in God's sight righteousness by our living

84 RECONCILIATION

union with Christ, righteousness which did
not belong to us actually, naturally, and
finally. Our righteousness is as little ours in-
dividually as the sin on Christ was His. The
thief on the cross, for instance— I do not sup-
pose he would have turned what we call a saint
if he had survived; though saved, he would
not have become sinless all at once. And the
great saint, Paul, had sin working in him long
after his conversion. Yet by union with Christ
they were made God's righteousness, they were
integrated into the New Goodness ; God made
them partakers of His eternal love to the ever-
holy Christ. That is a most wonderful thing.
Men like Paul, and far worse men than Paul,
by the grace of God, and by a living faith,
become partakers of that same eternal love
which God from everlasting and to everlasting
bestowed upon His only-begotten Son. It is
beyond words.

It was not a case of wiping a slate. Sin
is graven in. You cannot wipe off sin. It
goes into the tissue of the spiritual being. And
it alters things for both parties. Guilt affected
both God and man. It was not a case of de-
stroying an unfortunate prejudice we had
against God. It was not a case of putting
right a misunderstanding we had of God.

I

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 85

" You are afraid of God," you hear easy people
say ; " it is a great mistake to be afraid of
God. There is nothing to be afraid of. God is
love." But there is everything in the love of
God to be afraid of. Love is not holy without
judgment. It is the love of holy God that
is the consuming fire. It was not simply a
case of changing our method, or thought, our
prejudices, or the moral direction of our soul.
It was not a case of giving us courage when we
were cast down, showing us how groundless
our depression was. It was not that. If that
were all it would be a comparatively light
matter.

If that were all, Paul could only have spoken
about the reconciliation of single souls, not
about reconciliation of the whole world as a
unity. He could not have spoken about a
finished reconciliation to which every age of
the future was to look back as its glorious and
fontal past. In the words of that verse which
I am constantly pressing, " God was in Christ
reconciling the world unto Himself." Observe,
first, " the world" is the unity which corresponds
to the reconciled unity of " Himself " ; and
second, that He was not trying, not taking steps
to provide means of reconciliation, not opening
doors of reconciliation if we would only walk in

86 RECONCILIATION

at them, not labouring toward reconciliation,
not (according to the unhappy phrase) waiting
to be gracious, but "God was in Christ recon-
ciling," actually reconciling, finishing the work.
It was not a tentative, preliminary affair
(Romans xi. 15). Reconciliation was finished in
Christ's death. Paul did not preach a gradual
reconciliation. He preached what the old
divines used to call the finished work. He did
not preach a gradual reconciliation which was
to become the reconciliation of the world only
piecemeal, as men were induced to accept it, or
w^ere affected by the gospel. He preached some-
thing done once for all — a reconciliation which is
the base of every soul's reconcilement, not an
invitation only. What the Church has to do is
to appropriate the thing that has been finally
and universally done. We have to enter upon
the reconciled position, on the new creation.
Individual men have to enter upon that recon-
ciled position, that new covenant, that new rela-
tion, which already, in virtue of Christ's Cross,
belonged to the race as a w^hole. I will even
use for convenience' sake the w^ord totality.
(People turn up their noses at a word like that,
and they say it smells of philosophy. Well,
philosophy has not a bad smell ! You cannot
have a proper theology unless you have a

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 87

philosophy. You cannot accurately express
the things that theology handles most deeply.
The misfortune of our ministry is that it comes
to theology without the proper preliminary
culture — with a pious or literary culture only.)
I am going to use this word totality, and say
that the first bearing of Christ's work was upon
the race as a totality. The first thing recon-
ciliation does is to change man's corporate
relation to God. Then when it is taken home
individually it changes our present attitude.
Christ, as it were, put us into the eternal
Church ; the Holy Spirit teaches us how to
behave properly in the Church.

I go on to show that reconciliation has its
effect not upon man only, but upon God also.
That is a difficulty to many people. And, indeed,
we require to be somewhat discriminating here.
If you say bluntly that Christ reconciled God,
it is more false than true. I do not say it
is untrue. It is the people who want plain
black and white, false or true, that do so much
mischief in these matters. It is the thin,
commonsense rationalists, orthodox or hetero-
dox. It is the people who put a pistol to your
head and say, "I am a plain man and I

88 RECONCILIATION

want a plain yes or no," that cause so
much difficulty. Christ always refused to
answer with a pistol to His head. It was the
whole manner of His ministry to refuse to give
a plain answer when asked a blunt question.
We see that in Peter's discovery and confession,
"Thou art the Christ," and in Christ's joyful
answer, " Blessed Simon." Peter in his con-
fession had crowned what Christ had laboured
to live in upon them, but what He had never
said plainly in so many words — " I am the
Christ." He lived it into them and made them
discover it. Repeatedly He was asked, " Give us
signs," " Give us yes or no," and He always
refused. That would be sight, not faith. A
plain yes or no is sight. But faith is insight
into Christ. In this region a plain yes or no
is somewhat out of place. So, therefore, while
it is . not false to say that Christ reconciled
God, it is more false than true as it is mostly
put. You do not get it in the Bible. It would
be a useful exercise to go through the Bible
and see what proofs you can get of Christ
reconciling God. If we talk about Christ recon-
ciling God in the way some do, we suggest that
there was some third party coming between us
and God, reconciling God on the one hand and
us on the other, like a daysman. That is one

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 89

great mischief that is done by the popular
theories of atonement. God can never be
regarded as the object of some third party's
intervention in reconciling. If it were so, what
would happen? There would be no grace. It
would be a bought thing, a procured thing,
the work of a pardon-broker ; and the one
essential thing about grace is that it is un-
bought and unpurchasable. It is the freest
thing in heaven or earth. It would not be
free if procured by some third party. The
" daysman " metaphor has been much abused.
It is a Scriptural figure, but we get it in the
Old Testament, in Job, the idea being that of
one who, in the case of a dispute, puts one hand
on one head and the other on another and
brings two persons together. That is a crude
version of the Christian idea of reconciliation.
The grace of God would not then be the prime
and moving cause. It would not be spontaneous
and creative, it would be negotiated grace ; and
that is a contradiction in terms. Mediation can
never mean that. In paganism the gods were
mollified. God, our God, could never be mollified.
There is no mollification of God, no placation of
God. Atonement was not the placating of God's
anger. Even in the old economy we are told, " I
have given you the blood to make atonement."

90 RECONCILIATION

Given ! Did you ever see the force of it ? "I
have given you the blood to make atonement.
This is an institution which I set up for you to
comply with, set it up for purposes of My own,
on principles of My own, but it is My gift." The
Lord Himself provided the lamb for the burnt
offering. Atonement in the Old Testament was
not the placating of God's anger, but the sacra-
ment of God's grace. It was the expression
of God's anger on the one hand and the express-
ing and putting in action of God's grace on the
other hand. The effect of atonement was to
cover sin from God's eyes, so that it should no
longer make a visible breach between God and
His people. The actual ordinance was estab-
lished, they held, by God Himself. He covered
the sin. Sacrifices were not desperate efforts and
surrenders made by terrified people in the hope
of propitiating an angry deity. The sacrifices
were in themselves prime acts of obedience
to God's means of grace and His expressed will.
If you want to follow that out further, perhaps
I may be forgiven if I were to allude to the
last chapter in my book, "The Cruciality of
the Cross " (1909), in which there is a fuller
discussion of the particular point, and especially
of what is morally meant by the blood of
Christ.

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 91

§
But some one immediately asks, Is there then
no objective atonement ? It is a question worth
deep attention. A great many people say
Christianity wrecks chiefly on the idea of ob-
jective atonement. How cheap the objection is
in many cases, how easy and common it is ! If
you find somebody who is making it his mission
in life to pull to pieces the venerable theology of
the Catholic Church, and show how poor a thing
it is in the light of the thirty years in which he
has lived, you will hear it put likely enough in
such terms as these : that objective atonement is
sheer paganism. The Christian idea of atone-
ment is identified offhand with the pagan idea
of atonement, as a Hyde Park lecturer might.
And when you have done that at the outset, it
is the simplest thing to show how false and
absurd and pagan such theology is. It is said
further, that the whole Church has become
paganised in this way, and has spoken as though
God could be mollified by something offered to
Him. The criticism is sometimes ignorant,
sometimes ungenerous, sometimes culpable. If
such language has ever been held, it has only
been by sections of the Church, sections that
have gone wrong in the direction of unqualified
extremes. You have extravagancies, remember.

92 RECONCILIATION

even in rational heresy. Has the Church on
the whole ever really forgotten that it is in
the mercy of God that all our hopes begin and
end ? And even if the Church had gone further
wrong than it has done about this, we do not
live upon the Church, but upon the gospel and
upon the Bible. We live in and through the
Church. We cannot do without it. We must
get back a great deal more respect for it. But
we do not live on the Church ; we live on the
word of the gospel which is in the Bible.

What is the real objective element in the
Bible's gospel ? What is the real objective
element in atonement ? We are tempted, I say,
to declare that it was the offering of a sacrifice
to God outside of Him and us, the offering of a
sacrifice to God by somebody not God yet more
than a single man. That is the natural, the
pagan notion of objective atonement. But the
real meaning of an objective atonement is that
God Himself made the complete sacrifice. The
real objectivity of the atonement is not that it
was made to God, but by God. It was atone-
ment made by God, not by man. When I use the
word objective, I do not mean objective to you or
to me. You are objective to me, and I to you.

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 93

That is not the idea. Let us learn to think on
the scale of the whole race. What is objective
to that? The deadly kind of subjectivity is
the kind that is engrossed with individuals,
or with humanity, and does not allow for God.
It is the egotism of the race. And the real objec-
tivity is that which is objective to the whole
human race, over against it, and not merely
facing you or me within it. The real objective
element in the atonement, therefore, is that God
made it and gave it finished to man, not that
it was made to God by man. Any atonement
made by man would be subjective, however
much it might be made for man by his brother,
or by a representative of entire Humanity.

But we have a certain farther difiiculty to
face here. If it was God that made the atone-
ment— which it certainly was in Christianity —
then was it not made to man ? Can God recon-
cile Himself ? And can the atonement mean
anything more than the attuning of man to
God — that is to say, of individual men in their
subjective experience ? God then says to each
soul, " Be reconciled. See, I have put My anger
away." Can such attuning of Himself by God
have for its results anything more than indi-

94 RECONCILIATION

vidual conversion ? Now, conversion means
much, but it does not mean the whole of
Christianity. Reconciliation means the life-
communion of the race. But, if God made the
atonement, it might seem that the result and
effect of this atonement could only be reached
gradually by the attuning of individual men to
God. It would seem to destroy the totality of
the race, or (to employ another word even
more useful) the solidarity of the race. That
would seem to be the effect ; and it is such a
serious effect, for this reason : that it affects
the universality of Christ's work. Whatever
affects the universality of Christ's work cuts
the ground from under aggressive Christianity,
from under missions, whether at home or
abroad. They cannot thrive except upon a
faith which means the universality of Christ's
work, which means again the solidarity, the
organic unity, of the whole human race. And
the conversion of a race is a work that exceeds
conversion and is redemption. About that the
Old Testament and the New Testament are
at one.

But, you say, you do not have the solidarity
of the human race in the Old Testament. Well,
you do, and you do not. What you have face to
face with God in the Old Testament is a col-

PHILOSOPHIC AND CHRISTIAN 95

lective nation, Israel. We shall never read the
Old Testament with true understanding until
we realise that. That is one of the great things
modern scholarship has brought home to us —
that the vis-a-vis of God in the Old Testament is
Israel and not the individual Jew. Gradually,
as the Old Testament develops in spiritual in-
timacy, you have this changing and becoming
intensely individual, as in the later Psalms. In
Jeremiah it became so especially. The greatest
prefiguration of Christ's individual solitude in
the Old Testament is Jeremiah. But both of
them were representative or collective indi-
viduals. They condensed the people. The object
that faced God in the Old Testament in the
main was not primarily the individual soul, it
was the soul of the nation of Israel, even
though it was sometimes reduced to a remnant.
What took place when Israel made the great
refusal of Christ? There was set up another
collective unity, the Church, the new Israel, the
spiritual Israel, the landless, homeless Israel,
whose home was in Him, the universal Israel,
the new Humanity of the new covenant. The
Church became the prophecy and prefiguration
of the unity of Humanity. It is through the
Church alone that the unity of Humanity can
be consummated, because it is possible only

96 RECONCILIATION

through the gospel. And the preacher of this
gospel in the world is the collective Church.

We must, therefore, avoid every idea of atone-
ment which seems to reduce it to God's dealing
with a mass of individuals instead of with the
race as a whole — instead of a racial, a social, a
collective salvation, in which alone each indi-
vidual has his place and part. Our Protestant
theology has been too individualist, too little
coUectivist. And that has had serious social
consequences as well as theological. The basis
of a social salvation is the final redemption in
one act of the total race. And that act was the
Cross of Christ.

RECONCILIATION, ATONEMENT,
AND JUDGMENT

I

IV

RECONCILIATION, ATONEMENT, AND
JUDGMENT

THE point at which I broke off yesterday
wavS this. I was pointing out that
objective atonement is absolutely necessary.
Of course, it is quite necessary also that we
should know what is meant by an objective
atonement. The real objective element in
atonement is not that something was offered
to God, but that* God made the offering.
And in this connection I hinted that my
remarks to-day and to-morrow would have
to follow the idea also, that God's atonement
initially was made on behalf of the race, and
on behalf of individuals in so far as they were
members of the race. The first charge upon
Christ and His Cross was the reconciliation of
the race, and of its individuals by implication.

We start to-day, then, from the position that
God made the atonement. This (we saw) suggests

The Work of Christ. 99

100 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

a number of questions, not to say difficulties.
If God made the atonement, but reconciliation
meant no more than simply the moving and
attuning of individual men in their subjective
experience, it might seem as though it de-
stroyed the solidarity of mankind and made it
granular. And the peril there is that what-
ever destroys that, destroys the universality of
Christ's work. But that atomism is not the
Gospel. To reduce the reconciliation merely
to the aggregate of individual conversions
would be a total misrepresentation of New
Testament reconciliation, which is both solidary
and final.

Then there is another difficulty. If we say
that the one object of the atonement was not
the reconciliation of God, but the reconciliation
of man to God, then it looks as though the
work of Christ became only the grand helio-
graph from divine heights, the chief word in
what I might call a language of signs ; as though
it were only the leading expression of God's
will towards men, instead of something actually
done, and not merely said or shown, by God,
something really done from the depth of God
Who is the action of the world, something eter-
nally changing the whole situation, and destiny,
and responsibility of our race. If God in Christ

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 101

simply said the most powerful word about His
goodwill, His j)lacability, and His readiness to
forgive, that would destroy the permanence of
Christ — the depth of His work, and the height
of His place. Thus God would be saying more
than He did ; and we have a natural and proper
difficulty in thoroughly trusting people who say
more than they do. If Christ were simply an
expression of God's love, then His Cross would
simply be what is called an object-lesson of
God's love ; or it would simply be a witness
to the serious way in which God takes man's
sin ; or it might even be no more than the ex-
pression of the strong conviction of Jesus
about it. We are exposed to the danger there
always is when we make revelation a word
rather than a deed, something said instead of
something done, when we make it manifesta-
tion only and not redemption. The work of
Christ would be only something educational,
or at most impressive. And what happens
then ? If the work of Christ is only impres-
sively educational, if the need and value of it
ceases when we have recognised its meaning,
when we have taken God's word for it in
Christ that He does really love us, what
happens then? Why, as soon as the lesson
had been learnt, the work of Christ might be

102 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

left behind. There are a great many people
to-day who are Christian in a way, but have
very loose ideas as to what is involved centrally
in their Christianity. Many of them are in this
position I describe — they think they can ignore
Christ and the work of Christ since they have
assimilated the lesson these taught. If the
Cross is a kind of practical parable which God
set forth of His love and His willingness to
save, then when the parable has done its work
it can be forgotten. When the lesson has been
taught, the example can be put away into the
school store-room until we want it again. It
is exhausted for the time being, until somebody
else comes who needs the same lesson. In that
case the work of Christ simply sinks to the
level of other valuable events in the history
of religion. It is not fontal but episodic. It
represents the transition from Judaism to a reli-
gion of Humanity. It represents a great move-
ment in the history of religion, when religion
ceased to be national and particularist, and
became universal, when it ceased to be ritual and
became spiritual. The death of Christ would
thus be a great monument in the past, which
fades out of sight as we surmount it and leave
it behind ; and it does not retain a permanent
meaning and function at the centre of our faith.

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 103

§

I said that the work of Christ meant not only
an action on man, it meant an action on God.
Yet I pointed out that it was more false than
true to say that Christ and His death reconciled
God to man. I said that we must in some way
construe the matter as God reconciling Himself.
It was out of the question to think of any
reconciliation effected upon God by a third
party standing between God and man. God
could not be reconciled by man nor by one
neither God nor man. The only alternative,
therefore, is that God should reconcile Himself.
But then is there not something in that which
seems a little forced and unnatural ? Did God
have to compel Himself to change His feeling
about us ? Did He force Himself to be gracious ?
There is something wrong here surely, some-
thing that needs adjustment, explanation, re-
statement in some way.

Are we obliged to suppose that if God did
reconcile Himself it was in the sense of chanyfinsr
His oAvn heart and affection towards us ? I
have pointed out that the heart of God towards
us, His gracious disposition towards us, was
from His own holy eternity ; that grace is of the
unchangeable. God in that respect had not to
be changed. Was He changed at all then ? If

104 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

His heart was not changed, what remained in
Hina to be changed, what was changed in
connection with the work of Christ?

There was a change. And I am going to ask
you to recognise here another of those vakiable
distinctions of which the man without the evan-
gelical experience and its theological discipline
is so impatient. As I work my way through
the difficulties and questions that present them-
selves, over and over again I perceive that many
of the difficulties that seem so serious to some
turn entirely upon some valuable distinction
that has been ignored, often for lack of deep reli-
gion or due professional education. Of course
the man in the street says, as soon as he is
asked to distinguish, that that is getting into
the region of subtleties. Never mind the man
in the street. The distinguished person for hira
is the person with the least distinction from
himself, the person who gives him most satis-
faction with least trouble, the person who works
in black and white with no shades. Besides, the
man in the street is not devoted to his Bible, nor
to getting into the interior of the Bible, as you
preachers are. We must take our way, God's
way, and follow the subtle and searching Holy
Spirit as He leads and speaks in and through
the questions that arise to our earnest thought

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 105

concerning Christ's death. And the man in the
street must be left to the grace which has taken
us in from the street.

The distinction I ask you to observe is
between a change of feeling and a change of
treatment, between affection and discipline,
between friendly feeling and friendly relations.
God's feeling toward us never needed to be
changed. But God's treatment of us, God's
practical relation to us — that had to change. I
have pointed out that the relation between God
and man in reconciliation is a personal one, and
that, where you have real personal relation
and personal communion, if there is change on
one side there must be change on the other.
The question is as to the nature of the change.
We have barred out the possibility of its being a
change of affection, of hatred into grace. God
never ceased to love us even when He was most
angry and severe with us. It will not do to
abolish the reality of God's anger towards
us. True love is quite capable of being angry,
and must be angry and even sharp with its
beloved children. Let us fix our attention
more closely upon this distinction of mood and
manner.

106 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

§
Take the parable of the prodigal for illustra-
tion. There are those who say you have the
whole of the gospel really in the parable of the
prodigal son, that that was the culmination of
Christ's grand revelation of God. Well, if that
were so the wonder to me is, first, that the
apostles never seem to have used it ; and, second,
that having delivered this parable Christ did
not at once consider His mission discharged and
return to heaven. Or, on the other hand, why
did He not continue to live to a ripe and useful
age, reiterating in various forms and in different
settings this waiting (but inert) love and grace
of God ? We are moved sometimes to think He
might have done well had He not provoked
death so early, had He remained, like John, to
seventy or ninety years of age continually
publishing, applying, and spreading the message
which He gave His disciples. But you have not
the whole gospel in the parable of the prodigal
son. What is the function of a parable ? It is
one of the great discoveries and lessons taught
us by modern scholarship, that parables are not
allegories, because they exist for the sake of
one central idea. While we may allow our-
selves, under the suggestion of the Holy Spirit,
to receive hints of edifying truth from this or

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 107

the other phase or detail of the parable, we
have chiefly to ask, What was it in the mind of
Christ for the sake of which He uttered this
parable? Each parable puts in an ample ambit
one central idea. Now the one ruling idea in
the parable of the prodigal son is the idea of
the centrality, the completeness, the unreserved-
ness, the freeness, fullness, whole-heartedness of
God's grace — the absolute fullness of it, rather
than the method of its action. But however a
parable might preach that fullness, it took the
Cross and all its train to give it effect, to put it
into action, life, and history, to charge it with
the Spirit. Those who tell us that the whole
gospel is embodied in the parable say. You
observe nothing is suggested in the parable
about the Cross and the Atonement ; therefore
the Cross and the Atonement are subsequent
and gratuitous additions, confusing the gospel
of grace. But that turns Christ into a mere
preacher, instead of the centre of the world's
history. Bear in mind also that this parable was
spoken by the Christ who had the Cross in the
very structure of His personality as its voca-
tion, and at the root, therefore, of all His words.
That Cross was deep embedded in the very struc-
ture of Christ's Person, because nowadays you
cannot separate His Person from His vocation,

108 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

from the work He came to do, and the words He
came to speak. The Cross was not simply a
fate awaiting Christ in the future ; it pervaded
subliminally His holy Person. He was born for
the Cross. It was His genius, His destiny. It
was quite inevitable that, in a world Kke this.
One holy as Jesus was holy should come to the
Cross. The parable was spoken by One in
whom the Cross and all it stands for were
latent in His idea of God ; and it became
patent, came to the surface, became actual,
and practical, and powerful in the stress of
man's crisis and the fullness of God's time.
That is an important phrase. Christ Himself
came in a fullness of time. The Cross which
consummated and crowned Christ came in its
fullness of time. The time was not full during
Christ's life for preaching an atonement that life
could never make. Hence as to the method of
God's free and flowing grace the parable has
nothing to say. It does not even say that
the father went seeking the ]3rodigal. The
seeking grace of God we find there as little
as the redeeming grace. And so also you
have not the mode of grace's action on a
world. But, speaking of what you do have in
the parable, the father knows no change of
feeling towards the prodigal ; yet could he go

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 109

on making no difference? Could he go on
treating the prodigal as though he never had
become a prodigal ? He did not certainly when
he returned ; and as little could he before.
His heart followed the prodigal, but his re-
lations, his confidence, his intercourse were
with his brother. So long as the son is pro-
digal he cannot be treated as though he were
otherwise. Even repentance needs some gua-
rantee of permanence. The father's heart is
the same, but his treatment must be different.
Cases have been known where the father had
to expel the black sheep from the family for
the sake of the others. Loving the poor
creature all the same, he yet found it quite
impossible, in the interests of the whole family,
to treat him as though he were like the rest.
So God needed no placation, but He could not
exercise His kindness to the prodigal world. He
certainly could not restore communion with its
individuals, without doing some act which per-
manently altered the relation. And this is what
set up that world's reconciliation with Him. It
was set up by an act of crisis, of judgment.

Remember always we are dealing with the
world in the first instance and not with indi-

110 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

viduals. I constantly come back upon that, for
the orthodox and their critics forget it alike.
I suppose the prodigal was a slave, I suppose
he had sold himself to that vile work of swine-
feeding. When he returned I suppose he ran
away from his master. But the prodigal world,
of course, could not run away from its master,
it could not run away from the power that it
was enslaved to. " Myself am hell." Supposing
now the prodigal had not been able to run away.
Supposing he had been guarded as a convict
is guarded, then he could only come back by
being bought off. As soon as you go beyond
the one theme of the parable, the absolute
heartiness of grace, and begin to think of grace's
methods with a world, this point must be faced
by all who are more than pooh-pooh senti-
mentalists in their religion. We have to deal
with a world in a bondage it could not break.
If the prodigal could not have arisen to go to
his father ; if the elder brother had sold up the
whole farm, reduced himself to poverty, taken
the sum in his hand, followed the prodigal
into the far country, and there spent the whole
amount in buying his brother's manumission
from his master before a judge; and if it
was all done by mutual purpose and consent
of himself and his father ; would not that act

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT IH

be a great and effective thing, not so much
in producing repentance but in a harder matter
— in destroying a lien and making absolute cer-
tainty of the father's forgiveness? He is sure
because the father not only says but pays. His
mere repentance could not make him sure,
could not place him at home again, could not
put liim where he set out. His mere repentance
could turn his heart to his father, but it could
not break the bar and fill him with certainty of
his father's love and forgiveness. And that is
what the sinner wants, and what the great and
classic penitents find it so hard to believe. Now,
the parable tells us of the freeness of God's
grace, and its fullness, but the Cross enacts it
and inserts it in real history. It shows to what
a length that grace could go in dealing with a
difficulty otherwise insuperable when we turn
from a single prodigal to a world. The act
which I have described by a New Testament
extension of the parable— the act of Christ's
Cross— is not simply to produce individual re-
pentance, but it has its great effect upon the
relation of the whole world to God. And the
judgment, the payment, was on that scale. I
will show you later that it was not pain that
was paid but holy obedience.

What the elder brother does in the supposi-

112 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

tion I have made is twofold. First, he secures
the liberation, he deals with the equitable condi-
tions of the release. Secondly, he also acts upon
the prodigal's heart and confidence. In the first
case he meets certain judicial conditions, cer-
tain social conditions, ethical conditions, bound
up with the existing order, the law of society
in which the jjrodigal was living. But it is
said sometimes that there the analogy fails,
because the elder son, acting for the father,
in my extension of the story, has to deal with
a law which is outside his control and outside
the father's control ; he has to deal with the
law of society, with the law of the land where
the prodigal was. Whereas, if you come to
think about God, there can be no social and
moral conditions which are outside His control.
There, it is said, your illustration breaks down.
God could ignore any such impediments at
His loving will. Now, that is just the crucial
mistake that you make, that even Kant does
not allow us to make. God could do nothing
of the kind. So far the omnipotence of God is
a limited omnipotence. He could not trifle with
His own holiness. He could will nothing against
His holy nature, and He could not abolish the
judgment bound up with it. Nothing in the
compass of the divine nature could enable Him

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 113

to abolish a moral law, the law of holiness. That
would be tampering with His own soul. It had
to be dealt with. Is the law of God more loose
than the law of society ? Can it be taken liber-
ties with, played with, and put aside at the
impulse even of love? How little we should
come to think of God's love if that were possible!
How essential the holiness of that love is to
our respect for it and our faith in its unchange-
ableness! If God's love were not essentially
holy love, in course of time mankind would
cease to respect it, and consequently to trust
it. We need not a fond love, but a love we
can trust, and for ever. What love wants is not
simply love in response, but respect and con-
fidence. In the bringing up of children to-day
one often wishes they had more training in
respect, even if less in affection. God's holy
law is His own holy nature. His love is under
the condition of eternal respect. It is quite
unchangeable. It is just as much outside His
operation, so far as abrogation goes, as was
the law of the far country to the father of
the prodigal.

§
What was there in the work of Christ which
went beyond a mere impressive declaration of a
God who could not help being gracious, but fell

Tlie Work of Christ. g

114 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

on the prodigal's neck without more ado ? It
was solidary judgment. I am urging that the
difficulty we have in answering that question
is due to our modern individualism. Individual-
ism has done its work for Christianity for the
time being, and we are now suffering from
its after-effects. We do not realise that we are
each one of us saved in a racial salvation. We
are each one of us saved in the salvation of the
race, in a coUectivist redemption. What Christ
saved was the whole human race. What He
bought, if we may provisionally use the meta-
phor, was the Church, and not any aggregate
of isolated souls. So great is a soul, and so great
is its sin, that each man is only saved by an act
which at the same time saves the whole world.
If you reduce or postpone Christ's effect upon
the totality of the world, you are in the long run
preparing the way for a poor estimate of the
human soul. The more you abolish the sig-
nificance of Christ's redeeming death once for
all, the more you are doing to lower Humanity
morally, and make it a less precious thing than
the cosmic world around us. My plea is that
with no atonement, no solidary judgment of sin,
you reduce reconciliation not only to sentiment
but to a piecemeal series of individual repent-
ances and conversions, leaving it a problem

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 115

whether the race as a whole will be saved at
last. For the universality of Christianity (so
dear to Broad Church) you must have that fore-
gone finality which the New Testament offers in
the atonement.

I pointed out to you that in the Old Testa-
ment, for the most part, what faced God was not
this prophet or that saint, this king or that par-
ticular juncture, but Israel. I said that in the
subsequent phases of Jewish religion, indeed,
that idea has its detail filled in ; and in the later
psalms, in many of those psalms which we know
could only have been written after the captivity,
you have pious individualism sometimes express-
ing itself very strongly. But there the two war-
ring notes were — new individualism and old col-
lectivism ; and between these there never came
complete reconcilement until Christ came and
Christ's work. What have we in that great text,
John iii. 16 ? " God so loved the world" — the world
was the prime object of God's love — " God so
loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten
Son, that ivhosoever believeth on Him should not
perish, but have eternal life." Love in the first
instance directed upon the world, but directed
upon the world in such a way that it should be
taken home in every individual experience.
Mark the two words, " the world " and " who-

116 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

soever." Dwell upon the contrast. God loved
not this or that individual, or group of indi-
viduals, only. " God so loved the world " that
He did something to it in such a way that every
individual "whosoever" should receive the bene-
fit, and receive it in the only way which made
a world of saved individuals possible. You can
never compound a saved world out of any
number of saved individuals. But God did so
save the world as to carry individual salvation
in the same act. The Son of God was not an
individual merely ; He was the representative of
the whole race, and its vis-a-vis, on its own scale.
So that, in Ephesians, the Church, in rising to
Christ, had to acquire the fullness of a complete
and colossal man. No individual prophet of sal-
vation could save the world. He could not be
capable of a pity great enough, or a love. The
world could only be saved by somebody as large
as the world, and indeed larger. If he could
not save the world he could make no etei'nal
salvation of any individual. It is universal,
eternal salvation every way — universal not by
the addition of all units, but in a solidary sense.
What we are tempted to think of in our common
version of Christianity is a mass of people, great
or small, a mass of individuals, each one of
whom makes his own terms with God and gets

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 117

discharge of his sin. It is salvation by private
bargain. In conversion every individual makes
his own peace with God through Jesus Christ,
so that the work of God becomes a mere change
of attitude, feeling, or temper on the side of man
after man. That is not the New Testament idea.
Again, in speaking of the change in God, Christ
has been represented as enabling God to forgive
by enabHng Him to adjust His two attributes of
justice and mercy within Himself. Some theo-
logians of the Reformation — -Melancthon for one
— spoke of Christ in that fashion. But we have
entirely outgrown that way of thinking and
talking about it. It has produced much diffi-
culty and scepticism. What does it proceed
upon? It proceeds upon a certain definition
of an attribute, as though an attribute were
something loose within God which He could
manipulate — as though the attributes of God
were not God Himself, unchangeable God, in
certain relations. The attributes of God are
not things within Himself which He could
handle and adjust. An attribute of God is God
Himself behaving, with all His unity, in a par-
ticular way in a particular situation. God ih
a thinking God, let us say. He has the attri-
bute of thought. Does that mean that the
attribute of thought could be taken away,

118 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

that God could divest Himself of it ? No. The
thought of God is simply God thinking. So
also the love of God is not an attribute of
God; it is God loving. The holiness of God
is not an attribute of God ; it is the whole
God Himself as holy. There is nothing in the
Bible about the strife of attributes. Rather
remember 1 John i. 9, " He is faithful and just
to forgive us our sins." It is in the exercise of
His faithfulness to Himself and His observance
of justice that He should forgive. It lies in
the very holiness that condemns. There is a
similar text in the Psalms, " Thou art merciful ;
Thou givest to every man according to his
vsrork." He is the faithful and just to forgive.
There needed no adjustment of His justice with
His forgiveness. So also in Isaiah, " A just God
and a Saviour." There can therefore be no strife
of attributes.

§
What, then, does it mean when we hear about
the anger of God being turned away ? To begin
with, the anger of God means a great deal more
than His passion. His temper, His mode of
feeling, more than anger as an affection. The
anger of God in the Bible means much rather
the judgment of God in the reaction of His
moral and spiritual order. The judgment of God

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 119

is perfectly compatible with His continued love,
just as a father's punishment is perfectly com-
patible with his love for his children. The
father has to discipline his children. He insti-
tutes certain laws, the children disobey; they
must be punished, or, using the more dignified
term, judged. The anger of God : we shall get
the most meaning out of it when we think of it
as the judgment of God, the exalted, inflexible
judgment of God.

§
Taking a step further, it is judgment on the
world. It seems at first sight as though it
were meaningless to speak as if God could be
wroth with the world and yet gracious and
loving to individuals. But I may be very angry
with a political party, yet I cherish respect and
love for individuals belonging to that party.
We must be on our guard against narrow, indi-
vidual views, against treating individuals accord-
ing to their public and collective condemnation.
We are created, redeemed, judged as members
of a race or of a Church. Salvation is personal,
but it is not individual. (There is another dis-
tinction for you, if you have come in off the
street.) It is personal in its appropriation but
collective in its nature. What did the Reforma-
tion stand for ? Not for religious individualism.

120 RECONOILTATION AND ATONEMENT

But I hear some one asking in the back of his
mind, Was not the Reformation the charter of
private judgment and individual independence ?
It was nothing of the kind. It vs^^as the charter
of personal direct faith and its freedom. What
the Reformation did was to turn religion from
being a thing mainly institutional into a thing
mainly personal. The reformers were as strong
as their ojDponents about the necessity of the
Church for the soul — though as its home, not its
master. They were not individualists. Indi-
vidualism is fatal to faith. It was the backbone
of the rationalism and atheism of the French
Revolution. The Reformation stands for per-
sonal religion and social religion and not for
religious individualism.

There is no such thing as an absolute indi-
vidual. What is the change that takes place
when we are converted? Our change is really
from one membership to another, from member-
ship of the world to membership of the Church.
When we become a member of the Church we are
not really changed from individualism, but from
membership of the world. It is membership
either way. The greatest egoist and self-seeker
is a member of the world. He could not indulge
his egotism if it were not for the society in the
midst of which he lives and into which he is

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 121

articulated. He is a member of the world who
exploits his membership instead of serving with
it. When we are converted we are not con-
verted from a sheer and absolute individual.
There never was such a person. Certainly
Robinson Crusoe was not. We are converted
from membership of the world to membership
of Christ. Before our conversion and after
we belong. We are not absolute, solitary indi-
viduals. We are in a society, an organism.
We are made by the past. And our selfish,
godless actions and influence go out, radiate,
affect the organism as they could not do were
we absolute units. They spread far beyond our
memory or control. In the same way we are
acted upon by the other people. We are mem-
bers one of another both for evil and for good.
When you are told that evil is only selfishness it
is worth while bearing this in mind. Even as sel-
fish men, as egoists, we belong — only to a pagan
order instead of to Christ. The selfish man is a
member of a kingdom of evil. There is no such
thing as an absolute individual. Hence, to save
us, to reconcile us, involves the whole race we
belong to. Before God that race is an organic
unity. It is not a mere mass of atoms joined
together by various arbitrary relations, sym-
pathies, and affinities. Hence, as the race before

122 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

God is one, a personal God is able to do for the
race some one thing which at the same time is
good for every person in it.

But now, if the race is a unity, where does its
unity lie? Does it lie in our elementary affections
for each other, in the palpable relationships of
natural life with our parents, brothers, lovers,
and friends ? Or is the unity of the race simply
its capacity for being organised by skilful
engineers? Is the unity of the race like the
unity of machines? No. The unity of the
race is a moral unity. Therefore it is a unity
of conscience. If you want to find the trunk
out of which all the loves and practices of
humanity proceed, you must go to conscience
at the centre. That is where the unity of
Humanity lies. It is in the conscience, where
man is member of a vast moral world. It is
the one changeless order of the moral world,
emerging in conscience, that makes man uni-
versal. What have you to preach if you have
no gospel that goes to the foundations of human
conscience? What ground have you for a social
religion ? The most universal God is one that
goes there, not to the heart in the sense of
affections, but to the conscience. The great

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 123

motive for missions of every high kind is not
sentiment, but salvation. It is dangerous to
take your theology from poets and literary
people. You quote, " One touch of nature makes
the whole world kin." Well, if you are going to
build a religion on that, it will have a very short
life. In the long run nature means anarchy
when taken by and for itself. But it was never
meant to be taken by itself. It was meant to
go in an eternal context with super-nature. It
is not the touch of nature that makes us kin
enough for religion, for eternity, but the touch,
and more than a touch, of the supernatural —
not nature, but grace. What makes the world
God's world is the action and unity of God's
moral order of which our conscience speaks.

Now, if that order be broken, how can it be
healed ? If I slit the canvas of this tent it can
be patched. I make a fissure, but it is not ir-
remediable. I simply get some one to stitch it up.
At the w^orst I can have a new width put in. But
if the moral order, and its universal solidarity, its
holiness, is broken, how can that be healed?
That cannot be patched up. It is not merely a
rent in a tissue, a gap in a process, which the
same process goes on to heal into a scar. The
moral law differs from all natural law in having
in it a demand, a claim, an " ought " of a

124 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

universal kind. It is all of one piece. We use the
word " law " in a loose kind of way. We apply
the same word to gravitation and to the moral
law of retribution. It is that ambiguity of terms
which leads us astray. The moral law differs
from every other law in having a demand, and a
universal demand, a claim upon us for ever.
And that has to be made good as well as the
rents and bruises in us from our own collision
with it. It is not a gap that has to be made
good and sound. It is a claim, because we are
here in a moral and not a natural world. It is
one thing to make good a gap and another thing
to make good a claim. The claim must be met.
It will not do simply to draw the edges together
by mere amendment, to have God here and man
there, and gradually bring them together till
they unite. It is two moral persons with
moral passions we have to do with. It is moral
relationship that is in question, communion,
trustful mutuality, is the object of the divine
requirement. It is a case of moral, holy recon-
cilement. It is the expression of God's holy
personality whenever God makes His claim.
It is Himself in holy, changeless personality
that says, " Thou shalt." Then the claim can
only be honoured by personality of acknow-
ledgment. But what does that mean ? Some

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 125

confession, some compunction — "I have sinned?"
That is a poor acknowledgment of God's holi-
ness. It was neither in word nor in feeling that
we wounded that, but in life and deed. It must
be acknowledged in like fashion— practically.
The holiness of God is the sum of all His action
and relation to the world ; and the acknowledg-
ment of it must be made in like action. Do we
acknowledge the holiness of God's infinite law
simply when its penalty wrings from poor us a
confession of sin? We acknowledge natural
law in spite of ourselves when we suffer its
penalty amid our rebellion. But the acknow-
ledgment of moral, of holy law is something
different. It must be actively acknowledged —
acknowledged not in spite of ourselves but by
ourselves, with our whole heart ; and it cannot
be acknowledged simply by individual, or, in-
deed, any suffering. For divine judgment it
must be acknowledged in kind and scale, and
met by a like holiness. Mere suffering is no
acknowledgment really ; it is a pure sequel ; it
is not a confession of the moral law and its
righteousness, only of its power. Mere suffering
is no confession of the holiness of God. God,
truly, might and does assert His power upon
our defiance by making us suffer. But do you
think any holiness, any loving holiness, could

126 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

be satisfied with making the offender suffer?
There is only one thing that can satisfy the
hoHness of God, and that is holiness — adequate
holiness. To judge is to secure that at cost of
any pain both to the judge and the culprit. But
the pain is not the end. Nothing, no penalty,
no passionate remorse, no verbal acknowledg-
ment, no ritual, can satisfy the claim of holy
law — nothing but holiness, actual holiness, and
holiness upon the same scale as the one holy
law which Avas broken. The confession must be
adequate. Fix that word in your mind. All
your repentance, and all the world's repentance,
would not be adequate to satisfying, establish-
ing the broken law of holy God. Confession
must be adequate — as Christ's was. We do not
now speak of Christ's sufferings as being the
equivalent of what we deserved, but we speak
of His confession of God's holiness, his accept-
ance of God's judgment, being adequate in a
way that sin forbade any acknowledgment
from us to be. For the only adequate con-
fession of a holy God is perfectly holy man.
Wounded holiness can only be met by a
personal holiness upon the scale of the race,
upon the universal scale of the sinful race, and
upon the eternal scale of the holy God who was
wounded. It is not enough that the eternal

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 127

validity of the holy law should be declared as
some prophet might arise and declare it, with
power to make the world admire, as the great
and sublime Kant did. It must take effect.
Prophets have arisen who have produced
tremendous effect by insisting ujion the moral
ultimacy in life and things. The greatest
prophets of the last century, like George Eliot,
Carlyle, Ruskin, and Maurice among ourselves
had that as a chief note. But it is not
enough that the eternal validity and inflexi-
bility of eternal law should be powerfully,
searchingly declared. It must take effect. Its
breach must be closed up not merely by recog-
nition, but by judgment. It is not enough that
the whole human race should come confessing,
" We have offended against Thy holy law."
That would recognise the holy law and confess
its place, but it would not give it its own, it
would not bring to pass that which is essential
to holiness, namely, judgment. It would not
actually establish holiness in a kingdom, in
command of history. You cannot separate the
idea of holiness and its kingdom from the idea
of judgment. In the Old Testament the final
coming of the Great Salvation was always con-
nected with a great judgment, which was
therefore not a terror, as we view it, but the

128 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

grandest hope. If the essence of God is that He
should be holy, it is equally essential that He
should judge. If He sets up actual holiness it
must be by actual adjustment of everything
to it. It is not enough that we should say,
" Thou art our Judge, we submit and are will-
ing to take the penalty. The wages of sin is
death." All that is best and greatest in human
life turns upon something more than that.
There is a phrase which I never tire of quoting,
and it is this : " The dignity of man is better
assured if he were broken upon the main-
tenance of that holiness of God than if it
were put aside just to give him an existence."
The dignity, the very dignity of man himself
is better assured if he were broken upon the
maintenance of that holiness of God than if it
were put aside arbitrarily, just to let him off
with his life. This holy order is as essential
to man's greatness as it is to Gods ; and that is
why the holy satisfaction Christ made to God's
holiness is in the same act the glorifier of
the new humanity. Any religion which leaves
out of supreme count the judging holiness
of God is making a great contribution to the
degradation of man. We need a religion which
decides the eternal destiny of man ; and unless
holiness were jDractically and adequately estab-

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 129

lished — not merely recognised and eulogised,
but established — there could be no real, deep,
permanent change in the world or the sinner.
The change in the treatment of us by eternal
grace must rest on judgment taking effect.
Man is not forgiven simply by forgetting and
mending, by agreeing that no more is to be
said about it. To make little of sin is to
belittle the holiness of God ; and from a re-
duced holiness no salvation could come, nor
could human dignity remain.

Here, perhaps, you want to ask me what I
mean exactly by saying that the judgment-death
of Christ set up a real and actual kingdom of
holiness. It is a point which it is easier for
faith to realise than for theology to explain.
But the answer would lie along this line : What
Christ presented to God for His complete joy
and satisfaction was a perfect racial obedience.
It was not the perfect obedience of a saintly
unit of the race. It was a racial holiness. God's
holiness found itself again in the humbled holi-
ness of Christ's " public person." He presented
before God a race He created for holiness. Re-
member that the very nature of our faith in
Christ is union with Him. The kingdom is set

The Work of Christ. JQ

130 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

up by Christians being united with the work, the
victory, the obedience, the holiness of the King.
Christ, in His victorious death and risen life,
has power to unite the race to Himself, and
to work His complete holiness into its actual
experience and history. He has power, by
uniting us with Him in His Spirit, to reduce
Time to acknowledge in act and fact His
conclusive victory of Eternity. When you
think of what He did for the race and its
history, you must on no account do what the
Church and its theology has too often done —
you must not omit our living union with Him.
It is not enough to believe that He gained a
victory at a historic point. Christ is the
condensation of history. You must go on to
think of His summary reconciliation as being
worked out to cover the whole of history and
enter each soul by the Spirit. You must think
of the Cross as setting up a new covenant and
a new Humanity, in which Christ dwells as the
new righteousness of God. " Christ for us " is
only intelligible as " Christ in us " and we in Him.
By uniting us to Himself and His resurrection
in His Spirit He becomes the eternal guarantee
of the historical consummation of all things
some great day. I return to this later.

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 131

Sometimes, when I have been talking about
this claim of God's holiness, a critic has said :
" You are treating the holiness of God as
though it were a power outside God, tying
His hands." Nothing of the kind. What is
meant by the holiness of God is the holy
God. We talk nonsense in a like way about
the decrees of God. We say they stand for
the wretched survival of an outworn Cal-
vinism, as though they were things that God
could handle. Do you think that mighty men
such as the great Reformers were would have
been led into saying the things they did about
God if they thought the decrees were simply
things God could handle, or things like a doom
on God ? The decrees of God were to them God '
decreeing. The holiness of God was God as holy.
When that holiness is wounded or defied, could
God be content to take us back with a mere
censure or other penance and the declaration
that He was holy ? We could not respect a God
like that. Servants despise indulgent masters.
Sinners would despise a God who would take us
back when we wept, and speak thus : " Let us
say no more about it. You did very wrong, and
you have suffered for it, and I ; but let us forget
it now you have come back." We should not

132 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

respect that. We should go on, as servants do in
the case I have named, to take more liberties
still. He would be a God who only talked His
holiness and did not put it into force. Now, if
our repentance were our atonement, and the
Cross were simply an object-lesson to us of
God's patient and tender mercy to penitence.
He would be talking, I said, and not acting. He
would mention the gravity of our sin very im-
pressively, but that would not be establishing
goodness actually in the history and experience
of man. The sinner's reconciliation to a God
of holy love could not take place if guilt
were not destroyed, if judgment did not take
place on due scale, if the wrath of God did
not somehow take real effect. You say, per-
haps, it did take effect in the unseen world
of spirits. But the moral world is not a world
of ghostly spirits. It is the unseen side of the
world of history and of experience, it is its
inner reality and centre. The vindication, the
judgment, must take place within human his-
tory and experience. It must take place in the
terms of human history, by human action, in a
place, at some point, on a due scale and with ade-
quate depth. That was what took place in the
Cross of Christ. The idea of judgment is not
complete without the idea of a crisis, a day of j

RECX)NCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 133

judgment. Now the Cross of Christ was the
world's great day of judgment, the crisis of all
crises for history. The holy love of God yearn-
ing over souls could not deal with individual
sinners, there was a cloud between God and the
race, till the holiness was owned and perfectly
praised by its racial confession, until holiness
was confessed much more than sin, until on
man's side there was not only confession of
sin but confession of holiness from sin's side
amid the experience of a judgment on the
scale of the race, until the confessing race
was thus put in right relation to God's holi-
ness. Then judgment had done its perfect
work. The race's sin was covered and atoned
by it, i.e., by the God who bore it. Individuals
could not be reconciled to a holy God until
He thus reconciled the world. Not until sin had
been brought to do its very worst, and had in
that culminating act been foiled, judged, and
overcome ; not till then could individuals receive
the reconciliation. That was the unitary recon-
ciliation they must receive in detail. God there,
in a racial holiness amid racial curse, sets
up a racial salvation, which our souls enter
upon by faith. It is by Himself in His change-
less love and pity that it is set up. It is not the
Son's suffering and death, but His holy obedience

134 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

to both that is the satisfying thing to God, the
holiness of God the Son. In a sense, a great
solemn sense, it is an exercise of God's absolute
self-satisfaction, exhibited after a long historic
process, amidst the dissatisfaction of a world's
ruin. " In His love and in His pity He redeemed
them." He set up reconciliation by an act of
judgment on His Son, cutting off His own right
hand that we might enter into the Kingdom
of heaven : " In His love and in His pity He
redeemed them ; and He bare them, and carried
them all the days of old." The redemption was
a thing that was coming through the whole of
Israel's history, and in a remoter sense through
the whole history of the world. The changeless
holiness must assert itself in such judgment as
surely as in the kingdom. You all believe that
the holiness of God must assert itself in the
Kingdom of God. But how can there be a final
kingdom without final judgment? Is not all
judgment in the name of the king, even in our
human society? Are not king and judge in-
separable, as inseparable as king and father?
We say to-day that king and father are in-
separable. But king and judge are equally
inseparable, especially if you take the great Old
Testament idea. Christ submitted with all His
heart to God's holy final judgment on the race.

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 135

He did not view it as an unfortunate incident
in His life. He did not treat it as though it
happened to drop upon Him. But He treated
it as the grand will of God, as the effectuation
in history of God's holiness, which holiness
must have complete response and practical
confession both on its negative side of judg-
ment and its positive side of obedience. Christ's
death was atoning not simply because it was
sacrifice even unto death, but because it was
sacrifice unto holy and radical judgment. There
is something much more than being obedient
unto death. Plenty of men can be obedient unto
death ; but the core of Christianity is Christ's
being obedient unto judgment, and unto the
final judgment of holiness. It is being obedient
to a kind of death prescribed by God, indispen-
sable to the holiness of God's love, necessitated
in such a world by the last moral conditions, and
not simply inflicted by the wickedness of men.

Get rid of the idea that judgment is chiefly
retribution, and directly infliction. Realise that
it is, positively, the establishing and the securing
of eternal righteousness and holiness. View
punishment as an indirect and collateral neces-
sity, like the surgical pains that make room for
nature's curing power. You will then find
nothing morally repulsive in the idea of judg-

136 RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT

ment effected in and on Christ, any more than
in the thought that the kingdom was set up
in Him.

§
To conclude, then, God could only justify man

before Him by justifying Himself and His holy
law before men. If He had not vindicated His
holiness to the uttermost in that way of judg-
ment, it would not be a kind of holiness that
men could trust. Thus a faith which could
justify man, which could make a foundation for
a new humanity, could not exist. We can only
be eternally justified by faith in a God who
justifies Himself as so holy that He must set
up His holiness in human history at any price,
even at the price of His own beloved and
eternal Son.

I close, then, upon that unchangeable word of
God's self -justifying holiness. Even the sinner
could not trust a love that could not justify itself
as holy. It is the holiness in God's love, I urge,
that alone enables us to trust Him. Without
that we should only love Him, and the love
would fluctuate. For we could not be perfectly
sure that His would not. It is the holiness in
God's love that is the eternal, stable, unchange-
able element in it — the holiness secured for
history and its destiny in the Cross. It is only

RECONCILIATION AND ATONEMENT 137

the unchangeable that we could trust ; and
there alone we find it. If we only loved the
love of God, we should have no stable, eternal,
universal religion. But we love the holy love
He established in Christ, and therefore we
are safe with an everlasting salvation.

THE CROSS THE GREAT
CONFESSIONAL

THE CROSS THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL

IN the days of our fathers Christian belief
was more solid within the Church than it
is now ; and the defending and expounding of
Christianity, more especially the defending of
it, had to concern itself with outsiders — outside
the Church, and outside Christianity very often.
To-day our difficulties have changed ; and a
great part of our exposition must keep in view
the fact that some of the most dangerous chal-
lenges of Christianity are found amongst those
who claim the Christian name. There are those
who have a very real reverence for the char-
acter of Jesus Christ, and they can speak, and
do speak, quite sincerely, with great devotion
and warmth and beauty, about Christ, and
about many of the ideas that are associated
with apostolic Christianity. All the same, they

141

142 THE CROSS

are strongly and sometimes even violently,
antagonistic to that redemption which is the
very centre of the Christian faith ; and they
make denials and challenges which are bound
to tell upon the existence of that faith before
many generations are over. We do not take
the true measure of the situation unless we
realise that the thing which is at stake at this
moment is something that will not affect the
present generation, but is sure to affect two or
three generations hence. Those who are con-
cerned about Christianity on the largest scale
to-day are concerned with what may be its
position and its prospects then. The ideas at
the centre of the Christian faith are too large,
too deep and subtle, to show their effects
in one age ; and the challenge of them does
not show its effect in one generation or even
in two. Individuals, society, and the Church,
indeed, are able to go on, externally almost un-
affected, by the way that they have upon them
from the past ; and it is only within the range
of several generations that the destruction of
truths with such a comprehensive range as
those of Christianity takes effect. Therefore it
is part of the duty of the Church, in certain
sections and on certain occasions, to be less
concerned about the effect of the Gospel upon

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 143

the individual immediately, or on the present
age, and to look ahead to what may be the
result of certain changes in the future. God
sets watchmen in Zion who have to keep their
eye on the horizon; and it is only a drunken
army that could scout their warning. We are
not only bound to attend to the needs and
interests of the present generation; we are
trustees for a long future, as well as a long
past. Therefore it is quite necessary that the
Church should give very particular attention
to these central and fundamental points whose
influence, perhaps, is not so promptly prized,
and whose destruction would not be so mightily
felt at once, but would certainly become apparent
in the days and decades ahead.

That is why one feels bound to invite atten-
tion, and to press attention, upon points con-
cerning which it may very easily be said, " These
are matters that do not concern my faith and
my piety ; I can afford to let these things alone."
Perhaps A, B, and C can, and X, Y, and Z can ;
but the Christian Church cannot afford to let
these things alone. The Church carries the
individual amid much failure of his faith ;
there is a vicarious faith; but what is to
carry the Church if its faith fail? Remove
concern from these things, and the effect of

144 THE CROSS

the collective message of the Church to the
great world becomes undermined. Then the
world must look somewhere else than to the
Church for that which is to save it. That is
some apology for dwelling upon points which
many people would say were simply theological
and were outside the interest of the individual
Christian. Theology simply means thinking in
centuries. Religion tells on the present, but
theology tells on the religion of the future
and the race. i

Moreover, there are always natures among I
Christian people who refuse, and properly
refuse, to remain satisfied with superficial
experiences or current views of their faith.
They are bound by the spirit that moves
within them— by the kind of temperament God
has given them they are bound to penetrate
to the heart, to the depths of things. Their
work does not immediately pay ; and while they
grind in their mill the Philistines mock and the
libertines jeer. But it would be a great misfor-
tune if the whole of the work of the Church
were measured by the standard which is so
necessary in the world— the standard of what
will immediately pay, or promptly tell. It is,
of course, a great thing to go back upon the
history of Christianity, and to point out to our-

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 145

selves and to our people the great things that
Christianity has done in the course of history.
But you cannot rest Christianity upon that.
You can only rest Christianity upon Christ
Himself, and His living presence in the New
Humanity. You can put the matter in this
way. You can ask, On what did the Chris-
tianity rest of those who believed in the very
first years of the Church's hfe? They had no
results of Christianity before them. They had
no history of the Church before them. They
had not the glorious story of Christian
phUanthropy before them, nor the magnificent
expansion of Christian doctrine, nor the enor-
mous influence of the Christian Church and its
effect upon the course of the world's history.
On what did they rest their faith ? That upon
which they rested their faith must be that upon
which we rest our faith when we come to a
real crisis, and are driven into a real corner.
It thus becomes necessary to go into the deep
thmgs of God as they are revealed to us by the
Holy Spirit, through His inspired apostles, in
Christ and His Cross.

§
From what I have said you wiU be prepared
to hear me state that reconcihation is effected
by the representative sacrifice of Christ cruci-

The Work of Christ. jj

146 THE CROSS

fied ; by Christ crucified as the representative of
God on the one hand and of Humanity, or the
Church, on the other hand. Also it was by
Christ crucified in connection with the divine
judgment. Judgment is a far greater idea than
sacrifice. For you see great sacrifices made for
silly or mischievous causes, sacrifices which show
no insight whatever into the moral order or the
divine sanctity. Now this sacrifice of Christ,
when you connect it with the idea of judgment,
must in some form or other be dsscribed as a
penal sacrifice. Round that word penal there
rages a great deal of controversy. And I am
using the word with some reserve, because there
are forms of interpreting it which do the idea
injustice. The sacrifice of Christ was a penal
sacrifice. In what sense is that so? We can
begin by clearing the ground, by asking. In
what sense is it not true that the sacrifice of
Christ was penal? Well, it cannot be true in
the sense that God punished Christ. That is an
absolutely unthinkable thing. How could God
punish Him in whom He was always well
pleased? The two things are a contradiction
in terms. And it cannot be true in the sense
that Christ was in our stead in such a way as
to exclude and exempt us. The sacrifice of
Christ, then, was penal not in the sense of God

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 147

so punishing Christ that there is left us only
rehgious enjoyment, but in this sense. There is
a penalty and curse for sin ; and Christ consented
to enter that region. Christ entered voluntarily
into the pain and horror which is sin's penalty
from God. Christ, by the deep intimacy of His
sympathy with men, entered deeply into the
blight and judgment which was entailed by
man's sin, and which must be entailed by man's
sin if God is a holy and therefore a judging
God. It is impossible for us to say that God
was angry with Christ ; but still Christ entered
the wrath of God, understanding that phrase
as I endeavoured to explain it yesterday. He
entered the penumbra of judgment, and from
it He confessed in free action. He praised and
justified by act, before the world, and on the
scale of all the world, the holiness of God. You
can therefore say that although Christ was not
punished by God, He bore God's penalty upon
sin. That penalty was not lifted even when the
Son of God passed through. Is there not a real
iistinction between the two statements ? To
say that Christ was punished by God who was
ilways well pleased with Him is an outrageous
ihing. Calvin himself repudiates the idea. But
^e may say that Christ did, at the depth of that
;reat act of self-identification with us when He

148 THE CROSS

became man, He did enter the sphere of sin's
penalty and the horror of sin's curse, in order
that, from the very midst and depth of it. His
confession and praise of God's hoHness might
rise like a spring of fresh water at the bottom
of the bitter sea, and sweeten all. He justified
God in His judgment and wrath. He justified
God in this thing.

So the act of Christ had this twofold aspect.
On the one hand it was God offering, and on the
other hand it was man confessing. Now, what
was it that Christ chiefly confessed ? I hope you
have read McLeod Campbell on the Atonement.
Every minister ought to know that book, and
know it well. But there is one criticism to be
made upon the great, fine, holy book. And it
is this. It speaks too much, perhaps, about
Christ confessing human sin, about Christ
becoming the Priest and Confessor before God
of human sin and exposing it to God's judgment.
The horror of the Cross expresses the repen-
tance of the race before a holy God for its sin.
But considerable difficulties arise in that con-
nection, and critics were not slow to point them
out. How could Christ in any real sense confess
a sin, even a racial sin, with whose guilt He
had nothing: in common ? Now that is rather a

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 119

serious criticism if the confession of sin were
the first charge upon either Christ or us, if the
confession of human sin were the chief thing
that God wanted or Christ did. I think it is
certainly a defect in that great book that
it fixes our attention too much upon Christ's
vicarious confession of humayi sin. The same
criticism applies to another very fine book,
that by the late Canon Moberly, of Christ
Church, " Atonement and Personality." I once
had the privilege of meeting Canon Moberly
in discussion on this subject, and ventured to
point ovit that defect in his theory, and I was
relieved to find that on the occasion the same
criticism was also made by Bishop Gore. But
we get out of the difficulty, in part at least, if we
recognise that the great work of Christ, while
certainly it did confess human sin, was yet not
to confess that, but to confess something greater,
namely, God's holiness in His judgment upon
sin. His confession, indeed, was not in so many
words, but in a far more mighty way, by act and
deed of life and death. The great confession is
not by word of mouth — it is by the life, in the
sense, not of mere conduct, but in the great
personal sense in which life contains conduct
and transcends death. Christ confessed not
merely human sin — which in a certain sense,

150 THE CROSS

indeed, He could not do — but He confessed God's
holiness in reacting mortally against human sin,
in cursing human sin, in judging it to its very
death. He stood in the midst of human sin
full of love to man, such love as enabled Him
to identify Himself in the most profound, sym-
pathetic way with the evil race ; fuller still of
love to the God whose name He was hallowing ;
and, as with one mouth, as if the whole race
confessed through Him, as with one soul, as
though the whole race at last did justice to God
through His soul. He lifted up His face unto
God and said, " Thou art holy in all Thy judg-
ments, even in this judgment which turns not
aside even from Me, but strikes the sinful spot if
even I stand on it." The dereliction upon the
Cross, the sense of love's desertion by love, was
Christ's practical confession of the holy God's
repulsion of sin. He accepted the divine situa-
tion— the situation of the race before God. By
God's will He did so. By His own free consent
He did so. Remember the distinction between
God's changeless love and God's varying treat-
ment of the soul. God made Him gin, treated
Him as if He were sin ; He did not view Him as
sinful. That is quite another matter. God made
Him to be sin — it does not say He made Him sin-
ful. God lovingly treated Him as human sin, and

THE GREAT CONFESS! 3NAL 151

with His consent judged human sin in Him and
on Him. Personal guilt Christ could never con-
fess. There is that in guilt which can only be
confessed by the guilty. " I did it." That kind
of confession Christ could never make. That is
the part of the confession that we make, and w^e
cannot make it effectually until we are in union
with Christ and His great lone work of per-
fectly and practically confessing the holiness
of God. There is a racial confession that can
only be made by the holy ; and there is a per-
sonal confession that can only be made by the
guilty. That latter, I say, is a confession Christ
could never make. In that respect Christ did
not die, and did not suffer, did not confess, in
our stead. We alone, the guilty, can make
that confession ; but we cannot make it with
Christian effect without the Cross and the
confession there. We say then not only " I did
this," but "I am guilty before the holiness
confessed in the Cross." The grand sin is
not to sin against the law but against the
Cross. The sin of sins is not transgression,
but unfaith.

So also of holiness, there is a confession of
holiness which can only be made by God, the
Holy. If God's holiness was to be fully con-
fessed, in act and deed, in life, and death, and

152 THE CROSS

love transcending both, it can only be done by-
Godhead itself.

§
Therefore we press the words to their fullness
of meaning : " God was in Christ reconciling,"
not reconciling through Christ, but actually
j)resent as Christ reconciling, doing in Christ
His own work of reconciliation. It was done by
Godhead itself, and not by the Son alone. The
old theologians were right when they insisted
that the work of redemption was the work of
the whole Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit ; as we express it when we baptize into
the new life of reconcilement in the threefold
name. The holiness of God was confessed in
man by Christ, and this holy confession of
Christ's is the source of the truest confession of
our sin that we can make. Our saving confes-
sion is not merely " I did so and so," but " I did
it against a holy, saving God." " I have sinned
against heaven and in thy sight," sinned before
infinite holiness and forgiving grace. God could
not forgive until man confessed, and confessed
not only his own sin but confessed still more —
God's holiness in the judgment of sin. The
confession also had to be made in life and action,
as the sin was done. That is to say, it had to be
made religiously and not theologically, by an

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 153

experience and not an utterance. A verbal
confession, however sincere, could not fully own
an actual sin. If we sin by deed we must so
confess. It is made thus religiously, spiritu-
ally, experimentally, practically by Jesus Christ's
life, its crown of death, and His life eternal.
The more sinful man is, the less can he thus
confess either his own sin or God's holiness.
Therefore God did it in man by a love which
was as great as it was holy, by an infinite love.
That is to say, by a love which was as closely
and sympathetically identified with man as it
was identified with the power of the holy God.

So we have arrived at this. The great con-
fession was made not alone in the precise hour
of Christ's death, although it was consummated
there. It had to be made in life and act, and
not in a mere feeling or statement ; and for this
purpose death must be organically one with
the whole life. You cannot sever the death
of Christ from the life of Christ. When you
think of the self -emptying which brought
Christ to earth. His whole life here was a living
death. The death of Christ must be organic
with His whole personal life and action. And
that means not only His earthly life previous to
the Cross, but His whole celestial life from the
beginning, and to this hour, and to all eternity.

154 THE CROSS

The death of Christ is the central point of
eternity as well as of human history. His own
eternal life revolves on it. And we shall never
be so good and holy at any point, even in
eternity, that we shall not look into the Cross
of Christ as the centre of all our hope in earth
or heaven. It is Christ that works out His own
redemption and reconciliation, from God's right
hand, throughout the course of history. I
would gather that up in one phrase. Christ is
the perpetual providence of His own salvation.
Christ, acting through His Spirit, is the eternal
providence of His own salvation. The apostles
never separated reconciliation in any age from
the Cross and blood of Jesus Christ. If ever we
do that (and many are doing it to-day) we
throw the New Testament overboard. The bane
of so much that claims to be more spiritual
religion at the present day is that it simply
jettisons the New Testament, and with it historic
Christianity. The extreme critics, people that
live upon monism and immanence, rationalist
religion and spiritual impressionism, are people
w^ho are deliberately throwing overboard the
New Testament as a whole, deeply as they prize
it in parts. They say that the apostolic views
and interpretations of Christ's work may have
been all very well for people who knew no

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 155

better than men did at so early a period, but
we are now a long way beyond that, and
we must re-edit the New Testament theology,
especially as to Christ's death. I keep urging,
whatever we do let us do it frankly, let us do it
with our eyes open and with eyes competent to
take the measure of what we are doing. The
trying thing is that tremendous renunciations
should be blandly made, without, apparently,
any sense of their appalling dimensions, and
of the huge thing that is being so ignorantly
done. (See note at the end of this lecture.)

The apostles, I say, never separated recon-
ciliation from the Cross and the blood of Jesus
Christ. The historic Church has never done so,
with all its divisions. And what the Cross
meant for the apostles as Jews, with their his-
tory and education, was something like this. If
you go back to the Old Testament, you find
that the whole kingdom of God and destiny of
man turns on the treatment of sin. And either
the sin was atoned or the sinner was punished.
But there were some sins that never could be
atoned for, what are described as sins with
a high hand, presumptuous sins, deliberate,
defiant sins, as distinct from sins of ignorance

156 THE CROSS

or weakness, when a man so identified himself
with his sin that he became inseparable from
it. The man guilty of them was put outside
the camp, his comraunicsition was cut with the
saved community of Israel. He was committed
to the outer darkness. There remained only
punishment and death. The punishment was
expulsion from the covenant, and so from life.
And as there is little about immortality in
the Old Testament, it was death for good and
all. But in the Cross of Christ there is no
sin excluded from atonement. I know of
course what you are thinking about — the sin
against the Holy Ghost. That is far too large
a subject to enter on. I can only say that
I am not keeping it out of my survey.
And I repeat, there is no sin excluded from
atonement. Death as punishment of sin was
absorbed in Christ's sacrifice. Such was its
atoning work that the judgment due to all
mankind was absorbed, and the sin of sins
now was fixed refusal of that Grace. The
Cross bought up all other debts, so to say.

To return to my old point. The objection to
speaking of Christ's death as penalty is two-
fold. God could not punish One with whom

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 157

He was always well pleased. Consequently
Christ could not suffer punishment in the true
sense of the word without having a guilty
conscience. If the bearing of punishment were
the whole of Christ's work, there was something
in that way which He did not and could not do—
He could not bear the penalty of remorse. But
the whole of His work, was not the bearing of
punishment ; it was not the acceptance of suffer-
ing. It was the recognition and justification of
it, the " homologation " of God's judgment and
God's holiness in it.

The death and suffering of Christ was some-
thing very much more than suffering— it was
atoning action. At various stages in the history
of the Church— not the Roman Catholic Church
only but Protestantism also— exaggerated stress
has been laid upon the sufferings of Christ.
But it is not a case of what He suffered, but
what He did. Christ's suffering was so divine
a thing because He freely transmuted it into a
great act. It was suffering accepted and trans-
figured by holy obedience under the conditions
of curse and blight which sin had brought upon
man according to the holiness of God. The
suffering was a sacrifice to God's holiness. In
so far it was penalty. But the atoning thing
was not its amount or acuteness, but its
obedience, its sanctity.

158 THE CROSS

These pathetic ways of thinking about Christ
regard Him too much as a mere individual
before God. They do not satisfy if Christ's
relation with man was a racial one and He
represented Humanity. Especially they do not
hold good if that relationship was no mere
blood relationship, natural relationship, but a
supernatural relationship — blood relationship
only in the mystic Christian sense. We are
blood relations of Christ, but not in the natural
sense of that term, only in the supernatural
sense, as those who are related to Him in His
blood, in His death, and in His Spirit. The
value of Christ's unity and sympathy with us
was not simply that He was continuous with
the race at its head. It was not a relation
of identitij. The race was not prolonged into
Him. The value consists in that life-act of self-
identification by which Christ the eternal Son of
God became man. We hear much about Christ's
essential identity with the human race. That is
not true in the sense in which other great men,
like Shakespeare, for instance, were identical
with the human race, gathering up in consum-
mation its natural genius. Christ's identity was
not natural or created identity, but the self-
identification of the Creator. Everything turns
upon this — whether Christ was a created being.

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 159

however grand, or whether He was of increate
Godhead.

§
As Head of the human race by this volun-
tary self-identification with it, Christ took the
curse and judgment, which did not belong to
Himself as sinless. And what He owned was
not so much the depth of our misery as the depth
of our guilt ; and He did it sympathetically,
by the moral sympathy possible only to the
holy. Nor did He simply take the full measure
of our guilt. His owning it means very much
more than that His moral perceptions were so
deep and piercing that He could measure our
, guilt as a bystander of acute moral penetration
could. He carried it in His own moral ex-
perience as only divine sympathy could. And
in dumb action He spread it out as it is
before God. He felt sin and its horror as
only the holy could, as God did. We learn
in our measure to do that when we escape
from the indifference of our egotism and
come under His Cross and near His heart ;
we learn to do as Christ did as we enter into
living union with Christ. And we then rise
above purity — for purity is only shamed by sin —
we rise to holiness, which is burdened with sin
and all its load. How much more than pure

160 THE CROSS

Christ was ! How much fuller of meaning is
such a word as " holy" or " holiness " than either
" pure "or " purity." Purity is shamed by human
sin. Holiness carries it as a load, and carries it
to its destruction. In the great desertion Christ
could not feel Himself a sinner whom God re-
jects. For the sinner cannot carry sin ; he
collapses under it. Christ felt Himself treated
as the sin which God recognises and repels by
His very holiness. It covered and hid Him from
God. He was made sin (not sinful, as I say).
The holiness of God becomes our salvation not
by slackness of demand but by completeness
of judgment ; not because He relaxes His
demand, not because He spends less condemna-
tion on sin, lets us off or lets sin off, or lets
Christ off (" spared not ") ; but because in Christ
judgment becomes finished and final, because
none but a holy Christ could spread sin out in
all its sinfulness for thorough judgment. I
have a way of putting it which startles some of
my friends. The last judgment is past. It took
place on Christ's Cross. What we talk about as
the last judgment is simply the working out of
Christ's Cross in detail. The final judgment,
the absolute judgment, the crucial judgment
for the race took place in principle on the
Cross of Christ. Sin has been judged finally

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 161

there. All judgment is given to the Son in
virtue of His Cross. All other debts are bought
up there. °

It IS not simply that in the Cross of Christ
aU pumshment was shown to be corrective. A
favourite theme on the part of many of those
who challenge the apostolic position about the
death of Christ is that it was only the crowning
exposition of the great principle that all punish-
ment IS really corrective and educative. We
cannot say that. There is plenty of punishment
that hardens and hardens. That is why we are
obliged to leave such questions as universal
restoi-ation unsolved. Even when we recognise
the absolute power of God's salvation, we also
recognise that it is in the power of the human
soul to harden itself until it become shrunk into
such a tough and irreducible mass as it seems
the very grace of God could do nothing with.
Certainly there are people here, in this life, who
become so tough in their sin that the grace of
God IS m vain. And I am not sure that among
those who are toughest are not some who are
^luch comforted by their religion. You can do
something with a hardened sinner. He can be
.roken to pieces. But I do not know what
'ZZZtj''"^ ^ ;7°- -nt, with those

162 THE CROSS

who are wrapped in the wool, soaked in the
comfort of their rehgion, and tanned to leather,
soft and tough as a glove, by its bitterest bap-
tisms. I once used an expression of these people
which was somewhat criticised. I called them
" moral tabbies." Is there anything more com-
fortable, and selfish, and hopeless than a really
accomplished tabby? When religion becomes
perverted to be a means of mere comfort and
dense self-satisfaction, it becomes an integu-
ment so tough that even the grace of God
cannot get through it, or a substance so flaccid
that it cannot be handled.

§
I find it convenient, you observe, to dis-
tinguish between punishment and penalty. A ^
man who loses his life in the fire-damp, where
he is looking for the victims of an accident,
pays the penalty of sacrifice, but he does not
receive its punishment. And I think it useful I
to speak of Christ as taking the penalty of
sin while I refuse to speak of His taking;
its' punishment. I would avoid every word
that would suggest that He was punished
in connection with His salvation. It robs
the whole act of ethical value to say so.>
Penalty is made to honour God in the Cross oi

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 163

Christ, and thus it becomes a blessing to us.

Not that our punishment is turned to good

account in its subjective results upon us, but

that Christ's judgment has objective value to

the honour of God's holiness. He turned the

penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered.

And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment

He accepted. His passive suffering became

active obedience, and obedience to a holy doom.

He did not steel His face to the suffering He

had to endure, as though it were a fate to

which He had to set His teeth and go through

it in a stoic way. He never regarded it as a

mere infliction. For Him, whoever inflicted it, it

was the holiest thing in all the world — it was

the will and judgment of God. All the Old

Testament told Him that the Kingdom of God

could never come without the prior judgment

of God ; and He was prepared to force that

judgment in His impatience for the Kingdom. *

He answered the judgment of God with a grand

affirmative act. The willing acceptance of final

judgment was for Jesus the means presented by

God for effecting human reconciliation and the

* See Schweitzer's very remarkable " Quest of the
Historical Jesus " (A. and C. Black) — the last two chapters
— where a dogmatic and atoning motive in Jesus is de-
clared by an advanced critic to have been the explanation
of His death.

164 THE CROSS

Divine Kingdom. The essence of all sacrifice,
which is self-surrender to God, was lifted out of
the Old Testament garb of symbolism, and was
made a moral reality in Christ's holy obedience.
In the Old Testament we have the lamb and the
various other things brought for offering ; but
where did their essential value lie ? In the
obedience of the offerer; in the fact that those
institutions were given and prescribed by holy
God, however their details were due to man. And
the presentation of the victim was valuable, not
because of anything in the victim, but because
of the obedience and surrender of the will with
which the offerer presented it. This is the bear-
ing of sin — the holy bearing of its judgment.
This is the taking of sin away — the acknowledg-
ment of judgment as holy, vt^ise, and good, and
its conversion into blessing ; the absorption
and conversion of judgment into confession and
praise, the removal of that guilt which stood
between God and man's reconciliation — the
robbing sin of its power to prevent com-
munion with God.

I should, therefore, express the difference
between the old view and the new by saying
that one emphasises substitutionary expiation
and the other emphasises solidary reparation,
consisting of due acknowledgment of God's

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 165

holiness, and the honouring of that and not of
His honour.

§

Now let me pass as I close to-day to two or
three points I want specially to emphasise.

There is one quotation which I wanted to
make at a particular point and did not. The
Reformers are still, on the whole, the masters of
the great verities of experience in connection
with the work of Christ. They had an amazing
insight into the morbid psychology of the con-
science. They did understand what sin meant,
and they said this — the sinner, beginning with
indifference, must keep flying from God until he
actually hate God as a persecutor, unless he
grasp the pursuit as God's mercy. Indifference
could not stop at indifference, but goes on
through aversion to hate. Even if a man die
indifferent in this life, he comes into circum-
stances where he ceases to be indifferent. If we
believe about a future at all, it will be impossible
for an indifferent man to remain indifferent
when he has passed on there. Indifference is
an unstable position. It changes either upward
or downward — downward into antagonism, into
deadly hate against God, something Satanic ; or
upwards it passes into acceptance of God's mercy
by faith, and all its blossom and fruit, its joy

166 THE CROSS

and peace in the Holy Ghost. The Reformers
were perfectly right. It is only our dull ex-
perience and preoccupied vision which prevent
us seeing that it is so.

Then I should like to call attention to this
value in such a cross. It is only the judgment
sacrifice of the Son of God that assures the
sinner of the deep changelessness of grace.
Forgiving is not forgetting. Popular theology
too often tends to pacify us by reducing the
offence. But the Reformers put the matter quite
otherwise in saying that a justifying faith only
goes with a full sense of guilt. You cannot get
a full, justifying faith without a full sense and
confession of guilt. We always have mistrust
in the background of our own self -extenuations.
When conscience begins to work and you begin
to extenuate, when you try your hand earnestly
at justifying yourself to yourself, you have some
idea of how much more vast must be God's
justification of you before Himself. You can-
not cease to ask what charge conscience has
against you. Then you magnify that to God's
charge. If your heart condemn you. His con-
demnation is greater than that of your con-
demning heart. Do you consider His conscience?

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 167

His conscience has to be pacified as well as His
heart indulged. And if His conscience be not
met, ours is not sure. Has His conscience been
met ? Conscience has always mistrust in the
background if grace is mere remission. Mere
remission of sin does not satisfy even us. If
conscience witnesses, against our extenuations,
to the holy majesty of moral claim, is it to
be less severe and less changeless than the
claim of God Himself ? Conscience has in trust
God's law and its majesty, which must be made
good, as mere remission does not make it. Sup-
pose I transgress and I hear the message of
grace, does it tell me the accusing, irrepressible
demand of conscience, the haunting fear of
judgment, was an illusion ? It is doing me
very ill service if it does. True, there is now
no condemnation for faith ; but if the message
of grace ever teaches us that the judgment of
conscience is exaggeration, is illusion, it is not
the true grace of God. If a message of grace
tell us there was and is no judgment any more,
and that God has simply put judgment on
one side and has not exercised it, that cannot
be the true grace of God. Surely the grace of
God cannot stultify our human conscience like
that ! So we are haunted by mistrust, unless
conscience be drowned in a haze of heart. We

168 THE CROSS

have always the feeling and fear that there is
judgment to follow. How may I be sure that I
may take the grace of God seriously and finally,
how be sure that I have complete salvation, that
I may entirely trust it through the worst my
conscience may say ? Only thus, that God is the
Reconciler, that He reconciles in Christ's Cross
that the judgment of sin was there for good and
all. We are judged now by the Cross, and by
the Cross we stand or fall. The great sin is not
something we do, but it is refusing to make our-
selves right with God in Christ's Cross. We are
judged in the end by our relation to the Cross of
Christ. It is the principle of our moral world.
All judgment is committed to that Son. We
stand before God at last according as we are
owned by Christ. We are confessed by Him
according to our confession of Him. Nemesis
on us is hallowed as a part of the judgment
on Him to whose death we are joined. There is
no such thorough assertion of God's holy, loving
law anywhere as there, where in the Cross it
was given its own, and was perfected in judg-
ment in Him who became a curse for us. His
prayer for His murderers, or the closing sigh of
victory in the midst of that judgment, vouches
for ever to this, that |it is the same holy will
which judges man's wickedness and also loves us

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 169

and gives His Son for a propitiation for us.
Only that holiness which is changeless in its
judgment could be changeless also in grace.
His grace was so little to be foiled that He
graciously took His own judgment. Thus the
severity of conscience becomes the certainty of
salvation.

§
But, changeless in judgment ! Does that mean
exacting the uttermost farthing of penalty, of
suffering? Does it mean that in the hour of
His death Christ suffered, compressed into one
brief moment, all the pains of hell which the
human race deserved. We cannot think about
things in that way. God does not work by such
equivalents. What is required is not an equiva-
lent penalty, but an adequate confession of His
holiness. Let us get rid of that materialist
idea of equivalents. What Christ gave to God
was not an equivalent penalty, but an adequate
confession of God's holiness, rising from amid
extreme conditions of sin. God's holiness, then,
was so little to be mocked, that He actually
took His own judgment to save it. He spared
not His own Son — His own self. His severity
of conscience becomes at the same moment our
security of salvation. And the more conscience
preaches the changelessness of the judging God,

170 THE CROSS

the more it preaches the same changelessness in
the grace of Christ.

§
There is another consequence. Only the
eternal Reconciler, the High Priest, can
guarantee us our full redemption. "Take, my
soul, thy full salvation." You cannot do it
except you do it in such a Cross. It is not
enough to have in the Cross a great demon-
stration of God's love, a forgiveness of the
past which leaves us to fend for ourselves in
the future. Is my moral power so great after
all, then, that, supposing I believe past things
were settled in Christ's Cross, I may now feel
I can run in my own strength ? Can I be
perfectly confident about meeting temptation ?
Nay, we must depend daily upon the continued
energy of the crucified and risen One. We
must depend daily upon the action of that
same Christ whose action culminated there
but did not end there. His death is as organic
with His heavenly life as it was with His
earthly. What is the meaning of His perpetual
intercession if it does not mean that — the
exhaustless energy of His saving act ? It is
by His work from heaven that we appropriate
His work upon earth. He guarantees our per-
fection as well as our redemption.

THE GREAT CONFESSIONAL 171

The last step. It is only the atoning recon-
ciliation of a whole world that guarantees the
final perfecting of that world by its Creator.
How do we know that creation is going to
be perfected ? How do we know that it is
; to be to the glory of God who made it and
called it goud ? How do we know the world
will not be a failure for God with all but the
group of people saved in an ark of some kind ?
We only know because we believe in the
reconciliation of the whole w^orld in Christ's
Cross. There is a great deal of pessimism
to-day, much doubt as to whether perfection
really remains for the whole world ; and you
find people in the burdened West drawn to
the Buddhistic idea of the human soul's ex-
tinction. Some Christians content themselves
Wx.h individual salvation out of a world which
is left in the lurch, or they are satisfied with
personal union with Christ securing their
own future. But the gospel deals with the
world of men as a whole. It argues the re-
storation of all things, a new heaven and a
new earth. It intends the regeneration of
human society as a whole. Christ is the
Saviour of the world, who was also the agent
of its creation. The Creator has not let His

172 THE CROSS

world get out of hand for good and all. That
is to say, our faith is social and communal in
its nature. We must have a social gospel. And
this you cannot get upon the basis of mere
individual or sectional salvation. You can only
have a social gospel upon one basis, namely, that
Christ saved, reconciled the whole world as a
unity, the whole of society and history. The
Object of our faith, Jesus Christ, is what our
fathers used to call a federal Person, a federal
Saviour, in a federal act. All humanity is in
Him and in His act. It is quite true every
man must believe for himself, but no man
can believe by himself or unto himself. The
Christian faith fades away if it is not nourished
and built up in a community, in a Church.
And the Church fades away if it do not hold
this faith in trust for the whole world. Each
one of us is saved only by the act and by the
Person that saved the whole world.

Note to p. 153.

In some cases it seems due to congeuital defect. An
able naember of the "New Theology" group was con-
versing with my informant, who said, "For me all
Christianity turns on the unspeakable mercy of God to my
soul in the Cross of Christ." The reply was blankly, "I
do not understand it."

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

VI

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY*

THERE is a popular impression about both
philosoi)hy and theology that the history
of their problems is very sterile ; that it is
not a long development, carrying the discussion
on with growing insight from age to age, and
passing from thinker to thinker with growing
depth, but rather a scene in which each new-
comer demolishes the work of his predecessor
in order to put in its place some theory doomed
in turn to the same fruitless fate. Truly, as
Hegel says, if that were so with x)hilosophy,
its history would become one of the saddest
and sorriest things, and it would have no
right to go on. And if it were so with theology,
we should not only be distressed for Humanity,
but we should be sceptical about the Holy Spirit

* This chapter owes much to Kirn, Herzog, xx., Art.
" Versohnung. "

175

176 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

in the Church. It could be the Church of
no Holy Spirit if those who translated its
life into thought did not offer to posterity a
spectacle higher than dragons that tare each
other in the slime, or lions that bit and
devoured one another.

As a matter of truth and fact, both philosophy
and theology have not only a chronicle but a
history. They register the highest spiritual
evolution of the race. The wave behind rolls on
the wave before. The past is not devoured but
lives on, and comes to itself in the future. The
new arrivals do not consume their predecessors,
and do not ignore them ; they interpret them
and carry them forwards. They take their
fertile place in the great organic movement.
They modulate what is behind upwards into
what is to come. They correct the past and
enrich it ; and they hand on their corrected past
to be a foundation for the workers yet to be.

The amateur, or the self-taught, therefore is
at a great disadvantage. He does not take up
the problem where the scientific succession laid
it down. He does not come in where his great
co-workers left off. He must start ab ovo. He
must do over again for himself what they have
conspired to do better. He risks "being a fool
at first hand." He wastes himself criticising

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 177

what has long been dropped, and slaying the
long-time slain. He throws away effort in
establishing what the competent have agreed
to accept. And he misses the right points to
attack or to strengthen, because he has not sur-
veyed the ground. Every now and then one
meets the capable amateur, whose misfortune
it has been to have no schooling in the scientific
history or method of the subject, who applied
to it a shrewd mother-wit or an earnest but
uninstructed conscience, and who perhaps pub-
lishes a theory of Incarnation or Atonement
which, for all its hints and glimpses of truth,
makes no real contribution either to the history
or the merits of the case. This is the mis-
fortune of the self-taught who goes straight
to his Bible for the materials of his theology,
and ignores ^aost of the treatment the problem
has received from the greatest minds in the
history of the Church or the soul. The Bible
is enough for our saving faith, but it is not
enough for our scientific theology.

To make the most therefore of godly and
able men, who would else be wasted more or
less, it is well that we should teach them at
the outset to take up the question where they
find it, to begin where their best predecessors
left off, to work upon results, and to carry

The Work of ChrUt. ]^3

178 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

forward the subject in the train of its evolution
from the great and growing past. Let us couple
up with the past, and repay its gifts by fructify-
ing them for the future. Let us call in our
thought, and concentrate it upon the precise
question which previous thinkers have left us
to solve.

§
There is, thus, another thing we have to do.
We have to try to find a due place for those views
which, however one-sided, yet do compel atten-
tion to aspects that the Church from time to time
ignores. We have to meet, satisfy, and exceed
such views. Much, for instance, has been done in
the lifetime of most of us to correct and extend
those views of Christ's work which were so
rigidly objective that they became external. It
has been urged that the Church long thought
too much of Christ's action on God and not
enough of His action on man. And what is
called the moral theory of the Atonement has
therefore been pressed upon us, to replace the
ultra-objective and satisfactionary view. And
the pressure has often been so hard that an objec-
tive theory has been entirely denied as immoral,
and denied sometimes with a scorn unjustified
by either the mental acumen or moral dignity
of the critic.

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 179

But in spite of this over-pressure, and the
occasional insolence that goes with ignorance,
it remains our duty to find a proper place in
our view of the whole great subject for that
eifect of Christ upon men which has meant so
much for the sanctity of the Church. We have
to meet, satisfy, and transcend those pleas which
have been called into existence to redress the
balance of theological neglect, and to fill out
that which was behind in our grasp of the
manifold work. Especially we have to adjust
our theology of Christ's work to those who
Dbserve that the repentance of the guilty is an
3ssential condition of forgiveness, and who go
on to ask how we can speak of a finished
reconciliation or atonement by a sinless Christ,
who could not possibly present before God a
repentance of that kind.

There are certain results which, it may be
said, we have definitely reached in correction
)f what has long been known as the popular
dew of Christ's death and work. They are
paodern, and they owe much to Schleiermacher,
Liitschl, McLeod Campbell, Maurice and others ;
put they have also been shown to be scriptural,
9 J a new, objective and scientific investigation

180 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

of what the Bible has to say on the subject.
When we have brought the long history of
the question up to date, balanced the books,
and taken account of the general agreement
on the modern side, we can then go on to ask
where exactly the question no"w stands.

The modifications on which the best authorities
are substantially at one we have seen to be
such as these : —

1. Reconciliation is not the result of a change
in God from wrath to love. It flows from the
changeless will of a loving God. No other view
could make the reconciliation sure. If God
changed to it, He might change from, it. And
the sheet-anchor of the soul for Eternity would
then have gone by the board. Forgiveness
arose at no point in time. Grace was there
before even creation. It abounded before sin
did. The holiness which makes sin sin, is one
with the necessity to destroy sin in gracious
love.

2. Reconciliation rests on Christ's jDerson,
and it is effected by His entire work, doing, and
suffering. This work does three things. (1) It
reveals and puts into historic action the change-
less grace of God. (2) It reveals and establishes
His holiness, and therein also the sinfulness of
sin. And (3) it exhibits a Humanity in perfect

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 181

tune with that will of God. And it does more
I than exhibit these things — it sets them up, grace,
i holiness, and the new Humanity in its Head.
1 3. This reconciling and redeeming work of
Christ culminates in His suffering unto death,
which is indeed more of an act than an experi-
ence. Here, in the Cross, is the summit of
His revelation of grace, of sin, and of Humanity.
And the central feature of this threefold reve-
lation in the Cross is the holiness of God's love.
It is this holiness that deepens error into sin,
sin into guilt, and guilt into repentance ; with-
out which any sense of forgiveness would be
but an anodyne and not a grace, a self-flatter-
ing unction to the soul and not the peace
of God.

4. In this relation to God's holiness and its
satisfaction, nobody now thinks of the transfer
of our punishment to Christ in its entirety —
including the worst pains of hell in a sense
of guilt. Christ experienced the world's hate,
and the curse of the Law in the sense of the
suffering entailed on man by sin ; but a direct
infliction of men's total deserts upon Him
iby God is unthinkable. His penalty was not
punishment, because it was dissociated from
the sense of desert. Whatever we mean by
atonement must be interpreted in that sense.

182 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

And judgment is a much better word than
either penalty or punishment.

5. What we have in Christ's work is not
the mere pre-requisite or condition of reconciha-
tion, but the actual and final effecting of it
in principle. He was not making it possible,
He was doing it. We are spiritually in a recon-
ciled world, we are not merely in a world in
process of empirical reconciliation. Our experi-
ence of religion is experience of a thing done
once for all, for ever, and for the world. That
is, it is more than even experience, it is a faith.
The same act as put God's forgiveness on a
moral foundation also revolutionised Humanity.
Hence we are not disposed to speak of sub-
stitution * so much as of representation. But it
is representation by One who creates by His act
the Humanity He represents, and does not
merely sponsor it. The same act as disburdens us
of guilt commits us to a new life. Our Saviour
in His salvation is not only our comfort but
our power ; not merely our rescuer but
our new life. His work is in the same act
reclamation as well as rescue.

* Because substitution does not take account of the
moral results on the soul, and for a full account of the
cause we must include all the effects. To do justice
to the whole of Christ's work we must include the
Church, and in justification include sanctiflcation.

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 183

6. Another thing may perhaps be taken as
recognised in some form by the main line of
judicious advance in our subject. The work of
Christ was moral and not official. It was the
energy and victory of His own moral person-
ality, and not simply the filling of a position, the
discharge of an office He held. His victory was
not due to His rank, but to His will and
conscience. It lay in His faithfulness to the
uttermost amid temptations morally real and
psychologically relevant to what He was. It
was a work that drew on His whole personality,
and was built into the nature of that personality
as a moral necessity of it. What He did Ho
did not do simply in the room and stead of
others, He did it as a necessity of His own
person also — though its effect for them was
not what it was for Him. He fulfilled an
obligation under which His own personality
lay ; He did not simply pay the debts of other
people. He fulfilled a personal vocation.

And His faithfulness was not only to a voca-
tion. It was to a special vocation, that of a
Redeemer, not merely a saint. The immediate
source of His suffering was not the sight of
human sin, and it was not a general holiness
in Him. It was not the quivering of the saint's
purity at the touch of evil. But it was the

184 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

suffering of One who touched sin as the Re-
deemer. He would not have suffered for sin
as He did, had He not faced it as its destroyer.
Not only was this His vocation as a moral
hero, but His special vocation as Saviour. It
was the work of a moral personality at the
heart of the race, of One who concentrated on a
special yet universal task — that of Redemption.

His perfection was not that of a paragon, one
who could do better what every soul and genius
of the race could do well. He was not all the
powers and excellencies of mankind rolled into
one superman. But His perfection was that of
the race's Redeemer. It was interior to all other
powers and achievements. It was central both
for God and man. He made man's centre and
God's coincide. He took mankind at its centre
and laid it on the centre of God. His identifi-
cation with man was not extensive but intensive,
it was not discursive and parallel, so to say.
It was morally central and creative. He was
not Humanity on its divine side ; He was its
new life from the inside. The problem He had
to solve was the supreme and central moral
problem of guilt ; and the work could only be
done by the native action of a personality moral
in its nature and methods, moral to the pitch
of the Holy.

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 185

It is an immense gain thus to construe
Christ's work as that of a moral personality
instead of a heavenly functionary. It brings
it into line with the modern mind and into
organic union with the moral problem of
the race. It enables us to realise that every
step of the moral victory in His life was a step
also in the Redemption of the whole human
conscience. And we grasp with new pow^er the
idea that His crowning victory of the Cross was
the victory in principle of the whole race in
Him — that Justification is really one with Re-
conciliation, and what He did before God con-
tained all He was to do on man. It makes
possible for us what my last lecture will attempt
to indicate — a unitary view of His whole work
and person.

§
7. After these great modifications and gains,
we have cleared the ground to ask with some
exactness just where the question at the moment
stands. What was the divinest thing, the atoning,
satisfying thing, the thing offered to God, in
Christ ; ^Le thing, therefore, final and precious in
what He did ? The permanent thing in Christi-
anity must be that which gives it its chief
value to God. We are now beyond the crude
alternative that so easily besets us, " Did Christ's

186 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

work bear upon God or on man ? " Neither alone
would be a true Reconciliation. Neither Ortho-
doxy nor Socinianism has it. But we have to ask
this : " Can we combine the truth in each alter-
native? Can we reach the value of Christ's
saving work to God {i.e., its true and final value)
if we exclude its effect within man ? Must we
not take that in ? Nihil in effectu quod nonprius
in causa. Must we not include the effect to get
the full value of the cause, and give a full
account of it ? "

Now, let us own at the outset that the first
things we must be sure about are the objective
reality of our religion, its finality, and its ini-
tiative in God's free grace independent of act or
desert of ours. But if we start there, it looks
as if we were shut up to the first of the crude
alternatives, as if the idea of Christ's work as
acting on God only gave the best effect to these
conditions. It looks as if the old theory alone
guaranteed a salvation finished on the Cross, one
wholly God's in His grace, one that ensures a
full and objective release of the conscience.
These things are not secured by what we do, but
by Christ's work on the Cross. Moreover, that
work was done for the whole of mankind, and
was complete even for those who as yet make no
response. And, besides, that first alternative is

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 187

a view that seems to have the letter of Scripture
with it. It does look as if we could not have full
security except by trust of an objective some-
thing, done over our heads, and complete with-
out any reference to our response or our
despite.

But the difficulties begin when we ask what
the objective something was. How describe it?
For that purpose the old doctrine used juridical
forms. But these are not large enough for
the dimensions of a modern w^orld, or for its
deepened ethical insight. How exactly could the
obedience of Christ stand for the obedience of
all ? It was the fulfilment of His own personal
vocation ; how does it stand for the obedience
of every other person ? Or how does the suffer-
ing of Christ restore the moral order, especially
one He never broke? If you treat it as punish-
ment, that punishment alone does not restore
the moral order. And, if we say He did not do
that, He did not restore a moral order, so much
as acknowledge and confess the holiness of God
in His judgment, is not the value of that recog-
nition still greatly impaired by the fact that it
is not made by the guilty but the Guiltless, who
is not directly affected by the connection be-
tween sin and suffering. A finished religion
would then be set up without the main thing —

188 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

the acknowledgment by the guilty. That ac-
knowledgment, that repentance, would then be
outside the complete act, and would be at best
but a sequel of it ; whereas we ought to give
a real place in a complete work of Reconciliation
to our repentance (which some extremists say is
all that is required), or to Christ's moral action
on us. Do we not need to include in some way
the effect in the cause, in order to give the cause
its full and final value, i.e., its value to God.
The thing of price done by Christ for God, must
it not already include the thing done upon men?
Does not Christ's confession of God's holiness
include man's confession of his sin ?

Let us return to that idea of the moral order
which is at the bottom of this objective theory.
We ask whether the moral order is what the
Bible means by the idea of the righteousness
of God. The righteousness of God is not only
holy but gracious, not only regulative and re-
tributory, but also forgiving and restoring. It
seems, indeed, in the Gospels to need no other
condition of forgiveness than repentance. This
is so ; and it is all very well, we have seen, for
individual cases. But we have to deal, as Christ
at last had to deal, with the forgiveness of a

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 189

world, the pardon of solidary sin. And wo
need to be sure, as Christ alone with His insight
could be sure, that the repentance is true and
deep. There it is that we are carried into
questions which the Cross alone can answer.
How shall I know how much repentance is deep
enough ? Where find a repentance wide enough
to cover the sin of a guilty world ? Could Christ
offer that ? No ; directly, He could not. He
could not offer it as a pathos, a personal ex-
perience, for He had no guilt. But, then, guilt
is much more than a sense of guilt. And the
essence of repentance is not its intensity or
passion but the thing confessed. It is there-
fore the holiness more even than the sin that
holiness makes so sinful. It is the due and
understanding acknowledgment of the holiness
offended. And this only a sinless Christ could
really do, who was also sympathetic enough
with men to do it from their side. And only
the sinless could realise what sin meant for
God.

Farther, this acknowledgment is not simply
verbal, nor simply a matter of profound moral
conviction and admission, but it must be a
practical confession, as practical as the sin. It
must place itself as if it were active sin under
the reaction of the Divine holiness ; it must be

190 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

made sin. That is, it must accept judgment as
the only adequate acknowledgment of the holy
God in a sinful world ; it must allow His holy
law to assert itself in the Saviour's person in
the form forced on the sinner's Friend. He bore
this curse as God's judgment, praised it, hal-
lowed it, absorbed it ; and His resurrection
showed that He exhausted it.

But would His acceptance of judgment for us
be possible, would it stand to our good, would
it be of value in God's sight for us, if He
were not in moral solidarity with us ? How
could it? What God sought was nothing so
pagan as a mere victim outside our conscience
and over our heads. It was a Confessor, a
Priest, one taken from among men. But then
this moral solidarity is the very thing that
also gives, and must give. Him His mighty and
revolutionary power on us. What makes it
possible for Him to be a Divine victim or a
Divine priest for us also makes Him a new
Creator in us. His offering of a holy obedience
to God's judgment is therefore valuable to God
for us just because of that moral solidarity
with us which also makes Him such a moral
power upon us and in us. His creative re-
generative action on us is a part of that same
moral solidarity which also makes His accept-

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 191

ance of judgment stand to our good, and His
confession of God's holiness to be the ground
of ours. The same stroke on the one Christ
went upward to God's heart and downward
to ours.

Is this not clear ? Christ could make no duo
confession of holiness for us in judgment if
He were outside Humanity, if He were a third
party satisfying God over our head. The ac-
knowledgment would not be really from the
side of the culprit, certainly not from his in-
terior, his conscience. The judgment would not
really be the judgment of our sin, which would
therefore be still due. To be of final value
the atoning judgment must be also within the
conscience of the guilty. But how is the judg-
ment, the self-condemnation, the confession with-
in our guilty conscience to be offered to God
as an ingredient of Christ's reconciling work
and not its mere sequel ? It is not yet there.
Or else it is nothing worth offering by way of
; atonement when it is there. Is there any way of
offering our self-condemnation as a meritorious
contribution to forgiveness ? Can it be included
in the Divine ground of forgiveness in a guilt-
less Christ ? Repentance is certainly a condition
of forgiveness. But Christ could not repent.

192 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

How then could He perfectly meet the condi-
tions of salvation? The answer is that our
repentance was latent in that holiness of His
which alone could and must create it, as the
effect is really part of the cause — that part of
the cause which is prolonged in a polar unity
into the sequential conditions of time.

Not only, generally, is there an organic moral
connection and a spiritual solidarity between
Christ and us, but also, more particularly, there
is such a moral effect on Humanity included in
the work of Christ, who causes it, that that ante-
dated action on us, judging, melting, changing
us, is also part of His offering to God. He comes
bringing His sheaves with Him. In presenting
Himself He offers implicitly and proleptically
the new Humanity His holy work creates. The
judgment we brought on Him becomes our
worst judgment when we arraign ourselves ;
and it makes it so impossible for us to forgive
ourselves that we are driven to accept forgive-
ness from the hands of the very love which
our sins doomed to a curse.

§
What Christ offers to God is, therefore, not

simply an objective satisfaction outside His

revolutionary effect on the soul of man in the

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 193

way of faith, repentance, and our whole sancti-
fication. As the very judgment He bore for
us is relevant to our sin by His moral solidarity
with us, so the value of His work to God in-
cludes also that value which it has in acting
on us through that same solidarity, and in pre-
senting us to God as the men it makes us to be.
He represents before God not a natural Humanity
that produces Him as its spiritual classic, but
the new penitent Humanity that His influence
creates. He calls things that are not yet as
though they were. In Him a goodness of ours
that is not yet, rising from its antenatal spring,
brings to naught the sin that is. There was
presented to God, in Christ's holiness, also that
repentance in us which it alone has power to
create. He stretches a hand through time and
seizes the far-off interest of our tears. The
faith which He alone has power to wake is
already offered to God in the offering of
all His powers and of His finished work.
That obedience of ours which Christ alone
lis able to create, is already set out in Him
before God, impHcit in that mighty and sub-
duing holiness of His in which God is always
well-pleased. All His obedience and holiness
s not only fair and beloved of God, but it is
ilso great with the penitent holiness of the race

The Work of Christ. 1 4

194 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

He sanctifies. Our faith is already present in His
oblation. Our sanctification is already presented
in our justification. Our repentance is already
acting in His confession. The effect of His
Cross is to draw us into a repentance which
is a dying with Him, and therefore a part of
the offering in His death ; and then it raises
us in newness of life to a fellowship of His
resurrection.

§
He is thus not only the pledge to us of God's
love but the pledge to God of our sure response
to it in a total change of will and life. We see
now how organic, how central to Christ's gospel
of Atonement is Paul's idea of dying and rising
with Him, how vital to His work is this effect
of it, this function of it. For such a process,
such an experience, is not a mere moral sequel
or echo of ours to the story of the Cross, it is
no mere imitation or repetition of its moral
greatness ; nor is it a sensitive impression of
its touching splendour. To die and rise with
Christ does not belong to Christian ethic, to
the method of Jesus, but it has a far deeper
and more religious meaning. It is to be taken
into His secret life. It is a mystic incorporation
into Christ's death and resurrection as the
standing act of spiritual existence. We are

THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY 195

baptized into His death, and not merely into
dying like Him. We do not echo His resur-
rection, we share it. As His trophies we become
part of Christ's offering to God; just as the
captives in his procession were part of the
victor's self-presentation to the divinity of
Rome. God leadeth us in triumph in Christ
(2 Cor. ii. 14). It is, indeed, for Christ's sake
we are forgiven, but for the sake of a Christ
who is the Creator of our repentance and not
only the Proxy of our curse. And it is to our
faith the grace is given, yet not because of our
faith, which is no more perfect than our repent-
ance. It is to nothing so poor as our faith or
our repentance that new life is given, but only
to Christ on His Cross, and to us for His sake
who is the Creator and Fashioner of both. Our
justification rests on this atoning creative Christ
alone. And when the matter is so viewed, the
objection some have to the phrase " for Christ's
sake " should disappear.

No martyrdom could do what the death of
Christ does for faith. No martyrdom could
ofifer God in advance the souls of a changed
race. For no martyr as such is sure of the
future. It is easier to forget all the martyrs
than the Saviour ; and their power fades with
time, while His grows with the ages. With the

196 THE PRECISE PROBLEM TO-DAY

martyr's death we can link many admirable
reflections, exhortations, and even inspirations.
What it does not give us is the new and Eternal
Life. It is not the consummation of God's saving
purpose for the world.

THE THREEFOLD CORD

VII
THE THREEFOLD CORD

THERE are three great aspects of the work
of Christ which have in turn held the
attention of the Church, and come home with
special force to its spiritual situation at a special
time. These are —

1. Its triumphant aspect;

2. Its satisfactionary aspect ;

3. Its regenerative aspect.

The first emphasises the finality of our Lord's
victory over the evil power or devil ; the second,
the finality of His satisfaction, expiation, or
atonement presented to the holy power of God ;
and the third the finality of His sanctifying or
new-creative influence on the soul of man. The
first marked the Early Church, the second the
Medieval and Reformation Church, while the
third marks the Modern Church.

And if you fall back upon the New Testament,
where all the subsequent development of the
Church is in the germ, as a philosophy might bo

200 THE THREEFOLD CORD

packed in a phrase, you will find those three
strands wonderfully and prophetically entwined
in 1 Cor. i. 30, where it is said that Christ is
made unto us (2) justification ; (3) sanctification ;
and (1) redemption. The whole history of the
doctrine in the Church may be viewed as the
exegesis by time of this great text of the Spirit.
Now, it is not meant that in the period
specially marked by one of these aspects the
other two were absent. In various of the
medieval theologians you find all three. And
it is a good test of the native aptitude of any
theologian, and of his evangelical grasp, that he
should find them all necessary to express the
fullness of the vast work, and its adequacy to
anything so great and manifold as the soul.
But what we do not find in the classic theolo-
gians of the past is the co-ordination of the
three aspects under one comprehensive idea,
one organic principle, corresponding to the com-
X^lete unity of Christ's person, who did the work.
We do not find such a unitary view of the
work as we should expect when we reflect that
it was the work of a personality so complete
as Christ, and so absolute as the God who acted
in Christ. Yet we must strive after such a
view, by the very nature of our faith. A mere
composite or eclectic theology means a distracted

THE THREEFOLD CORD 201

faith. A creed just nailed together means
Churches that cannot draw together. We can-
not, at least the Church cannot, rest healthily
upon medley and mortised aspects of the one
thing which connects our one soul with the
one God in one moral world. We cannot rest
in unresolved views of reconciliation. As the
reconciliation comes to pervade our whole being,
and as we answer it with heart and strength
and mind, we become more and more impatient
of fragmentary ways of understanding it. We
crave, and we move, to see that the first aspect
is the condition of the second, and the second of
bhe third, and that they all condition each other
n a living interaction.

Now the object I have in view in this lecture
is to press a former point as furnishing this
mity — that the active and effective principle in
the work of Christ was the perfect obedience
5f holy love which He offered amidst the con-
aitions of sin, death, and judgment. The potent
:hing was not the suffering but the sanctity,
md not the sympathetic confession of our sin so
much as the practical confession of God's holi-
less. This principle (I hope to show) co-ordi-
lates the various aspects which have been
listorted by isolation. This one action of the
loly Saviour's total person was, on its various

202 THE THREEFOLD CORD

sides, the destruction of evil, the satisfaction of
God, and the sanctification of men. And it is in
this moral medium of holiness (if I may so say)
that these three effects pass and play into each
other with a spiritual interpenetration.

Thus Christ's complete victory over the evil
poveer or principle. His redemption (1), is the
obverse of His regenerating and sanctifying effect
on us (3). To deliver us from evil is not simply to
take us out of hell, it is to take us into heaven.
Christ does not simply pluck us out of the
hands of Satan, He does so by giving us to God.
He does not simply release us from slavery. He
commits us in the act to a positive liberty. He
does not simply cancel the charge against us in
court and bid us walk out of jail, He meets us
at the prison-door and puts us in a new way of
life. His forgiveness is not simply retrospective,
it is, in the same act, the gift of eternal life.
Our evil is overcome by good. We are won
from sin by an act which at the same time
makes us not simply innocent but holy.

So also w^e must see that the third — our
regenerate sanctification — is the condition of
the second — the complete satisfaction of God.
The only complete satisfaction that can be made
to a holy God from the sinful side is the sinner's
restored obedience, his return to holiness. Now,

THE THREEFOLD CORD 203

the cheap and superficial way of putting that is
to say that penitent amendment is the only
satisfaction we can give to a grieved God. But
future amendment does no more than the duty
of the future hour. And rivers of water from
our eyes will not wash out the guilt of the past ;
nor will they undo the evil we have set afloat
in souls far gone beyond our reach or control.
Yet it remains true that nothing can atone to
holiness but holiness. And it must be the
holiness of the sinner. It must also be an
obedience of the kind required by the whole
situation, moral and spiritual. It must be the
obedience not of improvement but of reconcilia-
tion, not of laborious amendment but of
regenerated faith. But faith in what? Faith
in One who alone contains in Himself a holy
obedience so perfect as to meet the holiness
of God on the scale of our sin ; but One also
who, by the same obedience, has the power
to reproduc3 in man the kind of holiness which
alone can please God after all that has come and
gone. No suffering can atone. No pain can
satisfy a holy God ; no death, as death. Yet
satisfied He must be ; else the freedom of grace
becomes but an arbitrary and non-holy thing,
a thing instinctive to the divine nature instead
of a victory of the divine will. Also consider

204 THE THREEFOLD CORD

this : much of your difficulty in connection with
satisfaction will yield if you keep in view that
what we are concerned with is not the satisfac-
tion of a demand but of a Person, not of a claim
by God but of the heart and soul of God. I
know it is easier to discuss and adjust statutory
claims than to grasp the manifold action of
a living and eternal Person. So I am afraid
I must be very theological for a moment and
tax you accordingly. The chief reason why so
many hate theology is because it taxes ; and
there is nothing we shrink from like spiritual
toil. But let the choice and earnest spirit
consider this.

The essence of holiness is God's perfect
satisfaction, His perfect repose in eternal full-
ness. And the Christian plea is that this is
Self-satisfaction, in the sublimest sense of the
phrase. For us, mostly, the word has an ignoble
sense. But that is only because what we meet
most is an exclusive self-satisfaction, an in-
dividual self-sufficiency. But when we have
an entirely inclusive self-satisfaction, an eternal
and complete adequacy to Himself in the most
critical situation, we have the whole native full-
ness of God blessed for ever, with men beneath
the shadow of His wing. The perpetual act of
holy God is a perpetual satisfaction or accord

THE THREEFOLD CORD 205

1' t ween His nature and His will at every junc-
jlme, and a satisfa tion from His own infinite
holy resource— a Seif-satisf action. God is always
the author of His own satisfaction : that is to say,
His holiness is always equal to its own atone-
ment. God in the Son is the perfect satisfaction
and joy of God in the Father; and God holy
in the sinful Cross is the perfect satisfaction of
God the holy in the sinless heavens. Satisfac-
tion there must be in God's own nature, whether
under the conditions of perfect obedience in a
larmonious world, or under those of obedience
larred and a world distraught. God has power
bo secure that the perfect holy obedience of
leaven shall not be eternally destroyed by the
iisobedience of earth. He has power to satisfy
iimself, and maintain His holiness infrangible,
3ven in face of a world in arms. But satisfied He
nust be. For an unsatisfied God, a dissatisfied

od, would be no God. He would but reflect the
iistraction of the world, and so succumb to it.

But a holy God could be satisfied by neither
pain nor death, but by holiness alone. The
itoning thing is not obedient suffering but
luffering obedience. He could be satisfied and
-ejoiced only by the hallowing of His name,
)y perfect and obedient answer to His holy
leart from amid conditions of pain, death, and

206 THE THREEFOLD CORD

judgment. Holy obedience alone, unto death,
can satisfy the Holy Lord.

Now as to this obedience mark two things. |

1. It includes (we saw) the idea that in obe-|j
dience Christ accepted the judgment holiness'^'
must pass upon sin, and did so in a way that
confessed it as holy from amidst the deepest
experience of it, the experience not of a spec-
tator but a victim. His obedience was not
merely a fine, perfect, and mighty harmony''
of His own with God's blessed will ; bvit it
was the acceptance on man's behalf of that]
judgment which sin had entailed, and the con-j
fession on man's behalf in a tremendous act
that the judgment was good and holy. For th
holiness of God makes two demands : first, fo
an answering holiness in love, and second, for
judgment on those who do not answer but def;
And Christ met both, in one and the same act
He was judged as one who, being made sin, wai
never sinful, but absolutely well-pleasing to God^'

2. And the second point is this : The satisfac-
tory obedience must be obedience from the race
that rebelled. Its holiness must atone for its sin.
But how can that possibly be ? Can it be by nierai
amendment from us ? Can we bring any amen(i«

THE THREEFOLD CORD 207

ment to atone for the past and secure its
remission ? Could the race do it ? Solidary in
its sin by its moral unity, could the race earn a
solidary salvation ? Could you conceive of man-
kind as one vast sinful soul repenting with a
like unity, turning like the prodigal, and deputing
the most illustrious spiritual hero of its number
to offer its repentance to God in Jesus Christ ? If
the supposition were possible, that might indeed
be a certain welcome offering made to God's
holiness ; but it would not be made by it. It
wouIq be something beyond the resources of
holiness, and God would not be the Saviour.
He would accept more sacrifice than He had
power to make. And it would make the action
of Christ a power conferred on Him by self-
saved man instead of inherent in Him from
God. His commission would be but to God, not
from God. And how should a sinful race oft'er
from its own damaged resources what would
satisfy the holiness of God ? Or, if repentance
could satisfy holiness, how are we to know how
much, how deep, repentance would do it, and
leave us sure it was done ?

§
\ The holiness that atones, though it return
from the race that rebelled, must therefore be

208 THE THREEFOLD CORD

the gift of the holiness atoned. For if holiness
could be satisfied by anything outside itself it
would not be absolutely holy. So if holiness can
be satisfied with nothing but holiness it can only
be with a holiness which itself creates. God
alone can create in us the holiness that will please
Him. And this He has done in Jesus Christ in-
carnate. But it is in Jesus Christ as the creator
of man's holiness, not as the organ of it, as man's
sanctifier, and not merely man's delegate. Christ
is our reconciler because on the Cross He was our
redeemer from sin's power into no mere indepen-
dence or courage or safety, but into real holiness ;
because the same act that redeems us produces
holiness, and presents us in this holiness to God
and His communion. The holiness of Christ is
the satisfying thing to God, yet not because of
the beauty of holiness offered to His sight in the
perfect character of Christ. We are not saved
either by Christ's ethical character or our own,
but by His person's creative power and work on
us. Christ's holiness is the satisfying thing
to God, because it is not only the means but also
the anticipation of our holiness, because it
carries all our future holiness latent in it and to
God's eye patent ; because in His saving act He
is the creative power of which our new life is the
product. It is not only that Christ conquered

THE THREEFOLD CORD 209

for Himself and emerged with His soul for a
prey, but, He being what He was, His victory-
contained ours. If He died all died. It was
not only that all the sin of the world, pointed
to its worst, could not make Him a sinner.
It was that by all the holiness of eternity
He had power to make the worst sinners
saints. Of course, there is no way to sanctifica-
tion but by deliverance from sin, by being " un-
sinned." But no sinful man can " unsin " himself,
lowever he amend.

It can only be done by the creation in him
)f a new life. It can only be done by the
linless Son of God, who lived from eternity
n God's holiness, entered man, lived that
loliness out in the face of sin, and thus not
nly broke the evil power by living it down
»ut created that holiness in us by living it
What is our redemption is thus also our
econciliation. If the atoning thing is holiness
which it is), and not suffering (which it is not),
hen Christ atoned by an act which created

new holiness in us and not a new suffering,
he act which overcame the world inten-
ively for good and all was also the act which

owly masters the world in the extensive sense.
;is moral and spiritual victory was so deep
ad thorough that it gives Him power to sub-

r;ie Work of Christ. 15

210 THE THREEFOLD CORD

•I

due other consciences to His holy self, world
without end.

§
There is an old word used in this connection

which there is much disposition at the present
to recall and reclaim. It is the word surety, of
which some of our fathers were so fond. The
word substitute has unfortunate and misleading
suggestions, and it has practically been dropped
in favour of a word more ethical and more con-
stitutional, like representative. But even that
word misleads us to think of Christ as the
spiritual protagonist of a democracy, drawing
His power from those He represents ; and it
muffles the truth that His relation to us is royal
and not elective, that it is creative and not
merely expository. He does not express tho
natural repentance of the old humanity but.
creates the penitent faith of the nev/ — " the
new man created unto holiness." It is nou
easy to find a word that has no defect, since
all words, even the greatest, are made frorii
the dust and spring from our sandy passions
earthly needs, and fleeting thoughts ; and they
are hard to stretch to the measure of eteriia
things without breaking under us somewhere
The word surety itself gives way at a greal
strain — as does guarantee. Christ's function foil

THE THREEFOLD CORD 211

A\ (

Ill-

was not simply an assurance to God, from one
lo knew us well, that for all our aberrations
' were sound and could be trusted at bottom.
-^ confession of us was not simply His
* xpression of His conviction, as deep as life,
iliat man, though tough and slow, would in
the long-run turn, obey, and confess if properly
treated from above. It was not a pledge to God,
3r an encouragement to man, that Humanity
would come right when experience had done its
work on his native goodness and his spiritual
aature, so much deeper than his sin. It was not
1 warranty to God that human nature would
It last rc^over its spiritual balance, of which
recovery Christ might point to Himself as being
in earnest, a prelude, a classic illustration. It
vas not that Christ staked His insight into the
leep nature of this most excellent creature man
hat he would one day rise from his swine, and re-
urn from his rebellion, and fall into the Father's
rms. Such poor suggestions as these spring
rom our common and commercial use of a word
ike surety or guarantee. As if Christ were a
bird party between two who did not quite believe
I each other. As if God by this aid might be
id to foresee thai, man would come to himself
i^ a faith and repentance distant but certain,
light credit it to him in advance, and might

1

212 THE THREEFOLD CORD

pardon on that ground. That would destroy
grace. And it would give man the satisfaction
of satisfying God if He would but give him time
to collect the wherewithal.

Christ is no third party, no arbitrator, no
moral broker. And He is not the first instal-
ment of man's return to God, its harbinger. In
no such sense is He our surety before God.
Because His work is not one of insight but
of regeneration. It did not turn on His genius
for reading us, but His power to create us
anew. He Himself is the creator in us of
what He promises for us. Any surety that
Christ gives to God for man is really God swear-
ing by Himself; it is the Creator's self-assurance |
of His own regenerative power. Christ, as the
Eternal Son of Holy God, can offer Him a holi-
ness which creates and includes that of the race,
and does not simply prophesy it.

We might put it thus : Christ alone in His
sinless perfection can feel all God's holiness ino
judging sin ; and therefore He alone coul
confess and honour it. No sinful man could do L
that ; and therefore no sinful man could dul^
repent. The value of repentance is always in
proportion to the sense of God's holiness. Tel

THE THREEFOLD CORD 213

confess that holiness is the great postulate in
order to confess sin. And the race could duly
confess its sin and repent only if there arose in it
One who by a perfect and impenitent holiness in
Himself, and by His organic unity with us, could
create such holiness in the sinful as should make
the new life one long repentance transcended by
faith and thankful joy. This was and is Christ's
work. And the satisfaction to God, as it was
certainly not His suffering, was also more than
the spectacle of His own holy soul presented to
God. It was that holy soul (the holier as He
faced and conquered evil ever growing more
black and bitter)— it was that holy soul seen
Iby God as the cause and creator of the race's
confession, both of holiness and of sin, in a
Church of the reborn. The satisfaction to God
was Christ, not as an isolated character, or in
m act wholly outside us and our responsive
anion with Him; but it was Christ as the
author of our sanctification and repentance.
Dur repentance and our sanctity are of saving
/alue before God only as produced by the creative
|ioliness of Christ. Christ creates our holiness

^)ecause of His own sanctification of Himself

Tohn xvii. 19— and His complete victory over
he evil power in a life-experience of moral
^•onflict.

214 THE THREEFOLD CORD

You wish perhaps here to ask nie this question :
Is then the sanctity of a Unitarian who rejects
any satisfaction by Christ, any atonement, as the
ground of man's holiness, is that sanctity of no
account before God ? Is the true repentance of
tliose who do not know of an atoning Christianity
of Httle price with Him ? Far from it. But from
our point of view we must regard them as in-
complete stages, which draw their value with
God from a subliminal union with that completed
and holy offering of Christ which He never ceases
to see, however far it be beneath our conscious
light.

When therefore we speak of Christ as our j
Surety, we mean much more than would be |
meant by a mere sponsorship. We suppose a
solidary union of faith created by the Saviour in I
the sinner, which not only impresses him but
incorporates him with Christ. All turns upon
that spiritual solidarity. All turns upon the
reality of that new life for which Paul had to
invent a new phrase — " in Christ." A tremendous
phrase, like that other, " the New Creation " —
and hardly intelligible to a youthful or impres-
sionist Christianity. The real ground of our for- | "
giveness is not our confession of sin, andnoteven'^H
Christ's confession of our sin, but His agonised

CI

THE THREEFOLD CORD 215

confession of God's holiness, and its absorb-
ing effect on us. To be in grace we must be
found in Him, Our new penitent life is His
creation. He contains the principle and power
of our forgiveness. And it comes home to us
only as we abide in Him. In Him, and only
in Him, the normal holy man, the man holy
with all the holiness of God, have we the
living power of release from guilt, escape from
sin, repentance, faith, and newness of life.
We are justified only as we are incorporate
(not clothed) in the perfect righteousness of
Christ, our Regenerator, and not in propor-
tion as the righteousness of Christ has made
palpable way in us. It is not as Christ is in
us that we are saved, but as we are in Christ.
It is this being in Christ for our justification
that makes justification necessarily work out
to sanctification, and forgiveness be one with
eternal life.

We shall be misled even by what is true in the
representative aspect of Christ unless we grasp
how much more He is, how creative He is, how
the solidarity involved in His representation is
due to His own act of self-identification and
not to natural identity with us. We must take
quite seriously that supreme word of a "new
creation in Jesus Christ." We need not get

216 THE THREEFOLD CORD

lost in discussing the metaphysic of it ; but
we must have so tasted the new life that
nothing but the strongest word possible is just 1
to it.

§
Christ our New Creator ! He was not simply
a new departure in the history of ethical civilisa-
tion, by the introduction of an exalted morality.
If that was what He came with, He brought much
less than the conscience needs ; and on countless
points He has left us without guidance to-day.
Nor was He simply a great new departure in the
history of religious ideas. He did much more
than bring us a new idea of God. If that was
all, again it was not what we need. For we
have more and higher ideas of God than we
know what to do with, more than we have
power to realise. But He stands for a new
departure in the history of Creation. His work
in so far is cosmic. It is a new storey added to
the world. It is a new departure in the action
which made the universe. It is an entirely new
stage in the elevation of human nature, so
imj^erfect in our first creation, to its divine
height in holiness. By His moral treatment of
our sinful case, which is our actual historic case,
we are taken into a share of His superhuman
life. That is our salvation. It is life and power

THE THREEFOLD CORD 217

we need. It is to bo made over again by the
Maker's redeeming hand. We are redeemed
from the ban of sin's magic circle by the only
One who has the secret of the unseen powers ;
we are joined with the sin-destroying life of
Christ. And we are redeemed, by the very
nature of that redemption, into the fellowship of
His eternal and blessed peace. And that is our
Reconciliation. The act that justified sanctifies
and reconciles. And that totality of Christ in
His Church is what God looks on and is satisfied.
We are, as a believing race, in the Son in whom
He is always well pleased.

Now what is it that has created so much diffi-
culty for the old Protestant doctrine ? I mean
difficulty in the mind of Christian believers, and
still more in their experience. For we need not
trouble here about difficulty from the side of the
worldlings or the ethical sentimentalists. But
difficulty arose within the pale of the most
devout and devoted evangelical experience.
Perhaps it has arisen in your own minds. Well,
the old Protestantism, as you know, was greatly
exercised about the true relation between faith
md works. And it had to insist so strongly on
:he sole value of faith in order to cope with

218 THE THREEFOLD CORD

Rome that its later years fell into an excessive
dread of good works, lest there should be 1
ascribed to them saving effect. As a result faith
was credited with a merely receptive power, or
no more beyond that than a power of assent.
Men lost hold of the great Lutheran fact that
faith is the most mighty and active thing in the j
soul, that our faith is our all before God, that it
is an energy of the whole person, that good
works are done by this whole believing person,
and that faith by its very nature, as trust in God's
love, is bound to work out in love. They mis-
read the moral impulse in faith, its power to
recast personality and refashion life. They did
not, of course, overlook the necessity of such
renovation ; but they put it down to a subse-
quent action of the Spirit over and above faith— J
almost as if the Spirit and His sanctification were'
a second revelation, a new dispensation. Which
indeed many of the mystics thought it was— liko
many rationalist mystics to-day, who think we
have outgrown historic Christianity and the|
historic Christ through our modern light. The
old Protestant orthodoxy did not realise that the
real source of the Spirit is the Cross. It therefore
detached faith from life in a way that has pro
duced the most unfortunate results, both in ai
antinomianism within the Church, and in £

THE THREEFOLD CORD 219

Socinian protest without, which was inevitable,
and so far valuable, but was equally extreme.
Faith was treated by the positive school then as a
mystic power, or an intellectual, but not as a
moral. It was not the renovating power in life,
but only prepared the ground for the renovating
power to come in. It had not in itself the trans-
forming power either individually or socially.
Its connection with love was accidental and not
necessary — as it must be, being faitK in love.

§
Now, if we translate this experimental lan-
guage into theological, it means that they did
not connect up justification and sanctification.
Forgiveness of sin was not identified closely
enough with eternal life. Eternal life was de-
tached from identity with that which was the
true eternal in life, from faith's practical (i.e.,
experimental) godliness. Forgiveness did not
go, as it should, with renewal of heart and con-
[duct in one act. It delivered from an old world
wi hout opening a new and planting us in its
rev<_ itionised principles. Faith had, indeed,
the p. ver to do works of love, but it was not
driven i them so that it could do no other.
And this, fiaw in faith corresponded to a like
flaw in thv reading of Christ's act which was

220 THE THREEFOLD CORD

the object of faith. They treated the work of
Christ in a way far too objective. It was some-
thing done wholly over our heads. There was
not a solidary connection between Christ's work
and the Church it created. Attention was con-
centrated upon one aspect of Christ's work — its
action on God. That is quite an essential aspect
(perhaps the chief), but it must not be isolated.
No aspect of that work must be isolated, as I
began by saying. It is the service an accom-
plished theology does for the Church to keep
all aspects in one purview, in the proportion of
a great and comprehensive faith. We have
to-day gone to another extreme, and isolated
another aspect — the moral effect of Christ on
man. So we need not give ourselves any airs
of superiority to the old orthodoxy in that
respect of onesidedness. And we must also re-
member that the whole secret of truth in this
matter is not what we are sometimes told — a
change of emphasis. We have changed the
emphasis, and yet we are short of the truth ;
and the state of the Church's piety shows it.
We have moved the accent from the objective
to the subjective work of Christ ; and we fall
victims more and more to a weak religious sub-
jectivism which has the ethical interest but not
the moral note. We fall into a subjectivism

THE THREEFOLD CORD 221

which is reflected in one aspect of Pragmatism
and overworks the principle contained in the
words, "By their fruits shall ye know them"
(know them, whether they are true to the Gospel,
not the Gospel and whether it is true to God
and reality). So that people say, " I will believe
whatever I feel does me good. My soul will
eat what I enjoy, and drink what makes me
[happy." They are their own test of truth, and

' their own Holy Ghost." The secret, therefore,
^s not change of accent but balance of aspects.
jA.nd the true and competent theology is not

nly one which regards the Church's whole
jhistory and outlook (thinking in centuries, I
balled it), but it is one disciplined to think in
broportion, to think together the various
aspects of the Cross, and make them enrich
and not exclude one another.

§
The defect of the old view was, then, as I have
paid, that it could not couple up justification
Imd sanctification. It could not show how the
pame act of Christ which delivered from the
ijuilt of sin delivered also from its power. And
;his was because in the justification too much
iitress was laid upon the suffering ; and suffering
n itself has no sanctifying power. You see how

222 THE THREEFOLD CORD

our practical experience, when it is well noted,
provides our theological principles. We do
find that suffering by itself debases, and even
imbrutes, instead of purifying ; that pain is an
occasion rather than a cause of profit. That is
a moral principle of spiritual experience. Con-
sequently when excessive attention was given to
the suffering of Christ, and the atoning value
was supposed to reside there instead of in the
holy obedience, the work of Christ lost in puri-
fying and sanctifying effect, whatever it may
have done in pacifying or converting. The
atoning thing being the holy obedience to the
Holy, the same holiness which satisfied God
sanctifies us. That is the idea the Reformers
did not grasp, through their preoccupation
with Christ's sufferings. But it is the only
idea which unites justification and sanctifica-
tion and both Avith redemption. For the holi-
ness which satisfied God and sanctifies us also
destroyed the evil power in the world and
its hold on us. It was the moral conquest
of the world's evil, amid the extreme con-
ditions of sin and suffering, by a Victor who
had a capital solidarity with the race, and not
merely an individual connection with it as a
member. So that it has been said that we
must explain and correct current ideas of sub-

THE THREEFOLD CORD 223

stitutionary expiation by the idea of solidary
reparation. The curse on man was the guilty
power of sin and its train — hitherto invincible.
There was but one way in which this could be
mastered. A moral curse could be mastered
only in a purely moral way, the world-curse
by the world-conscience. It could be mastered
but by One whose sinlessness was not only
negatively proof against all that sin could do,
but positively holy ; and He was thus deadly to
sin, satisfactory to God's loving judgment, and
creative of a new humanity in the heart of the
old. This was a task beyond mere substitu-
tionary penal suffering as that phrase is now so
poorly understood. For that would have been
just and effectual only if it had fallen on the
arch-rebel, who, with the nobility of Milton's
Satan in his first stage, assumed himself all the
worst consequences of his revolt to spare the
other souls ^,hom he had misled.

§
The truth is that Anselm, in spite of the
ir.speakable service he did both to the faith
md thought of his time and all time, yet put
:heology en a false track in this matter. He
aad too much to say of a superethical tribute
Daid to God's honour by the composition of a

224 THE THREEFOLD CORD

voluntary suffering. Our sin was compounded
rather than really atoned. He did not grasp the
sacrifice of Christ as made to God's holiness ; as
one therefore which could only be ethical in its
nature, by way of holy obedience. This obedience
was the Holy Father's joy and satisfaction. He
found Himself in it. And it was also the foiling
and destruction of the evil power. And it was
farther the creative source of holiness in a race
not only impressed by the spectacle of its tragic
hero victorious, but regenerate by the solidarity
of a new life from its creative Head. The work
of Christ was thus in the same act triumphant
on evil, satisfying to the heart of God, and
creative to the conscience of man by virtue of
His solidarity with God on the one side, and on
the other with the race. He subdued Satan,
rejoiced the Father, and set up in Humanity the
kingdom — all in one supreme and consummate
act of His one person. He destroyed the king-
dom of evil, not by way of preparation for the
kingdom of God, but by actually establishing
God's kingdom in the heart of it. And He re-
joiced, filled, and satisfied the heart of God, not
by a statutory obedience, or by one private to
Himself, which spectacle disposed God to bless
and sanctify man ; but by presenting in the
compendious compass of His own person a

THE THREEFOLD CORD 225

Humanity presauctified by the irresistible
power of His own creative and timeless work.
The holy demand of God is always couched in
a false form when it is made to call for the
expiation of an equivalent suffering instead of a
confession of God's holiness, adequately holy,
from the side of the sinner under judgment.
Heaven and its happiness are wrongly conceived
as immunity from judgment instead of joy in
the consummation of judgment in righteousness
and holiness for ever. It was not clear to the
old view that the very nature of justification
was sanctification, that the Justifier was so only
las One who always per'^ectly sanctified Himself,
land was organic, in the i 3t, with the race in its
[new life. It appeared to ur fathers as if sancti-
fication were only a facultative sequel of justi-
fication.

( Whatever we mean, therefore, by substitution,
it is something more than merely vicarious. It
is certainly not something done over our heads.
Ct is representative. Yet not by the will of
jnan choosing Christ, but by the will of
Dhrist choosing man, and freely identifying
Bimself with man. It is a matter not so much
)f substitutionary expiation (which, as these
vords are commonly understood, leaves us too
jittle committed), but of solidary confession and

The Work of Christ. 16

226 THE THREEFOLD CORD

praise from amid the judgment fires, where the
Son of God walks with the creative sympathy
of the holy among the sinful sons of men. It is
not as if Christ were our changeling, as if His lot
and ours were transposed on the Cross. But He
was our self-appointed plenipotentiary, and
what He engaged for we must implement by an
organic spiritual entail. So far His work was as
objective as our creation, as independent of our
leave ; and it committed us without reference
to our consent but to our need. When He died
for all, all implicitly died. The great transaction
was done for the race. But objective as it
was, gift as it was to us from pure grace, it
was so in its initiative rather than in its
method. Essentially it was a new creation of
us, but practically the new creator was in us,
and the word was flesh. In such a way that He
and His are one by faith in a solidarity corre-
sponding from beneath, 7nutatis mutandis, to
the solidarity between Father and Son from
above.

He and His form an organic spiritual unity —
one will in two parties or persons. Mere sub-
stitution is mere exchange of parts, in which one
is excluded and immune. But the work of
Christ is inclusive and committal, by our con-
tinuity of life with Him through the spirit in a

I

THE THREEFOLD CORD 227

Church. I The suffering of Christ is but the under
and seamy side of that solidarity whose upper
side is the beauty of our corporate holiness in
Him. The same law, the same act, which laid
our sin on Him lays His holiness on us, and
absorbs us into His satisfaction to God. In the
same act God made Him to be sin for us and
made us righteousness in Him. In the empirical
sense we are no more made righteous than He
was made sinful. But we are as closely incor-
porated in the holy world as He was in the
sinful. And our holiness is not ours, in the
same sense as our sin was not His — in the
sense of initiative and individual responsibility
for it.

It was as our self-appointed representative
that Christ died. He died as the result, as the
finale, of the act by which He identified Himself
with us and emptied Himself from heaven. He
is our Head by divine right and not by election of

' In His saving act He so became one with the race that the
new Humanity He set up arises in history as the company of
those who answer and seal His incarnate act with their faith.
By his incarnation and redemption Christ did not simply deify
Humanity, as a pagan Christianity had it in the fourth century,
nor manifest the essential deity of Humanity as a pagan Chris-
tianity has it in the twentieth. But He so took a Humanity
I predestined for Him that those who take Him should become
the new Humanity in the true Church.
I

228 THE THREEFOLD CORD

ours. Our representative, our surety He was —
not our choice illustration, not our mandatory
champion, not our moral deputy, not our friendly
sponsor promising that we should one day pay
our debt because of His optimistic faith in us.
It was not in us that He had faith so much as in
Himself as the power and grace of God. He did
not promise that we would pay (if the metaphor
may be allowed) ; He paid for us, knowing that in
Himself alone could we raise the vast advance.
What was presented to God was not only
Christ's perfection, nor was it His confidence in
us, but also His antedated action on us, His con-
fidence in Himself for us. That was what stood
to our good. There was offered to God a racial
obedience which was implicit in the creative
power of His, and not merely parallel with His,
as if He were our firstfruits instead of our Sun.

The juristic aspect is a real element in Christ's
death. It has a moral core ; and we cannot
discard it without discarding the moral order of
the world as one revelation of that irrefragable
holiness of God which must be expressed in
judgment and confessed from its midst. The
chief defect of the great revolution which began
in Schleiermacher and ended in Ritschl has

THE THREEFOLD CORD 229

been that it allowed no place to that side of
Christ's work. And it is a defect that much
impoverishes the current type of religion, be-
clouds it, and robs it of the power of moral con-
viction by reducing the idea of sin and dismissing
the note of guilt. It makes grace not so much
free as arbitrary, because it does not regard in
its revelation what is due to the holiness of God.
It banishes from our Christian faith the one
note which more than any other we have to-day
come to need restored — the note of judgment.
When properly construed the juristic element is
a great power to lift faith from the mere
ethicism to which Ritschl tends into the mystic
region which is so essential to make a moral
power a religious, to provide a home for the
soul as well as a lamp to our feet, and to secure
for believers a hidden communion with Christ.
It also saves the grace of God from being a
mere favouritism to believers, or a mere con-
cession to misery.

There is no doubt we are in reaction from a
time when that side of things was overdone.
The juristic aspect taken alone, and taken in
relation to legal demand rather than personal
holiness — such satisfaction, when isolated, does
not do justice to the aspect in which Christ was
triumphant over evil {redemption) nor to the

230 THE THREEFOLD CORD

aspect in which His work is regenerative for
mankind {sanctification). And it tended to pro-
mote the fatal notion that holiness could be
satisfied with suffering and death, or with any-
thing short of an answering holiness effected
and guaranteed. The satisfaction in it was
offered to a distributive justice rather than
to a personal holiness, to a claim rather than
a person, to a regulative law rather than to
a constitutive life. All that and more is quite
true.

But I must ask you to deal sympathetically
with those juristic views, to treat them with
spiritual insight. It was the vice of Socinianism,
and it is the vice of the Rationalism which is its
legatee, that it criticised orthodoxy by the fierce
light of the natural conscience instead of by the
inner nature and better knowledge of the reve-
lation on which orthodoxy founded all. It criti-
cised theology by the natural reason and not by
the supernatural Gospel. There is nothing more
vulgar than slashing criticism in such a matter.
You cannot slash here without cutting the face
of some great and true saints to whom these
views are dearer than life because bound up
with their entrusted Gospel and their life
eternal. One of the most damnatory features
of popular theological liberalism is the violent

THE THREEFOLD CORD 231

handling of what it calls orthodoxy, and its
total lack of spiritual flexibility and inter-
pretative sympathy — caused largely by the prior
lack of theological knowledge and culture.
That some orthodoxy is also shallow and in-
solent is no justification for those whose plea
is that they know better. I pray you to listen
to the old theology not as fools but as wise,
as evolutionists and reformers, not as dyna-
mitards. Consider what was gained for us in
it. True, it sometimes presented its gain in
false forms, as when it spoke of the equivalence
of Christ's suffering to what we all deserved.
That was but the form, and the Socinians did good
work in the correction of such things. But this
at least had been gained — the conviction that it
was not the touchy honour of a feudal monarch
that was to be dealt with at the head of the
world, but the love of a just God. The conviction
behind all was the grandest moral conviction
possible — that all things are by Christ in the
hands of infinite righteousness and holy love.
This vast moral step had been taken. Men had
come to realise that the result of Christ's work
was eternal right; and especially that it was
right, not in reference to the claims of an evil
will, but in regard to those of a will perfectly
good. The days were certainly outgrown by this

232 THE THREEFOLD CORD

juristic theology when there could be any such
talk as filled the early Church about dealing
with the rights Satan had won over man.
Evil has no rights in the soul. From that, in-
deed, it was a great advance even to Anselm's
apotheosis of God's honour. And it was a
further advance still beyond feudal dignity
when the great and noble categories of juris-
prudence were invoked to replace the notion
of courtly or military honour which made
God and man duellists rather than aught else.
It was a vast step in the moralising of theology
when its grand concern came to be the estab-
lishment of men before a righteous and social
judge. Do not speak contemptuously of that
step. It is one of our own stages. It gave us
rest and uplifting on our journey to where we
now stand. We have only had to carry further
that moralising of the nature of justice. The
whole idea was ethical and social compared
with what went before it — at least as much so
as ours now marks a farther advance. It was
ethical as regards claims by an evil power which
can have no moral rights. And it was social
in that it brought Christian belief into line
with the ruling principles of society as it then
was. It is a view, moreover, which has shown
itself capable of inspiring some of the deepest.

THE THREEFOLD CORD 233

sweetest, and most beneficent piety the world
has ever seen. Moreover, it had in it active
conditions of moral growth which broke

F'^^^ rough the packthreads of its own time,
e to-day have only had to carry forward
that process of moralising the idea of our re-
lation to God which the jurists began. Their
theology bad a moral passion which shed the
features in it that were ethically defective, and
assimilated the moral idea of the Gospel as
pe are now taught to read it in a Bible redis-
covered and reconstrued by the Spirit's action
both in the faith and the criticism of the day.

.\niong these three aspects of Christ's work
5ome minds will be drawn by preference to
)ne, some to another, just as different ages
lave been. Some souls, according to their ex-
je^'ience, will gravitate to the great Deliverance,
• jme to the great Atonement, and some to the
^reat Regeneration. Some ministries will be
narked by the influence of one, some of
mother. That is all within the free affinities
)f the spiritual life, and the preferential sym-
)athies of the moral idiosyncrasy. And the
Church is enriched by the complementary
j,ction of such diversities of ministry. But

234 TPIE THREEFOLD CORD

what ought not to be encouraged is any ten-
dency on the part of those who prefer the
one line to deny the equal right of the others.
And what ought not to be tolerated is the
habit of denunciation, by those who see the
one side, of the sides they find nothing in ; and
especially the habit of assuming that the sides
they are blind to represent a lower Christian
level. Where this is possible there has really
been little done for the conscience by the view
that is adopted. And it is both absurd and over-
weening to ask us to believe that those sections
of the Church, and those lights of piety, who
held to views at present in the background were
all theological bigots and moral inepts ; that
real moral aptitude and theological faculty did
not arise till now ; that a like devotion obscures
such questions ; that babes and sucklings per-
fect theological praise ; that wisdom is justified
by children ; and that it is now the monopoly
of those who detach theology from religion, and
dismiss it to a historical museum.

If Christ be the Saviour of the world in
any sense, the thing He did must be at least as
great as the world. And if as great, then no
less manifold, and no less the object for first-
rate intelligence than the lower objects of
experience. Faith in such a Saviour cannot

I

THE THREEFOLD CORD 235

3ontinue to live for either heart or conscience
if it is detached from mind. Nor can mind
3ubmit to be warned off the supreme object of
he soul's concern if that object is loved and
sought with all our heart and soul and
strength. The very type of prayer in the
ion-theological forms which claim to be Chris-
dan shows to what we can sink when faith is
stripped of mind and strength. It is only a poor
Dhrist that can be housed in a poor creed, and
feeble prophet that is canonised when a
sentimentalised ethic is offered as religion.

ADDENDUM

ADDENDUM

Note to Lecture IV.

There is a point in pp. 118-9 where, in speaking freely,
I have spoken loosely, and I have expressed myself with
some want of caution likely to cause misunderstanding
of my full meaning. I there say that the wrath of God
is not to be taken as a pathos or affection, but as the
working out of His judgment in a moral order. My
intention was to discourage the idea that it was a
mood or temper, and to connect it with the sure change-
lessness of God's moral natvire. But on reviewing the
passage I find I have so put it that I might easily suggest
that the anger of God was simply the automatic recoil
of His moral order upon the transgressor, the nemesis
which dogs him and makes hard his way, his self -harden-
ing ; as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God
Himself upon the sin, and no infliction of His displeasm'e
upon the sinner. This is an impression I should be sorry
to leave ; for it is one that would take much of its most
holy significance and solemn mystery out of the work of
Christ.

Was Christ's bearing of God's wrath just His exposure
to the action of the vast moral machine ? Did He just
become involved, as our rescuer, in the mechanism which
regulates ethical Humanity, using at times man's anger as
its agent ? This mechanism might be there possibly with-

239

240 ADDENDUM

out the ordinance of a God that it should be so, or possibly
as the institvition of a deist and distant God who calmly
watches His world spin with the motion He gave it. But
is God not personally immanent and active in His own
moral order ? Did Christ just incur the automatic penalty
of that order as He strove to save its victims ? Was He
just caught in the works? Or was there implied, and
felt, also the element of personal displeasure acting
through that order — the element that would differentiate
wrath from mere nemesis, and infliction from mere recoil ?
Granting then that there was in Christ's suffering the
element of personal displeasure and infliction, was it man's
or God's ? Was His treatment simply the reaction of
sinful man against holiness, or was it the reaction of a
holy God against sin ? Did He Himself feel He was
yielding to man's dark will, or God's will, darker, but
higher and surer ? Did He suffer, just as the holiest
saint might in a wicked world, the extreme hate of
men ; or was God's displeasure also upon Him ? We
have abundantly seen that this could not be ixpon Him as
His own desert, not as it lies vipon a guilty conscience.
If He was made sin He was not made sinful ; if He was
made a curse He was not acciu^sed. And have we not
also seen that He who acted in our stead could act with
no fitness and no precision if He took on Him the mere
equivalent of what the guilty would have paid had they
never been redeemed (that would have needed a generous
arch-rebel), but only if he paid what was appointed as the
price of their redemption ? The uttermost farthing is not
the last mite of their desert but of God's i-ansom price.
But the curse of sin's sequel is most real whatever the
amount. And it was certainly on Christ, by His freely
putting Himself under it beside the men on whom it lay.
That curse then — was it an infliction from God, which did
not lift, did not cease to be inflicted, even when the Son
put Himself in its way ; or was it something that struck

ADDENDUM 241

Him only from men below and not from God above
at all?

Surely as it falls on man at least it is God's infliction.

We do not only grieve God but we provoke His anger.

There is nothing we need more to recall into our sense of

sin at present than this (though we must extend it, as we

must extend our redemption, to a racial and solidary

wrath of God in which we share). Its absence has

slackened and flattened the whole tone and level of

Christian life. Tlie love of God becomes real anger to

our sin, and to us as we identify ourselves with the sin,

to us while, outside Christ, we are no more than membei-s

of a sinful race. Is not our satisfaction and increase in

well-doing the personal blessing of God ? Then svu-ely our

misery and infatuation on the other path is His personal

anger. If a true evolution carries with it the personal

1 and joyful action of God in blessing its results, is the

! result of degeneration a mere natural process in the

} moral region, secluded from God's displeased action and

i infliction ? Is it all His will only as a thing willed, and

I not as His action in willing it?

Weigh, as men of real moral experience, what is in
! volved in the hardening of the sinner. That is the worst
) penalty iipon sin, its cumulative and deadening history.
AVell, is it simply self -hardening ? Is it simply the
• reflex action of sin upon character, sin going in, settling
■ in, and reproducing itself there ? Is it no part of God's
I positive procedure in judging sin, and bringing it, for sal-
vation, to a crisis of judgment grace ? When Pharaoh
j hardens his heart, is that in no sense God hardening
1 Pharaoh's heart? When a man hardens himself against
j God, is there nothing in the action and purpose of God
i that takes part in that induration? Is that anger not as
I real as the superabovmding grace ? Are not both bound
j up in one complex treatment of the moral world ? When
' a man piles up his sin and rejoices in iniquity, is God
The Work of Christ. 17

^^2 ADDENDUM

simply a bystander and spectator nf f>,
not God's pressure on ,1^^^''^'''' °^ <^he process? Does
stiffen him, ^LtTiLunin^ "^'^^^^"-^ ^im, urge him.
shut up to mer y a^n^P t iT^:/' "l^^/^^* ^« -^^^^^ be
but the action of a ^vlL u- . '^^ *" '^^^ <^hat this is
permissive w^y ^1 Jt 1 '" ^"^^^^ ^^^'^^^^^^ ^ ^
the Situation P'can th^A^: l^ rpCtrr. '^1^ '^
If so, where is the inner action of ,! P""'"'^^ *^ anything ?
immanence in things is one of 4 P'""'^"^' ^"^ ^h°««
tions ? Everythincf t n l ^'' ^^"'^^ ^""^^rn revela-

to the whoi7ci':irrintrv^ ^> r^^ ^^^^^^^-^

it is imderstood, not indeed to 1 f ^^^^^^^^^ «f «i" as
Jong, deep history of th! f ^' ^"^ ^^ *^°^^ ^^ ^he

coincided ^th a ^XnLr^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^-'-^

him of Romans vii. Ask ,„.J^ * 't-true sons of

thus-that the anger of God ™ "T"""'^ " "' '» "'^^'<"-
the private imagination to .w.^ " ""• *«'''^""1 "'
then sliocks, apS the'dnH "" '™^8^«^''i™ ^ wlaich
all conflden e fnthe flesh ft' ^ 'T ''°'^'"^ '<"'^ <"
*e a totally new nln=' ol "' *' °°"''P"' "^■■"'
world, bnt, sin beipTin ..f" "r"-- ?"' ^^ in the
power, does God nL ^ brfj" 1 V^' ''™"''"«
precipitates its destrnct L ? ^o He'nf \'''^' "'
nnatic over a precipioe into waJr where heTanr '"i
and divert him from fi,o , ^I'neie ne can be saved

dashed to Xcesl BmrT^'l ^^" ^^''' ""' ^°"'^^ ^^
xii. 39) ? men in W T* '° ^'' ^^^^^ ^^^-^^ ^J"hn

morally possible as th. ^^""' " '^"'^ "° -'^^^ "^i-g

With LlZ^\t:^lsTeTR "" ^'^'^-^^ r ^^'^'^ ^^-^
more sinful. Every al tJ \T ^''^ ''^ ^^^ ^^^«^^«
That is the curie of the ' . ^'^^ ^""* "^ ^^^^^"^ ^t.
from God, and cut adrift 7" . f " ''"* I-w detached

"nderHis'indiffe:LeP I. t,otH ""^ "^^'"^^^ "^^^^
if God be in His law /. t \ curse and anger still,

His world ? ' ^" ^' ""^ ^^" ^^^^^-« Hi^ to pervad^

The love of God is not more real than the wrath of God.

ADDENDUM 243

For He can be really angry only with those He loves.
And how can Absolute Love love without acting to save ?
Well, if it be so, that God's direct displeasvu'e and
infliction is the worst thing in sin's penalty, did the dis-
pleasiu-e totally vanish from the infliction when Christ
stood under it? Would He have really borne the true
judgment on sin if it had ? Was Christ's great work not
the meeting of that judgment and hallowing it? Did
the complete obedience and reparation not include the
complete acceptance of God's displeasure as an essential
factor in the curse ? A holy God could not look on sin
without acting on it ; nor could He do either but to abhor
and curse it, even when His Son was beneath it. Wherein
is guilt different from sin but in this — that it is sin, not
cut adrift from God and let go its own way and go to
pieces, but sin placed under the anger of God, under the
personal reaction of that Absolute Holy God which no
creature, no situation, can escape? And could Christ bear
our guilt and take it away if He did not carry it there, and
bear it there, and hallow its judgment there ? Did He
just throw it down there, leave it, and rid Himself of it ?
Does not the best of sons suffer from the angry gloom that
spreads from the father over the whole house at the
prodigal's shameless shame ? Did God not lay on Him the
iniquity of us all, and inflict that veiling of His face which
darkened to dereliction even the Redeemer's soul ? It is
not desert that is the worst thing in judgment, but deser-
tion— the sense of desert forsaken by God. The forsaken-
ness is the worst judgment. For with God's presence
my sense of desert may be my sanctiflcation. What
Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection
between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of
sin, but a sense of the sinner's relation to the personal
vis-d-vls of an angry God. God never left Him, but He
did refuse Him His face. The communion was not broken,
but its light was withdrawn. He was forsaken but not

244 ADDENDUM

disjoined. He was insolubly bound to the very Father
who turned away and could not look on sin but to abhor
and ciu-se it even when His Son was beneath it. How
could He feel the grief of being forsaken by God if He
was not at bottom one with Him? Neglect by one to
whom we have no link makes no trouble.

Even a theologian so little orthodox as Weizsacker
says : —

" The moral experience of guilt is too strong to let me
say that it can be met by any mere manifestation of grace
or of love from God to man— even when that manifestation
carries in it the sympathetic suffering of sin's ciu-se, borne
merely in the way of conjarming the manifestation and
pressing the object-lesson." " When repentance helps the
believer to peace it is not ex opere operato, because he has
repented and may now trust grace ; but it is because in
his repentance he has part and lot in the infinite i^ain and
confession of Christ."

w

UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE QRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON

B-24-04 32180 MS ^

pr\nce\pf*

Ty>eo\oq'^ify

Ubfa^lf^

A0A2

0A26A

96A7

DATE DUE

H\C