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 Gospel of reconciliat on, or at-one-ment 
 
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 3 1924 029 376 344 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029376344 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 THE SPIRIT AND THE INCARNATION. 
 
 In the Light of Scripture, Science, and Practical 
 Need. Third Edition, 9s. 
 
 CHRISTIAN THEISM AND A SPIRITUAL 
 
 MONISM. 
 
 God, Freedom, and Immortality, in View of 
 
 Monistic Evolution. Second Edition, 9s. 
 
 THE CROSS AND THE KINGDOM, 
 
 As viewed by Christ Himself and in the Light 
 of Evolution. 9s. 
 
 WHAT ABOUT THE NEW THEOLOGY? 
 
 Second Edition, 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 THE TEACHING OF CHRIST IN ITS 
 PRESENT APPEAL. 
 
 Second Edition, 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. 
 
THE GOSPEL OF 
 RECONCILIATION 
 
 Or AT-ONE-MENT 
 
 Rev. W. L. WALKER 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 'THE SPIRIT AND THE incarnation" "the CROSS AND THE kingdom" 
 
 "CHRISTIAN THEISM AND A SPIRITUAL MONISM " 
 
 ETC. ETC. 
 
 In publishing a notice of this hook will the 
 Editor kindly credit it as "IMPORTED 
 BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS" 
 
 Edinburgh: T. & T. CLARK, 38 George Street 
 1909 
 
- 7 » vtd 
 
 Printed by 
 
 Morrison & Gibb Limited 
 
 for 
 
 T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. 
 
 LONDON I 5IMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. LIMITED. 
 NEW YORK I CHARLES SCRIBNER's SONS. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ONE purpose of this Book is to set forth the 
 Scriptural conception of the Cross of Christ as 
 being, not an Atonement to God or Expiation of man's 
 sin, but the means whereby God was effecting the 
 At-one-ment, or Reconciliation, of the World with 
 Himself. It is not written to support a one-sided 
 " moral theory " of the Cross (although any true theory 
 must be a moral one), but to state the Evangelical 
 doctrine in its essential and abiding truth. An en- 
 deavour is made to show the real teaching of St. Paul 
 and the truths underlying it, tested by the actual 
 history and teaching of Christ. In Chapter VII. the 
 doctrine of the Cross in its "judicial" aspect, or "the 
 sin-bearing of Christ," is re-stated so as to show how 
 Christ "bore our sins" and manifested the Divine 
 Righteousness, in the way in which His Cross actually 
 came to Him in the sequence of the Divine Moral 
 Order, and apart from any arbitrary transfer, sub- 
 stitution, or suggestion of penal infliction on Christ. 
 The Cross is also shown to be the Supreme manifesta- 
 tion of the Love of God. 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 Above all, the desire has been, at a time when many 
 are finding it difficult or impossible to receive the old 
 forms of doctrine, to bring out afresh the reality of the 
 Gospel as the proclamation of the universal and uncon- 
 ditioned forgiving and saving love of God in Christ. 
 We believe that, rightly apprehended, it is the only 
 power that can really save the world of men, in- 
 dividually or socially, because it is "the Wisdom and 
 the Power of God" to substitute for the reign of self 
 that of God in His Love in human hearts. The Gospel 
 of Reconciliation is therefore set forth in both its 
 individual and social aspects. 
 
 The present outlook in a large portion of Christen- 
 dom is, in the words of Lord Rosebery, " most 
 ominous," and it presses on the Churches the question 
 whether they have been faithful to Christ and His 
 "Gospel of God," the effect of which is Love and 
 Righteousness and Peace. 
 
 Fernihirst, Shettleston, 
 Glasgow, June 1909. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chap. 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 I. The Gospel and the Cross .... 
 II. Not "Atonement," but " At-one-ment " . . 13 
 
 III. Paul's Doctrine of the Cross 33 
 
 IV. Christ "Made Sin for Us" 45 
 
 V. Paul's Doctrine considered . . . -55 
 
 VI. The Cross in its Historical Setting . . 87 
 VII. How Christ "Bore our Sins" .... 107 
 VIII. Christ and the Race : the Head of Humanity 133 
 IX. Relation to the Teaching and Life- Work of 
 
 Christ 
 
 X. The Manifestation of the Love of God . 
 XI. The Gospel of Reconciliation . 
 XII. The Social Aspect of the Gospel 
 XIII. The Final Question 
 
 , 149 
 i6 S 
 179 
 205 
 223 
 Index 239 
 
I 
 
 THE GOSPEL AND THE CROSS 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE GOSPEL AND THE CROSS 
 
 ALTHOUGH the Gospel was first preached by 
 Christ Himself, it was through the Cross that 
 it went forth to the world. The Gospel of Christ 
 therefore involves a doctrine of the Cross. But the 
 Cross cannot be separated from the life and teaching 
 which preceded it and of which it was the crown. All 
 that Jesus said and did, whether in His life or by His 
 death, had one great object. Like the garment that 
 He wore, the work in which He clothed His spirit was 
 one seamless whole. In His teaching He sought to 
 bring men to God, to their true life of sonship toward 
 their heavenly Father, and of brotherhood towards each 
 other. In His own phrase, it was to make " the 
 Kingdom of God " a reality in the world. To the same 
 end He accepted His Cross, believing that it would be 
 effectual to accomplish what His life and teaching had 
 failed adequately to do. He was sure that after His 
 death the Kingdom of God would come. As His con- 
 fidence is expressed in the Fourth Gospel : " I, if I be 
 lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me." 
 It is the same thing that is meant by God's sending 
 
 3 
 
4 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 forth His Spirit in order to raise men into their true 
 spiritual life as His children. That Calvary was followed 
 by Pentecost was no accident. The one was necessary 
 in order to the other. Pentecost, or the going forth of 
 God's Holy Spirit for man's salvation, was the designed 
 sequence of Calvary. It was the result of the Divine 
 manifestation there. Strictly, indeed, the one was the 
 means of the other. The Spirit of God must come to 
 us clothed in some word or deed or personality, and it 
 was through the Cross of Christ that the Spirit went 
 forth in the fulness of Divine saving power. 
 
 It is as bringing the power of this Spirit to us that 
 any doctrine whatever is of value — as bringing Divine 
 influences to operate on our hearts to save us from self 
 and sin to the love of God and our fellow-men — to 
 become itself the principle of the life of Love in our 
 hearts. Christ was full of this Spirit, and through His 
 Cross He poured it forth on the world. Of what avail 
 are our doctrines if they promote not the practical life 
 of Love in the world ? It is the want of the Divine 
 Spirit of Love that is the real source of evil, and its 
 absence or the feebleness of its manifestation on the 
 part of professed Christians furnishes the strongest 
 argument against Christianity. All moral wrongs are 
 rooted in that self-centred, self-loving, self-seeking 
 principle which occupies the place that Love should 
 fill. It was this that was the source of sin in both Jew 
 and Gentile. And it is this that is the deepest cause 
 of the separation between man and God and between 
 
THE GOSPEL AND THE CROSS 5 
 
 man and man to-day. It was this that needed to be 
 broken up, removed and changed to Love, if men were 
 really to be brought into oneness with God and with 
 one another. And the same need exists wherever men 
 are found. If a Divine power is to operate on the 
 world for its salvation, it must be one that can change 
 the natural self-love of the human heart into the love 
 of God and man. It must be a power that can 
 regenerate and quicken quite a new life within the soul. 
 
 Not that there is no natural good in men or no love 
 towards their fellow-men, or towards that Highest and 
 Best that may stand for them as God. Far from it. 
 But there is still, even in the best, at bottom, a principle 
 of self-love which is never wholly overcome. It asserts 
 itself in many ways in even the maturest Christian, and 
 has to be constantly fought against and kept under. 
 And it takes the most insidious forms. But in the new 
 life the principle of Love to a personal God and Father, 
 and to all men as brother-men and children of the one 
 heavenly Father, is accepted as the dominant principle. 
 Given this new life, developed and rightly directed, and 
 all removable evils that curse the earth would disappear. 
 
 That the Gospel which was preached through the 
 Cross of Christ was effectual to the quickening of this 
 new life in the case of multitudes, is a matter of history 
 beyond dispute. It led those at whose instance Jesus 
 had been crucified to feel the enormity of their crime, 
 and to cry, "What must we do to be saved?" It 
 convicted many others of the reality of sin, and moved 
 
6 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 them to repentance. It enabled them at the same time 
 to believe in the forgiving love of God, to realise the 
 burden of their guilt removed, to have peace with God 
 and the assurance of Divine acceptance. It was so 
 used by the Spirit as to shed abroad God's love for 
 them in their hearts and to quicken an answering love, 
 the principle of the new life, within their souls. It 
 moved them to die with Christ to self and sin, and to 
 rise with Him to a new life of love and righteousness. 
 And it broke down the barrier between Jew and Gentile, 
 taking away " the Law " that separated them, " making 
 of twain one new man in Christ." Many questions may 
 be raised concerning the New Testament Scriptures, 
 but these are facts of ordinary history. The Gospel 
 proved itself to be " the power of God unto salvation to 
 all who believed." In short, the expectation of Jesus 
 was justified : after His death and by means of it, the 
 Kingdom of God began to come in its true spiritual 
 power. 
 
 Although causes soon appeared which checked the 
 Gospel in its early march of victory, yet throughout the 
 Christian centuries the Gospel of the Cross has shown 
 itself mighty to accomplish similar results under a great 
 variety of circumstances and with many different 
 theories held concerning the Cross. So that we cannot 
 doubt that its central purpose is to bring men into a 
 union of Love with God and with one another. What- 
 ever theory we may hold of its relation to God, this is 
 certainly its relation to man. Whatever theory can 
 
THE GOSPEL AND THE CROSS 7 
 
 most effectually aid in the accomplishment of this great 
 end is the truest theory. And whatever stands between 
 the Cross and its Divinely-intended end must be 
 removed. 
 
 It is because the Gospel that entered the world 
 through the Cross of Christ has this Divine power that 
 it is of supreme importance for men to-day. Many are 
 still living in separation from God and from each other, 
 and, because of the isolation of self in its own earthly 
 interests, men are suffering in countless ways, and the 
 eternal life is being missed. Because God is not reign- 
 ing in human hearts, the inevitable consequence is 
 wrong and suffering. If this Gospel can still do its old 
 work, there is nothing so important for men. If it can 
 save the world from its self-centred life to the life of 
 Love, the duty of holding it forth is paramount. If it 
 be, as Paul believed and as results proved it to be, " the 
 Wisdom and the Power of God " for man's highest good, 
 to ignore it is as unwise as it would be to ignore the 
 beneficent forces of Nature. 
 
 For effective belief in or preaching of the Gospel of 
 the Cross we need to have some understanding of it. 
 It is quite possible that no perfectly complete and 
 adequate doctrine of the Cross may be within the power 
 of man to formulate. Like all the works of God, it may 
 be so deeply grounded and so many sided that no one 
 mind nor any number of finite minds can comprehend 
 or even see the whole. Its many-sidedness, and the fact 
 that we always feel that there is something still hidden 
 
8 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 from us, is a proof of its Divineness. As with the 
 Moon, we behold only one side at one time and another 
 at another, and it is only one side we can ever see at 
 all. There is a Godward side of the Cross which we 
 cannot behold as we can its manward side. More than 
 one theory, therefore, may be true, or, rather, there may 
 be some element of truth in all reasonable theories. 
 We are not justified in setting up any one theory and 
 saying that this alone is evangelical and true. In doing 
 so we are going contrary to history and everyday 
 experience, and are arrogating to ourselves a function 
 that belongs only to the ever-teaching Spirit. One fact 
 stands sure and is founded on by all Christians. Jesus 
 certainly accepted His Cross for our sakes, and we owe 
 to Him our salvation. As Dr. Jowett wrote long ago : 
 " All or almost all Christians would agree that in some 
 sense or other we are reconciled to God through Christ 
 — all would join in saying that He is the way, the truth, 
 and the life. And had the human mind the same 
 power of holding fast points of agreement as of dis- 
 cerning differences, there would be an end of the 
 controversy." And he asks, " If our Saviour were to 
 come to earth again, which of all the theories of atone- 
 ment and sacrifice would He sanction with His 
 authority ? Perhaps none of them, yet perhaps all may 
 be consistent with a true service of Him " (On Atone- 
 ment and Satisfaction; Essays, pp. 498, 504). Dr. 
 Denny also in his latest book remarks that a doctrine 
 of Atonement arises out of Christian experience and is 
 
THE GOSPEL AND THE CROSS 9 
 
 not a condition of faith. It is well known that in the 
 post-Apostolic Church some very fantastic forms of 
 doctrine concerning the Cross were held, yet God's love 
 in Christ shone through them and wrought towards 
 men's salvation. The great thing was to feel the love 
 of Christ, and under that influence be drawn to God 
 and the true life. This must ever be the essential 
 thing. At the same time, a right understanding of the 
 Cross is far from being a matter of indifference. The 
 Cross will certainly be to us what we believe it to 
 mean, and the truer our conception of its meaning the 
 more effective will be its power. 
 
 But many of the theories which have been formed of 
 the Cross, many of its doctrinal interpretations, are such 
 that not a few are quite unable to receive them in the 
 light of present-day knowledge and feeling. The Cross 
 itself has become in some minds so identified with 
 certain theories concerning it that it is practically left 
 out of account, and with it the Gospel for which it 
 stands. It is regarded as something which served its 
 purpose but it is now obsolete. The doctrines that have 
 prevailed concerning it are believed to have rested on 
 misconceptions and on ignorance of the conditions of 
 thought in Apostolic times. By some modern writers 
 much ingenuity is shown in explaining away what has 
 hitherto been regarded as the Apostolic teaching. 
 Certain quite incidental beliefs entertained by the 
 Apostles as men of their time are said to explain their 
 whole doctrine. In a recently published Handbook of 
 
io THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 Early Christianity, by Professor Slack, of New York, 
 he gives the standpoint from which we must view the 
 Apostle Paul as being that stated by Wrede : " Paul 
 believes that without Christ mankind is in the power of 
 potent spirits, demons, and angelic powers. In our own 
 day, angels are regarded as the property of children and 
 poets ; for the Apostle and his time they are sober 
 realities." This is how the English-reading million are 
 asked to view Pauline Christianity. Apart from such 
 extremes, there is a wide agreement amongst recent 
 critics that Paul's doctrines are to be explained by his 
 previous Jewish opinions. Not to believe this is to be 
 behind the times. There is in this, of course, a measure 
 of truth ; but to give it as a complete explanation is 
 to confound the form with the substance. Even many 
 Christian preachers and Christian people feel the want 
 of such a doctrine of the Cross as shall enable them to 
 hold it with confidence, or to preach it and the Gospel 
 it declares with the power that can only proceed from 
 personal conviction, and in such a manner as will make 
 it credible to the minds and effective in the hearts of the 
 men of to-day. The old doctrines of satisfaction, sub- 
 stitution, and penal endurance are felt to be incredible 
 or inadequate. By many the Cross is regarded as the 
 manifestation of the Love of God, but it is not seen to 
 be at the same time the manifestation of His Righteous- 
 ness. Some are seeking refuge in the conception of a 
 Confession of man's sin by Christ as our Representative, 
 but still it is felt that there is much in the New Testa- 
 
THE GOSPEL AND THE CROSS n 
 
 ment which this view does not cover. In short, not a 
 few are seeking such a statement of the Cross as shall 
 be true to fact and experience, and as shall make it a 
 living and influential reality to the mind and conscience 
 of the present. Nearly all thoughtful Christians feel 
 the need of this. 
 
 The importance of the Cross, however, is in its rela- 
 tion to the Gospel of God's Love and to what that 
 Gospel is meant to effect. By many the Cross is 
 identified with the Gospel, and because they cannot 
 believe certain theories of the Cross the Gospel itself is 
 rejected or ignored. God as revealed in Christ is there- 
 fore unknown. It is this absence of the knowledge of 
 God in His truth that keeps the world in spiritual 
 darkness and hinders the operation of the Divine Power 
 upon it. It is only God who can truly bless men and 
 save the world. But if His Presence in the Love in 
 which He revealed Himself in Christ and His Cross is 
 unknown, it is the same thing with respect to the 
 spiritual and higher interests of men as if the sun 
 suffered an almost total eclipse. What the world so 
 greatly needs to-day is what it has always needed, the 
 light of God's gracious Presence to shine upon it, His 
 pitying and saving love to be realised so that it may also 
 live in us. It is this, not any merely doctrinal or theo- 
 logical interest, that calls for the endeavour to remove 
 misconceptions and to set forth the truth concerning 
 that Cross in which the revelation of God to men 
 culminated. The Cross rightly viewed brings men 
 
12 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 to God and God to men. For long the cry has been 
 " back to Christ " ; now it is " back to Jesus, the prophet 
 of Nazareth " : the Gospel of the Cross leads men not 
 only back to Christ and back to Jesus, but, through 
 Jesus Christ, back to God. We do need to return to 
 Jesus, in whom God was manifested as man — thorough 
 loyalty to His teaching, His life, His 'Cross, is just our 
 great want. But for this we do not need to forsake 
 " Christ " or Paul in those essential truths in which he 
 was at one with Jesus and the continuator of His work. 
 And for an effectual return to Jesus, we must first be 
 baptized in His Spirit. 
 
II 
 
 NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 
 
CHAPTER II 
 NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 
 
 THE whole subject of the Cross has been obscured 
 and rendered difficult by the introduction of 
 words and phrases which either have no place in the 
 Scriptures or are taken in a wrong sense. But the 
 chief source of error and confusion lies in the use of the 
 word Atonement in a sense quite different from that 
 warranted by the New Testament. No doubt this has 
 been often pointed out; but it has been done most 
 frequently in support of the idea that the reconciliation 
 was wholly on the human side. As the use of the word 
 Atonement in the sense referred to continues on the 
 part of many of the most recent writers, it is necessary 
 to be explicit, and to show the true meaning of the word 
 in the New Testament, and its bearing on an evangelical 
 conception of the Cross. This is necessary, even though 
 it may cause us to say things that " every one knows," 
 but which, if known, seem to be constantly forgotten. 
 Adherence to the New Testament sense of " Atone- 
 ment " will, we believe, more than anything else, help us 
 to the understanding of the Cross. It will at least clear 
 
 away the most formidable obstacle to an understanding 
 is 
 
16 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 of it and the most potent source of misunderstanding. 
 It is true that the use or non-use of a particular word or 
 term cannot determine such a great subject; but the 
 unwarranted sense which has been imported into this 
 particular word has given the very name by which the 
 work of Christ on His Cross is commonly described — 
 the familiar everyday term " the Atonement." Hundreds 
 of learned volumes and laboured treatises have been 
 based on this misleading word, and, as already remarked, 
 we find the error constantly repeated. This is true of 
 both English and German theological writers, whatever 
 their theological opinions may be. The consequence in 
 Germany as well as in Britain is that, as Rothe remarks, 
 " our dogmatists consider that it is a matter quite 
 self-evident that the atonement for sin is a satisfaction 
 for sin through expiatory endurance of its punishment " 
 {Still Hours, E.T. p. 206). 
 
 The word "Atonement" occurs only once (Rom. v. 
 11) in the Authorised Version of the New Testament; 
 it is not to be found in the Revised Version at all, 
 the Greek word so rendered in the A.V. being in 
 the Revised correctly translated Reconciliation. The 
 word " Atonement " is right enough if it be used in 
 its original and proper sense of At-one-ment. But, 
 as it is commonly employed in theology, preaching, 
 and controversy, it is used in the sense of atoning for 
 sin, making an atonement or satisfaction for sin, or 
 expiating it. Christ's " Atonement " is represented as 
 something offered to or done before God which expiates 
 
NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 17 
 
 sin or satisfies the Divine Justice or Holiness in view of 
 sin, so that it can be forgiven. By some quite recent 
 writers Atonement and Expiation are used as equi- 
 valent terms. Some who seek to avoid this implication 
 still use the misleading word without explanation. 
 Such implications are by no means contained either in 
 the original Greek word used by Paul or in the Eng- 
 lish word " Atonement " in that older and proper sense 
 which it bore about the time when the Authorised 
 Version was made, but which was also the time of 
 transition to its later significance. 
 
 The Greek word used by St. Paul is xccrccXXayfi, 
 (katallags), meaning a change or exchange of any kind ; 
 hence, in the New Testament, a change in the position 
 or condition of parties, e.g., from enmity or opposition 
 to friendship, a reconciliation, a becoming at one, or at- 
 one-ment. Therefore in the Revised Version we read 
 in Rom. v. 11 (where the A.V. had "Atonement"), 
 " Through whom we have now received the reconcilia- 
 tion." So in Rom. xi. 15 we have, " If the casting of 
 them away be the reconciliation of the world." With 
 special reference to the Cross, Paul speaks in 2 Cor. 
 v. 18 (as in both A.V. and R.V.) of "the Ministry 
 of Reconciliation," and his designation of the Gospel 
 that thus came to men is " the word of Reconciliation." 
 These are the only occurrences of the noun. In several 
 places the verb (xccraKkccoaai) is used in the sense of 
 to reconcile, as in 2 Cor. v. 18, "But all things are of 
 God who has reconciled (or atoned) us to Himself 
 
18 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 through Christ." So Rom. v. 10. In i Cor. vii. n we 
 read, " Let her (the wife) be reconciled to her husband." 
 It occurs in no other sense. If we are to found on 
 Scripture, then, there can be no doubt that "the 
 Reconciliation " is the proper term, or " Atonement," 
 not in the sense of expiation, but of being at one, or 
 At-one-ment. 
 
 This was also the original sense of the English word 
 " Atonement " (originally " onement "), and it is possible 
 that it was in this sense it was used in Rom. v. 1 1 by 
 the translators of the A.V., although Dr. John Owen, 
 writing not long after the time of the translation, says, 
 " which (Reconciliation), I know not by what means we 
 have translated ' Atonement ' " ( Works, x. 263). 
 
 Many examples of the usage of atone and atonement 
 in their original sense of at-one-ment might be given 
 from early writers. In Shakespeare we have, 
 
 " He and Aufidius can no more atone 
 Than violentest contrariety." 
 
 " I would do much 
 To atone them, for the love I bear to Cassio." 
 
 "He desires to make atonement 
 Betwixt the Duke of Gloucester and your brothers." 
 
 From Murray's New English Dictionary one or two 
 further examples may be given. Milton writes in 1643, 
 " The king and Parliament will soon be attoned." 
 Bayne, on Ephesians, has, " Now God is atoned and 
 reconciled through Christ." We have an illustrative 
 
NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 19 
 
 example in Queen Catharine Parr, who writes in 1553, 
 " To reconcile himself and make an onement with God." 
 Tyndale in 1526 translates 2 Cor. v. 18, "God hath 
 given unto us the office to preach the Atonement." 
 Kyngsmill writes (in Man's Estate), "If God did vouch- 
 safe to make • atonement with us." Here it will be 
 observed it is God who is said to make atonement. 
 As late as 1650, S. Clarke has in his Ecc. History, "We 
 must not come to make an attonment with God — before 
 we make an attonment with our brothers." 
 
 The word, however, came also to be used of "the 
 propitiation of an offended or injured person by repara- 
 tion of wrong or injury, amends, satisfaction, expiation," 
 and in this sense it has been adopted by theology. 
 This leads a theologian very ingenuously to remark, 
 " The old word atonement has by true instinct deepened 
 into the idea on which it rests, and has come to carry 
 with it the idea of propitation or expiation.'' But this 
 is just what is so greatly open to question, and, as the 
 article in Murray's Dictionary notes, " The word is not 
 so applied in any version of the New Testament." 1 
 
 Of course, it will be said that what is meant by the 
 
 1 As Dr. Trench remarks, " The notion of satisfaction lies now in these 
 words (atone and atonement) rather than that of reconciliation. An 
 atonement is the satisfaction of a wrong which one party has committed 
 against another, not the reconciliation of two estranged parties. This 
 last, however, was its earliest meaning, and, if the word may be rightly 
 divided at-one-ment, as probably it may, is in harmony with its ety- 
 mology " (Select Glossary of English Words). " Tell your scholars," he 
 says elsewhere, " that Atonement means reconciliation " {Study of 
 Words, p. 335). 
 
ao THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 term in its modern theological sense is that what Christ 
 did on the Cross is that which leads to the At-one-ment 
 or Reconciliation. It is true that it was in Christ and 
 His Cross that God was atoning the world to Himself; 
 but if we understand this in the sense of Christ making 
 satisfaction, etc., it ignores, or, rather, contradicts the 
 fact that, according to the Scriptures, the Atonement 
 originated with God ; it was " God " who " was in Christ 
 at-on-ing the world to Himself." Into what Christ is 
 believed to have done has been imported the idea 
 commonly expressed by the modern use of the word 
 atonement, namely, satisfaction or expiation. But this 
 sense is not conveyed by the word that Paul uses, which 
 means simply Reconciliation. 
 
 The use of the word Atonement in its modern 
 theological sense is no doubt partly due to the 
 influence of Anselm's " satisfaction theory," and partly 
 to a belief in the nature of the Old Testament sacrifices 
 which is now widely discredited. The expression " to 
 make atonement" is frequently employed in the 
 O.T. to translate the Hebrew verb Kipper, which 
 means "to cover" We have there the institution of 
 "atoning sacrifices," the oft quoted statement that 
 "the blood maketh atonement for your souls," the 
 great " Day of Atonement," and certain special sacrifices 
 by means of which Moses and others " made atone- 
 ment for the sins of the people." This language has 
 been carried over into Christian theology with the 
 assumption that these sacrifices were strictly propitiatory 
 
NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 21 
 
 sacrifices, expiating or " atoning for " the people's sins. 
 But this by no means follows. It is now generally 
 held that the Hebrew word means simply " to cover." 
 The great passage in Lev. xvii. 1 1, with reference to the 
 Blood, says simply, " I have given it to you to cover 
 your souls." As Schultz remarks, "the idea of ex- 
 piation has been put into the word ' cover ' without 
 any justification." What is stated is that the Blood, 
 being the seat of life and as such peculiarly holy (if not 
 even Divine), is given by God to them as a covering in 
 relation to certain offences, so that by offering it before 
 Him in a way prescribed they may continue in 
 Covenant relations to Him. So with the other sacri- 
 fices, even the sin-offering and the guilt-offering {Old 
 Test. Theology, vol. i. p. 385 f.). Dr. Davidson, in his 
 Theology of the Old Testament, remarks that " while 
 stating the fact that the life thus given atones, the 
 ritual law offers no explanation. The traditional ex- 
 planation has been that the victim was a poena vicaria 
 for the sin of the offerer. And it is probable that this 
 idea did become attached to sacrifice. It is questionable, 
 however, when all things are considered, if it be found 
 in the law" (p. 3 S3). As for the prophets, "none of 
 the prophets, not even Ezekiel, refers to sacrifice as the 
 means of atonement for the sins of the people. God 
 forgives of His grace and mercy alone" (p. 330). 
 
 Finally, to quote a Jewish authority, Dr. Kohler in 
 The Jewish Encyclopedia defines "Atonement" as 
 "the setting at one, or reconciliation of two estranged 
 
22 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 parties." There was a gradual spiritualisation of the 
 idea. Sin meant estrangement of the life from God. 
 Hence (as all Jewish interpreters agree) the blood was 
 offered as representing the life. " The life of the victim 
 was offered, not, as has been said, as a penalty 
 in the judicial sense, to avert Heaven's punish- 
 ment, not to have man's sins laid upon it as upon the 
 scape-goat of the Day of Atonement, and thus to have 
 the animal die in his place, but as a typical ransom of 
 ' life by life,' the blood sprinkled by the priest upon the 
 altar serving as a means of renewal of man's Covenant 
 of life with God." 
 
 That none of these sacrifices of the law had in them- 
 selves, or in the fact of their being offered, any actual 
 expiatory character, is evident from the words of the 
 writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews: "For it is im- 
 possible that the blood of bulls and goats should take 
 away sin " : the law having " only a shadow of the good 
 things to come." That none of them was meant to 
 propitiate God (after the manner of heathen sacrifices) 
 or to make Him willing to forgive, is clear from the 
 fact that they were all of Divine appointment and pro- 
 vision. They were ceremonial observances ordained by 
 God Himself in His merciful regard for the people by 
 observance of which they, in spite of their sins, might be 
 " covered," or continue to stand in acceptance before Him, 
 The sacrificial system was " an institution provided by 
 God for sins committed within the Covenant : sins done 
 with a high hand cut a man off from the covenant 
 
NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 23 
 
 people" (Davidson, Theol. of O.T. p. 310). As Dr. 
 Dorner (who himself held a doctrine of " atonement ") 
 remarks: "That the blood of beasts of itself, or the 
 mechanical offering of the same, has expiatory force 
 for men, is not only expressly repudiated by the 
 Psalmists and Prophets, but contradicts the institution 
 of the sacrificial service; for it is only through God 
 that the sacrifice can avail for the reconciliation of 
 man" {System of Christian Doctrine, iii. p. 405). It 
 was really At-one-ment in the sense of Reconciliation 
 — proceeding from God — that these sacrifices provided 
 for. By means of them God was atoning the people 
 to Himself as members of His community. It was 
 God who gave them to this end, not man that devised 
 them as atonements for his sins. They were a mani- 
 festation of the Divine long-suffering, and had not the 
 power to purify the conscience. The atonement was " for 
 individual offences, to which the sacrifices apply, not 
 an atonement for the sin, for the guilt-burdened state. 
 For this reason the full and proper forgiveness of sins, 
 the atonement for the entire man, is reckoned in the 
 Old Testament itself among the blessings of the New 
 Covenant which was to be looked for" (pp. 408-9). By 
 their use, Atonement in the sense of Reconciliation was 
 always open to the people. What Paul says in the 
 third chapter of Romans throws light upon the method 
 of the Divine procedure. He says that God " passed 
 over in His forbearance the sins of the past," instead 
 of strictly punishing them. But if these sacrifices had 
 
24 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 been real propitiations for sin he could not have spoken 
 thus. It is quite clear, therefore, that we have here to 
 do with At-one-ment or Reconciliation, not with 
 Atonement in the modern sense. These sacrifices 
 had no intrinsic value or virtue " to atone for sin," " to 
 propitiate an offended Deity," or "to avert His just 
 wrath." Whatever we may believe concerning the 
 origin of the O.T. sacrifices, they were never intended 
 to have any such virtue or value. Later Jewish theology 
 may have ascribed it to them, but without warrant ; 
 indeed, as the result of lower conceptions of God. Such 
 atonements can have no place with the God of Truth. 
 And, as a matter of fact, for downright, high-handed 
 sin or transgression no reconciling or covering sacrifices 
 were provided. Death was the doom of the wilful 
 transgressor. But, at the same time, At-one-ment with 
 God through penitence and confession was proclaimed 
 to all sinners by the prophets, altogether apart from 
 sacrifices. "The sacrifices of God," said the Psalmist, 
 " are a broken spirit ; a broken and a contrite heart, 
 O God, Thou wilt not despise." In the suffering 
 Servant of Jehovah we have the picture of one who 
 bears the sins of his people, enduring what is due to 
 their sins with a redeeming effect on the people. But 
 it does not follow that he was " making atonement for 
 them," or that his sufferings were really expiatory, 
 although they should issue in at-one-ment for many. 
 
 The importation of the sense of expiation into the 
 English word Atonement (the German word Versoknung 
 
NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 25 
 
 also means both Expiation and Reconciliation) has, we 
 cannot help thinking, often led theologians far astray 
 in their endeavours to interpret the Cross, a source of 
 error from which adherence to the word actually used 
 by Paul would have saved them. A man may desire 
 to make atonement to God for his sins, or to his brother 
 for the wrong he has done him. He is anxious to do 
 or endure something that will show his sorrow and 
 wipe out his fault, or to make some great sacrifice 
 which he thinks may "atone" for the injury or offence. 
 When such a feeling is rooted in a real sense of wrong 
 done or of sin, it is, of course, a commendable one. It 
 was doubtless necessary that man should be led to feel 
 that sin, morally conceived, real sin, was injurious to 
 man and heinous before God ; that it deserved to be 
 punished, or in some way expiated if that were possible. 
 It was a necessary preparation for the coming of God 
 into man's deepest nature. Whatever external form 
 the earliest sacrifices may have taken, the feeling of 
 something standing between the man and his god was 
 doubtless of Divine origin. The study of Comparative 
 Religion bids us see God deepest of all in all religions. 
 But, owing to his sensuous nature, the Divine educa- 
 tion of man has been very slow, and has been strangely 
 perverted. The desire to propitiate the gods, as charac- 
 teristic of the earlier forms of religion, was not moral in 
 its character. It was a transfer to the deity of human 
 relations and feelings, founded in ignorance of the true 
 God. It was expressive of a feeling deep seated in the 
 
26 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 animal nature (we see the same thing even in some 
 domesticated creatures in relation to man), and no 
 pages of human history are more sad and terrible than 
 those which record the developments of propitiatory 
 and expiatory sacrifices wherein, not only animals, but 
 little children, weak, trembling women, captives, slaves, 
 strong men in their prime, .sometimes in holocausts, 
 were immolated on the altars of sacrifice. It was self 
 that was strongest in it. As Dorner remarks : " An 
 Egoism, although unconscious, lies at the foundation 
 of heathen acts of worship ; they are means of bribery 
 and flattery." The Deity is not conceived as holy. 
 Even when a sense of sin was in some measure felt, the 
 disposition was ''either to transfer the guilt of evil 
 outside self, or at least to seek an expiation outside 
 one's own person. But where the expiation is taken 
 upon one's own person, the guilt is at least discovered 
 outside the soul itself — in the body, and attempted to 
 be erased by means of negative, lacerating or life- 
 destroying ascetic practices; or the lusts of the flesh 
 put on the garb of devotion, and require or present the 
 sacrifice of innocence in pretended honour of the gods " 
 (ii. 256, 257). Therefore we say that as it entered the 
 human purpose, it is, in Pauline phrase, " of the flesh," 
 not of the spirit. It is for selfish satisfaction. And if 
 a man could persuade himself that he had done or 
 suffered enough, it would tend to a self-satisfaction or 
 self-righteousness inimical to the higher life, it would 
 lead, in short, to that parody of true religion contained 
 
NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 27 
 
 in the cry of Louis xiv. of France in the face of his 
 troubles — " After all that I have done for God ! " 
 
 True religion, therefore, does not adopt the principle 
 or the practice. It was in order to separate the 
 Israelites from those heathen sacrifices, so fraught with 
 evil, and ultimately to deliver them wholly from them, 
 that the Mosaic Legislation was instituted and a system 
 of provisional sacrifices in view of a Divine Law 
 appointed and provided as a means of reconciliation, 
 not by the offenders, but by the supreme Lawgiver. 
 And, side by side with these sacrifices, there were the 
 prophets, telling the people how vain and empty these 
 were in themselves. It was a preparation for the full 
 revelation yet to come that the Reconciliation must 
 proceed, not from the offender, but from the offended One, 
 not from man, but from God, that it was God alone who 
 could propose or provide a real propitiation for man 
 in view of his sin. Certainly, that propitiation was not 
 likely to be provided after the manner of heathen 
 sacrifices of human life or the death of innocent victims. 
 If the blood of animals could not take away sin, no 
 more can " a sacrifice of richer blood and nobler name " 
 do so if it be materially and not spiritually regarded. 
 The desire to atone is commendable as between man 
 and man, and it may often, as with Sidney Carton, 
 manifest itself in noble action ; but as between man 
 and God the old question of the prophet remains un- 
 answerable : " Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, 
 and bow myself before the high God ? Will the Lord 
 
28 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousand 
 rivers of oil? shall I give my first-born for my trans- 
 gression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? " 
 And still it is true : " He has showed thee, O man, what 
 is good ; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but 
 to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
 thy God?" In returning to God without any atone- 
 ment, the prophet proclaimed that the way of at-one- 
 ment was always open to men. We cannot atone for 
 our sins before God, but we can turn unto Him and be 
 forgiven. The sense of guilt, however, is real, and it 
 needed to be deepened. Where a deep consciousness 
 of sin is felt, God's forgiveness can only be assuredly 
 and savingly received where it is recognised that God's 
 righteousness in relation to sin has been adequately 
 manifested, as it has been in the Cross of Christ. 
 
 What we have in Christ, however, is on the same 
 lines as those followed in the Old Testament. It is 
 not the movement of man towards God, but that of 
 God towards man. It was God who in Christ made 
 and declared the way of at-one-ment. As Paul said, 
 " God was in Christ reconciling (at-oning) the world to 
 Himself." 
 
 We do not for a moment question the validity of 
 trust in what Christ did for us on the Cross. But it is 
 very desirable that we should endeavour to understand 
 what it was that He did. The description of the work 
 of Christ as " atoning for man's sin to God " has tended 
 to hide His actual work from many. It has also 
 
NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 29 
 
 introduced an element opposed to the higher life of 
 man as it is designed to be by God and as it is set 
 before us by and in Christ. While it is perfectly true 
 that Christ suffered on account of our sins, and that He 
 "bore our sins," atoning for them is another matter 
 entirely. Atoning for anything implies that something 
 has been done that needs atoning for. How could 
 Christ atone for the sins of generations yet unborn, for 
 all the dreadful crimes of men before ever they were 
 committed ? There is a true sense in which the work 
 of Christ was Eternal, but this does not affect our 
 present objection to the interpretation which has been 
 given of it. An eternal atonement embraces past, 
 present, and future. 
 
 The idea that sin has been already atoned for 
 (although it is often counteracted by other considera- 
 tions) tends to give quite a false conception of the 
 relation of men to God and to sin with its consequences. 
 If all my sins have been really atoned for, how can I 
 be treated as a sinner ? If my sin is a fact, so also is 
 the adequate atonement for it. If strict justice is to 
 rule, the sinner has nothing to fear, whether he accepts 
 Christ or not. Here, surely, we are going against the 
 Divine Holiness or Righteousness, and suggesting 
 something to the sinner prejudicial to his highest 
 interests. One often wonders to see how indifferent 
 to certain forms of sin, and even to the knowledge of 
 what is sinful, some who say they are accepted by God 
 on account of Christ's Atonement can be, and at what 
 
30 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 a low level many holding this form of faith are content 
 to live. We need not wonder. For here is an element 
 which, all unconsciously, may work disastrously : " I 
 am a sinner, but all my sins have been atoned for by 
 Christ," — if I rest in this, am I not in very real danger 
 of taking sin lightly,, of cherishing a merely selfish 
 satisfaction in the fact of my salvation, and a false 
 contentment with myself as I am and with the world 
 as it is ? I may be told to think of what it cost Christ 
 to make that atonement. But this is just what those 
 of whom we speak do not think and cannot realise. 
 Indeed, we must ask in all seriousness whether the 
 belief that my sin has been expiated or atoned for by 
 another, especially by another's suffering, does not tend 
 to perpetuate or to carry men back to that old selfish 
 egoism which characterised so much of pre-Christian 
 religion with its substitutionary sacrifices ? 
 
 Again, to rest our confidence on the ground of an 
 atonement made by Christ for our sins, is to fail to 
 realise the fulness and freeness of the Divine forgiving 
 Love as Christ proclaimed it and manifested it. It 
 causes a serious limitation to our sense of the love of 
 God — the Love that God is — and, consequently, to the 
 possession of our souls by that Love. And this accounts 
 for that undue self-centredness which still remains in 
 many Christians, and for the absence of a larger 
 measure of that broadly Divine and human, universal 
 and brotherly Love that showed itself in Christ, the 
 want of which, in the measure in which it ought to be 
 
NOT ATONEMENT, BUT AT-ONE-MENT 31 
 
 present, is the greatest defect of modern Evangelical 
 Christianity. 
 
 But although Paul did not use the word " atonement," 
 did he not really teach that what Jesus did was to atone 
 for our sins, and that it was this which made the 
 At-one-ment or Reconciliation actual? Let us ask 
 now, therefore, what St. Paul's doctrine of the Cross 
 really was. 
 
Ill 
 
 PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 
 
CHAPTER III 
 PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 
 
 PAUL'S doctrine of the Cross has both a judicial 
 and an ethical side or aspect. It had necessarily 
 a judicial aspect, because he had to show how the Cross 
 of Christ met and ended "the Law." He had to 
 vindicate the Cross in the face of that Jewish opposition 
 which based itself on " the Law " as a Divine institution 
 which could never be set aside, which separated them 
 from and raised them above the rest of the world. 
 He did this by showing that under "the Law" 
 righteousness, entitling to acceptance with God, was 
 impossible; that the Jew under the written law was 
 equally guilty with the Gentile to whom the law of 
 God was witnessed in his conscience, so that under no 
 form of Law merely could man attain to " the glory of 
 God," that is, to the Divine approbation. But now God 
 had opened for all men a new way of righteousness and 
 salvation through faith in Jesus as the true spiritual 
 Christ. In His death God's own righteousness had 
 been so manifested that Reconciliation or At-one-ment 
 had been made for the whole world, so that those 
 who, because of their sins, had been in the position of 
 
 35 
 
36 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 " enemies " could be received into favour, " accounted 
 righteous" in Christ, blessed with God's peace, and 
 made partakers in that spirit of true life and real 
 righteousness which went forth to the world in Christ. 
 
 Stated briefly, his doctrine on its judicial side, as 
 given in Rom. iii. 21-26, was this: that God, who was 
 drawing nigh to men in His forgiving love, gave up 
 Christ His Son to death as a manifestation of His 
 righteousness, in view of His passing over sin in the 
 past, and of the proclamation of Forgiveness and ac- 
 ceptance now being made in the Gospel. There was, 
 however, a deeper ethical element in his thought of 
 the Cross which must yet receive our special attention. 
 But, meanwhile, let us observe some features of Paul's 
 judicial conception as here stated, which show that 
 certain theories of " the Atonement " do not find support 
 therein. 
 
 First, be it noted that the whole procedure originated 
 with God, not with Christ considered apart from God. 
 It was God who took the first step ; it was God who 
 was drawing nigh to men in His Grace. The Cross, 
 therefore, could not possibly be an atonement offered 
 to that God from whom the whole proceeded and who 
 Himself made the sacrifice, — " who spared not His own 
 Son, but delivered Him up for us all." It could not be 
 to induce, or even to enable God to forgive ; for God was 
 already forgiving men, and it was because He was 
 forgiving them that He gave up His Son to die for 
 them. It could not be in any real sense to propitiate 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 37 
 
 God. The idea of God propitiating Himself, or atoning 
 for sin to Himself, is forced and unnatural. Besides, 
 it is out of keeping with the historical facts which show 
 us Christ accepting the Cross as the will of His Father, 
 and dying with the cry of desolation on His lips. 
 God can neither die nor feel Himself forsaken by 
 Himself. It was Christ, His Son, in human form as 
 true man, that was given up by God so to suffer and die. 
 
 But does not Paul attribute our justification to "the 
 blood of Christ"? does he not speak of the death of 
 Christ as a sacrifice, — a propitiatory sacrifice, — and is 
 not Christ elsewhere described as " the propitiation for 
 our sins ; and not for ours only, but also for the whole 
 world"? The "Blood of Christ" simply means His 
 sacrificial death, although some prefer to take it in a 
 spiritual sense as in John vi. 53-56. The meaning of 
 the word (kilasterion) in Rom. iii. 25, rendered in the 
 A.V. "propitiation," is doubtful. It is rendered by 
 some, Mercy-seat, since in the Greek version of the Old 
 Testament it is used to designate the lid or cover of the 
 ark on which the sacrificial blood was sprinkled, and 
 over which the Divine Glory appeared, speaking peace 
 to the people. This is the meaning of the word in the 
 only other place in which it occurs in the New Testament, 
 Heb. ix. 5, " overshadowing the mercy-seat." It is easy 
 to understand how Christ on His Cross is the meeting- 
 place between God and man ; where the Divine mercy 
 descends in its supreme manifestation. Others, how- 
 
38 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 ever, prefer " propitiation " or " propitiatory sacrifice." * 
 A similar dubiety applies to the phrase in Rom. viii. 3 
 {peri hamartias), rendered in the R.V. " as an offering 
 for sin." It will be noticed that the words "as an 
 offering '' are not in the original text, but simply " for " 
 or "concerning sin"; but the phrase is used in the 
 Septuagint to denote a propitiatory sacrifice. Paul, no 
 doubt, had the Jewish sacrifices in view. His manner 
 of speaking of the blood of Christ suggests this, although 
 " blood " was also a familiar synonym for life taken, or 
 a violent death. And if we bear in mind what we have 
 already seen with respect to these sacrifices, the sense 
 in which Christ is the propitiation for our sins will be 
 manifest. It is in the same sense as that in which these 
 sacrifices were propitiations. They were not actual pro- 
 pitiations of God, but means provided by God, whereby 
 men by using them might, in spite of their sins, be 
 accepted by God, at-oned to Him, and abide in the 
 community of His people — in Christian language, "in 
 fellowship with God." So, in a similar way, God, not 
 man, has provided in Christ a propitiation (or a pro- 
 pitiatory sacrifice) for sinful men. It is by no means 
 
 1 Deissmann concludes a learned inquiry into the meaning of the word 
 by maintaining that it means simply "the propitiatory thing," "the means 
 of propitiation," and holds that in Rom. iii. 25 the general sense " means 
 of propitiation " is quite sufficient : Christ, the exalted spiritual Lord, in 
 whom the believer lives, moves, and has his being, is, as faith in blood- 
 communion with Him proves Him to be, given to us by God as our 
 ever-present propitiator, our continual propitiation (Ency. Bib., article 
 " Mercy -seat"). See also I John i. 2, where, however, we have a different 
 word. 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 39 
 
 implied that the death of Christ actually propitiated 
 God in the sense of gaining His favour. What Paul 
 says concerning the necessity for that sacrifice we shall 
 see immediately. But that God so gave up His Son, 
 not to propitiate Himself, but to be an ever-availing 
 propitiation for sinners, is the very foundation of Paul's 
 Gospel. It was this — not merely the fact that there 
 was a sacrifice for sin, but that God Himself made the 
 sacrifice of giving up His own Son for us all — that called 
 forth the note of wonder and kindled the flame of love 
 in the heart ; and this fundamental fact must rule in all 
 interpretations of the Cross. Just as those Old Testa- 
 ment sacrifices were not, like those of the heathen world, 
 meant in themselves to propitiate God, but were pro- 
 vided by God for the people, in order that by their 
 bringing them into His Presence they might have the 
 consciousness of the remission of their transgressions, 
 and of abiding in His favour as members of the 
 community of His people, so is it with the great sacrifice 
 of Christ. It is something provided by God in view of 
 which remission of sins can be realised by all, something 
 that man can always look to and place his confidence 
 in. Therefore, of Christ, Paul says, "Whom God set 
 forth (or put forward) as a propitiation through faith in 
 His blood." Why " whom God put forward," if it was 
 to propitiate God ? It will not do to say that in Christ 
 God gave humanity the means of making propitiation, 
 but that the propitiation was actually made by Christ 
 as representing man. What the Apostle says is that 
 
40 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 God set forth Christ as a propitiation. It is this, not 
 merely the gift of Christ to men, that is attributed to 
 God. It will not do to turn it round to say that Christ 
 made propitiation to God. And why " through faith in 
 His blood " ? Through man's faith in its sufficiency, as 
 the Israelite found a propitiation through faith in the 
 blood of the animal sacrifices which God provided for 
 him. As Weiss remarks in his New Testament Theology 
 (i. p. 428), " In the blood of Christ He set forth to the 
 world a means of propitiation through faith." 
 
 Again, Paul says that God has provided " a righteous- 
 ness of God through faith in Jesus Christ unto all them 
 that believe'.' It was only "unto them that believe" 
 that Christ was a propitiation, just as the ancient 
 sacrifices were only propitiations to those who accepted 
 them and relied on them — in faith. God provided 
 these for all who would accept them ; so He has pro- 
 vided in Christ the complete and final propitiation for 
 all who will accept Him. 
 
 Men do not need to understand it in its Godward 
 aspect; it is sufficient that it has been provided for 
 them by God. It is in this sense, then, that Christ is 
 "the propitiation for our sins." As it is put in the 
 First Epistle of John : " If any man sin, we have an 
 Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous 
 One : and He is the propitiation for our sins : and not 
 for ours only, but also for the whole world." That is, 
 although we sin, there is an abiding propitiation pro- 
 vided for us by God, so that we need not any other 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 41 
 
 sacrifices, — a propitiation, in virtue of which, " if we 
 confess our sins, He is faithful and just (in view of 
 the propitiation which He has Himself provided) to 
 forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all un- 
 righteousness." 
 
 In virtue of that Divinely-provided propitiation we 
 can abide in fellowship with God. This is very 
 different from the idea of the Cross as a propitiation 
 made by Christ to God. 
 
 2. What the Cross was in the view of God — what it 
 was meant by Him to be in relation to sin — Paul also 
 tells us, still from the standpoint of something done by 
 God. It was the manifestation, setting forth, or demon- 
 stration of God's Righteousness in view of His having 
 passed over sin, and of His forgiveness and acceptance 
 of sinners. The Apostle's words deserve all attention: 
 "But now, apart from law, a righteousness of God (a 
 free gift of acceptance) has been manifested — being 
 made (or accounted) righteous freely by His grace, 
 through the Redemption that is in Christ Jesus ; whom 
 God set forth a propitiation (or a propitiatory), through 
 faith in His blood, in order to show forth (or demon- 
 strate) His righteousness, because of the passing over 
 of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God, 
 for t/te showing forth (or demonstrating) of His 
 righteousness, at the present time, in order that He 
 might Himself be righteous (or perhaps, " shown to be 
 righteous") — and the Giver of righteousness to him 
 
42 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 who has faith in Jesus (or, "who is of the faith of 
 Jesus"), Rom. iii. 21-26. 
 
 It is now almost universally agreed that " righteous- 
 ness" in vers. 25 and 26 means God's moral righteous- 
 ness. But the point to be noticed here at present is 
 that the Cross was provided by God Himself in order to 
 demonstrate His Righteousness in view of His merciful 
 passing over of sins in the past and His gracious gift of 
 justifying righteousness to sinners in the present. The 
 word is endeixis, which meams a pointing out (properly 
 with the finger ; index is from the same root). As he 
 had said before that Christ was " set forth " (proetheto) 
 by God to be a propitiation. It was not to satisfy the 
 Divine Justice or holiness, but to demonstrate it, to show 
 it forth to the world. This is the important thing to 
 grasp. 
 
 In this way, Paul says (2 Cor. v. 19), " God was 
 in Christ reconciling the world to Himself," that 
 is, at-oning it, making it at one with Himself in His 
 righteousness. Just as by means of the propitiations 
 provided by Him under the Law, offenders were at-oned 
 to Him. This was something done by God in Christ 
 once for all and completely for the whole world. It was 
 something provided by God for man as man of which 
 all could take advantage. It was not merely that God 
 in His Love was seeking men to be reconciled to Him. 
 He was doing this in Christ, and through the Apostles 
 as Ambassadors for Christ ; but He had first of all 
 actually in Christ reconciled the world to Himself, — the 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS 43 
 
 world as represented by Christ, — and it was this that 
 was the basis of the Gospel message and appeal. On 
 His side all was done that needed to be done ; it was 
 now for men individually to enter into the Reconcilia- 
 tion. What God did in Christ made a true and lasting 
 At-one-ment or Reconciliation for all sinners. God 
 declared Himself reconciled to them in Christ, it was 
 for them to be reconciled to God. The Reconciliation 
 was first on God's part, provided by Him for man. It 
 was something which, Paul said, God had done in Christ 
 for us " while we were enemies," something for men to 
 " receive " or take advantage of by their laying aside 
 their enmity to God who had in His Love provided this 
 Reconciliation or At-one-ment for them. " We entreat 
 you," he says, " that ye receive not the grace of God in 
 vain." 
 
 If we ask next, How this was done} there is no doubt 
 that it was in the death of Christ on the Cross, or, as 
 Paul states it more definitely in 2 Cor. v. 21, by His 
 being " made sin for our sakes." The meaning of this 
 we may best consider in a separate chapter. 
 
IV 
 CHRIST "MADE SIN FOR US" 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 CHRIST "MADE SIN FOR US" 
 
 BY many of the older interpreters the expression 
 " made Sin " was on the ground of supposed 
 Septuagint usage explained as meaning "made a 
 sacrifice for sin." But this is rejected by modern 
 expositors. The question, however, is immaterial, 
 because even if we interpret it in the sacrificial sense 
 contended for, the sacrifice would represent sin. A 
 common interpretation is that Christ " took the sinner's 
 place," died in the sinner's stead the death which the 
 sinner was doomed to die. This is also the interpreta- 
 tion adopted by those who explain the Cross (and 
 ultimately explain it away) as having exclusive 
 reference to "the Law," and who regard the death of 
 Christ as the suffering by Him of that penalty of death 
 which the Law declared, but which had not been 
 inflicted on sinners. We shall have to return to this. 
 But Paul does not say that Jesus was made or treated 
 as a sinner, but that He was "made sin" \ just as in 
 Gal. iii. 13 he says, He was made a curse, not an 
 accursed person. He seems purposely to avoid the 
 suggestion that Christ was made or treated as a 
 
48 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 sinner by using the abstract terms '' sin " and 
 " righteousness " : Christ, he says, was made sin, that 
 we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. 
 We thus give to " sin " the same sense as in the 
 previous sentence, which says that "Christ knew no 
 sin." The idea of exchange in the " Reconciliation " is 
 also thus suggested. Elsewhere, also, sin is personified 
 by Paul. In the sixth chapter he tells how sin entered 
 the world and what it has wrought, contrasting it with 
 righteousness in Christ. And in the seventh chapter, 
 sin is represented as an enemy which wrought in him 
 all manner of coveting, and slew him. "Apart from 
 the law," he says, "sin was dead," but with the law 
 sin " revived " ; beguiled him and doomed him to death. 
 He was sold under sin as a hard master or owner, so 
 that it was no more he (the real man that he was) 
 that did the evil, but sin that had seated itself in him 
 and held him captive. Again, he says in chap. viii. 
 3 and 4, that " God, sending His own Son in the like- 
 ness of sinful flesh (literally, ' flesh of sin ' ) and for, 
 or on account of, sin, condemned sin in the flesh ; that 
 the requirement of the law may be fulfilled in us who 
 walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." The 
 point here is that it is as standing " in the likeness of 
 sinful flesh " that he thinks of Christ, and that it was 
 " sin in the flesh " or the sinful flesh, not " the sinner," 
 that was condemned and died before God. To say 
 that sin was condemned in the flesh is very different 
 from saying that the sinner was represented as con- 
 
CHRIST " MADE SIN FOR US " 49 
 
 demned and judged in Christ, or that Christ took the 
 sinner's place, while it remains wholly true that Christ 
 died "for our sakes" and "for our sins." It was our 
 sins that caused or necessitated His death, and it was 
 in order to show forth God's righteousness in relation 
 to sin that He died. 
 
 No doubt He represented the sinner also, if the sinner 
 cannot be separated from his sin ; and, as man cannot 
 of himself free himself from his sin, Christ's death, in 
 Paul's view, represents the death which we must all 
 have died. But Paul explicitly teaches that the sinner 
 is not to be identified with his sin. While sin is 
 inseparable from "the flesh," it is not inseparable from 
 the man. Sin is something foreign to the true man, 
 " the man within," the man as God conceives him, the 
 man as he knows himself in his true being. It is a 
 tyrant foreign to his true self that has got seated in 
 him, from whose dominion Christ dies to free him. 
 It was that false usurping power, which had hitherto 
 dominated men, that was judged, condemned, and 
 rendered powerless by means of the Cross of Christ. 
 As, according to the Fourth Gospel, Christ Himself 
 said, " Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the 
 Prince of this world be cast out." It was not directly 
 the sinner, therefore, but sin, and God's judgment on 
 sin, that was represented by the Cross of Christ. 
 
 How does Paul think of Christ as being " made sin " 
 for us? No interpretation, of course, can be correct 
 which says that Christ was actually made sin — a thing 
 4 
 
50 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 impossible. It must therefore have been in some 
 representative sense. It was, he says, in order that 
 the righteousness of God in His relation to sin might 
 be demonstrated. The natural meaning is that Christ 
 on His Cross suffered what sin deserved to suffer, died 
 as 9in (or " the sinful flesh," from which in Paul's view 
 sin was inseparable) was doomed to die. In this way 
 the righteousness of God in view of sin was set forth. 
 It was shown that, although God had passed over sin 
 and was now forgiving it, sin was not lightly regarded 
 by God, but was doomed to death. Such a manifesta- 
 tion was necessary, says Paul, that God might be seen 
 to be just, and the justifier of him who believes in 
 Jesus. Such was Paul's judicial doctrine of the Cross, 
 whatever we may think of it. But before discussing it 
 further, let us note how, at this point, it passes into an 
 ethical doctrine. 
 
 It was as representing sin or "sinful flesh" that 
 Christ died ; and Paul teaches that, as so represented, 
 man in the flesh died before God. Christ's death was 
 a death to sin, and in that death all men died re- 
 presentatively. They did so in the very fact that the 
 sinful flesh died utterly in Christ's death. Man died 
 completely in Christ as regards the old life, and arose 
 in Him in His resurrection a new creature. In the 
 sixth chapter of Romans this aspect of the Cross is 
 emphasised. " We who died to sin, how shall we any 
 longer live therein — all we who were baptized into 
 
CHRIST " MADE SIN FOR US " 51 
 
 Christ were baptized into His death — that like as 
 Christ was raised from the dead, through the glory of 
 the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life." 
 It was not in baptism that they so died, but in the 
 representative death of Christ. "Our old man was 
 crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be 
 done away, that so we might no longer be in bondage 
 to sin : for he that hath died is justified from sin (freed 
 from it) ; the death that He died, He died unto sin 
 once for all, but the life that He liveth, He liveth unto 
 God. Even so reckon ye also yourselves dead unto 
 sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus." " You died," 
 he says elsewhere, " and your life is hid with Christ in 
 God" (Col. iii. 3). "The love of Christ constraineth 
 us," he says again, " because we thus judge that if one 
 died for all, therefore all died ; and He died for all, 
 that they which live should no longer live to them- 
 selves, but to Him who died for them and rose again " 
 (2 Cor. v. 15). The death of Christ was thus a death 
 to sin, and represented before God the death of all 
 men to sin or " the flesh." Sin died in Him. It had 
 an ethical significance to God, and it comes with an 
 ethical inspiration and power to men. And Paul 
 hesitates not to say that if this ethical significance 
 of Christ's death be not realised by men, Christ will 
 have died in vain. Notwithstanding Christ's death 
 "for our sins,'' he says plainly that if men continue 
 to live after the flesh, they shall "die"; only if they 
 follow the Spirit shall they live. In Christ nothing 
 
52 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 avails but "a new creature." "If any man have not 
 the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." 
 
 Again, the death of Christ is with Paul inseparable 
 from His resurrection. Both were representative acts ; 
 and apart from the resurrection, the death would have 
 been insufficient. The death might vindicate God's 
 passing over sins and His proclamation of forgiveness, 
 but God in the Gospel does more than forgive. He 
 "justifies" the sinner, reckons him "righteous," accepts 
 him as His son and heir, imparts to him His Spirit. - 
 This is because in Christ man not only dies in the 
 flesh, but rises to a new spiritual life of righteousness. 
 Therefore, he says, " Christ was delivered up for our 
 trespasses, and was raised for our justification." He 
 represented before God a new, redeemed, spiritual 
 Humanity. Men in Him could be, not only forgiven, 
 but justified, even "glorified" (Rom. viii. 30). As we 
 read in Ephesians ii. : " God, being rich in mercy, for 
 His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we 
 were dead (justly liable to death) through our 
 trespasses, quickened us together with Christ (or in 
 Christ), and raised us up with Him, and made us sit 
 together with Him in the Heavenly places in Christ 
 Jesus." Christ in His death, therefore, was "made 
 sin," as representing the death which sin is doomed to 
 die, and which the sinner must die if he cannot be freed 
 from his sin ; but He also represented the death of 
 sin, or of man to sin, and his uprising into the new 
 .spiritual life of righteousness. 
 
CHRIST " MADE SIN FOR US " 53 
 
 This representative character which is given to the 
 death of Christ, and the union in it of the judicial and 
 the ethical, gives quite a peculiar complexion to Paul's 
 doctrine of the Cross, and forbids its interpretation 
 after any merely human analogies. What he sees in 
 it is something wholly unique and Divine, impossible 
 to be found in the case of another. And not only 
 does he lay at least equal stress on the ethical and 
 the judicial aspects of the Cross, but it is in the realisa- 
 tion of its ethical significance alone that man's actual 
 salvation is to be found. 
 
V 
 PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 
 
CHAPTER V 
 PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 
 
 THE modern mind finds no difficulty in accepting 
 the ethical aspect of the death of Christ, especially 
 if He be regarded as the Head and Representative of 
 Humanity. But great difficulty is often felt with 
 respect to the judicial aspect of His death, and it is 
 often misapprehended. The problem of the present 
 may be said to be how to conceive and state the judicial 
 aspect of the Cross, so that it shall be credible and 
 vital for us to-day. Let us now, therefore, give our 
 careful consideration to Paul's doctrine. We are by no 
 means tied down to Paul's teaching : the Cross is there 
 for each man to interpret for himself. But we must 
 believe that Paul was Divinely taught, and made the 
 instrument of the liberation of Christianity from 
 Judaism, so that through him it went forth as that 
 universal world-saving religion Jesus meant it to be. 
 That Christianity was further developed by means of 
 Paul, is no reason for placing Paul in opposition to 
 Christ. If we claim for ourselves Divine teaching and 
 progress in the truth, we must not deny it to Christ's 
 first followers. What we have to do is to separate the 
 
58 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 substance from the temporary forms which contained 
 it. By most Christians, Paul's teaching has been 
 accepted as the foundation of the evangelical faith. 
 Paul, therefore, cannot be lightly regarded ; and if, as 
 we must believe, he was led by the Spirit of God, there 
 must be lasting truth, deeper than such forms of 
 thought as were to him the necessary media of the 
 Spirit's teaching, and the means whereby the special 
 necessities of the time were met. Paul had, as we 
 have seen, a particular work to do in the first instance 
 in relation to those who stood for the old religion of 
 " the Law," and for the idea of a temporal Messiah who 
 should come for their special behoof. He had to show 
 that those who boasted themselves of that law were, 
 judged by their law, sinners before God as truly as the 
 Gentiles whom they despised ; liable, therefore, to the 
 doom of sin under the law, and only redeemed there- 
 from by the death of Christ. 
 
 Hence much in Paul's writings has reference to re- 
 demption from the Law, and to the opening of the door 
 of God's Kingdom to the Gentiles through that Cross 
 which ended the separating Law. In the Epistle to the 
 Galatians the Cross is regarded almost exclusively in 
 its relation to those who were under the Jewish law. 
 " Christ," he says, " redeemed us from the curse of the 
 law, having become a curse for us," that the promise of 
 righteousness through faith — which was prior to the law 
 — and that life in the Spirit to which faith in Christ leads, 
 " might come upon the Gentiles." Again, he says that 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 59 
 
 Christ was " born under the law, that He might redeem 
 them which were under the law, that we might receive 
 the redemption of sons" — the Jews themselves being 
 thus raised to a higher standing. It was to meet the 
 demand of the law that he says, " the Son of God loved 
 me, and gave Himself up for me." So in I Cor. xv. we 
 read, " The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin 
 is the law" — which dooms man as a sinner to death. 
 In Ephesians and Colossians also, the stress is laid on 
 the work of the Cross in relation to the law, leading to 
 the " reconciliation " of Jew and Gentile : " But now, in 
 Christ Jesus, ye that once were afar off are made nigh 
 in the blood of Christ. For He is our peace who made 
 both one, and broke down the middle wall of partition, 
 having abolished in His flesh the enmity, even the law of 
 commandments contained in ordinances, that He might 
 create in Himself of the twain one new man, so making 
 peace" (Eph. ii. 15, 16). See also Col. ii. 13, 14. 
 
 In the first portion of the Epistle to the Romans the 
 thought of the Law and its claims is predominant, and 
 it may be fairly said that, when the Apostle speaks of 
 the death of Christ in chap, iii., he has primarily before 
 his mind the doom of death under " the Law." Even in 
 the spiritual emancipation described in chaps, vii. and viii. 
 4, it is still redemption from the Law — " the law of sin 
 and death " — the law which only revived and increased 
 sin — that he has in view. Deliverance from that law, 
 with the hopeless life under it, meant much more to 
 Paul and his fellow-Christians than we can well realise : 
 
60 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 and that Cross which, he held, freed them from it, at the 
 same time broke down the barrier between Jew and 
 Gentile, doing thus a redeeming work for the Gentile 
 as well as for the Jew. No wonder, then, that Paul 
 magnified the work of the Cross as freeing men from 
 "the Law." 
 
 It is held by many modern writers that this reference 
 to "the Law" sufficiently explains all that Paul says 
 with respect to the Cross of Christ : that his doctrine of 
 the Cross is simply an adaptation of Jewish theology 
 to his purpose of showing how Christ's substitutionary 
 or representative death met the penalty which the 
 Law demanded, and thus adequately manifested the 
 righteousness of the Lawgiver, so that, its ultimate de- 
 mand having been met, the law was ended. His 
 reasoning was, in short, an argumentum ad Judceos, 
 which served a necessary purpose, but has now lost its 
 value. That is, indeed, a commonplace of much recent 
 theology, and it may be questioned whether evangelical 
 writers have sufficiently faced and met this position. 
 Certainly, some of Paul's arguments have no force for 
 us to-day. We were never under the Jewish law, or 
 needed redemption from it. As Gentiles, we share in 
 the benefits of its removal, but that would be for us a 
 much too distant motive of devotion to the Saviour. 
 Moreover, we cannot look upon that law to-day as 
 the Jews of St. Paul's time did, as being a direct and 
 inviolable Divine institution or revelation, on the fulfil- 
 ment of every requirement and threat of which the 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 61 
 
 righteousness of God Himself was staked. Nor can we 
 see, perhaps, how the violent death of Christ could 
 really meet the demands of a righteous Law. It is 
 impossible for us to-day to believe, e.g., that " cursed is 
 every one that hangs on a tree," altogether irrespective 
 of the merit or demerit of the sufferer. 
 
 But to affirm that this meets all that Paul says about 
 the Cross would be far too sweeping a statement. It 
 is not merely with " the Law '' that Paul is concerned, 
 but with sin — real, universal sin, and want of righteous- 
 ness before God on the part of both Jew and Gentile. 
 Besides, it must be remembered that it is not Paul 
 alone who asserts that Christ " died for our sins " ; it is 
 the universal Christian belief. In much that Paul has 
 written and in his practical doctrine of sin and spiritual 
 salvation the place given to the Cross goes far beyond 
 any reference to the Jewish law. Even in the Epistle 
 to the Galatians there are hints of a wider reference, as 
 where he says that Christ " gave Himself for our sins, 
 that He might deliver us from this present evil world " 
 (or age), and that by the Cross of Christ he was " cruci- 
 fied to the world, and the world to him." In Ephesians 
 also, where he speaks of the union of Jew and Gentile, 
 he says they were made one, that Christ " might recon- 
 cile them both in one body unto God through the 
 Cross " ; and, writing to them as Gentiles, he says, " as 
 Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for you an 
 offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour of a sweet 
 smell " (Eph. v. 2, etc.). 
 
62 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 In the Epistle to the Romans the universal reference 
 of the Cross is made quite clear. The Gentiles, he 
 shows, were under a law to God as well as the Jews, to 
 which their consciences bore witness, in view of which 
 they were sinners " worthy of death " ; all came short of 
 righteousness ; for none was it possible under any 
 "law"; for all, therefore, Jesus died. In His death, 
 therefore, Jesus met a universal necessity, and became 
 the Head of a new spiritual humanity. The soundness 
 of his argument may be questioned, but certainly his 
 view of the Cross was not restricted to its relation to 
 the Jewish law. And although we may not be able to 
 view it exactly as Paul did, it is possible that we may 
 yet see that there was a real and abiding Divine signifi- 
 cance in the death of Christ " for our sins." Instead of 
 hastily brushing aside Paul's reasoning, we ought to 
 inquire what lasting truth there is in his doctrine, and 
 how we can apprehend it to-day. We have already 
 seen that there do not enter into it any of those ideas 
 of " atonement for sin," " expiation,'' or " propitiation of 
 God " which are commonly attributed to Him, and that 
 the Cross was God's own provision in order to set forth 
 His righteousness in view of sin and its forgiveness. 
 Let us return, then, to the consideration of the essential 
 elements of Paul's doctrine. These are : 
 
 i. The necessity for a manifestion of the righteousness 
 of God in view of sin. 
 
 2. That sin is doomed to death. 
 
 3. That Christ was made sin for us, or died for our sins. 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 63 
 
 1. When Paul says that the death of Christ was 
 necessary as a manifestation of God's righteousness in 
 view of His passing over, in His forbearance, the sins 
 of the past, his statement is, of course, open to the 
 objection that it is based on a too external conception 
 of the relation of God to sin and its punishment. It 
 seems to rest on the idea (that of " the law ") that such 
 a punishment must be a violent death or some openly 
 manifested infliction. This, of course, we cannot believe. 
 Sin does not go unpunished although it is not openly 
 visited by such Divine retribution as we may feel it 
 deserves. God does not really pass over sin, although 
 in His mercy the sinner does not suffer at once the 
 ultimate penalty. It is in this that His forbearance is 
 shown : He is " not willing that any should perish, but 
 that all should come to repentance." But just because 
 of this apparent passing over sins, just because of man's 
 misconception of God's ways, a demonstration of His 
 righteousness in relation to sin was needed by the 
 world. Especially was this necessary in connection 
 with a Gospel which proclaimed universal forgiveness. 
 
 Here, however, an element in Paul's gospel, not 
 always recognised, must be taken into account. It is 
 often objected to the Cross that in the Old Testament 
 God's forgiveness was always freely extended to the 
 penitent ; that the teaching of Christ, e.g., in the parable 
 of the Prodigal Son, followed the Old Testament in this 
 respect, that, prior to the Cross and quite apart from it, 
 Christ proclaimed the Divine forgiveness. 
 
64 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 But the gospel of Christ goes beyond the Old 
 Testament teaching. Christ did not merely repeat the 
 teaching of the prophets. If John the Baptist was 
 " more than a prophet," much more was Christ. What 
 He proclaimed was the fulfilment of that which the 
 prophets had foretold, — the drawing nigh of God in 
 the Grace of wholly free and universal forgiveness unto 
 the salvation of His people, " for His own name's sake " 
 — in order to lead them to repentance and salvation. 
 It was not the old announcement of pardon to the 
 penitent merely, but the proclamation of a gospel of 
 Divine grace to the nation and ultimately to the world, 
 in order that God's reign might be really and per- 
 manently established in their hearts. As we have seen, 
 it was because God was forgiving sin that, as Paul 
 taught, He gave up His Son to death in order to 
 demonstrate His righteousness. In view of the Divine 
 forbearance in the past, and especially in view of this 
 newly declared movement of universal Grace, it is 
 evident that the righteousness of God must be at the 
 same time manifested if men are really to be saved 
 from their sins. For Forgiveness to have been limited 
 to " the penitent " would have been no advance on the 
 past, and would have failed in respect of that attractive 
 power which the Gospel was meant to possess. It 
 would have left out the chief motive which was designed 
 to lead men to God, namely, His forgiving Love going 
 forth to all without exception through the Cross of His 
 Son ; and it could not have produced in man that glad 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 65 
 
 confidence in God which the Gospel was designed to 
 produce, and which it did produce. On the other hand, 
 to have simply proclaimed forgiveness would have 
 failed to produce in men's hearts a due sense of the 
 evil and danger of sin ; it would have created quite a 
 wrong conception of God as a Being of mere good 
 nature, instead of that Holiness on which the world's 
 hope rests; it would have tended to increase sin, 
 instead of to save the world from it. It is not on this 
 head that Paul's doctrine is open to objection ; on the 
 contrary, he has here seen and stated a great truth. 
 
 And here be it noted that this central element of 
 Paul's doctrine, that what Christ suffered on the Cross 
 on our behalf was a sufficient manifestation of God's 
 righteousness in view of sin, so that sinners are forgiven 
 and accepted by God, — this, apprehended under many 
 forms, has ever been the essence of the distinctively 
 evangelical faith. 
 
 2. That sin must die is a Divine necessity, quite apart 
 from any positive Law ; and it is a necessity that holds 
 good for any nature from which sin is inseparable. It 
 is quite impossible that sin can enter Heaven or be 
 perpetuated in an eternal life. The relation of God to 
 sin and its necessary doom of death have been obscured 
 by mistaken views of sin's nature and source. Hence 
 a revolt has arisen against the theological conception 
 of sin which is dangerous in its tendency and untrue 
 to fact. Sin is not that absolutely mysterious and un- 
 5 
 
66 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 accountable thing which it has often been represented as 
 being. It is the action of the self in disloyalty to the 
 true governing principles of life. It is the outcome of 
 the animal nature in man failing to rise to the higher life 
 of the Spirit. Every form of sin, in thought, word, or 
 deed, can be traced to its root in the self-loving, self- 
 seeking principle which is necessarily that of the animal 
 nature considered in itself. It is inseparable from that 
 nature, though separable from the man as he is thought 
 by God and meant by God to become. The animal 
 nature had to come first ; but man is more than an 
 animal ; ideally, he is a son of God ; Love, not self, 
 God, not the world, is the true principle of his life. It 
 is often said that sin is the great problem of the world, 
 and it is asked, Why did God permit sin ? Or, Why 
 should sin appear in the world of a good Creator ? The 
 appearance of sin is always possible in a world where 
 finite beings are endowed with a self of their own ; and 
 apart from such endowment, man could have had no 
 existence. A good being cannot be externally created ; 
 and, as Dr. Caird says most truly, " the very conscious- 
 ness of self carries with it the assertion of self and the 
 seeking of self ; and in a finite being such self-assertion 
 and self-seeking have in them the germs of all that is 
 evil" {The Evolution of Theology in Greek Philosophy, 
 p. 341). The source of sin is seen still more clearly 
 when we take into account man's slow emergence from 
 a lower condition as science has revealed it to us. That 
 which becomes sin in man was not sin in the purely 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 67 
 
 animal creation. As Paul says, "Where there is no 
 law, sin is not imputed." Where the law of a higher 
 life does not make itself felt in the Conscience, or does 
 not in some way claim man's obedience, such a thing 
 as sin has no existence as sin. The law of man's higher 
 life must be freely obeyed ; he cannot be good or 
 righteous mechanically, or under compulsion. Sin is 
 simply the result of man's failure, in his freedom, to 
 comply with the higher law of his life. — This is true 
 whatever theory we may hold of his origin. Sin, in 
 its essence, is life for self, instead of for God. 
 
 Paul pictures the condition graphically in the seventh 
 chapter of Romans. The man, awakened to hear the 
 call of the higher law, inwardly approving of it and 
 even desiring to obey it, yet finds himself unable to 
 rise to the occasion. Sin is seated in him as it were 
 a usurping tyrant, so that in spite of his better self that 
 has become awakened, he finds himself ever coming 
 under sin's dominion and condemnation. It is truly 
 seated in him in that self-pleasing principle of his lower 
 nature from which he cannot by any effort free himself. 
 Sin in him must die, if he is to rise into the higher life. 
 But that means that man after the flesh merely must 
 die. He cannot in that lower nature be a son and heir 
 of God : " they that are in the flesh cannot please God." 
 " In solemn truth I say unto you," said Jesus, " Ye 
 must be born anew. That which is of the flesh is flesh, 
 and that which is of the Spirit is Spirit." 
 
 "The flesh" — not the body, but the lower animal 
 
68 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 nature — is the seat of sin, and it is certain that sin 
 cannot be perpetuated. It cannot " inherit the Kingdom 
 of God " ; its place is " the outer darkness " ; its doom 
 is death away from God. The flesh had to come first, 
 but its rule in man was not meant to last, it was to 
 be changed into that of the Spirit. The flesh had a 
 necessary purpose to serve in the evolution of humanity ; 
 but, having served that purpose, it must die if man is 
 to rise into his true, God-intended life. Just as the 
 flora and fauna of earth have had again and again to 
 die for the sake of higher orders of life, so man in the 
 flesh must die, to be succeeded by man in the Spirit. 
 If we think of this and of the necessity for preventing 
 sin's entrance into the eternal life (if such a thing be 
 even conceivable), we shall see that the doom of death 
 on sin is an absolutely necessary one. It is not the 
 sentence of a hard and stern Lawgiver, but the ordering 
 of the Love of God in the fulfilment of His creative 
 purpose. But this must be kept quite separate from 
 the idea of an arbitrary penalty externally inflicted, or 
 such as could be endured by a substitute. 
 
 3. It is with our third head that we shall encounter 
 the greatest difficulty. In what sense can we credibly 
 say to-day that Christ " died for our sins," was " made 
 sin for us," "bore our sins," or endured their con- 
 sequences? In what way can we see this to be true 
 apart from the idea of " atoning for " or " expiating " sin ? 
 
 Here it is evident that we must leave aside or get 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 69 
 
 beneath those differing interpretations of the Apostle's 
 language which men of equal learning and conscientious- 
 ness are led to give. It is clear that on those matters 
 where such differences of interpretation are possible, 
 Paul's teaching cannot be meant to be normative. How 
 can we tell whether we accept Paul's teaching or not, 
 if we cannot be certain as to what he says ? We must 
 view the subject broadly in the light of his essential 
 position that Christ died in order that God's righteousness 
 might be manifested, and that in so dying He died for, 
 i.e., on account of, our sins, showing forth in His own 
 person what sin entailed on sinners in the righteousness 
 of God. As such a broad statement we could (if 
 "wrath" be rightly taken) accept that given by Dr. 
 Stevens in the course of his criticism of Paul's doctrine : 
 " Christ was ' made sin ' on man's account, that is, He 
 so came under the action of the Divine Wrath against 
 sin, that God's Justice is thereby vindicated and 
 satisfied" (we would omit "and satisfied," for that is, 
 we think, going beyond Paul), {The Christian Doctrine 
 of Salvation, p. 60). But is it so certain that, as he 
 proceeds to say, "it is unquestionably true that the 
 juridical elements in Paul's theology as seen in his 
 doctrines of expiation and justification are survivals of 
 his Pharisaic training"? Is Paul's judicial doctrine of 
 the Cross only this and nothing more? We have 
 already seen that the ideas of " expiation " and " atone- 
 ment to God" are foreign to Paul's doctrine. They 
 cannot with fairness be imputed to him : and perhaps 
 
70 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 it will yet appear that, underlying his judicial repre- 
 sentation of the Death of Christ, there is something 
 more broadly human and Divine, something Christian 
 as well as Jewish, something lastingly true, although 
 it may need to be stated differently. 
 
 Let us suppose for the moment that this is so, that in 
 some real sense the death of Christ was " a death for 
 our sins," or that Christ was "made sin for us," the 
 accident that Paul apprehended and stated this in the 
 forms of thought or speech with which he and his 
 readers were familiar does not affect the fact in the 
 slightest degree. How else could he have apprehended 
 and stated it? The men of Paul's day apprehended 
 many things — even the commonest things — in a 
 different way from ourselves, and gave them other 
 names than those we apply to them, but the things 
 themselves are the same for us all. The real question 
 is, was there a truth apprehended by Paul under these 
 forms, and what is that truth ? 
 
 There is wide agreement to-day in the rejection of 
 anything penal in the death of Christ. So far as an 
 external legal penalty is concerned, and so far as the 
 thought of Christ suffering punishment directly at the 
 hand of God, or any idea of satisfaction by suffering, 
 comes into theories of the Cross, the rejection is to 
 be justified. That conception of the death of Christ 
 to which Pfleiderer, for example, seeks to tie down 
 Evangelical theology cannot be received. Nor do we 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 71 
 
 think that it can be fairly ascribed to Paul. According 
 to this, Sin up till then had not been duly punished. 
 This required a proof of the Divine Justice. This 
 could only be given — since death is the wages of sin — 
 by a bloody penal death. In order to show grace to 
 the guilty, God, instead of inflicting the full penalty 
 of death as His avenging justice required on all who 
 had deserved it, inflicted it on one who had not 
 deserved it, and thus set forth this one in His blood 
 that was shed as the victim who suffered (vicariously) 
 the punishment due to others, and so expiated their 
 guilt. And this He did in His own interest (proetketo, 
 middle voice) in order to cause the recognition of His 
 own justice, which recognition had been endangered by 
 the previous impunity of sin. 
 
 This is said to be the only view that accords simply 
 and naturally with Jewish notions, according to which 
 justice is the exact requital of actions and consequent 
 punishing of every instance of guilt; but in whose 
 person the guilt was punished, whether in that of the 
 guilty person himself or vicariously in that of another, 
 was of no immediate concern, all that was required was 
 that the penalty should be inflicted. 
 
 Now in this, of course, there would be no real mani- 
 festation of the righteousness of God, but the reverse. 
 It was a strange doctrine this even for "the Jews." 1 
 
 1 Jewish scholars repudiate the assertion of Christian writers that Paul 
 represented Rabbinic Theology. Dr. Kohler, writing in the Jewish 
 Ency., says, " There is no indication in Paul's writings that he had received 
 the rabbinical training ascribed to him by Christian writers ancient and 
 
72 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 It would be still more strange if Paul, with his sound 
 judgment, Christian feeling, and high regard for real 
 righteousness, believed that such an example was set by 
 God before the world ; and preached it as the means of 
 man's salvation. 1 It would be a very peculiar mode of 
 getting that freedom from " the law of sin and death," 
 in which he gloried, — by an act of the strictest and 
 most literal legalism on the part of God, thus at once 
 satisfying and doing away with the law, — a law which 
 Paul regarded as having only a temporary value. To 
 think of the righteous Father for the sake of that 
 temporary law, inflicting "a violent death" on His 
 Son, or setting Him forth to suffer it in order to 
 maintain His Justice, is quite repellent, and we cannot 
 but believe that Paul viewed the matter in some other 
 way than this. If such were indeed the only legitimate 
 interpretation of his reasoning, we should not hesitate to 
 regard it as being only an argumentum ad hominem in 
 which he adapts himself to the Jewish view of Law and 
 penalty for the sake of proving to the Jew how, on his 
 own principles, the Law has been met and satisfied. 
 But the way in which he extends his doctrine to the 
 Gentiles as well as to the Jews, and the place which the 
 death of Christ holds in his gospel generally, suggests 
 
 modern, least of all that he was a disciple of Gamaliel." The representa- 
 tions of Weber, Bousset, etc. ,' are not accepted. 
 
 1 While his Jewish training naturally influenced his forms of thought, 
 was Paul the Christian so completely under the power of "Jewish notions 
 of justice " (if such these were) that he could only conceive the Cross which 
 freed him from Judaism in terms of them ? 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 73 
 
 that Paul saw something more in the Death of Christ. 
 It was something occurring in the Divine moral order ; 
 only thus could he be so confident that God was in it. 
 And, as we have seen, it was the death of sin, or of 
 "sinful flesh," that Paul had in view; he carefully 
 avoids the suggestion that Christ was treated as a 
 sinner. 
 
 Paul certainly teaches that " Death " is the " wages of 
 sin '' — the penalty of sin under the Law of God, and we 
 are compelled to ask, What did he mean by " death " 
 in this connection, and what warrant had he for his 
 assertion? By some Evangelical writers the death 
 which happens to all in physical dissolution is re- 
 garded as the penalty of sin. " Death," says Dr. 
 Denney, "is the word which sums up the whole 
 liability of man in relation to sin, and, therefore, when 
 Christ came to give Himself for our sins, He did it by 
 dying. It does not occur to Paul to ask how He could 
 bear the sins of others. The death that He died was 
 the only death that we know." But if it did not occur 
 to Paul to ask how Christ could bear the sins of others, 
 there are many to-day who are anxiously asking that 
 question, and also, how physical death can be regarded 
 as the penalty of sin ? It can only be so on the un- 
 supported supposition that had not man sinned he 
 would have lived for ever on the earth, or have been 
 gradually spiritualised and translated. These we may 
 imagine as possibilities, but we have no ground for 
 saying that they entered into the Divine thought of 
 
74 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 man's creation. We cannot look upon bodily death as 
 being a penalty for sin, although it is, doubtless, made 
 to serve a wise and good purpose under God. Death, 
 we are told, must be interpreted through conscience. 
 But it must be also interpreted through intelligence. 
 Physical death has often been accepted by one person 
 for another; it is constantly faced by some in the 
 pursuance of their profession, and in the fulfilment of 
 their duties it is often vicariously endured. The most 
 unselfish and heroic conduct frequently entails it on 
 men, and surely we cannot think of it as coming upon 
 them as a doom from God. Such a conception tends 
 to make both God and sin very unreal. Such theology, 
 though no protest may be voiced against it, carries no 
 real conviction. And if the Cross meant nothing more 
 than the acceptance of physical death in a shameful and 
 cruel form, it would doubtless be something that ought 
 to arrest the attention and move the heart in some 
 measure, but it would not possess that unique value in, 
 not merely temporal but eternal relationships which it 
 had for Paul, and which has given it such a power over 
 human hearts. It is easy, in a way, to defend the Cross 
 if no more than this was involved in it, but it is a Cross 
 bereft of its highest power. 
 
 Science will not allow us to regard physical death as 
 the penalty of sin. The energy of every finite organism 
 must sometime become exhausted. Death is just as 
 natural as life, and is absolutely necessary if humanity 
 is not to be a narrow and restricted thing, both numeri- 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 75 
 
 cally and in its character. Had it not been for Death 
 making room for us we should not have been here 
 to-day. Science shows us that Death came in to 
 further the evolution of living forms. And had it not 
 been for Death, man would have remained on a much 
 lower level, with far inferior endowments. 
 
 What valid scriptural grounds are there for saying 
 that physical death is the penalty of sin ? Doubtless 
 Paul included it in his thought of "Death," but he 
 shows us that he founds on the Genesis narrative, 
 which cannot in the light of our present knowledge be 
 regarded as direct Divine revelation. 
 
 In the teaching of Christ, physical death was not the 
 punishment of sin. His teaching is here quite distinct. 
 Man, He said, could inflict bodily death, and, therefore, 
 His disciples were not to fear it : there was something 
 else beyond man's power to inflict — and it was this 
 they ought to fear. The final consequence of sin was 
 exclusion from the Kingdom of God, which certainly 
 does not mean physical death. All die, saint and 
 sinner alike. The death that comes to all cannot 
 possibly cover our Lord's representations of exclusion 
 from the Kingdom, of the outer darkness, of Gehenna, 
 of aeonian punishment. Did Paul mean nothing more 
 when he said, " If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die " ? 
 Was this really the death which he said Jesus died for 
 us in order that we might live unto God and not die ? 
 There is no correspondence between the two things. 
 Paul does not say that it was in order that we might 
 
76 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 not die "with a bad conscience'' or "with fear," but 
 that we might not die. We all do die physically, and 
 the sinner often dies with ease and comfort, welcomes 
 death as a blessed release, seeks it for himself. When 
 Paul speaks of Christ being " made sin for us," he does 
 not think merely of His physical death. How could 
 that be any manifestation of God's righteousness in 
 view of His having passed over sin ? All men had died, 
 and if bodily dissolution be the penalty, sin had not 
 been passed over. If this be all that Christ did for us — 
 what many a man has done for his fellows — it is no 
 wonder that the preaching of the Cross should often 
 seem so powerless, and that it should have so little real 
 influence on some modern believers. 
 
 But although Paul may sometimes seem to have 
 simply physical death before his mind, much more was 
 included under his conception of " Death." This is 
 clear from the passages already referred to, e.g. when 
 he says to the Roman believers, " If ye live after the 
 flesh, ye shall die'.' They were certain to taste physical 
 death whether they lived after the flesh or not. The 
 death which "the law" enjoined for high-handed 
 transgression — for real sin — was off-cutting from the 
 community, violent death, " destruction/' says Davidson. 
 So with the Prophets. When Ezekiel says, " The soul 
 that sinneth, it shall die " (xviii. 4), it is this off-cutting 
 that is meant, — in v. 1 3 the Hebrew is " shall be put to 
 death." (See also Isa. i. 20, " If ye refuse and rebel, 
 ye shall be slain with the sword," etc.) It was not 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 77 
 
 mere " natural death," nor " eternal death," but a violent 
 death from God in punishment of their wickedness. 
 
 The truth is that Paul accepted the Hebrew con- 
 ception of death, not as a part of Pharisaism, but as 
 contained in the Old Testament Scriptures. This 
 included physical death, but it was not the mere act of 
 dying ; it was the entering on death as a state, and from 
 that state, to the sinner, there was no resurrection. 
 Death in itself was the worst of evils. As the end and 
 antithesis of life, it meant cessation of that inspiration 
 of the Divine Spirit that made man man — separation 
 from God, though not extinction of being. Even the 
 righteous shrank from it, and their only hope was in a 
 redemption or resurrection. As Dr. Davidson remarks : 
 " To die was to become separate from God ; to be dead 
 was to continue in this state of separation. This is the 
 meaning of death in the Old Testament. Hence the 
 terrors that gathered around dying" {Theol. of O.T. p. 
 520). Death, then, in Paul's view meant, not an act, 
 but a state of separation from God, out of which there 
 was, to the sinner, — and in his view we were all sinners, 
 — no resurrection. We can now understand how solemn 
 was the warning, " If ye live after the flesh, ye shall 
 die " ; we can see what is meant when it is said that 
 " Death is the wages of sin " ; how " sin, when it is fully 
 matured, bringeth forth death," and how much more 
 than His passing through physical death is involved in 
 the statement that " Christ died for our sins," " was made 
 sin for our sakes," "loved me, and gave Himself up 
 
78 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 for me." He gave Himself up to enter a state which, 
 in itself, involved separation from God. We fail to see 
 this, because we throw back upon it the light that has 
 come to us through the resurrection of Christ. 
 
 It is death in this sense of continued separation from 
 God that is the ultimate doom of sin, its necessary 
 consequence indeed. But we cannot think of it as 
 being an externally inflicted penalty which may be 
 endured either by the actual sinner or by a Substitute. 
 We shall see immediately in what sense Christ " bore 
 our sins," etc., but the affixing and exacting of penalties 
 in such an external way is quite inconsistent with the 
 Christian thought of God as the Father of men. It 
 belongs to the older thought of God as a Sovereign and 
 Judge. There is an externality and legality in it which 
 are out of keeping with the idea of Fatherhood. We 
 must ask reverently — Could God do nothing more for 
 His incomplete, if sinful, children than sum them all 
 up under this hopeless doom of death? And, if strict 
 Justice is to rule, so that the sinner must die, how 
 would the suffering of death by Christ meet the demand 
 of justice on the actual sinner? 
 
 Even the idea of " Grace " — although true for in- 
 dividual sinners — suggests Sovereignty rather than 
 Fatherhood. We plead for no " mere good-natured 
 Fatherhood " ; but we do plead for real Fatherhood. 
 Grace is favour shown by a Sovereign, not a Father's 
 loving, sympathetic, and righteous regard for his 
 children. It suggests a relation of God to man which 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 79 
 
 is different from that revealed in Christ, and a con- 
 ception of sin and guilt which neither Christ's teaching 
 and attitude towards men nor modern knowledge bears 
 out. Sin and guilt are both sadly real, but man is not 
 just the subject of a Sovereign Ruler, amenable to His 
 Justice and doomed to Death if he offends, but, at the 
 lowest, a creature of God destined to become His child, 
 for whose presence in the world and entire nature as 
 man God in His Wisdom and Love is responsible. In 
 man the animal nature had to come first : he is a grow- 
 ing being, weighted by the inevitable " flesh,'' for whom 
 God had a higher life in view. 
 
 We should greatly err, however, were we to exclude 
 from our thought all idea of penalty, in the sense of 
 consequence and punishment. Every conscience wit- 
 nesses that sin deserves to be punished, and there are 
 consequences of wrong-doing which must be regarded 
 in the light of punishment. What we have to avoid is 
 the conception of a penalty affixed to an external law 
 under which man has been placed, which must be 
 rigorously executed on him or else on a substitute, and 
 which is executed as from without. But the whole 
 experience of life bears solemn witness to the fact of 
 penalty or evil consequences following sin and wrong- 
 doing. The entire Universe is under Law, with its 
 inherent, self-acting penalties. It is quite conceivable 
 also that the final consequence of sin persevered in, or 
 with which a man identifies himself, is separation from 
 God, exclusion from the kingdom, as Christ teaches. 
 
80 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 This, indeed, we have seen must be the fate of sin and 
 the doom of that " sinful flesh " from which sin cannot 
 be separated. 
 
 Paul certainly teaches that the doom or just desert 
 of sin was set forth in the death of Christ "in the 
 likeness of sinful flesh and on account of sin," and that 
 in this the " righteousness of God " in view of sin was 
 manifested. It was in some sense a judicial act, and 
 something which Christ endured instead of sinners. 
 Although Christ did not actually take the sinner's place, 
 He took the place of sin in the flesh, or of sinful flesh, 
 and died as man's Representative the death which sin 
 must die. He was " made sin " for us. The question 
 that now confronts us is, what is the truth underlying 
 this teaching? How was Christ's death on the Cross 
 such a manifestation of God's righteousness ? 
 
 Whether Paul represents Jewish theology or not, it 
 cannot be denied that he has the Law with its penalty 
 of " death " primarily in view in his argument. But it 
 is impossible to believe that it was really to vindicate 
 His righteousness in having declared this penalty, or 
 His veracity in connection with it, that God had to 
 sacrifice His Son. When Evangelical theologians so 
 represent the necessity for Christ's death, we must ask, 
 with our altered conception of Inspiration, where has 
 God so pledged His word to inflict this penalty on 
 sinners that Christ had to die in order to show Him 
 veracious ? We do not now believe in verbal inspiration, 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 81 
 
 and no such word was ever directly spoken from 
 Heaven. It is true that in the nature of things sin 
 must die: but we are here getting on to different 
 ground. 
 
 But does not Paul's ethical view of the Cross come 
 here to our help? Was it not really in the ethical 
 dying of Christ to sin, which Paul so emphatically 
 declares must be realised in us also if we are to be truly 
 saved, that the manifestation of God's righteousness 
 consisted ? This, however, with Paul was founded on 
 the judicial conception of the death of Christ. It is not, 
 as is sometimes said, a view of Christ's death standing 
 side by side, unconnectedly, with the other. It was not 
 because he saw Christ in the ethical sense dying to sin 
 in our name that he enunciated the ethical aspect of 
 his doctrine. It was because Christ's death was a 
 complete death of " the flesh," of " the old man," and His 
 resurrection a rising out of that death into an entirely 
 new life of the Spirit. As he says in the sixth of 
 Romans : " He that hath died is freed from sin " ; and 
 of Christ, " The death that He died, He died unto sin 
 once for all." One who has died is freed from all 
 pertaining to the flesh and the former life. So, he 
 argues, this complete death to the past and the old man 
 having been represented in Christ for us all, we all died 
 completely before God to all that pertained to the old 
 life and rose to a new life, which it must now be ours 
 to realise practically through the power of that Spirit of 
 Christ which is the Spirit of the true life for us all. It 
 
82 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 was thus that the judicial death of Christ came to have 
 for Paul an ethical value and power. 
 
 If, however, we go to the Gospels, we shall see that, 
 in itself, Christ's death was an ethical death to sin and 
 to all that was of the flesh. We shall see how, in His 
 complete obedience to the Will of the Father even unto 
 death, in spite of all the natural solicitations of the flesh 
 in the midst of all that could try it, and under the 
 utmost that man can suffer, "the flesh" did in Christ 
 die utterly and ethically and representatively for us all. 
 
 The question thus arises : Was not this representative 
 ethical death in itself a sufficient manifestation of the 
 righteousness of God in view of His passing over the 
 sins of the past, and of His proclamation of Forgive- 
 ness and acceptance in the Gospel? Was not God's 
 righteousness in view of sin demonstrated, inasmuch as 
 it was here made manifest that in due time sin should 
 be conquered in man, that the sinful flesh should 
 utterly die, and man rise to a new life of the Spirit and 
 of righteousness? This was the Divine purpose from 
 all eternity, although only in due time could it be 
 realised and manifested. Was it not in view of this 
 that the Heavenly Father bore with His weak, imperfect, 
 and sinning children as He did ? Was not this a real 
 reconciliation or At-one-ment of God with man ; and 
 is it not because now man has been set forth in Christ 
 as dead to sin and risen to righteousness that the 
 Gospel Message of Forgiveness and acceptance goes 
 freely forth to all? In this deeper view of the 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 83 
 
 representative death of Christ to sin it would certainly 
 seem that we have a real At-one-ment of God with man, 
 and such a manifestation of the Divine righteousness 
 as appears to be necessary in connection with the going 
 forth — not the procuring — of the Divine Forgiveness. 
 
 But it by no means follows that the "judicial" aspect 
 of the Cross has no truth underlying it. We cannot 
 believe that its statement by Paul was a mere accom- 
 modation, or argumentum ad Judceos, or a mere in- 
 heritance of Paul's Jewish training: still less that the 
 general Christian faith rested on nothing real when it 
 held the confidence that " Christ died for our sins." It 
 must indeed be seen in a deeper way ; but were we to 
 leave it out altogether, we should omit an important 
 aspect of the manifestation of the Divine righteousness 
 in the death of Christ, and we should deprive the Cross 
 in large measure of its power to produce in men the 
 ethical fruits of Christ's death. 
 
 We need to bear in mind what it was that God was 
 doing in Christ. He was reconciling the sinful world 
 to Himself in His righteousness with a view to save men 
 from sin and make them. His children in spirit and truth. 
 The Cross was not a mere setting forth of His righteous- 
 ness in view of sin : it was this in order to the salvation 
 of the world — in order to the salvation of men from sin 
 to their true life in Himself. It is not merely something 
 that men can intellectually perceive done in their name 
 that can move them as they need to be moved. It 
 
84 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 must be something that they feel, so that it shall become 
 an inspiring and soul-winning power — something that 
 shall make them realise at once the actuality and the 
 evil of sin with its consequences, and, at the same time, 
 the greatness of the forgiving love of God. They must 
 see Christ, not merely dying to sin, but dying for their 
 sins ; in some very real way " bearing the iniquities of 
 us all." It was necessary that sin should be set forth in 
 all its hideousness and in the evil that it works for man, 
 if men were to be saved from it. And this could only 
 be fully done by one who could die in our name and 
 who could come forth again from death to be the power 
 of a new life in men. It was necessary that such a 
 manifestation of the evil of sin and of the love of God 
 should be made as should move sinners to repentance, 
 give them confidence in the Divine Forgiveness, and 
 kindle an answering love to God in their hearts. 
 History has shown that from the Cross viewed in this 
 light have proceeded the most powerful motives to lead 
 men to God and salvation. Therefore God "spared 
 not His own Son, but gave Him up for us all." It was 
 not merely, as it is sometimes represented, the sense of 
 the world's sin that was the element of suffering in the 
 experience of Christ. He bore our sins in the sense of 
 suffering the consequences that come upon man through 
 sin. 
 
 We here reach the question which so greatly needs 
 to be faced and answered to-day : How can the death 
 of Christ, in the circumstances in which it came to Him 
 
PAUL'S DOCTRINE CONSIDERED 85 
 
 at the hands of sinners, be seen to be His bearing the 
 sins of men in the sense of suffering that which comes 
 on man as the consequence of sin in the righteousness 
 of God? In other words: Can the judicial as well as 
 the ethical aspect of Paul's doctrine be still maintained ? 
 We believe that it can. But, just as Paul's ethical view 
 of the Cross must be reached in a deeper way, so his 
 judicial conception of it can only be vindicated by 
 viewing it in a wider light. Paul teaches that God's 
 righteousness was set forth by His giving up His own 
 Son to bear the consequences of man's sin. This may 
 be stated in such a way as to be repellent. But it may 
 also be shown to contain a great truth. It can, we 
 think, be shown that in the same sense as that in which 
 the righteous servant of Jehovah bare the sins of his 
 people, in the Divine moral order of the world, the sin 
 of the world came upon and was borne by Christ. But 
 this must be set forth in such a way that it shall be 
 seen to be no mere arbitrary representation or external 
 transfer, or taking on Himself of the world's sin, but 
 that which actually came upon Him in the sequence of 
 the Divine moral order, in the historical circumstances 
 under which He endured His Cross, and in harmony 
 with both the righteousness and the love of God. 
 
 But first let us consider for a moment the Cross in its 
 actual historical setting, when we shall see more fully 
 the reality and value of that ethical aspect of the Cross 
 of which we have spoken. 
 
VI 
 
 THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL 
 SETTING 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 
 
 HOW did the Cross come to Christ? It came in 
 the course of the fulfilment of His mission to 
 bring in the Kingdom of God. The Gospels give no 
 ground for the assertion, often made, that He came into 
 the world to die. He came preaching " the Gospel of 
 God" to His people, asking them to receive Him, be- 
 lieve the good news, and, turning to God, rejoice in His 
 salvation. It was only their rejection of Him that 
 made His death necessary. Doubtless, long before the 
 event He anticipated it ; but the Gospels show us a 
 hopeful beginning with a Divine message which ought 
 to have gladdened the hearts of all who heard it. We 
 see Christ grieved because of their unbelief, and wonder- 
 ing at the little faith of His disciples. Even as late as 
 Gethsemane He could pray that if it was possible the 
 cup might pass from Him. The idea that He came 
 just to die, and that before ever He went forth to 
 preach He was convinced that His preaching would be 
 rejected, makes His whole life and pleading with men 
 quite unreal. How completely opposed it is to the 
 opening words of St. Mark's Gospel : " The beginning 
 
go THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 of the Gospel (the glad tidings) of Jesus Christ." Jesus 
 Himself was the first Preacher of the Gospel : He did 
 not merely "make it possible for a Gospel to be 
 preached." Ignoring the fact that Jesus Himself first 
 preached the Gospel, has created much needless 
 difficulty. In various ways it has been sought to ex- 
 plain how the Gospel came to be preached by the 
 Apostles, who are supposed to have proceeded on quite 
 different lines from those pursued by Christ, so that we 
 need to come back from them to Christ Himself; while 
 it is the simple fact that what they preached was really 
 the completed form of the Gospel first preached by 
 Jesus Himself. 
 
 Jesus came preaching " the gospel of the Kingdom of 
 God." That with Him meant the drawing nigh to men 
 of the Heavenly Father in His forgiving love, in fulfil- 
 ment of the promises of the prophets. Therefore He said, 
 " The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God (so long 
 looked for) has come nigh to you ; the promised accept- 
 able year of the Lord has dawned." It was a spiritual 
 Kingdom that He preached, one that should be realised 
 when men were brought nigh to God in spiritual son- 
 ship and in brotherly love to one another ; the Kingdom 
 of God, He said, was first of all within men. But this 
 was not the kind of Kingdom the people in general were 
 looking for. They believed that they were God's 
 chosen people, His children already by natural heritage, 
 and they expected an outward dominion to be set up, in 
 which they, as God's people, should be supreme. There- 
 
THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 91 
 
 fore all but a few not only rejected, but resented, the 
 spiritual preaching of Christ, and at length the Heads 
 of the nation determined that He should die. For some 
 time He had seen this dark shadow brooding over His 
 future; but although He shrank from entering it, He 
 accepted it as His Father's will, believing that it should 
 do what His life and preaching and gracious works had 
 failed to accomplish, namely, bring in the Kingdom of 
 God, make His Gospel real and effectual to men's salva- 
 tion. Although he met His death at the hands of 
 wicked men, it was not because they had decreed it 
 that He died. The Gospels show us that His accept- 
 ance of death was wholly voluntary. That He need 
 not have died, so far as man's action was concerned, is 
 clear from their records. He knew His danger, and, 
 humanly speaking, there was no need for Him to enter 
 into it. He had looked forward to His suffering, and 
 had spoken to His disciples of it repeatedly. He felt 
 that He " had a baptism to be baptized with," and was 
 " straitened till it was accomplished." He was to give 
 His life a ransom for many. His Body should be given 
 for their sakes; His Blood should be to them that of 
 God's saving Covenant. After His death He should 
 " drink the new wine " with them in His Father's King- 
 dom. Surely it is absurd to believe, as the method of 
 interpretation of such sayings of Christ by some modern 
 critics would lead us to do, that Jesus looked forward 
 to a literal drinking of new wine along with His disciples 
 after His death : He surely meant that His death would 
 
92 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 be the means of bringing in the spiritual Kingdom. 
 The wine which He looked forward to drink in their 
 fellowship was the wine of joy in the accomplished 
 saving purpose of God, Yet, as the event became 
 imminent, He shuddered, and He only accepted it 
 when, after earnest prayer, He was convinced that 
 nothing else could meet His Father's will. He rebuked 
 His disciples' well-meant attempt to save Him :'" Think 
 ye not," He said, " that I could pray to My Father, and 
 He should give me twelve legions of angels " — where- 
 with to scatter His foes. He went forward to His death, 
 not because He was helpless before His enemies, but 
 because He gave Himself up to that Will of His Father 
 which sought to accomplish man's salvation — moved 
 to this by the Father's own Spirit within Him. This 
 deliberate giving of Himself up to death for the spiritual 
 salvation of men gives an altogether unique significance 
 to His self-sacrifice. While it places it in line with 
 that of the suffering servant of Jehovah in Isaiah, the 
 immediate purpose of that sacrifice was rather the 
 temporal salvation of the people than their spiritual and 
 eternal salvation. He goes "as it has been written," 
 and, according to Luke's Gospel, that embraced what 
 had been written concerning the servant of Jehovah: 
 " For I say unto you that this which is written must be 
 fulfilled in Me, ' And he was reckoned with the trans- 
 gressors ': for that which concerneth Me hath fulfil- 
 ment" (xxii. 37). As that suffering had the effect of 
 fulfilling Jehovah's good purpose, so He felt sure it 
 
THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 93 
 
 should be with respect to His own. It was also as " the 
 Son of man " that He should die, which gives to His 
 death a representative aspect. If He said also that it 
 was " for the remission of sins,'' that might be true in 
 more ways than one. It would be true if His death 
 led men to repentance and so to forgiveness. His more 
 express teaching concerning His death will yet be con- 
 sidered. But we may say here that He nowhere says 
 anything that clearly and unmistakably suggests that 
 He regarded His death as an atonement for sin, or a 
 satisfaction to God's justice, or a penal infliction. The 
 way in which His death came upon Him seems to 
 forbid such conceptions of it. While He accepted it 
 voluntarily, it yet came upon Him at the hands of His 
 enemies. He was to be " killed," " put to death " by 
 them. It was " the hour and power of darkness." His 
 blood was to be violently " shed," like other " righteous 
 blood " that had been unrighteously shed : all of which 
 should come upon " this generation." He by no means 
 died as bowing to Justice in human law, but was 
 deeply conscious of the injustice and wickedness of 
 those who compassed His death. It were " good for 
 the man who betrayed Him that he had never been 
 born." " If they do those things in the green tree, what 
 shall be done in the dry ? " His murderers knew not 
 what they did : " Father, forgive them," He prayed. 
 
 Why He should not only suffer but pass into that 
 state of death which to the pious Jew was one of 
 separation from God, relieved only by the hope of a 
 
94 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 resurrection, was possibly not made clear even to Him- 
 self. But we cannot doubt that He who had told His 
 disciples not to fear them who could kill the body but 
 could not touch the soul, surrendered Himself to it 
 with confidence in God. His cry on the Cross cannot, 
 therefore, be interpreted as one of despair or of failure, 
 as some would interpret it. It cannot mean that He 
 lost His faith in God. If we interpret it in the spirit 
 of the Psalm from which it was taken, it was the cry 
 of one passing through such suffering as might have 
 suggested Divine abandonment, but underneath which 
 was the confidence that it had a gracious purpose to 
 effect in His own experience and in that of others 
 (Ps. xxii.). It is really a question with the answer 
 implied. Had the disciples understood it as a cry of 
 despair, or failure, or loss of faith, it is impossible to 
 conceive how they could have maintained their faith in 
 their Master. As we shall see, the experience it in- 
 dicates may have had an important part to fulfil in 
 relation to the perfect obedience of Christ. 
 
 So far as we have gone, the simple truth may seem 
 to be that Jesus accepted His Cross with all that might 
 come upon Him, even death itself, in order that, through 
 the influence of His suffering thus for our sakes, the 
 evil of sin on the one hand, and the Love thus displayed 
 on the other, might bring men to God, and so making 
 them members of God's kingdom, save them with a 
 spiritual and eternal salvation. No explanation is 
 given of why He should die, save that His death 
 
THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 95 
 
 was for the sake of others and should have a saving 
 issue. 
 
 Nothing is said from Heaven either in explanation 
 of this death of the Son of God in those solemn circum- 
 stances. His disciples at first simply could not under- 
 stand it. But that Cross stands there before men. It 
 speaks, and it is for men to listen and try to understand 
 what it says as something that came to Christ by the 
 will of the loving and righteous God and Father. A 
 Spirit goes forth from it, and it is for men to feel and 
 receive that Spirit's influence. In the light of that 
 Spirit's suggestion the Cross must be interpreted, and 
 so become effectual for its purpose. If there is any 
 reality in Divine spiritual teaching — if God by means 
 of what He does can speak to man — we must be loyal 
 to the Spirit's teaching. This does not mean that that 
 teaching will come to every man in the very same 
 manner. We shall see only what we have been pre- 
 pared to see. And the Spirit's teaching is not limited 
 to one aspect of the Cross, or to one generation of men. 
 There is ever " more light and truth " to come to us. 
 It does not imply that we must accept the very forms 
 in which the teaching of the Spirit was first apprehended 
 and expressed. The Spirit of God does not teach in 
 the words of men, but in deeper convictions, impressions, 
 excitements, and suggestions than can perhaps be ex- 
 pressed in any human language. Of this Paul, for one, 
 shows himself to be well aware. But if we believe in 
 the reality of the Spirit's teaching at all ; if we claim 
 
96 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 that teaching for ourselves and for the present genera- 
 tion, if we would have really progressive Divine teaching, 
 we must be careful not to deny the coming of that 
 illuminating Spirit to Christ's first disciples and Paul, 
 and, however far we may advance, we must hold fast 
 the substance of that which was taught them, which 
 they apprehended and expressed in the forms of their 
 own time. Otherwise, we virtually deny that there is 
 any such thing as Divine spiritual teaching, and man 
 is left to make himself " the measure of all things " in 
 heaven as well as on earth. 
 
 If we can trust the Gospels and the Book of Acts, 
 the first Christians were led to interpret the Cross in 
 the light of those Old Testament Scriptures which 
 had been a guide to Jesus Himself. According to 
 Luke's Gospel, Jesus, after He was risen, had ex- 
 pounded to two of His followers "the things in the 
 Scriptures concerning Himself," showing them that 
 it was necessary that the Christ should suffer and 
 enter into His glory. In that glory they believed He 
 was to come again to judge the world and set up the 
 eternal Kingdom of God. His crucifixion is regarded 
 as a notorious criminal act, which, however, served a 
 high Divine purpose. He whom the Jews had cruci- 
 fied, God had raised from the dead and made Lord 
 and Christ. Although the narrative of Philip and the 
 Eunuch shows that the fifty-third of Isaiah was before 
 their minds, there is no mention of an atoning sacrifice. 
 
THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 97 
 
 The stress is laid on the resurrection of Jesus by God. 
 Repentance and Forgiveness of sins are preached in 
 His name. All who believed in Him should be saved. 
 Paul, in his preaching at Antioch, still lays the stress 
 on the Resurrection. The " glad tidings " — the gospel — 
 was, that God had fulfilled the promise made to the 
 fathers "in that He had raised up Jesus," "and 
 through this man is proclaimed to you remission of 
 sins ; and by Him every one that believeth is justified 
 from all things, from which ye could not be justified 
 by the law of Moses." The ground of this justification 
 is not stated, but it is implied that there was such a 
 ground. In his later speech before Agrippa, Paul 
 again refers to the fulfilment of all that had been 
 written in the Scriptures, that the Christ should be a 
 suffering Christ, and "that He first, by a resurrection 
 from the dead, should proclaim a message of light to 
 the Jewish people and to the Gentiles." We see here 
 why the stress was laid on Christ's resurrection from 
 the dead. Thereby, Paul says, He brought a glad 
 message of light. What was that light? It was the 
 light of "eternal life" for mankind. His emergence 
 from that "death," which is the doom of sin, was 
 the proclamation in "this man" of man's justification 
 before God — a justification in which all who believed 
 in Him should share. Nothing whatever is said of 
 the relation of Christ's death to this justification; but 
 it was natural to believe that it had some relation to 
 it. Paul's entire doctrinal system may very well under- 
 
98 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 lie this preaching. For the Christians generally, with 
 their familiarity with animal sacrifices, and in view of 
 the significance these were believed to have, it would 
 be a most simple and natural thing to interpret the 
 death of Christ as " a sacrifice for sin." As Peter says 
 in his Epistle, " Christ suffered (or died) for sins once, 
 the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might 
 bring us to God " ; " who His own self bare our sins in 
 His body upon the tree, that we, having died unto 
 sins, might live unto righteousness." Hence the first 
 word of the Faith as it was delivered to Paul was 
 "that Christ died for our sins." The essential matter 
 here is that, as we must believe, under the Divine 
 Spirit's guidance they did so interpret the death of 
 Christ; and therefore, although we may not be able 
 to view it in the same simple manner, we seem to be 
 bound to believe that there was a truth underlying 
 their belief. It was this belief that brought to them 
 the saving Power of the Gospel. 
 
 We know how the meaning of the Cross came to 
 Paul. It " pleased God to reveal His Son in him " ; 
 but he had to be prepared for the revelation by a 
 deep and trying spiritual experience. He had been 
 striving for a sense of acceptance with God, endeavour- 
 ing to work out a righteousness in which he should 
 stand "justified" before God and an heir of eternal 
 life. Was it not by observance of that Law which 
 God Himself had ordained that righteousness was to 
 be found? And now the followers of the Nazarene 
 
THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 99 
 
 (such as Stephen) were preaching that the Law and 
 the Temple worship were to be ended, and that Jesus 
 who had been crucified had been raised up by God, 
 who had even brought Him back from the dead, in 
 the power of a new and endless life, to be their Leader 
 to a truer worship and a more real righteousness. 
 They were affirming that all had failed to keep the 
 law, and could only be justified by faith in "the 
 Righteous One," whom God had approved as such by 
 His resurrection from among the dead. But certainly 
 they were wrong: God would never abolish His Law 
 like that, and He would never have suffered His Son 
 to be crucified. And yet ! we know not what pangs 
 of conscience Paul already had — how far, even now, 
 he experienced that condition of the awakened soul 
 which he afterwards described so well in the seventh 
 chapter of Romans. He had probably begun to feel 
 that this might be the way after all ; that all his efforts 
 had not brought him peace with God or assurance of 
 His acceptance. And when Christ showed Himself to 
 him in the way to Damascus, he felt sure of it. He 
 saw the Christ risen into that very life for which 
 he was hoping, the life of the justified — a life wholly 
 free from the power of that " flesh " which he already 
 knew within himself to be the seat of sin, the ambush 
 in which the enemy lurked that was constantly gaining 
 the mastery over him. To be done with the old life 
 entirely, to be raised with Christ into that new life of 
 the Spirit which was in Him stamped with God's 
 
ioo THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 approval, — that was the way of salvation. He felt 
 himself to be a sinner before God, needing His forgive- 
 ness. The way of man in the flesh, the struggle after 
 righteousness under the law, was a hopeless one : hence- 
 forth he would be done with it and seek the way of 
 the Spirit. Trusting no longer to his own righteous- 
 ness, he saw and accepted God's provision of righteous- 
 ness for man made in Christ, the righteous One. God 
 had provided a new way of righteousness " apart from 
 Law." Christ "was the end of the law for righteous- 
 ness." What part did the Cross play in this ? It, said 
 Paul, for one thing at least, marked the end of the law. 
 The death to which the law doomed sin was met 
 by Christ. The righteousness of the Divine Lawgiver 
 was thus manifested in the death of Christ, so that 
 the law was ended and God could justify men freely 
 out of His grace in Jesus Christ. It was an amazing 
 revelation that thus came to him. In that Cross which 
 he had deemed a sure proof that Jesus was not the 
 Christ, he now saw an unspeakable manifestation of 
 the Love of God for sinful men, a Gospel of Forgive- 
 ness going forth to the world, and a new way of life 
 made manifest for Jew and Gentile alike. "God," 
 he said, " was in Christ at-oning the world to Himself, 
 not imputing their trespasses unto them. For Him 
 who knew no sin He made sin for our sakes, that we 
 might be made the righteousness of God in Him." 
 
 It was undoubtedly this interpretation of the Cross 
 
THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 101 
 
 that sent the Gospel forth into the world as a Divine 
 saving power. But we have seen how, while a judicial 
 aspect belongs to Paul's doctrine of the Cross, he seems 
 to carefully avoid saying that Jesus atoned for man's 
 sin in the later Jewish sense of Atonement; how 
 impossible it is to give this meaning to his teaching, 
 seeing that it is founded on the fact that it was God 
 who gave up His Son to die. Hence Paul regards 
 the Cross as a setting forth of God's righteousness in 
 view of sin by Jesus dying "in the likeness of sinful 
 flesh," representing the death of the sinful flesh in all 
 men. We have further seen that, while this is suscept- 
 ible of a judicial interpretation, there is a deeper 
 ethical thought in the mind of Paul. He saw Christ 
 dying, not only for our sins but to sin, and rising to a 
 new life in the Spirit — representing the death of all 
 men to sin and their resurrection to the life of 
 righteousness. The essential thing with him was the 
 new life of the Spirit. It was the sinful flesh that died 
 before God, not the man. It was this death to sin 
 and life to righteousness that had to be realised in 
 each man's experience. In Paul's view "the flesh" 
 died in Christ because Christ's was a complete death in 
 the flesh. 
 
 If we now go back again to the actual circumstances 
 of the death of Christ, we will see how fully, in a 
 deeper way, this ethical interpretation of the death of 
 Christ is borne out. We see Jesus, a true man — stand- 
 
102 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 ing in the likeness of sinful flesh, but at the same time 
 the Son of God entirely at one with His Father, 
 accepting the Heavenly Father's will to the uttermost, 
 even to the complete sacrifice of Himself, whatever 
 that sacrifice might involve. As we see in the agony 
 in Gethsemane, the flesh shrank from the ordeal, 
 pleading with strong crying and tears that, if it were 
 possible, He might be saved from it: there was thus 
 even in Christ a will of the flesh that might jhave 
 refused that cup. But He accepted it in obedience 
 to the Divine Father's will, and drank it to the bitterest 
 dregs. If we regard the cry from the Cross as indicat- 
 ing a temporary loss of the consciousness of the Divine 
 Father's presence, we may gain thus an ethical inter- 
 pretation of it. It was His final testing. He was 
 left completely to Himself — to His simple manhood — 
 in order that He might prove the complete conquest 
 of the flesh by the spirit — its utter death in Him — and 
 the entire oneness of man in Him with God. If, in 
 the absence of everything beyond Himself (as that self 
 had been formed under Divine influences), He per- 
 severed in His obedience, then the human will showed 
 itself wholly one with the Divine will, and man in 
 Christ was made entirely at-one with God. The cry 
 from the Cross we may regard as the cry of the flesh 
 in its bitterest experience. Yet, in all the spirit 
 conquered. 
 
 The Divine Man who so atones our Humanity to 
 God becomes in that very fact the source of a new life 
 
THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 103 
 
 to men, even that life of the Spirit which wholly- 
 possessed Him and showed itself so triumphant in His 
 experience — the life of God in man. Humanity has 
 now in Christ entered on a new epoch ; man after the 
 flesh has completely died, and out of that death man 
 after the Spirit has arisen. "Old things have passed 
 away '' : there is a new Creation. Before God, the old 
 Humanity is dead, and unto Him a new Humanity has 
 been born. God's righteousness in view of His merciful 
 forbearance in the past is vindicated in this conquest of 
 sin and oneness of man with Himself. The old, there- 
 fore, can be allowed to pass wholly away, 
 
 "To die forgotten as a dream 
 Dies at the opening day." 
 
 A Gospel of free, divine Forgiveness can thus go forth 
 to men. God can deal with them no longer as under 
 stern Law, but as under " Grace," " not imputing their 
 trespasses unto them." 
 
 It is obvious that the Cross is in this way also brought 
 into harmony with that Fatherhood of God which is the 
 Christian revelation of God. God was chiefly known 
 to Israel as a Sovereign, but to us He has been revealed 
 as the tender and loving Father of men. Judaism was 
 no doubt reaching after that thought of God, but it 
 was Christ who made it real. Christianity is not an 
 extension of Judaism, but, while arising out of it, it is 
 a new religion which transcends it, as truly as new 
 creative epochs transcended those which had preceded 
 
io 4 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 and prepared the way for them. It is not as the stern 
 Ruler and Judge, exacting penalty, that God is revealed 
 in Christ, but as the loving Father, yearning over His 
 children, seeking to raise them to their true life in union 
 with Himself. 
 
 The Cross is thus also brought into line with the entire 
 life and work of Christ. It is seen to be the culmina- 
 tion of that at-one-ment of man with God which was 
 increasingly manifested in His life. And it is not a 
 new Gospel that the Cross proclaims, but the old Gospel 
 which Jesus preached, sealed and made effectual 
 unto us. 
 
 Is there then, we are led again to ask, no truth 
 underlying Paul's judicial conception of the Cross? 
 Is there no sense in which it can be rightly said that 
 Jesus was there bearing the sin of the world in the 
 sense of enduring for our sakes the consequences of 
 sin, which " the bearing of sin " in Biblical phraseology 
 means? If we reject Paul's judicial conception of the 
 Cross, shall we not be ignoring the way in which the 
 Cross actually operated on men to bring them to God ? 
 It was the love of Christ in enduring what He did for 
 their sakes, His actually bearing their sins in His own 
 body, upon the tree, that moved the heart so mightily 
 and quickened love within it. It was not because men 
 reasoned out how the righteousness of God was 
 ethically manifested by Christ, but because they saw 
 Christ dying for their sakes under the righteousness of 
 
THE CROSS IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 105 
 
 God, that they were moved to repentance, to faith, and 
 to love. We still need to see the Cross in such a light 
 as shall bring home to our hearts the love of Christ 
 in what He suffered as bearing our iniquities for our 
 salvation. 
 
 It is true that there was another side to this view of 
 the Cross. In after times the love of God tended to 
 be obscured by the love of Christ. The heart in going 
 out to the Christ who died for men did not always go 
 out to God. The Cross was not always seen to be the 
 manifestation of the love of God, it was rather the 
 expression of the love of Christ who "interposed His 
 precious blood" between men and God to save them 
 from His wrath. God was regarded as the stern Judge 
 rather than as the loving Father. He was not known 
 as the Cross ought to have made Him known. Dark 
 thoughts concerning the Best came to fill the minds of 
 men, and in time Christ Himself became to them the 
 awful Judge instead of the loving Saviour — one with 
 whom His Mother had to intercede for sinners. All 
 this was, of course, unworthy, untrue, and unwholesome. 
 The bad effects have not yet wholly passed away, and 
 they have not a little to do with the present wide-spread 
 indifference to religion. 
 
 Yet there is, we believe, a deep truth underlying the 
 judicial conception of the Cross which we cannot afford to 
 leave out of account. Of course, even in a purely ethical 
 aspect of the Cross, it was because of our sins, " for our 
 sins," that Jesus had to pass through all His suffering and 
 
106 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 die. But the ordinary mind does not readily grasp this, 
 and we shall see that it is also true that He bore our 
 sins in the sense of enduring their worst results in the 
 righteous judgment of God ; that in His death we have 
 the actual lighting on Him of the consequences of the 
 accumulated sins of the world ; and that this was an 
 essential element in that manifestation of the righteous- 
 ness of God in which He was reconciling the world to 
 Himself, which Christ had to endure for our sakes. To 
 show this in such a way as shall be free from all taint 
 of suffering Divinely inflicted on the innocent and 
 operative on God, free from all arbitrariness and artifi- 
 ciality, and in keeping with the way in which the Cross 
 actually came to Christ, yet so as to manifest at once 
 the evil of sin and the righteousness and love of God, 
 is, we think, one of the most imperative requirements of 
 the present, if the Gospel is to retain the fulness of its 
 power. 
 
VII 
 HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 
 
 ONE objection to the doctrine of the sin-bearing 
 of Christ as it is commonly stated, and to the 
 Pauline representation of the manifestation of God's 
 righteousness in His death, is that the Cross seems 
 something arbitrary, thrust into the course of this world's 
 life as it were from without, not coming in the natural 
 sequence of human action, in the way of cause and 
 consequence. A second difficulty is, How could the 
 punishment of sin, in any sense, fall upon or be endured 
 by one who was wholly sinless ? A third objection is 
 that Paul's doctrine is an individual interpretation of 
 an historic fact which, viewed in its actual connection, 
 appears in a very different light. Christ's crucifixion, 
 as it came upon Him, was a human crime, the crowning 
 act of man's unrighteousness, — how, then, does His 
 suffering under man's unrighteousness become at the 
 same time the supreme and sufficient manifestation of 
 God's righteousness? We must emphasise this ques- 
 tion, for it is so generally ignored by Evangelical writers. 
 The fact that Christ suffered voluntarily does not meet 
 
 the case. It is under God's judgment that sin is 
 
 109 
 
no THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 punished. But Christ died at the hands of wicked men, 
 not of God. It was God's will, no doubt, that He 
 should die : God gave Him up to this, and He died 
 quite voluntarily. Still, it was sinful men who condemned 
 Him and put Him to death. The question which needs 
 to be answered is, How was the righteousness of God 
 shown in this — the righteousness of God in His judg- 
 ment on sin ? Sinful men were not the executors of 
 God's justice. In other words, How was Christ, who 
 was put to death at the hands of sinners, at the same 
 time " bearing their sin " — that is, the punishment of the 
 sin of man ? And if we were to think of expiating sin, 
 we should have to ask (if we may put it bluntly without 
 offence), How could that crowning sin — that murder of 
 the Son of God — become the expiation of the sin of the 
 world ? We cannot think of God as in an arbitrary or 
 external way " laying our sin " or " its doom " on Christ, 
 saying, " Be Thou Sin ; all that is done to Thee shall 
 represent its punishment." If we are to get at it at all, 
 it must be in some other way than this. And we must 
 get at it, or else give up the judicial aspect of Christ's 
 death entirely. Because it has not been made plain, 
 many have given it up, thus (often unconsciously) 
 implying that there was an element of untruth in the 
 original Gospel 
 
 We may see something of the truth which underlies 
 Paul's judicial representation if we bear in mind (i) 
 that God is Law as well as Love; (2) how, under the 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS in 
 
 Divine Law, sin in man is actually punished; (3) the 
 Solidarity of the Humanity represented by Christ; and 
 (4) the mode of action of the principle of vicarious 
 suffering; (5) we must also bear in mind that the 
 method of Divine Revelation is not by means of words, 
 but" by events and experiences in the Divine moral 
 order, to be interpreted by man's Reason and Con- 
 science quickened and enlightened by the Divine Spirit. 
 1. God is Law as well as Love: lawless Love would 
 be no true Love : God is at once Reason, Righteousness, 
 and Love. The Divine Law is not something external 
 to God, enunciated in a Code, such as that given to the 
 Jewish nation : it is one with the holy Love that God 
 is, and is for ever operative. An approximation to the 
 knowledge of the Divine Law was made by the Jewish 
 and by other peoples, but the Law itself resides in God 
 and is one aspect of God Himself. There is a Divine 
 moral order, higher, juster, far more searching, and 
 surer in its operation than any law or order that man 
 has formulated ; a Divine Law by which all human law 
 is judged. That Law man often fails to discern. Its 
 operation is hidden from him. Human life on earth 
 is not so long that it can always, or even often, work 
 itself out in the experience of individuals. Its action is 
 more clearly discerned in the case of nations and of 
 Humanity as a whole. On a wide view of the world's 
 history it is manifest that there is " a Power Eternal, not 
 ourselves, that makes for righteousness." The ever- 
 operating Divine Law entails without fail on all sinners 
 
ii2 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 the just and necessary consequences of their sin. It 
 never turns aside for any person, or for any reason : it 
 is identical with Reason itself, with Causation, with God. 
 Throughout both Jewish and Roman history that Law 
 had been acting, and it was under its operation that the 
 Cross came to Christ, came to the Righteous One in the 
 midst of the self-loving, sinful world. The Law that 
 brought it could not be turned aside even for Christ. 
 It was not possible for the cup to pass away from Him 
 who was so identified with this sinful Humanity. But 
 His openly drinking it could be made the means of 
 the world's redemption. For the manifestation of His 
 righteousness, God gave up His Son to die under the 
 action of the Law which brings the consequences of 
 man's sin on man's own head, and which here lighted 
 on and was voluntarily endured by man's truest Re- 
 presentative for the sake of man's spiritual salvation. 
 
 2. We shall understand that Law and its working 
 better if we ask, in the light of actual fact, How does 
 God punish sin ? 
 
 We know how man's judgment on crime falls on the 
 offender by an external act of punishment. But this is 
 no true analogue to the Divine mode of action. Man's 
 moral order is not identical with God's ; on the contrary, 
 it often embodies much that is really immoral. Man's 
 law can only deal with what man accounts crime, social 
 or political; sin it cannot touch, and may not even 
 recognise. God's Law deals with sin, which is not 
 always, by any means, externally expressed in action. 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 113 
 
 While God transcends the world, His action on it is 
 not from without, after the manner of human action. 
 Apart from the influences of the Divine Spirit on man, 
 there is no external Divine action manifested in the 
 world. We cannot, therefore, think of God as standing 
 simply above or over-against Christ, and by an act of 
 Divine determination causing His righteous indignation 
 at sin to fall upon His Head. God is in the world by 
 His Law or Order, and He was in Christ pre-eminently 
 in His holy, saving Love. Whatever was done on the 
 Cross in relation to sin was done, not by a wholly 
 external Deity, but through a Divine Spirit which dwelt 
 in Christ, with which He in His humanity was wholly 
 one. 
 
 " The history of the world," it has been most truly 
 said, "is the judgment of the world." According as 
 men have lived or have failed to live in harmony with 
 the Divine Law of their life, their experience has been. 
 Not their experience of outward good and evil, but of 
 real good and evil within the soul. There is no direct 
 infliction of punishment or forth-going of wrath, as if 
 from without, on the individual sinner. The wicked 
 may outwardly prosper in their wickedness, the good 
 may suffer, and no God seem to care, so that " the fool 
 says in his heart, There is no God." But God is there 
 all the same, at once Love and Law, Mercy and Judg- 
 ment. Sin is made to become its own punishment. Its 
 just reward is reaped by the unrepentant sinner in his 
 
 increasing sinfulness and widening distance from God 
 8 
 
U4 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 which may be accompanied by a growing hardness and 
 insensibility to all that to him would savour of punish- 
 ment. The wickedest man may be the least troubled 
 within or without. The climax is reached when it can 
 be said, "Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone"; 
 when the conscience becomes " seared as with a hot 
 iron." Then the man is, for the time at least, wholly 
 away from God, dead to God and to his true self, not 
 far from moral self-destruction. This is how Paul in 
 the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans exhibits 
 the working of " the wrath of God." That wrath is not 
 something that strikes out at the sinner ; it does not act 
 by outward inflictions. God punishes sin by suffering 
 the sinner constantly to fall into deeper sin, till, it may 
 be, the deepest and most unnatural depths of depravity 
 are reached, and the consequences are, as far as may be, 
 reaped in his own body and by those with whom he is 
 associated in even this present world. As Olshausen 
 remarks on Rom. i. 32, " Into this flood of sins the holy 
 God permitted unholy men to sink ; not by means of 
 any special influence tending to make them bad, but 
 according to the necessary law of the moral order of the 
 world. For where God and His holy Being is not, and 
 therefore the vanity of the creature's self is the ruling 
 power, there sin begets sin, and punishes itself by sin. 
 In this law Divine love shows itself as plainly as Divine 
 justice; for the frightful consequences of sin are 
 intended to awaken in man the germs of those better 
 feelings that slumber there." The principle is summed 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 115 
 
 up in that solemn saying of St. Paul's : " Be not 
 deceived ; God is not mocked : for whatsoever a man 
 soweth, that shall he also reap." It is only of some 
 sins, however, that their punishment can be thus made 
 manifest. 
 
 In the case of a community we can witness the action 
 of the Divine punitive principle more clearly. While 
 there is still no direct Divine infliction, the consequences 
 of their sins may come upon them in a manifest external 
 manner, through the action, it may be, of those who are 
 as great, or, possibly, even greater sinners than them- 
 selves, but who are stronger, more cunning, or more 
 powerful. And, while the consequences of the individual 
 evil-doer's sins may not light on himself in any external 
 manner, the consequences of his sins, or those of "a 
 multitude of them that do evil," may fall very heavily 
 on those associated with them in an organic or more or 
 less close capacity — who may themselves be the most 
 innocent and righteous in the community. The sin of 
 a people goes on in increasing sinfulness, but sooner or 
 later it brings suffering, it may be disaster, upon them ; 
 and such suffering or disaster will fall quite as heavily 
 (it may be more heavily) on the good as on the evil- 
 doers. 
 
 We have a striking modern illustration of this in the 
 American Civil War as a consequence of slavery, when, 
 as the poet-prophet predicted, the exodus of the slave 
 was " through a Red Sea whose surges are of gore," 
 when righteous and unrighteous suffered alike. "Care- 
 
n6 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 less seems the great Avenger," but His judgment 
 neither slumbers nor sleeps. The French Revolution, 
 the terrible doom that fell on Jerusalem and the Jewish 
 nation, the self-destruction of civilisations in which 
 righteousness did not rule, afford illustrations of the 
 principle. We might take in illustration, indeed, the 
 result of fostering the war-spirit in nations. For many- 
 years, it may be, all seems well. Armies and navies go 
 on increasing, and the people congratulate themselves 
 on their wisdom and security. But it is a wrong spirit 
 that has been fostered, and, sooner or later, actual war 
 breaks out and the innocent suffer with the guilty. 
 The man who at such a time — when national passions 
 are inflamed — would speak out and stand for the right, 
 might be made to suffer most of all. 
 
 3. These results are owing to the national solidarity. 
 But there is also a wider, human solidarity — a oneness 
 of humanity. It is ideally an organic unity. Humanity 
 is as one man before God. It is " the world " as a unit 
 He is said to " love." Jesus is " the Saviour of the 
 world." It was "the world" that God in Christ was 
 reconciling to Himself. He was dealing with the race. 
 We all share in one life. We are all so bound up 
 together that, just as in the physical realm there cannot 
 be a blow struck or even a movement made which does 
 not, to some extent, however infinitesimal, affect the 
 entire material universe, so the good or evil that men 
 do influences, more or less, all their kind, according to 
 the force of the influence and the nearness or distance 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 117 
 
 of the relationship. Nor does it die with them, but 
 may go on gathering fresh force as it proceeds. A 
 righteous man may thus suffer for the sins of his 
 fathers and mothers, of his brothers and sisters, of his 
 nation, of his race, owing to this principle of solidarity. 
 In the words of Dr. Dale : " It is this law of inter- 
 dependence, this vital union of men with each other, 
 which underlies the darkest mysteries and the divinest 
 glories of the moral universe. We are not isolated 
 individuals, but members of a race. We cannot dis- 
 solve our relations to mankind. It is not true, without 
 qualification, that we have our life and character and 
 destiny in our own hands. We are involved in all the 
 sins and follies of past generations, and their wisdom 
 and virtue are ours. . . . Christian theology has steadily 
 refused to acknowledge that there can be any real 
 separation between the individual and the life and 
 fortunes of the race " (Essays and Addresses, p. 103 f.). 
 This principle is at the root of Paul's doctrine of " the 
 oneness of the race in its fall and in its redemption " : 
 All dead in Adam ; all made alive in Christ. When 
 we see the innocent suffering, its explanation is to be 
 found in this fact of solidarity. 
 
 4. When the suffering that falls on an innocent person 
 as a member of a sinful community is accepted and 
 endured by him as that due to their sins, and borne in 
 order that God's moral order may be vindicated and 
 others benefited, we witness vicarious suffering- in its 
 highest form. The sins of others have lighted on the 
 
n8 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 sufferer ; they are accepted by him as justly due to the 
 sins of his people, and are borne by him in the hope 
 that his suffering will have a salutary influence on 
 them. In what he suffers he is truly "bearing their 
 iniquity " ; " the transgression of his people has lighted 
 on him " — who himself was wholly innocent. 
 
 The classical example of such vicarious suffering is, 
 of course, that of the Servant of Jehovah in Isaiah. We 
 do not here raise the question whether our Lord had 
 this in His mind in His acceptance of His own suffering. 
 We believe that He did. But whether or not, there it 
 stands as a luminous example both of how the punish- 
 ment of sin comes on a people and of the vicarious 
 suffering of the righteous. Their sinfulness had in- 
 creased till it had weakened the national character, 
 becoming a foolishness which brought upon them 
 conquest and captivity. But the consequences fell 
 heaviest of all, either on a prophet or on the most 
 pious amongst them. In Isaiah they are represented 
 as falling on a person. They could have come upon 
 him only at the hands of the oppressor, or of the 
 wicked amongst his own people. Yet it was the 
 Divine judgment on their sins that he was bearing. 
 He accepted and bore it all in order that God might 
 be justified when He judged, that they might see what 
 their sins had wrought, and, perceiving the evil of their 
 ways, might turn to the Lord. It was a manifestation 
 of God's righteousness. The sufferer was, so far, " made 
 sin " for their sakes. If we interpret the picture as a 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 119 
 
 representation of the suffering of Israel itself for the 
 sake of the salvation of "the nations'' who come to 
 discern the meaning of that suffering, the principle is 
 the same. The sufferer was truly bearing in his own 
 person the judgment of God on sin, although it came 
 upon him, not by an external transfer or laying on 
 him of the sins of others, or by direct Divine infliction, 
 but as the result of his relation to a people whose sin 
 had gone on increasing, and had in this way brought 
 this suffering upon him. " For the offences of my 
 people am I stricken." 
 
 5. So was it in the case of Christ. Remember that 
 He stood there as the " Son of man," the Representative 
 of Humanity. He is not to be separated from those 
 who crucified Him. He was identified with them, and 
 He chose to remain so identified. Even as a man He 
 belonged to the race. He stood there " in the likeness 
 of sinful flesh," the representative of man before God, 
 and on His head lighted the worst consequences of the 
 sins of Humanity in the working out of the Law that 
 punishes sin by increasing sinfulness. It was not the 
 punishment of his own sins that the suffering servant 
 of Jehovah endured, but that which came upon him as 
 the consequence and the punishment of the sinfulness of 
 his people. So, in the case of Christ, what He suffered 
 was that which came upon Him as the consequence and 
 punishment of human sin in the Divine moral order. It 
 was the ever-increasing sinfulness of men that made 
 such an act as His rejection and crucifixion possible, 
 
i2o THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 and in that ever-increasing sinfulness the real self- 
 entailed punishment of sin, issuing in suffering and 
 " Death/' consists. 
 
 (i) In this act sin reached its climax; it proclaimed 
 its own utter badness in the presence of the Divine 
 righteousness, and made manifest the justice, nay, the 
 necessity of its doom of death. In its judgment of 
 God's Son it judged itself. God simply allowed things 
 to take their course without interference, and He did 
 this for our sakes, that sin might be seen to be exceed- 
 ing sinful, and that His righteous judgment on it might 
 be witnessed to by every man's conscience. As His 
 enemies judged Christ to be worthy of death, so every 
 enlightened conscience judges worthy of utter death the 
 sin that could commit such a crime. 
 
 (2) God's judgment on sin was seen in Christ's death, 
 inasmuch as He accepted that which had come to pass 
 through sin, bringing suffering and death on the Son 
 of man, as arising in that moral order and will of God 
 to which He submitted Himself. It was not that He 
 bowed to the human order that condemned and 
 crucified Him, — with respect to that He said, "They 
 know not what they do." As we have seen, He always 
 regarded His death at the hands of men as a crime: 
 " The Son of man shall be delivered into the hands of 
 men, and they shall kill Him " ; " the Son of man is 
 delivered into the hands of sinners " ; " now is the hour 
 and power of darkness." But deeper than the human, 
 there was the Divine moral order, — the will of the 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 121 
 
 Father, — to which He referred all that came to Him — 
 the Divine moral order making sin its own punishment 
 till it became manifest in its destructive consequences. 
 That law must work on ; and its reality must be made 
 manifest to men oblivious of it. Christ in His self- 
 identification with Humanity must be given up by God 
 to suffer under its action in order that God's righteous- 
 ness in relation to sin might be manifested and men 
 saved from the sin which has such results. Owing to 
 the method by which sin is punished by God, in 
 increase of sinfulness tending to death, it was only in 
 this way — by letting sin work its worst on Christ — 
 putting to death the Best, the true Head and Repre- 
 sentative of Humanity, that God's righteous judgment on 
 sin could be revealed. Not by speech from Heaven ; but 
 by the deed that sinners were left to do in the natural 
 sequence of the moral order. Therefore, although He 
 saved others, Himself He could not save. It was not 
 for any abstract reason or for some satisfaction to 
 Himself that God gave up His Son to the Cross, but 
 in order to save men from sin. " Its operation was not 
 to be on God, but on man." The Cross did not make 
 any " change " in God or in His attitude to man ; it 
 was the complete revelation and expression of the 
 Divine forgiving love, and the means by which it 
 went forth to the world in its saving power. 
 
 Humanity as represented by those who crucified 
 Christ was really acting self-destructively. As they 
 represented the worst, He whom they crucified repre- 
 
122 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 sented the highest and best in the race — was indeed 
 man in his highest and best. He was truly, as Paul 
 taught, the Head pf Humanity and the Representative 
 of man before God. His crucifixion was the work of 
 "sinful flesh." Sin in the flesh was thus shown to be 
 destructive of Humanity, as there represented in its 
 Head, in its highest and best. The judgment that 
 ultimately comes on sin — God's condemnation of sin — 
 was thus shown, not by anything that God inflicted on 
 Christ, but by His giving up His own Son to sinful 
 men — that is, not interfering with the natural 
 sequence of events — in order that sin should be 
 suffered to work itself out and there, once for all, 
 manifest itself as that self-destructiveness which it is 
 made to become under the Divine righteousness. Here 
 it was shown how truly "sin when it is fully matured 
 bringeth forth death'.' Had Jesus been simply a man 
 after the flesh, like other men, His crucifixion would 
 have been the ruin of the world. That death of Christ 
 would have been the utter death of man in the higher 
 aspects of his being. What is true of the individual is 
 true of the race. " Selfishness," says Sir Oliver Lodge 
 most truly, — " selfishness, long continued, must lead to 
 isolation, and so to a kind of practical extinction : it is 
 like a disintegrating or repulsive force in the material 
 cosmos ; while unselfishness is like a cohesive and con- 
 structive force " (Hibbert Journal, vol. ii. p. 474). 1 This 
 
 1 This is quoted also by Mr. Lofthouse in his Ethics and Atonement. 
 " Then it was made clear to mankind," he says, " that sin was * exceeding 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 123 
 
 effect of selfishness in its worst form — in the guise of 
 religion — was seen in the death of Christ at the hands 
 of men professing a zeal for God. Had the evil there 
 manifested really triumphed, had Christ continued 
 under the power of the death then inflicted on Him, it 
 would have been the moral and spiritual destruction of 
 Humanity. Evil would have gone on its baleful way 
 unchecked; it would have seated itself on the throne 
 of the world instead of God, and death in the darkest 
 sense would have been the fate of man. 
 
 Does this seem too strong a statement ? Not if the 
 Christian conception of Christ's personality and of 
 man's true ideal and destiny are sound. It may be 
 said that we are unwarrantably extending to the world 
 what was realised in the experience of one person in 
 one corner of the globe only. It may be asked, was 
 God nowhere save in Christ ; was there no morality 
 and religion outside of Palestine ; although Jesus might 
 have been crucified and silenced for ever, would not 
 the race still have made progress? But to what goal? 
 Where else was man on the way to realise his ideal as 
 a son of God — as a being whose self was surrendered to 
 God that God might live in him ? In what person 
 other than Christ had this been reached ? Jesus was 
 truly the " second man '' — man wholly after the Spirit ; 
 and if He was put to death by those who ought to have 
 
 sinful,' and that it contained within itself the seeds of dissolution, which, 
 unchecked, brought forth death. Thus, in the death of Christ, man not 
 only felt but saw his own punishment ; the sword hanging over his own 
 head had fallen on Him who knew no sin." 
 
i2 4 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 been the best fitted to recognise and receive Him, did 
 not Humanity, as represented by those amongst whom 
 the Divine education of the race had been carried to 
 the highest point ethically, repudiate its true life as it 
 was designed by God, and choose for itself a lower life 
 which, to whatever intellectual, moral, and material 
 advance it might lead, meant really the death of man 
 as he was meant to become by his Creator? There 
 would have been not only failure to rise as God meant 
 man to rise, but the downward-tending influence would 
 have gained in power. " Not this man, but Barabbas," 
 — the representative of self-centred, self-serving force, — 
 would have become the Ruler of the world. There 
 were certainly great thinkers other than Christ, and 
 religious Leaders besides Him ; but where has there been 
 one who has led man to His true life in God, apart from 
 Christ? What philosophy, what religion has accom- 
 plished it effectually, however near they may at times 
 have come to it? What lasting value to man in the 
 highest aspects of his being has there been in it all, 
 save as it has been taken up into Christianity, or as 
 Christianity has entered it? Where is the path that 
 has led men onward as spiritual beings, save that on 
 which the revelation of God in Christ has shone, and on 
 which the Spirit of the Crucified has descended ? That 
 which we behold in Christ was the culmination of all 
 God's working in the world, with the view of raising 
 man to his true life in Himself. It was there that God 
 was in His complete entry into Humanity. Christ was 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 125 
 
 filled with the Divine Spirit of man's true life, and it 
 was this which men refused to receive. It was only 
 after they had crucified Christ that the reaction came, 
 that men saw their sin and began to receive the Spirit 
 of the Saviour, which is that Spirit of God which alone 
 can make man partaker in his true life and God- 
 intended destiny. If we are to maintain Christianity 
 in its power, it must be in no half-hearted manner. We 
 must see and assert that God was in Christ for the 
 salvation of the world, and that "there is none other 
 name given under heaven wherein we must be saved" 
 
 It is in this view of the Cross that we behold the 
 marvel of the Divine Wisdom and Power, that we see 
 how truly God was in it. For, while Christ stood in 
 the sinful flesh, He knew no sin. The Spirit was the 
 real principle of His Life : in the power of that Spirit 
 He arose out of death, and His death thus became " the 
 death of death," the redemption of the world. Through 
 His voluntary acceptance of it, that death of man in 
 the flesh became the death of sin in the flesh and the 
 life of man in the Spirit. 
 
 In a word, it was Humanity that was there repre- 
 sented both in Christ and in His murderers — Humanity 
 that, in its members, had failed to rise above the self- 
 centred lower nature, and whose sin had, in the 
 righteous retribution of God, gone on increasing and 
 deepening, till it inflicted on Him who represented 
 Humanity in its truth, a death which, had He not been 
 man wholly after the Spirit, would have meant its own 
 
126 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 destruction. And this all came about under that 
 '' righteousness of God " which makes sin its own 
 punishment. The Righteousness of God in its relation 
 to sin was thus manifested in that crucifixion of Christ 
 by sinners. 
 
 In all this we see Christ literally " bearing our sins,'' 
 " dying for our sins," " made sin on our behalf," " manifest- 
 ing the righteousness of God in view of sin," and making 
 it possible, — not for God to forgive sin, — but for the 
 Forgiveness that was in His heart, and wherein He was 
 visiting men, to go forth to the world so as to save it. 
 He was the world-sufferer on whom lighted the world's 
 sin, the sin which would have been the moral and 
 spiritual, and, ultimately, the utter death of the world, 
 had it not been met by one in whom the power of 
 the Spirit was mightier than that of sin in the flesh. As 
 has been well said : " What slew Him was sin conspir- 
 ing under many forms against its Divine Adversary ; it 
 was the general selfishness directly attacked by His 
 word, and put under constraint by His life; it was 
 hypocritical formalism (the Pharisees), it was servile 
 traditionalism (the Scribes), it was sacerdotal pride (the 
 priests), it was frivolous or selfish politics (Herod, the 
 Sadducees, Caiaphas), it was religious scepticism (Pilate) 
 which coalesced finally to overwhelm Him " (Reville). 
 These evil influences all have their roots in that " flesh " 
 which is common to man. And it was by letting these 
 evil influences which here came to a head do their 
 natural work on the Best that the self-destructive 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 127 
 
 nature of sin, as it has developed under the righteous 
 Law that makes sin its own punishment in that increase 
 of sinfulness that works death to man, was set forth. 
 It was thus that God's righteousness in relation to sin 
 was judicially manifested in the death of Christ, in order 
 to the world's salvation. In this manifestation of the 
 result of sin in the complete working out of His 
 righteous Law ; in its acceptance by Christ in our name 
 and endurance of its consequences, God at-oned the 
 world to Himself in His righteousness, so that He might 
 save it. It was in this way only that Christ bore the 
 punishment of man's sin. Not as inflicted on Him by 
 God, nor as representing man in His sinfulness: He 
 represented man at His highest and best. But He 
 suffered to light on Himself the worst consequences of 
 man's sin as these came to Him (Himself wholly sinless) 
 in that moral order and righteous judgment of God, 
 which makes sin its own punishment, which is made 
 manifest in what men through increasing sinfulness are 
 left to do, and which unchecked would have proved the 
 destruction of Humanity. It was God's condemnation of 
 sin, not of Christ as representing men. His Cross thus 
 became the manifestation of God's righteousness in 
 that self-acting punishment of sin of the reality of which, 
 because it did not fall upon them in any open manner, 
 men were oblivious, and at the same time reversed the 
 action of sin by bringing a new principle into operation 
 in virtue of which the world might be saved. 
 
 As we have seen, while Christ was truly bearing the 
 
128 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 consequences of our sins, — before God, it was really sin 
 in man that died. As Paul says, " The death that He 
 died, He died unto sin once for all ; the life that He 
 liveth, He liveth unto God." With Paul, the judicial 
 death became an ethical death of sin in the flesh. Man 
 was represented in Christ as dead unto sin and alive 
 unto righteousness. Therefore, all who accept Christ 
 and His life-principle as theirs are accepted by God as 
 His sons and heirs, justified, glorified. 
 
 The death of Christ in its relation to sin was 
 necessary, let us say once more, not to propitiate God, 
 nor to atone for man's sin in the sense of making 
 expiation or reparation, nor to satisfy Divine Justice 
 by bearing a certain penalty, still less to meet a 
 personal wrath in God ; but, as Paul states it, — although 
 we cannot accept the forms of his representation, 
 — to demonstrate God's righteousness in view of His 
 forbearance and forgiveness of sin, and to manifest 
 His Love, in order that men might be saved from 
 sin into that life of Love which is the life of God in 
 man. 
 
 It was this that Christ did for us on the Cross : He 
 endured the worst that sin could bring on man for the 
 sake of the manifestation of God's righteousness and 
 for our salvation. His death at the hands of men 
 showed what sin, continued in, brings on man. He so 
 died, by the will of God indeed, but at the hands of 
 sinful men, in order that what sin works in the right- 
 eous retribution of God might be manifested. It was 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 129 
 
 necessary that the righteousness of God in relation to 
 sin should be manifested if the world was to be saved 
 from sin. On account of the Divine forbearance, it had 
 not been adequately manifested. Men did not realise 
 it as it needed to be realised, especially in view of the 
 Gospel proclamation. The necessity was met, we have 
 sought to show, not by any arbitrary intervention, but 
 by the Divine action continuing to proceed along those 
 lines on which both the Love and the Law of God had 
 been always moving — Law and " Wrath '' reaching their 
 climax in the self-acting punishment of sin in the case 
 of those who put the Divine man to death, and Love 
 reaching its supreme expression in God's giving up His 
 Son to endure the worst consequences of man's sin for 
 the sake of man's salvation. The requirement of the 
 Divine Righteousness was met, we have sought to show, 
 in a twofold manner : ethically, by the perfect obedience 
 of Christ unto the death of the Cross, and judicially, if 
 we may use the term, by Christ suffering to light on 
 Himself the cumulative results of the sin of the world. 
 Yet these two aspects are one. It was in His accept- 
 ance of the death of the Cross in obedience to the 
 Father's will — in the working out of the Divine moral 
 order — that "the flesh" died ethically in Him. Paul, 
 we have seen, has both a judicial and an ethical con- 
 ception of the Cross ; and although we cannot accept 
 the form in which he states either, yet in the light 
 in which we have sought to place them both are true. 
 Neither aspect can be omitted and yet the Cross retain 
 9 
 
130 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 the fulness of the Divine Wisdom and Power for the 
 salvation of the world. 
 
 We cannot look upon the death of Christ as being 
 an arbitrary substitution of Christ for sinners, or a 
 representative act in which an external penalty was 
 laid upon Him. The ethical righteousness of God, the 
 sinlessness of Christ, and the manner in which His 
 death came to Him, all unite to make such conceptions 
 impossible. But we see Christ standing in such a vital 
 relation to Humanity that there light upon Him, and 
 are vicariously borne by Him, those consequences of 
 human sin which are also its punishment in the 
 righteousness of God. Viewed thus, there is indeed 
 a sense in which we may speak of both substitution 
 and representation. For He endures in Himself 
 that last consequence of sin which would otherwise 
 have proved the destruction of Humanity, in order 
 that we may be saved from it. This is the truth 
 underlying the Pauline and later forms of evangelical 
 doctrine. 
 
 The tendency to-day is to reject the " judicial " aspect 
 entirely. But in that case the real evil and the certain, 
 self-destructive doom which sin brings on man are not 
 seen and felt, and the greatness of the debt that we owe 
 to Christ and to God is not sufficiently recognised. 
 The power of that Divine Love which identifies itself 
 with us even in our sin, even at its worst, for our 
 salvation, does not adequately reach and win the heart ; 
 the self is not so humbled before God as to renounce 
 
HOW CHRIST BORE OUR SINS 131 
 
 itself and have the dying and living again of Christ 
 repeated in its experience. 
 
 All that was done on the Cross was, we shall 
 endeavour to show, the manifestation of the love of God. 
 But the view of the sin-bearing of Christ which has 
 been here presented is best seen in the light of His 
 Headship of Humanity. We shall therefore devote a 
 short chapter to the statement of this truth, after which 
 we shall test the whole by an appeal to Christ's own 
 teaching. 
 
VIII 
 
 CHRIST AND THE RACE: THE HEAD 
 OF HUMANITY 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CHRIST AND THE RACE: THE HEAD 
 OF HUMANITY 
 
 WHAT has been said in the preceding chapters, 
 in common with all forms of evangelical 
 doctrine, implies that Jesus held the unique position of 
 being the true Head of Humanity. By this we mean 
 that the Divine ideal of man in the ethical truth of his 
 being was realised in — not an Ideal "Christ," but 
 Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 This unique and representative position of Jesus is 
 rejected by not a few to-day, and with others it con- 
 stitutes a difficulty. Of course, for those who really 
 believe that in Christ God was incarnate in human form, 
 no question of His Headship can arise. They can see 
 the truth of the teaching ascribed to Him in the Fourth 
 Gospel : " I am the true Vine, ye are the branches." 
 But for those who approach Christ on the human side 
 it is different. To speak of the Headship, unique, or 
 representative character of Christ, savours to some of 
 theological artificiality, tends to make His person a 
 needless mystery, and to remove Him out of real 
 
 relation to ourselves. They remind us that Jesus was 
 
 135 
 
136 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 not the only God-inspired man, that His Cross is not 
 the only atoning Cross in human history, and that the 
 work of at-oning God with man and man with his 
 brothers is being carried forward by a means of all the 
 crosses of sacrifice and suffering voluntarily accepted 
 and endured in the world. 
 
 It is highly desirable to drop all that is arbitrary and 
 artificial in our conception of Christ and His Cross; 
 there has been too much of that kind of thing in 
 theology. But in affirming the Headship of Christ we 
 are simply asserting that Lordship of Christ which all 
 Christians acknowledge. We do not regard that Lord- 
 ship as being His in any arbitrary manner, or for 
 any external reason ; nor do we represent Him as a 
 Being abruptly introduced, out of all relation to those 
 who have gone before Him or who have followed after. 
 On both sides of His Person we see Him issuing 
 from out of our Humanity, and at the same time from 
 God as He has been progressively expressing Himself 
 therein. We see thus in Him, not only man, but God 
 as man. 
 
 We sometimes fail to see the uniqueness of Jesus — 
 the real incarnation of God in Him — because we expect 
 too much ; we look for the impossible. We lay down, 
 as if we had all knowledge, a priori conditions which 
 must be fulfilled if God is to be incarnate ; and because 
 we do not see these all met in Christ, we refuse to 
 believe in Him : we believe so strongly in ourselves. 
 But if we think carefully and modestly, we will see 
 
CHRIST AND THE RACE 137 
 
 that it is contrary to the very idea of man as a finite, 
 limited being that all the infinite perfections of God 
 should be manifested in any human person. Such a 
 person would be no longer man, but wholly God in 
 human disguise. Yet there is an aspect in which the 
 Infinite can be revealed in the human — in its ethical 
 truth — which is that which is deepest and most essential 
 in God. If we can say "God" at all, He must be 
 essentially ethical Being. And so truly is man in the 
 image of God, that we can behold in a human life a 
 righteousness and love which are perfect, to which we 
 can put no limits or conceive of aught that could be 
 added. Such a perfect righteousness and love we do 
 behold in Jesus Christ. To look for Omnipotence and 
 Omniscience in a human being, for the display of all 
 manner of Divine riches, or even for such knowledge 
 and teaching as would have been unnatural in a true 
 man of that time and place, is to look for the impossible, 
 and to overlook the actual presence of the essentially 
 Divine. It is just the absence of such features that 
 makes Christ's humanity real. It is not the absolutely 
 complete teacher in even the ethical field — attacking 
 every form of evil and giving instructions for every 
 sphere of action — that we can expect to see. It is one 
 who has as the deepest principle of His life, and who 
 expresses in the actual circumstances in which He finds 
 Himself placed, that which is the one principle of all 
 morality and of all righteousness. To see this in the 
 lowly man of Nazareth, in Jesus apart from all sub- 
 
138 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 sequent " idealisation " of Him, is part of that wisdom 
 that is "hid from the wise and prudent and revealed 
 unto babes" — to the childlike spirit. To-day, as of 
 old, the Greek seeks for " Wisdom " and the Jew craves 
 " miracle," and so they fail to discern the truly Divine 
 in that true man, under the limitations which necessarily 
 conditioned His life. 
 
 To say that Christ does not stand absolutely alone, 
 or that in His Cross we have the highest example of 
 all vicarious suffering, is no argument against the 
 uniqueness of His Person and Cross. The Head of the 
 body is not the less a member of the body because it 
 is the head. But it is the Head, and as such occupies 
 quite a unique position in relation to the other members. 
 All that the other members experience is carried to 
 the Head; there alone is it felt and interpreted, and 
 from the Head the directions come which guide the 
 other members, as well as the energy which enables 
 them to act. Apart from the Head, the other members 
 would be quite blind and unknowing ; and if they were 
 to refuse to acknowledge and trust the Head, or fail 
 to follow its guidance, the life of the Body would 
 become impossible. While belonging to the one 
 organism, the Head is above all the other members. 
 The distinction between Jesus Christ and others may 
 therefore very well be that between the Head and the 
 other members of the Body. 
 
 In another aspect, the distinction is that between the 
 incomplete and the complete, the imperfect and the 
 
CHRIST AND THE RACE 139 
 
 perfect, the sinful and the sinless, the striving and the 
 attained. The distinction between the incomplete and 
 the complete "makes all the difference." It gives us 
 just that uniqueness which we claim for Christ. To make 
 this plain, let us borrow an illustration used in another 
 connection by the late Professor Le Conte. Here is an 
 even surface of water . From 
 
 this we may imagine portions being gradually raised 
 
 till the complete drop is reached <*" "^ ) * ^ — 
 There is identity, yet a very real difference. The 
 complete drop, although consisting of the same water, 
 represents something new — something which stands 
 out from the rest and can exist by itself: it is unique 
 in its completeness. So with the various members of 
 humanity in relation to Christ. The completely 
 formed, perfect humanity is seen only in Him. There 
 had been approaches to that which was attained in 
 His birth and life: He alone was from the first man 
 wholly after the Spirit. And in the culmination of His 
 life He was man in whom God in His essential, Ethical 
 Being was wholly incarnate. 
 
 To Paul, Jesus was "the second man," "the new 
 man," the perfect Son in whom the Divine and the 
 human were one, who was therefore at once " the man 
 Christ Jesus" and the "image of God," the repre- 
 sentative of both God and man. The Gospels bear out 
 this conception of Jesus Christ. He so represented 
 God on the earth that He could forgive sin. Yet it 
 was as the " Son of man " that He did so. Explain the 
 
140 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 origin of that name by which He ever called Himself 
 as we may; say that it means in the Aramaic only 
 " man " or " the man," we cannot get away from its 
 representative significance as it was used by Christ. 
 As Professor Schmit acknowledges at the close of his 
 learned discussion in the Ency. Biblia: "When Jesus 
 declared that man is lord of the Sabbath, and has the 
 authority to pardon sin, he no doubt thought of man 
 as he ought to be as the child of the heavenly Father." 
 And, we must add, He must have been conscious that 
 He was that man, or else He could not have taken upon 
 Himself those functions. But it is not the name only 
 that gives it. His whole attitude and teaching imply, 
 and, indeed, directly claim, such a position. His con- 
 sciousness of Himself in relation to men was one of 
 universality. The recognition of Jesus as Lord is based 
 on His own claim : " Ye call me Master, and Lord ; and 
 so I am," He could truly say. As we have it in St. 
 Matthew's Gospel, " One is your Master." He knew 
 Himself to be such a Master as could claim of right 
 the trust and obedience of all other men, even to the 
 sacrifice of their earthly lives. Father or mother, sister 
 or brother were not so near and had not such claims 
 on men as He had. It was not a merely physical bond 
 that thus united Him to others, it was spiritual. There 
 was, He declared, a higher kinship than the earthly: 
 " Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is My 
 brother, and sister, and mother." It was the presence 
 in Himself of the fulness of that Divine spiritual life 
 
CHRIST AND THE RACE 141 
 
 which is the truest and highest life of man that gave 
 Him this universal relationship. The fulness of that 
 Divine ethical life which is the essential life of both 
 God and man was centred in Him. He, therefore, 
 stood forth as the Representative of man as God's 
 child, claiming for man the freedom, the good, the 
 sonship which God meant him to possess. He was to 
 be seen and served in all men ; in the little child, in His 
 suffering brethren. He who received a little child in 
 His name received Him. " Inasmuch as ye did it unto 
 one of these the least of these My brethren, ye did it 
 unto Me; and inasmuch as ye did it not to such, ye 
 did it not to Me" These and similar sayings, His call 
 for unreserved faith in Himself, and His attitude 
 generally, bespeak, not an individual, but a universal 
 relationship. In a word, He was man before God, the 
 true Head and Representative of Humanity. 
 
 That Humanity should have its Head is necessary 
 according to the analogy of all life. What Nature long 
 strove to produce was a head. When the first head 
 appeared there was an immense ascent in life. The 
 head was at first very humble, very small in its 
 beginnings, very simple in its nervous structure; but 
 in that lowly head Nature first came to some faint 
 consciousness of itself. It was the dawning world- 
 consciousness. As the development of the head 
 progressed, Nature ascended higher and higher, till 
 in the human brain it reached its climax. Then 
 began the evolution of man in his spiritual nature, 
 
142 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 as a child of God. It was the culmination of the 
 Divine working towards the realisation of man's 
 spiritual nature which was reached in Christ, and 
 constituted Him the true Head of Humanity. The 
 Nature - consciousness became in Him at once a 
 completely human and a truly Divine consciousness. 
 God's ideal of man in his true ethical being was realised 
 and manifested in Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 Every developed organism must have its head, which 
 becomes its guiding and governing organ. Humanity 
 itself is an organism, and as such must have its Head. 
 Men and women are not a number of unconnected or 
 loosely connected units, as it may seem to superficial 
 observation. They are united as vitally as the branches 
 and leaves of the tree, or as the members of a body. 
 The want of acknowledgment of the true Head of our 
 Humanity is just the cause of the anarchy and 
 confusion which characterise society, and only in 
 recognition of and obedience to its Head can that 
 confusion be reduced to order. "The Head of every 
 man is Christ." 
 
 This Headship of Christ is seen and accepted by 
 His Church, " which is His Body," in the world ; that 
 is, those who believe in Him realise their true relation- 
 ship to Him as the members of an organic Body of 
 which He is the rightful Head. Their true life is, as 
 Paul teaches, to be found by " growing up in all things 
 into union with Him who is the Head, even Christ," 
 from whom the whole Body receives its impulse 
 
CHRIST AND THE RACE 143 
 
 and nourishment. It is just this that forms "the 
 Church." 
 
 Christian thought has always recognised in Christ 
 that character of completeness and universality which 
 constitutes Him the Head of the race and gives Him 
 His representative character. It has seen in Him a 
 personality, neither exclusively Jewish nor Greek, 
 Eastern nor Western, but simply and perfectly human, 
 in the highest aspects of humanity. It united the 
 strength of manhood with the tenderness of woman's 
 heart. It was stern in its righteousness, yet full of 
 mercy, combining in itself every virtue and grace, 
 presenting an ideal for men and women alike wherever 
 found. It was no more limited in respect of time than 
 it was restricted in regard to place. It has shone 
 before all the successive generations of mankind with 
 the same lustre, and has appealed to the most varied 
 temperaments with equal force. The desire of Paul's 
 warm heart, in all things to follow Christ, has been 
 paralleled by the dictum of the cold, clear intellect 
 of the nineteenth century philosopher, John Stuart 
 Mill, that we cannot find a better practical guide than 
 "to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve 
 our life." In the words of one whose utterance in this 
 connection should carry weight, the life of Christ was 
 that of " One in whom we see balanced and united the 
 separate gifts and graces of which we catch glimpses 
 only in His followers. It is a life which is mysterious 
 to us, which we forbear to praise in the earthly sense, 
 
144 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 because it is above praise, being the most perfect image 
 and embodiment that we can conceive of Divine 
 goodness" (Dr. Jowett). 
 
 This unique relationship of Christ to us has also 
 been realised in Christian experience. We know what 
 Paul's experience was as he has expressed it in his 
 writings. "There is," says the writer just quoted, 
 " something meant by this language which goes beyond 
 the experience of ordinary Christians, something 
 perhaps more mystical than in these latter days of 
 the world most persons seem capable of feeling; yet 
 the main thing signified is the same for all ages, the 
 knowledge and love of Christ, by which men pass out 
 of themselves to make their will His and His theirs, 
 the consciousness of Him in their thoughts and actions, 
 communion with Him and trust in Him. Of every 
 act of kindness and good they do to others His life 
 is the type; of every act of devotion and self-denial 
 His death is the type; of every act of faith His 
 resurrection is the type. And often they walk with 
 Him on earth, not in figure only, and find Him near 
 them, not in figure only, in the valley of death." 
 
 If the men of to-day are ceasing to see all this in 
 Christ, truly human, yet Divine in His humanity, for 
 them, yet above them, calling them as the Head of the 
 Body gives direction to its free members, their percep- 
 tions of the highest things must be becoming seriously 
 impaired, and the loss will in some form or other make 
 itself manifest to the hurt of all. 
 
CHRIST AND THE RACE 145 
 
 As the Head of Humanity in whom the fulness of 
 its highest life was centred, Jesus could feel with and 
 for men as none other could. If, as Paul said, in the 
 body, when one member suffers all the other members 
 suffer with it, how much more true is this of the Head. 
 In Him all human experience centred. He wore our 
 " flesh "' and knew its power. The Spirit also in Him 
 reached the fulness of its life in man. Our humanity 
 was represented in Him on both sides of its being. In 
 Him man could both die to sin and rise to righteousness. 
 As the Head He could " bear the sins " of the members 
 of His Body, that is, endure their consequences, in order 
 that the evil of sin might be manifested and men saved 
 from that which would otherwise have been their ruin. 
 If we think of the Cross in its judicial aspect, as the 
 manifestation of God's righteousness in relation to sin, 
 we thus see that in crucifying Christ, men were really, 
 so far as they could go, destroying the true Head and 
 Representative of Humanity. How could the evil and 
 enormity of sin as it deepens in sinfulness have been 
 more effectually shown, or the Divine Judgment that 
 makes sin self-destructive have been made more 
 manifest ? 
 
 The Ethical work of Christ as the Head appears with 
 the same clearness. The Gospels show us how truly 
 both principles — "the flesh" and "the Spirit" — were 
 present in Christ potentially, although the lower 
 principle was always subordinated to the higher. He 
 had a self, a will of His own which might have opposed 
 
146 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 itself to the Will of God. But, as in the keen struggle 
 in Gethsemane, His whole life was governed by "not 
 My will but Thine be done." Still, we see from the 
 conflict there how truly He stood " in the likeness of 
 sinful flesh," and could represent man in the flesh as 
 well as man in the Spirit. In His acceptance of the 
 will of the Father to the uttermost sacrifice of Himself, 
 "the flesh" died completely in Him and for us all, 
 through the power of that Spirit that was centred in 
 Him and that proceeds from Him to us. 
 
 In short, as we have said, Christ before God was man 
 before God. What He did in our name, man did in 
 Him. Or, to state it from the Divine side, what was 
 done in Him was done by God in man and for all 
 men, because Christ was the true Head and Repre- 
 sentative of Humanity. Therefore it was no mere 
 flight of fancy or of unreasoned mysticism when Paul 
 saw all dying in the death of Christ and all rising in 
 His resurrection. In the great Body of Humanity 
 there are many members — a multitude innumerable. 
 But such would also be the plants proceeding from a 
 single seed were they suffered to grow unrestrictedly. 
 Yet they were all represented in that first single seed. 
 To one with sufficient knowledge the possibilities of 
 each could have been known and confidently reckoned 
 on. So with Humanity in Christ: it can be forgiven, 
 accepted, made the son and heir of God, because in 
 Christ it has died as regards the flesh, and in Him 
 there is the potency of perfect spiritual life for all who 
 
CHRIST AND THE RACE 147 
 
 will consent to take up their right relationship to Him 
 and from Him draw their life. 
 
 The conception of mankind as a unity, or the 
 solidarity of Humanity, is one that is impressing itself 
 on the modern mind with its growing social feelings 
 and aspirations. Mankind are felt to be one Body 
 with one common interest and aim. We are coming 
 to realise the truth of that noble Stoic utterance which 
 has been well called "the watchword of Humanity," 
 but which for long stood in solitary grandeur: Homo 
 sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto. The Spirit of 
 Humanity is gathering force and seeking expression. 
 But what the Body needs for its safe guidance and 
 well-being is the recognition of its rightful Head. A 
 body without a Head is a very imperfect and unsightly 
 thing. If Christ were only seen to be really the Head 
 and obeyed as such — if He were allowed to do for the 
 body of Humanity what the head does for the physical 
 body — our most clamant problems would be solved. 
 They never can be solved till the Head is recognised. 
 "Not holding the Head" was the source of error in 
 Apostolic times, and it is the source of blindness and 
 misery in our own day. 
 
IX 
 
 RELATION TO THE TEACHING AND 
 LIFE-WORK OF CHRIST 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 RELATION TO THE TEACHING AND 
 LIFE-WORK OF CHRIST 
 
 ANY interpretation of the Cross must be tested by 
 its agreement with the teaching and life-work 
 of Christ Himself. Primarily with His teaching con- 
 cerning God and the Kingdom and His own death. 
 His teaching concerning God is summed up under the 
 word Fatherhood. God was the loving and merciful 
 Father, rather than the strict, inexorable Judge. But 
 He was a Holy Father, and, ultimately, also the Judge 
 of all. While repentance and forgiveness were free to 
 returning sinners, those who persisted in evil should 
 be sternly condemned and banished from His presence. 
 The door of the Kingdom stood open to all, but the 
 unrighteous could not enter it ; they should be cast out 
 if they ventured in ; their place was the outer darkness 
 — away from God. This is manifestly the same fate as 
 the "death" that Paul speaks of. If Christ dies to 
 save men, it is ultimately from that doom. We cannot 
 truly represent Christ's teaching if we ignore this 
 sterner element; even if we think we can discern the 
 
 glow of a hope beyond it. In the same way He speaks 
 151 
 
152 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 of the loss of the soul, of the life, of the self: "What 
 shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world 
 and forfeit his soul " (or life), or " lose himself" ? What 
 is this loss of the soul or life, or of himself, but the 
 death which Paul says is the wages of sin? Not 
 necessarily annihiliation. 
 
 When, therefore, Christ says that He is "come to 
 give His life a ransom for many " ; while the word 
 "ransom" in itself may have various applications, it 
 is really, ultimately, from this death, as the consequence 
 of sin, that He ransoms them by giving His own life 
 for their deliverance. 
 
 But it is at the Last Supper that our Lord gives the 
 most explicit teaching concerning the meaning of His 
 death. The whole has been the subject of the keenest 
 criticism, and we shall therefore keep to that which 
 seems least open to cavil or question. By some, as 
 by Bousset in his "Jesus," the Last Supper is left 
 entirely out of account in this connection, because it 
 seems to them hopeless to endeavour to ascertain its 
 meaning. But with the three Synoptical Gospels and 
 Paul all in substantial agreement in their account of 
 it, and in view of the place which it gained in the early 
 Church, it seems unreasonable so to treat it. That it 
 was the Passover Festival, whether held on the proper 
 evening or not, or, if not the actual Passover Feast, 
 one substituted for it and suggested by it, cannot be 
 questioned without overturning the whole narrative of 
 these last days; and this fact must dominate in any 
 
TEACHING AND LIFE-WORK OF CHRIST 153 
 
 interpretation of our Lord's utterances on the occasion. 
 The sayings themselves have been much discussed, and 
 are by some cut down to the meagrest measure. As 
 they stand in St. Mark's Gospel, we read : " And as 
 they were eating, He took bread (or a loaf), and when 
 he had blessed, He brake it, and gave to them and 
 said, ' Take ye : this is My body.' And He took a cup, 
 and when He had given thanks, He gave to them ; and 
 they all drank of it. And He said unto them, ' This 
 is My blood of the Covenant (some authorities insert, 
 with Paul in 1 Cor. xi. 25, "new I' the new Covenant) 
 which is shed (or poured out) for many ' " (Mark xiv. 
 22, 24). Schmiedel remarks that " with the omission 
 of 'Take ye,' this may be regarded as the relatively 
 (not absolutely) oldest form of the words of the 
 institution of the Eucharist " ; and he regards them as 
 referring to His sacrifice " as an offering, not for sin, 
 but for the immunity of His followers, after the manner 
 of the Passover lamb in Egypt, or for ratification 
 of their Covenant with God, as in Gen. xv. 10, 17 ; 
 Jer. xxxiv. 18; Ex. xxiv. 1-8" (Ency. Bib. ii. col. 1887). 
 By Hollmann the words of the institution are restricted 
 to " This is My Body," and " This is My Blood," which 
 is surely the least we can have if we are to have any- 
 thing at all. Well, let us accept this provisionally, so 
 as to keep on the surest ground. The words were 
 spoken in the course of the Passover Feast (or a 
 substitute for it), in commemoration of the deliverance 
 of the fathers of the nation from Egyptian bondage, 
 
154 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 previous to which the blood of a lamb that had been 
 slain was sprinkled on the lintel and doorposts of their 
 dwellings that they might be covered or sheltered from 
 the Angel of Death who smote the first-born in all the 
 houses of the Egyptians. Whether historical or not, 
 this was their belief. When Jesus in these circum- 
 stances gave His disciples the Bread and said that it 
 represented His Body, and the cup of Wine saying 
 that it should henceforth represent to them His Blood, 
 was He not telling them quite plainly that He was to 
 give Himself for their deliverance as the lamb had 
 been given to their fathers in Egypt in order that its 
 blood might be shed and used for their protection? 
 Was He not saying that His blood should fulfil on 
 their behalf a function similar to that which the blood 
 of the lamb had fulfilled for their fathers in Egypt? 
 He was manifestly substituting His Body and Blood 
 for those of the Paschal lamb. If it was not the actual 
 or regular Passover Feast, the substitution would be 
 all the more impressive. His reference to His Blood 
 in this connection suggests the language of sacrifice. 
 For in the death that He looked forward to, no actual 
 blood would be shed. But " the blood " of sacrifice had 
 a commonly recognised meaning for all Israelites. It 
 was given by God to be a covering for them. The 
 blood of the lamb slain in Egypt was a covering for 
 all on whose dwellings it was sprinkled — a covering 
 from the Judgment that at midnight visited that land. 
 So, Jesus meant them to understand that His Blood 
 
TEACHING AND LIFE-WORK OF CHRIST 155 
 
 (the shedding of which would seem so strange to them) 
 would be a covering to them in the Day of God's 
 Judgment on the sinful nation. His life had been 
 given to them by God to that end as that of the lamb 
 had been given to their fathers in Egypt. 
 
 The full force of our Lord's saying here is not always 
 realised, because it is taken out of its eschatological 
 setting. Jesus was thinking and speaking to them of 
 the coming of the Kingdom, when He should drink with 
 them the new wine. But the coming of the Kingdom 
 had a Judgment side to it, as He had taught in many 
 of His sayings and parables. The darker side of 
 Christ's teaching needs to be here kept in view. 
 When the King should come in the glory of His 
 Father, it should be to universal Judgment — the 
 righteous should be welcomed to the Kingdom : on 
 others doom should fall. But just as their fathers had 
 been " covered " in Egypt by the blood of the Passover 
 lamb, so should they be covered by His Blood in the 
 coming Judgment Day. It implies that His death 
 should avail to protect all who were His. Not because 
 He should be punished by God instead of them, but 
 because (as we saw in a previous chapter) He let the 
 full consequences of the national and of universal sin 
 fall on Himself, and it should operate to their salvation. 
 It did so save them, and it would have saved the whole 
 nation from the awful judgment that came upon it, 
 had it been suffered to have its due effect on its Heads 
 and Guides. It saved His disciples by separating 
 
156 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 them, as a new spiritual people, from the carnally 
 minded Israel, and it is mighty to save all men by 
 separating them in their spirit from the sinful world, 
 in response to its influences. 
 
 If, as it is probable, He spake of His Blood as that 
 " of the Covenant," the meaning is the same. For the 
 Passover was " the sacred Covenant Supper " of which 
 none could partake save those who were rightfully in 
 the sacred community. " The sacred act of Covenant- 
 consecration, as described in the oldest narrative, the 
 sprinkling of the people with the blood of the Covenant, 
 the acceptance of 'the words of the Covenant,' could 
 never in the nature of things be repeated. But in 
 memory of God's mighty act of deliverance, of the 
 blood with which, on that occasion, the holy community 
 was marked and protected from the wrath of the angel 
 of death, in memory of the hasty exodus and the 
 affliction of those days, the supper was to be observed 
 as a symbolical act of worship " (Schultz). It is widely 
 held that the blood of the Paschal lamb had an atoning, 
 i.e. a covering or cleansing, efficacy, so that those who 
 sat down to the feast could feel that in spite of their 
 sins they were in acceptance with God; and that 
 this naturally suggests a like efficacy in the Blood of 
 Christ. But in any case, we see that the Covenant 
 Blood was a " covering " Blood for those who accepted 
 it. If Jesus spake specially of the New Covenant, the 
 establishment of which was virtually identical with 
 the coming of the Kingdom of God in its spiritual 
 
TEACHING AND LIFE-WORK OF CHRIST 157 
 
 aspects, the meaning of "the Blood" would remain 
 unchanged. His Blood would be the ratification of 
 that New Covenant, or that which would make it 
 effectual. The New Covenant was based on Forgive- 
 ness, and " the Blood " has always one well-understood 
 sacrificial significance : it is always given as a covering 
 to men. When we find Paul saying, " Even Christ our 
 Passover has been sacrificed for us"; when we read 
 in 1st Peter and in Revelation of "the Blood of the 
 Lamb," and find in the Fourth Gospel Christ repre- 
 sented as "the Lamb of God that taketh away (or 
 beareth) the sin of the world," and His crucifixion 
 made to fall on the day when the Paschal lamb should 
 be slain, with which in the narrative He is identified, 
 we see how truly the Church had learned the lesson 
 which its Founder sought to convey by His references 
 to His Body and Blood, and how the Gospel repre- 
 sentations agree with those of St. Paul. The Book of 
 Acts shows us also that when Christ was first preached 
 to men it was as one by belonging to whom men 
 should be saved in the coming Judgment Day. We 
 have the same teaching in the earliest of the Epistles 
 — 1st Thessalonians. 
 
 It is not said, indeed, in what sense His blood should 
 avail for His disciples, that is, what precisely it should 
 do ; but we seem bound to intrepret it as having some 
 real analogy to the well-known efficacy of sacrificial 
 Blood, especially to that of the original Passover lamb. 
 
 But it would surely be a great mistake were we to 
 
158 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 interpret our Lord's references to His sacrificial death 
 in a merely external and unspiritual manner. It was 
 essentially a spiritual Kingdom that Christ preached, 
 and the salvation He was bringing was primarily a 
 spiritual salvation. Only as being such in the first 
 instance could it become an external salvation. His 
 Blood was not just like that of animal sacrifices. Such 
 a comparison would be most odious and irreverent. 
 A libation of the richest human blood could not be 
 satisfying to God. Christ's life was given up to God 
 in order to fulfil a high Divine purpose of spiritual 
 redemption. It was the consummation of His life- 
 work, the completion of the At-one-ment. In that act 
 of supreme obedience, God and man were made wholly 
 one. His " Blood " should avail only for those who 
 belonged to Him, as the blood of the Passover lamb 
 had availed only for those Israelites who sheltered 
 themselves under it. But there could not be, as in 
 their case, any literal blood in view, or any external 
 sprinkling. It had to be received into the heart, which 
 was perhaps symbolised by the words, " Drink ye all of 
 it." St. Mark is careful to tell us that " they drank of 
 it every one." As St. John has it, we must "eat the 
 flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man." It 
 was Himself that He gave to us on that Cross, to be 
 received as our Spirit and Life. It may be that this 
 spiritual significance of His Blood, as we find it in St. 
 John's Gospel, was only later revealed to His disciples ; 
 but we find it already in Paul, who teaches that it is 
 
TEACHING AND LIFE-WORK OF CHRIST 159 
 
 only in spiritual union with Christ that salvation can 
 be found. 
 
 At the same time, it was necessary in order to this 
 spiritual union with Him that He should die as He did 
 for our sakes. In that death He did a work on our 
 behalf which no one else could have done, and which 
 was necessary for our spiritual salvation. It is because 
 He died for our sakes that we are invited to become 
 united with Him in His Spirit; and it is through the 
 influences that go forth from His Cross that the spiritual 
 union is effected. His work for us cannot be ignored. 
 We must receive His life to live in us as He gives it to 
 us, and that is as giving it " a ransom for us," or, as Paul 
 puts it, " dying for our sins " — the Underlying truth of 
 which we have sought to show. To think of coming 
 to Christ, or of receiving His life, that is, His Spirit, to 
 be our life, without any such sense of sin as feels the 
 necessity for His Cross for the manifestation of the 
 righteousness of that God in whose forgiveness we trust, 
 is to propose something to ourselves that will not be 
 realised in our experience. There is a measure of self- 
 righteousness, or self-sufficiency, still in us that will 
 make it impossible for us truly to receive Christ's life to 
 be ours. The " natural " man is still asserting himself, 
 so that the true spiritual man cannot be born. We 
 still lack that very sense of human sin and of Divine 
 Righteousness and Love which the Cross was intended 
 to create — the want of which, in fact, made it necessary. 
 The ground within has not been prepared so that the 
 
160 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 love that the Cross declares can, not merely fall on it, 
 but sink into it, and become the power of the Christ-life 
 within us. We forget that we are not, like Christ, 
 born of the Spirit from the first. If Christ is to live 
 in us, Self must die. We must be " born anew " — 
 born "of the Spirit." 
 
 On the other hand, to trust in anything that Christ 
 has Aowzfor us, without becoming spiritually united to 
 Him, is sheer, inexcusable presumption, such as He 
 tells us shall be disowned by Him in " that day." It is 
 disowned by Him in this present day; for there is 
 nothing more evident on the part of mere outward 
 believers, whether " orthodox " or " unorthodox," than 
 their want of the Christ-like Spirit. To enjoy the bene- 
 fits of Christ's redemption we must belong to Christ, 
 and this means cherishing and living in His Spirit of 
 Love and self-sacrifice. For, " If any man have not 
 the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His " ; and, " If ye 
 live after the flesh, ye shall die." 
 
 The Cross did not really add anything to what Jesus 
 had taught and borne witness to in His life. All along 
 He had declared both the Righteousness and the Love 
 of God, both His judgment on sin and His forgiveness 
 of sinners. The Cross was the final witness to both of 
 these Divine principles. All Christ's teaching and all 
 His life were here gathered up into one great word. 
 Christ's dying for our sins and to sin was the culmi- 
 nating expression of both the Righteousness and the 
 Love of God. 
 
TEACHING AND LIFE-WORK OF CHRIST 161 
 
 This is why in the Pauline doctrine attention is fixed 
 on the death and resurrection of Christ, with practically 
 no reference to His previous life and teaching. This 
 those who would take us "back to Jesus," apart from 
 the Cross, fail to see. The whole life and teaching of 
 Jesus, His very innermost Spirit, are contained in the 
 great act of the Cross, witnessed to by His resurrection. 
 In that act Christ gives His very self to us that His 
 death to the flesh and life in the Spirit may become 
 ours. In that act we have a Christ entirely freed from 
 all that was of the flesh. While He lived and taught 
 under its limitations, local and temporal features might 
 to some extent characterise His teaching, and men 
 might lay hold on these outward features merely, as 
 some of the early Christians did. But by His gift of 
 Himself in that sacrifice of the Cross He passed entirely 
 beyond all these, to come as an inspiring Spirit into 
 the hearts of the men of all time and of all places 
 according to their ever-growing and changing needs. 
 The " ideal Christ," rightly conceived, is the real Christ 
 of the Cross freed from all limitations of the flesh ; not 
 a different Being from Jesus, or one to be vaguely con- 
 ceived, but Jesus of Nazareth as He comes to us in the 
 fulness and infinite inexhaustibility of the Spirit. 
 Therefore Paul said, " I know not even Christ any 
 more after the flesh." 
 
 It is the knowledge of Christ in the Spirit — in that 
 Divine and human Spirit of Holy Love, of Righteous- 
 ness and Truth, that so completely expressed itself on 
 
i6a THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 the Cross, and from that Cross goes forth to the world 
 — that is the essential thing. It is in this Spirit that we 
 are made individually truly at one with God. In that 
 Spirit we have Christ Himself in us. Wherever 
 Christ Himself in Spirit is really received, all that 
 is implied in His teaching, freed from the limitations of 
 time and place, will be expressed in life and action. 
 We are thankful for the record of His earthly life, but 
 we are not dependent on it. The attention that is now 
 being given to the criticism of the Gospel records is in 
 danger of leading us away from that Christ of the 
 Spirit with whom we have to do,' though it may end by 
 throwing us more completely on Him. The Spirit is 
 ever deeper, greater and more important, than the 
 letter : 
 
 " The letter fails, the systems fall, 
 And every symbol wanes ; 
 The Spirit, over-brooding all, 
 Eternal Love, remains." 
 
 We sum up, then, by saying that we can get no better 
 interpretation of the Cross than that which was given 
 by St. Paul, if we view it in its ethical aspect in a more 
 direct manner, and see its judicial significance in a 
 wider way, both of which, however, are only expansions 
 of Paul's doctrine of the death of Christ to sin and of 
 the manifestation of the Righteousness of God in His 
 Cross. In the suffering and death of Christ we have 
 the supreme example of that vicarious principle in 
 virtue of which a righteous person allows to light on 
 
TEACHING AND LIFE-WORK OF CHRIST 163 
 
 himself the consequences of the increasing sinfulness of 
 those with whom he is associated as these show them- 
 selves under the Divine moral order, — himself bowing 
 to that order for their sakes, in the hope that they will 
 feel their sinfulness and, turning to God, be saved from 
 what would otherwise be their fate. But Christ holds such 
 a relation to the race as its Head, and His acceptance 
 of His Cross had such a direct relation to man before 
 God, to the worst consequences of man's sin, to the 
 manifestation of God's righteousness, in the doom that 
 sin brings on Humanity, and to God's loving will for 
 man's salvation, that, like His Person, His Sacrifice is 
 unique and representative as that of no other person 
 can possibly be. It becomes the foundation of a 
 universal Gospel, in which God, having thus in Christ 
 reconciled the world to Himself in His righteousness, 
 draws nigh to all with the word of Forgiveness, 
 " not imputing to them their trespasses," but beseeching 
 them to be reconciled, or at one, with Himself. 
 
 But as the universality of the Gospel and its absolute 
 unconditionedness are not always fully recognised, and 
 so the Gospel-message is thereby robbed of much of 
 its Divine power, we shall yet devote a chapter to the 
 setting of it forth. Meanwhile let us seek to view the 
 Cross, as far as we may, on its Divine side as the 
 supreme manifestation of God and His Love, and in its 
 relation to the Divine creative purpose. 
 
THE MANIFESTATION OF THE LOVE 
 OF GOD 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE MANIFESTATION OF THE LOVE 
 OF GOD 
 
 WHILE we see Christ on His Cross bearing the 
 consequences of the world's sin as these come 
 upon man in the righteousness of God and thus mani- 
 festing God's Righteousness, we must at the same time 
 see in that which was done the supreme manifestation 
 of the sympathy and love of God. One consequence 
 of that view of "the Atonement" that has been so 
 widely accepted is, that in spite of the verbal acknow- 
 ledgment that the whole procedure originated with God 
 and was the expression of His love, the love of Christ, 
 as seen in what He endured for our sakes, has largely 
 overshadowed that of God in Christ. When the Cross 
 is represented as something suffered in order to satisfy 
 God, His Holiness or Justice, it is impossible to realise 
 in its fulness the great truth that it was God who was 
 thus " in Christ reconciling the world to Himself." We 
 may try to imagine something of the love of the Father 
 who gives up His Son to endure all this, but the Divine 
 so greatly transcends the human that our effort fails, 
 
 and it is still the Son who is vividly before us as the 
 167 
 
168 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 actual sufferer : it was Christ who bore our sins ; it was 
 Christ who so loved us as to die for our sakes. No 
 doubt, love to Christ ought to be love to God ; but in 
 actual experience it has not always been such, and in 
 consequence there has always been something lacking. 
 For it is God's love we must see, because it is to God 
 we must be brought, and it is God's love that must 
 possess us. 
 
 But to think of God as being wholly outside of Christ, 
 giving Him up externally, as if separate from Himself, 
 is quite out of keeping with the truth of the Incarnation 
 of God in Christ, and with the truth of God as the all- 
 inspiring Spirit of life. Christ was "God manifest in 
 the flesh." What He did, God did in Him. The 
 humanity was distinct from the Divinity, but it was one 
 therewith. It was that Spirit of Holy Love that God 
 is that was expressing itself in the whole life and work 
 of Christ. If we see Christ bearing our sins, we see 
 God in His great love taking them on Himself, and so 
 reconciling to Himself the world in its sin and in its 
 separation from Himself. 
 
 This is the most wonderful and the most affecting 
 thing revealed in the Cross. The olden prophets could 
 think of God as being afflicted in all His people's 
 affliction, as bearing their sicknesses and sorrows, but 
 they could not rise to the thought of God Himself 
 bearing even their sins. Yet this was manifested in the 
 Cross of Christ. We see God there taking on Himself, 
 not only the sorrow, but the sin of the world. It is the 
 
THE MANIFESTATION OF THE LOVE OF GOD 169 
 
 revelation of what God has been bearing from all eternity, 
 and is bearing now for our sakes. We think far too 
 little of what God suffers and has to bear for the sake 
 of His creation. We often lament our own suffering, 
 and we see and deplore the suffering and sin of the 
 world: the more holy and sympathetic a man is the 
 more painfully does he feel the burden of the sorrow 
 of the creation, the more repulsive is its thoughtlessness, 
 selfishness, and sin ; yet the more is his heart touched 
 with sympathy for sinners. But does not God see it 
 all, feel it all, sympathise with all, infinitely beyond 
 anything that is possible to us ? He could end it all ; 
 but then His loving purpose in His creation would be 
 frustrated. Man must freely form himself and become 
 God's child. So God denies Himself, restrains, limits 
 Himself, in order that man may become man, and 
 be, not mechanically, but freely, His child. It is the 
 supreme, unsurpassable expression of this Divine sym- 
 pathy and sacrifice on the part of God, originating with 
 Him, moved and made actual by Him in Christ, that 
 we behold in the Cross. 
 
 The life of God is for ever the same life of self-denial 
 and self-sacrifice, because it is the life of perfect Love. 
 Out of His overflowing fulness He is constantly giving 
 of Himself in creation in order to find Himself again 
 in those whom He has raised to participation in the 
 Divine Life. This is that Eternal kenosis in which " the 
 Son " is for ever passing out of " the Father " and again 
 returning to the bosom of God. The Incarnation in 
 
170 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 Christ was not that of a moment of time, and it was 
 only completed by the Cross. That Cross is the symbol 
 and revelation of the Divine life. We speak confidently 
 now of the Divine Love, but it was only the Cross of 
 Christ that made it known. In some measure the 
 Divine Spirit of holy Love moves in all men, and we 
 can now recognise it in those who have become martyrs 
 for the sake of their fellows, vicariously " bearing their 
 sins." They do this, not of themselves, but as moved 
 by God's Spirit of Love. They are not alone in their 
 suffering : God Himself is in it. 
 
 " Up from undated time they come, 
 The martyr souls of heathendom," 
 
 as we call it. Deeper than all ignorance of men, God 
 has been in it. And in the fulness of the time all this 
 suffering Love was revealed to man in the Cross of 
 Christ as the very love of God. 
 
 We say reverently, therefore, that in the Cross of 
 Christ we behold God taking on Himself the responsi- 
 bility for His world in all its sinfulness. Sin is very 
 real, very awful in its consequences to man and in its 
 actuality before God. It is His great grief, His great 
 burden, against it His holy Love inevitably operates in 
 that which is so often misunderstood as " the Wrath of 
 God." That Wrath is nothing else than the necessary 
 action of His holy Being against that which is contrary 
 to Himself, to His children, and to His loving purpose, 
 and which must disappear out of His creation. But 
 
THE MANIFESTATION OF THE LOVE OF GOD 171 
 
 while men are rightly judged guilty and punished, 
 inasmuch as they have not striven after righteousness 
 as they ought to have done, but have yielded too readily 
 to purely earthly influences and have cherished too long 
 the desires of their lower nature of " the flesh," it is the 
 fact of their possession of such a nature that is the real 
 source of the world's sin. And their grounding in this 
 nature was inevitable. First must come " that which is 
 natural," and only after it "that which is spiritual." 
 "The first man was of the earth earthy," and such is 
 still true of all in whom "the second man" has not 
 been born. Now, it was God who gave existence to 
 the world and to man with this earthy, animal nature. 
 He did this in His love, and He has never regretted it, 
 because man should in due time transcend it. But it 
 has caused Him to bear a very heavy burden. He 
 knew that man could not be raised into his true, higher 
 manhood in any mechanical way, or by mere creative 
 force. To move man upward by an outward, uplifting 
 Hand, or by some compelling force in the very least 
 degree, would be destructive of his manhood. There- 
 fore the long, sad story of struggle and of sin. Although 
 man is a guilty being, a sinner before God, deserving of 
 punishment, yet, practically, and in the sight of Him 
 who knew the constitution of His creature, this sinful- 
 ness was something which was virtually certain to be 
 manifested; because man, in order to be man, was 
 gifted with a will of his own, and was initially weighted 
 by "the flesh" or animal nature. The experience of 
 
172 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 sinfulness may not have been necessary for his develop- 
 ment and perfecting, although it is impossible to see 
 how he could otherwise have come to know the in- 
 finitude of the Divine Love, and so have that as the 
 principle of his life. But this implies the reality of sin 
 as sin, for which there can be no apology. But the 
 actual appearance of sin in man could not have been 
 unknown to God ; it did not prevent Him from creat- 
 ing ; must we not say with Paul, " Where sin abounded, 
 grace did much more abound?" It was all foreseen, 
 accepted, and provided for. Christ was "the Lamb 
 slain from the foundation of the world." The creation 
 was grounded in sacrifice, which should be given its 
 complete expression and manifestation in the fulness 
 of the time. As Peter says of Christ as the sacrificed 
 Lamb : " Who was foreknown indeed before the founda- 
 tion of the world, but was manifest in these last times 
 for you, who through Him are believers in God, who 
 raised Him from the dead, and gave Him glory ; so that 
 your faith and hope might be in God." Might be in 
 God, be it noted. The truth is that our hard views of 
 God's justice and man's punishment rest on the old 
 Jewish conception of Sovereignty instead of Father- 
 hood, and on the creation narrative in Genesis, where 
 man is represented as having been created wholly good, 
 " free to stand, yet free to fall," directly disobeying a 
 simple positive command which might easily have been 
 kept, given to one man, who by his disobedience 
 involved the race in sin and misery. Such a conception 
 
THE MANIFESTATION OF THE LOVE OF GOD 173 
 
 cannot be entertained to-day. It does not consort with 
 our knowledge of man's primitive condition, and we 
 know that the narrative has no claim to be considered 
 special Divine revelation. Man had to rise from the 
 animal man to the spiritual man and child of God. 
 Throughout all human history God has been seeking, 
 not by force, but by means of spiritual influences, 
 including the suffering of man for man and of Himself 
 in man, to raise men to this higher life ; and, when the 
 world was best fitted to receive it, the supreme manifesta- 
 tion of His holy, sacrificial and saving Love was made 
 in the Cross of Christ. God there seems to say: 
 "Behold I take the responsibility of My world on 
 Myself; I bow beneath the worst consequences of the 
 sin which I condemn, that you may be saved there- 
 from ; I show to you, O men, how truly I am in it all, 
 suffering through you and for your sakes, in the hope 
 that this My suffering will manifest My holy Love, 
 and bring it to bear within you as My Power to your 
 salvation." 
 
 Viewed in this light, we see how short those views 
 of the Cross which regard it as something " to atone for 
 sin," " to satisfy Divine Justice," etc., come of its Divine 
 significance; how, in fact, they may be said to have 
 sometimes been the very antitheses of the truth. And 
 yet, as we have regarded it, we see God at once main- 
 taining His inviolate Righteousness and revealing His 
 infinite Love. All that sin suffers, all that it brings 
 on man, is just and necessary; but Love is the 
 
174 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 source of the creation, Love will take it all upon 
 itself so as to work out its loving purpose for 
 mankind. 
 
 The purpose of God in the Cross was to bring us 
 all into the same Spirit of holy Love as was there 
 manifested. This is at once the creative and the 
 redemptive Spirit; so that the great Deed of God in 
 the Cross of Christ was truly a fresh creative act. It 
 is in the power of that Spirit that God for ever acts. 
 It is the only Spirit of true life. The creation itself, 
 as we have said, is founded in sacrifice, and by sacrifice 
 it is constantly maintained and carried onward and 
 upward. By the sacrifice of the Cross God seeks to 
 inspire, live, and act in men in this Divine Spirit. It 
 is a manifestation of God in the truth of His Divine 
 Life, to be received by us that we may thereby share 
 in the one Divine and eternal life. As Mr. T. H. Green 
 has said : " A death unto life, a life out of death must 
 (in the light of the Cross) be in some way of the 
 essence of the Divine nature — must be an act which, 
 though exhibited once for all in the crucifixion and 
 resurrection of Christ, was yet eternal — the act of God 
 Himself. For that very reason, however, it was one 
 perpetually re-enacted, and to be re-enacted by man. 
 It is so far as the second man which is from heaven, 
 and whose act is God's, thus lives and dies in us that 
 He becomes to us a Wisdom from God which is 
 Righteousness, sanctification, and redemption" {The 
 Witness of God; p. 8). 
 
THE MANIFESTATION OF THE LOVE OF GOD 175 
 
 The Cross was "the Wisdom and the Power of 
 God, not only for the redemption of man, but for 
 the completion of the Creation. It came as the culminat- 
 ing expression of the self-sacrificing love in which the 
 Creation was founded and by which it had been 
 continually elevated. It was God's purpose "in 
 Christ to reconcile all things to Himself, having made 
 peace through the blood of the Cross." It was to be 
 the reconcilation, not only of man in his sinfulness to 
 God, but of the Creation in its separateness to the 
 Creator. Creation implies a going out of God from 
 Himself again to return to Himself in the effected 
 creation. Man, if God's loving purpose concerning him 
 is to be realised, must exist as a separate personality, 
 with a will of his own, and then be brought into one- 
 ness with God, not, of course, to lose thereby the 
 personality that has been formed, but to find it 
 perfected. In Christ as the Head of Humanity, that 
 reconciliation — that return from separateness into 
 oneness with God — was effected, actually in His own 
 Person, and representatively and potentially, for all 
 men. What Philosophy has sought to realise by 
 thought, and Mysticism by ecstasy or intuition, was 
 there realised in the moral and spiritual life, and it is 
 only in that life that the world can ever become one 
 with God. For that is the essential Divine Life. 
 When the humanity in Christ entirely accepted the 
 Divine Will in that complete sacrifice of the Cross, 
 then, and then only, was the human entirely one with 
 
176 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 the Divine. In this perfect unity of Will and Spirit 
 we behold that complete reconciliation which was, as 
 such, the perfecting of the Creation. God and man 
 were one in that self-sacrificing, holy love, which is 
 the eternal life of God. The immanent Divine was 
 one with the transcendent from which it proceeded. 
 The Divine idea of the Creation was realised in that 
 act in Christ in which not only did "the flesh" die 
 that "the Spirit might live, but the finite was made 
 eternally one with the Infinite — taken up into it. And 
 it is when men realise the separation that exists 
 between them and God, not merely the creaturely 
 separation of the flesh and of finiteness, but the moral 
 separation because of sin, — that is, self-love, self-will, 
 self-seeking and pleasing, — and enter fully into the 
 reconciliation effected in the name of all in Christ, that 
 the life of God — the very life that God is — becomes 
 their life also, and although the body of the flesh 
 remains till death shall " rend the veil," all real separa- 
 tion is annulled and man in the Spirit is one with 
 God. 
 
 That life of God comes that it may possess us fully 
 through the Cross of Christ — through the holy love 
 there manifested reaching us in our sinful separation 
 and self-life. How else could the knowledge of it 
 come to us so as to win us to itself? 
 
 Others have reached in thought the essential ideal 
 oneness of God and man, — in Hindoo Philosophy, for 
 example, — and have sought in various ways to tran- 
 
THE MANIFESTATION OF THE LOVE OF GOD 177 
 
 scend all separateness. But only in Christ has the Way 
 been manifested ; only in Him has it been fully 
 realised for all, and, therefore, where the knowledge of 
 His Cross has not reached men they are still in 
 ignorance of "the Way, the Truth, and the Life." 
 Here lies our Missionary obligation to the world — 
 "to the wise and to the unwise, to the Greek and to 
 the barbarian" — in taking up which we become "Co- 
 workers with God." God does not repeat Himself, 
 and it is in vain that we look elsewhere for that which 
 He has given to the world in Christ. 
 
 It is only through Christ's Cross accepted as ours, 
 on which we are crucified with Christ to all that is of 
 self and to all that separates our spirits from the 
 Infinite and Eternal Spirit of Holy Love, from God 
 and His unchanging Goodwill, however it may come 
 to us, that we enter into that complete reconciliation 
 or at-one-ment with God in which our true and eternal 
 life and peace are to be found. Paul had learned the 
 great lesson when he said, " I live ; yet not I, but Christ 
 liveth in me." God in Christ is God in human form, 
 God as He has made Himself known to man, God as 
 He comes to live His eternal life in us. No mere 
 trust in an external Cross can really save us. We 
 cannot by any possibility be saved outside ourselves. 
 Christ must be " formed in us " ; it is " Christ in you 
 the hope of glory." His Cross must be, as Paul saw 
 so clearly, and ever taught, the Cross within, whereon 
 we die with Christ to rise with Christ, or, to state it 
 12 
 
178 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 differently, whereby self dies and God lives His own 
 life in us, and lifts us into eternal unison with Himself. 
 As many of the Mystics preached, and as Angelus 
 Silesius put it into rhyme : 
 
 "Though Christ in Joseph's town 
 
 A thousand times were born, 
 Till He is born in thee, 
 
 Thy soul is still forlorn. 
 The Cross on Golgotha 
 
 Can never save thy soul : 
 The Cross in thine own heart 
 
 Alone can make thee whole." 
 
XI 
 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 IN the preceding chapter we have been endeavouring 
 to state the highest aspects of the Cross ; but the 
 whole is brought nigh to all in the simple Gospel- 
 message, if it be truly grasped and proclaimed. The 
 Evangel which proceeded through the Cross, however, 
 has not always been apprehended in all the freeness 
 and fulness with which St. Paul proclaimed it. Hence 
 God has not been known in all the greatness of His 
 love, and this has had much to do with the weakness 
 and imperfection which have too often characterised 
 the religious life, and with the growing indifference to 
 religion. Where God is not truly known, Religion 
 cannot really live. The great want of the world to-day 
 is a real belief in God as He has revealed Himself in 
 Christ — not in the mere words of a doctrine about Him. 
 With Paul, the Gospel was the very antithesis of 
 " Law," but with his successors there has too frequently 
 crept in a legal element. Conditions have been laid 
 down which men must comply with if they are to be 
 forgiven and saved. The tendency to a reversion to 
 legal conceptions has all along been the great foe to 
 
 181 
 
182 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 Christianity. The Judaism which contended with Paul 
 had dogged the Gospel throughout the centuries. In 
 some cases it succeeded in quite transforming the 
 Gospel. Nor did the Reformation wholly deliver men 
 from it. This legalism is, as Paul said, " of the flesh," 
 and therefore it is "natural," and readily finds favour 
 with men. 
 
 When the Cross is regarded as a sacrifice demanded 
 by God in order to satisfy His justice, sometimes even 
 to appease His wrath, or to enable Him to forgive, and 
 the Gospel or Grace as only coming to us as the 
 outcome of this, it cannot come thus in its Divine 
 freeness and fulness ; it cannot thus affect our hearts 
 as the spontaneous outcome of God's love should do. 
 We do not really see God to be the Love that He is, 
 and, therefore, that Love does not come to possess us. 
 A doctrinal system like this soon becomes formal, 
 barren, and uninteresting. It may be preached, but it 
 has little real influence ; people get tired of hearing it 
 and ministers of preaching it. It lacks reality. But, 
 as we have seen, such representations are made in the 
 face of the plainest declarations of the New Testament 
 that the Cross represents the great sacrifice made by 
 God in His forgiving and reconciling love for the world. 
 It was the outcome and the supreme proof of that love. 
 If God had not been drawing nigh to men in forgive- 
 ness, why should He have given up His Son to suffer 
 and die for them ? Surely the great Gospel texts are 
 these : " God so loved the world that He gave His only- 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 183 
 
 begotten Son," and " God was in Christ reconciling the 
 world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto 
 them." 
 
 The Gospel as something new and in advance of even 
 the highest prophetism has not always been appre- 
 hended. The difference between the forgiveness of 
 individual penitent sinners previous to the Cross and 
 that universal proclamation of Divine Grace and For- 
 giveness which goes forth to the world through the 
 Cross, has not always been seen. All along in O.T. 
 times Forgiveness had been freely proclaimed to 
 repentant sinners : " Come now, and let us reason 
 together, saith the Lord ; though your sins be as scarlet, 
 they shall be white as snow ; though they be red like 
 crimson, they shall be as wool " ; " Who is a God like 
 unto Thee, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin?" 
 etc. Christ also proclaimed the Divine forgiving love 
 for all repentant sinners. The father of the prodigal 
 was ready to forgive his returning child. What true 
 father would not be so? Some, as we have already 
 said, have seen in these facts an argument against the 
 necessity for the Cross. But this is because they have 
 not understood the rich, free, universal Gospel which 
 the Cross proclaims. It goes beyond the announcement 
 of mercy for returning sinners. It is the proclamation 
 of God's forgiving love to the whole world — His 
 reconciliation of "the world" to Himself. The Cross 
 shows us God, not waiting till His wandering children 
 return, but going forth seeking them with the word of 
 
184 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 forgiveness on His lips. It is what Thomas Erskine 
 described as the "Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel." 
 God freely forgives the repentant sinner. But the 
 difficulty is that men will not repent. The Cross was 
 designed to lead men to Repentance by the manifesta- 
 tion of the evil of sin on the one hand and of the love 
 and unbought Grace of God on the other. Men will 
 not come to God, and God in His fatherly love comes 
 to them. Not waiting- till they do — what few would 
 ever do — return from the far country of sin, but going 
 after them in that surpassing sacrifice to draw them to 
 Himself: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw 
 all men unto Me," said Christ. God comes to men in 
 Christ, Paul taught, as a reconciled Father, beseeching 
 His children to be reconciled to Him, freely and fully 
 forgiving those who had nothing wherewith to pay — 
 " not imputing their tresspasses unto them." How 
 much there is in that last sentence " not imputing their 
 trespasses unto them " — not reckoning their sins against 
 them, or even mentioning them to them. This was 
 what the Cross enabled God to do in relation to 
 Forgiveness. It did not enable Him to forgive men, — 
 which in His heart He had already done, — but to come 
 to them proclaiming His free and full forgiveness. His 
 righteousness had been adequately set forth in what 
 Christ did and suffered in our name. In Him men 
 have been made at one with God. It is only now for 
 them individually to respond to this Divine seeking love, 
 to " receive the Grace of God, not in vain," to draw nigh 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 185 
 
 to Him who so graciously draws nigh to them, to enter 
 into the Reconciliation thus opened up. This was the 
 Gospel of Reconciliation or At-one-ment, the Christian 
 Gospel, the "message" from God to men which Paul 
 said the Apostles went forth as ambassadors from God 
 to proclaim, beseeching men to be reconciled to God. 
 All that was wanted was their response. 
 
 Men were certainly called on to repent; but to put 
 repentance or anything else between the sinner and 
 God is to obscure the Gospel of the Cross ; it is to go 
 back to Old Testament times, to "Law" away from 
 " Grace." But is not this dangerous ? Are we not going 
 against Righteousness in preaching such a Gospel? 
 Are we not in danger of fostering Antinomianism ? So 
 Paul's enemies objected to him. But, " nay," said Paul, 
 " in this way we establish the law " ; it is only in those 
 who are freed from the Law, brought under "Grace," 
 delivered from self and inspired by the Spirit of God, 
 that " the requirement of the Law " can be fulfilled. 
 The one thing that can most effectually lead men to 
 repentance, issuing in the new life of the Spirit, and so 
 in real salvation, is experience of the pardoning love of 
 God in Christ. Turning to God in acceptance of His 
 Grace is the essential thing in repentance. 
 Let some things, however, be here observed : 
 1. That the Forgiveness and acceptance in Christ 
 which goes forth through the Cross does not imply the 
 negation of all the consequences of sin in him who 
 accepts it. Law works steadily on as well as Love. 
 
186 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 But it implies the removal of the worst consequence of 
 sin — separation from God, and the bringing of His Love 
 into our lives so that a new power begins to operate. 
 This new Power, Law will also serve, to the annulling 
 of much that would otherwise have ensued, and to the 
 making of our whole experience, even such con- 
 sequences of sin as remain, work for our highest good. 
 
 2. That men never really make Forgiveness their 
 own unless they do really come to God. And God is 
 Love : that very Love that is seeking them. To come 
 to God is to come to Holy Love. Otherwise God is 
 but a name to us, — three letters forming a word, — and, 
 however confident we may be that we are forgiven and 
 " saved," because we " believe " this or that, we are still 
 ignorant of God. For, says the Apostle, " He that 
 loveth not, knoweth not God ; for God is Love." All 
 that Christ said about the spirit of the forgiven person 
 in relation to his fellow-men and about the need of 
 forgiving if we would be forgiven, remains wholly true. 
 But this love is not the condition of Forgiveness, but 
 its result, as Jesus taught in the house of Simon the 
 Pharisee : " to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth 
 little," implying that to whom much is forgiven the 
 same loves much, as in the case of the woman before 
 them. Now, what will bring men to this love if it be 
 not that manifestation and proclamation of the freely 
 forgiving love of God in harmony with His righteous- 
 ness that comes to us through the Cross of Christ ? Love 
 kindles answering love ; Holy Love quickens like Holy 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 187 
 
 Love. It is in this way that the Love that God is gets 
 into our hearts and becomes the principle of our lives. 
 It is thus that the Gospel of Reconciliation in Christ 
 becomes the really saving power. It is thus that, as 
 Paul said, the Law as requiring righteousness is 
 established. 
 
 3. The real evil from which we need to be saved is 
 self— mere self-dependence, self-love, and self-serving. 
 It is self, cherished in its separateness, that is the great 
 enemy of God in man. We are excluded from the 
 Eternal Kingdom, not merely because " guilt " rests on 
 us, but because we are sinful — because self is the life- 
 principle instead of God. God must take the place of 
 self in our hearts if we are to be truly saved. The 
 Gospel is designed to effect this. But if our forgiveness 
 and acceptance be made dependent on anything what- 
 ever in ourselves, — repentance, or faith, or anything else, 
 — the very purpose of the Gospel is defeated ; self is 
 still the ground of our confidence ; self still lives and, 
 whatever we may believe, we are not truly saved. 
 " Believing " is not the condition of forgiveness, but is 
 simply the means of apprehending it; and, while re- 
 pentance, in the sense of turning to God, is, of course, 
 always implied, it is not because of our repentance that 
 we are forgiven. Experience of the Divine Love will 
 work in us a continual ever deepening repentance. 
 
 4. It is in Christ that God comes to us in His 
 reconciling Love ; it is in Christ that we meet with 
 God. The Gospel is that of God's free forgiveness, 
 
188 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 but it is thus that it comes to us. It was in Christ 
 that God came to men in " the days of His flesh," and 
 it is in Christ in His Cross and risen life that God 
 comes to us now. As Paul says, God was in Christ 
 reconciling the world to Himself, and "the free gift" 
 is "unto all them that believe," or "who are of the 
 faith of Christ." Therefore Christ also called for faith 
 in, and the reception of Himself. All is centred in 
 Christ and comes through Him. It is in accepting 
 Christ as that which He has been " made unto us of 
 God" — righteousness (acceptance, justifying righteous- 
 ness, a right relationship to God), and " Sanctification " 
 (Holiness), and Redemption (deliverance from death 
 and from all real evils) — that we enter into the Gospel 
 Reconciliation. 
 
 But this is no condition laid down of acceptance. 
 Christ is the channel through which the Grace of God 
 comes to us, and He is " freely offered unto us in the 
 Gospel." God does not say, " If ye. accept Christ I will 
 forgive you," but "In accepting Christ, ye enter into 
 My reconciliation, and so into the state of salvation." 
 We show that we do enter into the Reconciliation by 
 this acceptance of Him in whom God appears recon- 
 ciling the world to Himself. Entering into God's 
 Reconciliation must mean something to us; otherwise 
 it would be a mere empty phrase. And this is what 
 it means, the acceptance of Christ as our Saviour and 
 Lord. But the whole provisions of the Gospel are in 
 Christ absolutely and unconditionally free. It is with 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 189 
 
 the word of Forgiveness that Christ comes to us. Like 
 rebels in a distant land, to whom their Sovereign sends 
 His Son as His representative with a message of peace, 
 or proclamation of an amnesty ; or children to whom 
 a father sends an elder brother, — we show that we 
 become reconciled, loyal subjects of our Sovereign, or 
 obedient children of our Father by receiving His Son 
 as He sends Him to us. 
 
 5. While the Gospel comes proclaiming the free 
 Divine Forgiveness and acceptance in Christ of all 
 who will receive it, it is not final salvation that is thus 
 secured, but present acceptance with God, in order that 
 we may become truly His children, and, sharing in 
 the one Divine and Eternal life, be finally saved. 
 Both Christ and Paul always taught that all should 
 be ultimately judged according to their works and 
 character. If we are accepted in Christ, the Righteous 
 one, it is in order that " Christ may be formed in us." By 
 His Spirit in us He is able to conform us to Himself 
 and "to present us to His Father without reproach, 
 if we continue in the faith of the Gospel." There is 
 thus no opening for Antinomianism in the Gospel. 
 
 Has this rich, free, unconditional Gospel of God's Love 
 been widely and faithfully preached in the world f Has 
 the unrestricted " message of reconciliation " in which 
 God is " beseeching " or " entreating " sinful men to be 
 reconciled to Himself, "not imputing their trespasses 
 unto them," with no "ifs," but just the one word 
 " Come," been proclaimed as Paul went forth proclaim- 
 
igo THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 ing it? Have men in their indifference and sin been 
 made to feel that the God whom they ignore and 
 oppose is a God who loves and forgives them like this, 
 and who is pleading with them to be friends? Has 
 not the Gospel of Reconciliation been often so hedged 
 round with restrictions, supposed safeguards, conditions, 
 and theological explanations, that its power has been 
 largely lost? And is not this the reason of the 
 comparative failure of the Church to present a more 
 Christ-like appearance and to bring the world to 
 God? 
 
 Here and there throughout the Christian centuries 
 there have been those who have apprehended and 
 preached with effect this Gospel. To its practical 
 preaching all true spiritual revivals have been due. 
 In some of the more recent books on the Cross we 
 observe a movement towards it. But too often the 
 old spirit of legalism and the fear of Antinomianism 
 has kept back the full Gospel proclamation, and some 
 of our " new theologies " seem to have got away from 
 it altogether. Men have had a zeal for righteousness 
 without knowledge. They have failed to see how 
 really coming to God, responding to His advance as 
 He comes to us in Christ, ensures all they have been 
 anxious for in the interest of morality. If we would 
 only believe it, God is " wiser than men," although His 
 Wisdom should be accounted "foolishness." It is 
 "Grace, free Grace," that saves the soul. "All is of 
 God," says Paul, "lest any man should boast." All 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 191 
 
 must be of God, if He is really to live in us, not con- 
 straining, but winning our wills, Christ's first word 
 to the suffering man, " Son, thy sins are forgiven thee," 
 still carries in it the Divine healing power. " He loves 
 much who has much forgiven." It is the forgiveness 
 that kindles the love, not the love that brings the 
 Forgiveness. We repeat this; for it is just here that 
 we have the real difference between evangelical and 
 non-evangelical. 
 
 Thomas Erskine states well the philosophy of it. 
 "The great cause of the disorder and misery which 
 distract the human mind is aversion or indifference to 
 God. The love of God, the key-stone of the arch, is 
 fallen from its place, and all has in consequence gone 
 to wreck. . . , The only cure for this dreadful and 
 wide-spreading disorder must therefore be something 
 which will replace the key-stone in the arch — something 
 which will re-kindle love towards God by taking away 
 fear and imposing confidence. 
 
 "Now, the manifestation of the character of God 
 contained in the gift of Christ is exactly fitted for this 
 purpose. It is not a mere deliverance from penalties. 
 Indeed, the penalties are not cancelled. . . . The 
 forgiveness of the Gospel meets the penalties of the 
 law, not by cancelling them, but by associating them 
 with the purpose of a loving Father to deliver from 
 sin, instead of a purpose of mere retribution. . . . 
 Access into the presence of God is thrown open; all 
 
192 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 are invited and urged to come in. He hath loved us 
 and given Himself for us. The medicinal virtue of 
 the Gospel — the virtue which heals the disease of the 
 soul, which destroys enmity and enkindles holy love, 
 which does away with the cowardly fear of punishment, 
 and at the same time implants and strengthens the 
 holy fear of sinning, — the medicinal virtue which 
 effects this, lies in the manifestation of that love of 
 God which passes knowledge, that holy love with 
 which God so loved the world as to give His only- 
 begotten Son for it. Love is the great principle 
 developed in the Gospel, which reveals the union of 
 an infinite abhorrence towards sin and an infinite love 
 towards the sinner. This mysterious history is the 
 mighty instrument with which the Spirit of God breaks 
 the power of sin in the heart and establishes holy love 
 and filial confidence." 
 
 Since the great foe to man's true life is his self-will 
 and self-dependence, " nothing but a true sense of the 
 absolute unconditional gratuitousness of the Gospel 
 can write the law of God on the heart of man. And 
 yet this doctrine of gratuitousness is opposed as if it 
 were antinomian. The true reason of the opposition 
 is that it opposes the pride of man. Man therefore 
 opposes it. There is something very striking in the 
 perverse ingenuity with which man endeavours to 
 dilute the medicinal virtue of the Gospel. He must 
 have self to lean on, and so when he is obliged to 
 surrender his own works he betakes himself to his own 
 
THE GOSPEL OF EECONCILIATION 193 
 
 faith as his prop. But this is still self: and in what- 
 ever form it appears, as long as it is the ground of 
 hope it must command the will. . . . Self, in fact, is 
 the great antinomian, because it is the great Anti- 
 christ: where self acts and tries to establish a claim 
 to the forgiveness of sins, either by faith or works, it 
 incapacitates us for spiritual obedience, by cutting us 
 off from the true source of spiritual life" {The Uncon- 
 ditional Freeness of the Gospel, pp. 65, 66). 
 
 What the Gospel seeks to effect is the possession of 
 the soul by God. It is not a doctrine about God that 
 we are invited to believe and receive, but God Himself 
 as He comes to us in Christ and His Cross, manifesting 
 a Presence that is always with us, and that seeks to 
 dwell within us as the inspiration of our life. "The 
 living personality of God must," still further to quote 
 from Erskine's now little read book, 1 " if I may use the 
 expression, animate and fill out our systems of Christian 
 doctrine — otherwise they only tend to add a fatal 
 security to the sleep of the soul. They may be subjects 
 of talk to us, as the gods of silver furnished talk to 
 Belshazzar and his lords, until some Providence 
 surprises us, as the handwriting on the wall surprised 
 them, and makes us feel and know what it is to be in 
 the presence of the real God whom we have not 
 
 1 Mr. Erskine towards the end of his life was induced to consent to a 
 republication of this Book, having convinced himself that it was in 
 substantial harmony with his later views. A new edition was accordingly 
 published, with a few changes "either dictated by himself or cordially 
 approved of by him" (Edinburgh : David Douglas, 1879). 
 
 13 
 
194 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 glorified. I feel persuaded that no idea of a power 
 external to us, however mighty, can ever produce the 
 sentiment of creaturely dependence in the heart : there 
 must be the sense of God within us as the root and 
 basis of our being — as the continual supplier of strength 
 for thought and action — as the fountain from which 
 our current runs, or else dries up" (pp. 20, 21). In 
 Paul's doctrine of the Indwelling of God in the Holy 
 Spirit we see how truly the reception of his gospel led 
 to this sense of the indwelling, inspiration, and sanctifica- 
 tion of the soul by God. 
 
 It cannot be doubted, and it needs to be emphasised, 
 that one of the greatest evils in Christian history from 
 which both the Church and the world have suffered, has 
 been the mere belief in doctrines about God, instead of 
 receiving the reconciling God Himself. Because of 
 this, many, while professing to believe in God, have 
 been living in a kind of "practical Atheism. 1 ' When 
 doctrines are separated from God and His omnipotence 
 — "when they become mere syllogisms or emblazon- 
 ments, they can take their place under the dark shadow 
 of the Atheism of the heart as well as the syllogisms 
 of any other science." 
 
 As we have already seen, it is not Forgiveness merely 
 that the Gospel of Reconciliation brings to men, but 
 what Paul terms "Justification," that is, Acceptance 
 with God in Christ as His children and heirs. This 
 is just entering into our right relation to God and man. 
 In the Gospel, God Himself comes, or rather we should 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 195 
 
 say, unveils His face to us — for He is always near — 
 in all the greatness of His love, makes Himself known 
 within the soul as the Source of our true life and 
 salvation. We are, Paul teaches, united to Christ, in 
 Him we are made at one with God. God as He is in 
 Christ is in the man who accepts Christ, and Christ 
 Himself is in him a real spiritual, helping, saving, 
 and perfecting Power in relation to God and to that 
 true life and eternal destiny which have been realised 
 by Christ in our name, and which, through that Spirit 
 which is at once that of God and of Christ, can be 
 realised in us all. The human soul is much greater 
 than most people allow themselves to discover. It is 
 not only in the image of God, but His Dwelling-place 
 and Temple. The soul can realise its relation to God 
 and at the same time to Christ, and can recognise the 
 presence of Both within itself in the one Holy Spirit, 
 which at once calls the soul upward and enables it to 
 ascend. 
 
 The Reconciliation is complete on God's part. It is 
 not primarily the reconciliation of man to God, but 
 God's reconciliation of Himself in His Righteousness 
 with man in Christ and His Cross — by means of which 
 He goes forth "reconciling the world unto Himself." 
 It is the reconciliation of an absolutely righteous God 
 with a sinful world, because the Divine Righteousness 
 in its relation to sin has been adequately set forth. 
 " By whom," says Paul, " we have received the reconcilia- 
 
i 9 6 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 tion." It is as if a Friend whom we have injured comes 
 to us and says, " I forgive you. Come and be friends." 
 There is nothing whatever lacking on God's side with 
 respect to even the greatest sinner in the world, and 
 there is nothing which he is asked to do but simply to 
 receive that which God sends him in Christ, which is 
 really to receive God Himself as He thus comes to him 
 for his salvation. 
 
 The old Calvinistic Puritans, such as Dr. John Owen, 
 saw clearly that the reconciliation was complete on 
 God's side, and they believed that it must also be 
 complete on man's side. But they could not help 
 seeing that it was not actually universal on the human 
 side. Therefore they concluded and argued earnestly 
 that the whole was confined to the elect. But this 
 was a strange conclusion. Surely a person may be 
 reconciled to his enemy and send him a message of 
 reconciliation which he declines or fails to accept. To 
 his message of Reconciliation St. Paul adds the warning, 
 " See that ye receive not the grace of God in vain!' 
 It is always possible to do this. When it is said that 
 on him who believes not on Christ " the Wrath of God 
 abides," what is meant by " wrath " is not a feeling like 
 human anger or active resentment, but that aspect of 
 the Divine Being by which sin is inevitably punished. 
 God's reconciliation of the world to Himself in Christ 
 means that men may thereby come under the operation 
 of His " Grace " instead of being under the operation of 
 His sin-punishing "wrath." But if a man refuses to 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 197 
 
 enter into this reconciliation with God, he remains 
 where he stood, under the operation of that "wrath" 
 or judgment-element which belongs essentially to the 
 Righteousness and Love of God, and which makes sin 
 its own punishment. 
 
 The universality and unconditionedness of the Gospel 
 is necessary for that Assurance of Forgiveness and 
 Acceptance with God which is so essential for the full 
 life of Sonship toward Him. How else can the in- 
 dividual sinner rightly attain to it? For want of 
 perceiving these features of the Gospel many never 
 do attain to it — which is a great loss to themselves 
 and to the world. Do we say that God forgives us 
 if we repent ? But how can we be sure that our repent- 
 ance is adequate ? Have we done " the works meet for 
 Repentance"? Have we forgiven our brother from 
 the heart ? Have we made full restitution to all those 
 whom we have wronged? Is not that impossible? 
 Are there not some to whom, alas ! restitution or 
 reparation cannot now be made on our part, however 
 willing we may be to make it ? Is it said that Forgive- 
 ness and acceptance are assured to all who believe in 
 Christ ? That is true if we take " believing in Christ " 
 as being equivalent to " receiving Christ " — simply, the 
 means of appropriating what God sends us in Christ. 
 But if we make " faith " a condition, how can we be sure 
 that we have complied with the condition? If we 
 regard " believing in Christ " in such a light, must we 
 
198 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 not ask more seriously than is often done, what is 
 meant by it? and whether we have really complied 
 with the requirement? In all this we are away from 
 the Gospel of Reconciliation, back to legalism and 
 separateness and dependence on ourselves: Self is in 
 some measure keeping out God. 
 
 But "Assurance" is very necessary if we would 
 experience the full power and blessedness of the Gospel 
 Salvation and have God's Love to live in us as it seeks 
 to do. For want of it many are ''weak," and our 
 Christianity a much poorer thing than it is meant to be. 
 We have referred to the conviction which the Puritan 
 Calvinists had of their Divine Acceptance on the 
 ground of the completeness of the Divine Reconciliation 
 for the elect. Calvinism made strong and brave (if 
 sometimes stern and narrow) men and women, because 
 it gave them confidence in their acceptance by God. 
 The want of a like confidence is one of the causes of 
 the weaker Christian life of to-day. Our present-day 
 Christianity has other desirable features, but it lacks 
 the old Puritan backbone. But Calvinism had another 
 and darker side to it. It was not every earnest soul 
 who could attain to confidence in his election by God. 
 Many humble, sincere souls could find no sure grounds 
 for that belief in their own case, and therefore their 
 lives were often lives of misery — a constant alternation 
 of believing and doubting, hoping and fearing, trusting 
 and despairing. Some were driven insane by anxiety 
 and uncertainty, and others drowned in a deep gulf of 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 199 
 
 despair. But Calvinism was a strange misreading of 
 the Gospel of the Grace of God. While there are 
 various forms of " election " in the Divine economy, 
 the Augustinian and Calvinistic doctrine of the election 
 of individuals to eternal salvation was founded on a 
 gross misunderstanding of the Apostolic teaching. Cal- 
 vinists were quite right in believing that they belonged to 
 the election of God ; where they erred was in supposing 
 that others were excluded from it. Paul's doctrine of 
 election to salvation was the very opposite of the re- 
 stricted Election of Calvinism. It was the extension 
 of God's election of Israel as His people to the Gentiles, 
 to. the whole wide world, to all who chose to come into it 
 by responding to His Grace in Christ. What Paul 
 proclaimed on the basis of the Cross was that God's 
 election, or choice of a people, was now open to all 
 men, that it was no longer confined to Israel; that 
 the eternal purpose, long hidden, had now been 
 revealed " that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs and fellow- 
 members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the 
 promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel " (Eph. iii. 
 1-7)- It was this that made him so obnoxious, not 
 only to the bigoted Jews, but also to the judaising 
 Christians. This understanding of " Election " as the 
 extension of the Kingdom of God to all mankind shows 
 clearly the grounds of confidence for all who will 
 accept the Divine invitation. All are invited to enter 
 it. The more we think of it, the more clearly will it 
 appear that there can be no other sure ground of 
 
200 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 assurance before God for any one but the proclamation 
 of a universal and unconditioned Gospel — the going forth 
 from God to the whole sinful world of a Divine Grace 
 and Love which only needs to be received by men — the 
 opening of a world-wide Reconciliation which only 
 waits to be entered on our part. Only thus can I be 
 certain that it is all for me. 
 
 It may be asked, How does this Forgiveness come to 
 us? In one aspect, it does not come to us at all. It is 
 always there for us in God who is always with us. 
 When we come to God we come to His Forgiveness. 
 A separate act of Forgiveness is not necessary for each 
 individual. It is a universal Forgiveness which we 
 make our own, " receive " or appropriate for ourselves. 
 In another aspect, it may be said to come to us in the 
 same sense as that in which Light comes into a darkened 
 room when the shutters are opened. The Light was 
 always there, and always the same thing. But it was 
 excluded from that room, and now it has entered it. 
 There is now a difference in our relation to it, and a 
 corresponding difference in its relation to us in that 
 room. But there is no change in the Light. The only 
 difference is that we have opened the shutters and let 
 it enter. When the Divine Forgiveness enters the soul 
 it is so real and so truly of God that, just as the physical 
 light entering the room makes itself manifest as light, 
 so God's forgiving Love makes itself felt as such within 
 the soul : " the Love of God is shed abroad " through the 
 Holy Spirit within us, bestowing a "peace with God 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 201 
 
 through the Lord Jesus Christ " which no efforts of man 
 can impart. We have then the proof of that which we 
 have believed. 
 
 Of course, in its completeness, Reconciliation with God 
 — At-one-ment with Him — means unison with God in 
 every aspect of His being and relation to us, and this 
 is not all at once made actual in our experience. It is 
 something to be continually striven after, and may 
 mean much, sometimes painful, surrender of our own 
 will and desires. It is something that we may never 
 feel we have wholly and permanently reached. Our 
 entrance into the Divine Reconciliation does not imply 
 that we shall never sin more, or that we may not 
 need a constant prayer for the forgiveness of sins and 
 shortcomings of the past, or of which we are conscious 
 in the present. On the contrary, the more clearly we 
 see what is sin and what reconciliation with God in its 
 completeness means, the more deeply will we realise 
 the need of asking forgiveness, and the more earnestly 
 will we strive after complete harmony with God. And 
 there are no limits set to our possible attainment, 
 save those that exist within ourselves. But when 
 we respond to His Grace in Christ, we know that 
 we are accepted by God in His forgiving Love; 
 we have "come to God"; we are at one with Him 
 in spirit and principle; and, in the endeavour after a 
 complete acceptance of His providence, a complete 
 surrender of our whole being to His will and service, 
 and a growing likeness to His character, the At-one- 
 
202 THE- GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 ment is becoming ever more and more complete in our 
 experience. 
 
 Finally, we remark that it is the unrestricted preach- 
 ing of such a Gospel that is most likely to win men to 
 God and the new life. When the appeal is made in 
 the name of "the law" it is apt to fall powerless, 
 although a sense of the reality and evil of sin is 
 necessary. Men already know what they ought to 
 do ; what is needed is something that will move them 
 and help them to do it. When conditions are laid 
 down — what they must do if they would find Divine 
 acceptance — their hearts are chilled — these are the very 
 things they feel themselves unable to do. In the Life of 
 Dr. Dale we find him remarking in a letter to Dr. Wace, 
 that " Moody in his last visit to Birmingham insisted 
 much on the necessity for repentance, and with far less 
 effect than on his former visit. In 1875 he preached 
 in a manner which produced the sort of effect produced 
 by Luther, and provoked the same kind of criticism. 
 He exulted in the free grace of God. The grace was 
 to lead men to repentance — to a complete change of 
 life. His joy was contagious. Men leapt out of dark- 
 ness into light and lived a Christian life afterwards. 
 The " do penance " preaching has had no such results. 
 I wrote him about it a few weeks ago. He said in 
 reply that it had set him a-thinking, and he wanted to 
 talk it over with me." 
 
 What is wanted is something that will lead to real 
 repentance — the open door, the Father's outstretched 
 
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 203 
 
 Hand, the kindly appeal to come home for all is forgiven 
 and will be forgotten. This is what is provided by the 
 Gospel rightly understood. It is the drawing nigh of 
 the Holy God and Father to sinful men with the word 
 of Forgiveness on His lips, spoken forth with fulness 
 through that Cross on which He gave up His Son to 
 die for our salvation, in whom we have been made 
 at-one with Himself representatively and can be so 
 actually, if we only will. Away from God, serving 
 other gods, or living as if self were a god, thus, not only 
 injuring ourselves but deepening the misery of a world 
 without God, we are really in the position of " enemies " 
 to God. We are opposing His loving purpose in our- 
 selves and in His world. What is more likely to melt 
 down the opposition of an enemy than to " heap coals 
 of fire " — the fire of Divine Love — " on his head " ? 
 This, God comes doing in Christ, if we would only open 
 our eyes to see it. He comes, we say once more, to 
 every sinner, to His greatest enemy, saying, "You 
 wrong yourself and you wrong Me, your Creator ; but I 
 forgive you ; I am reconciled ; I long to have you as 
 My child ; Come ! be reconciled to Me, for your own 
 sake, for My sake, and for the sake of My world." 
 This leads us to speak of the Gospel in its Social 
 application. 
 
XII 
 THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE GOSPEL 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE GOSPEL 
 
 IT would be a grave omission if we failed to consider 
 the Gospel of Reconciliation in its social bearings. 
 The desire and cry of to- day is for a Social Gospel, a 
 Gospel which shall not merely address itself to the 
 individual, but shall bring such influences to bear on 
 Society as shall change its order, so far at least as 
 to make life in its fulness more open to men and 
 women as a whole, — a Gospel that shall perfect the 
 collective life. This is greatly to be desired ; and this 
 the Gospel of Christ is designed to do. It is certainly, 
 as we are often reminded, a spiritual Gospel, one which 
 must make its appeal to the individual as a spiritual 
 being, not in view of his material interests; but this 
 by no means limits its purpose or circumscribes its 
 influence. Its social bearing makes itself manifest 
 from many points of view. 
 
 I. The Reconciliation to be effected through Christ 
 is unlimited in its scope. " It was," we read, " the good 
 pleasure of the Father that in Him should all the 
 fulness dwell ; and through Him to reconcile all things 
 unto Himself — whether things upon the earth or 
 
 207 
 
ao8 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 things in the heavens." It begins with the individual 
 soul, but it does not end there. Paul teaches that 
 the entire creation shall share in the redemption in 
 Christ. As long as there is anything on the earth 
 out of harmony with the mind and will and Love of 
 God, the Reconciliation on the created side is not 
 complete. 
 
 2. It is the reconciliation of God to man : it is as 
 a Gospel, not to the individual merely, but to the race, 
 to " the World," that it comes to us. Only because it 
 is such can the individual find a Gospel for himself in 
 it. The idea that any one can appropriate that Gospel 
 selfishly, or on any other ground than the fact that 
 he is a human being, is condemned by the very state- 
 ment of the fact of the Gospel. 
 
 3. Reconciliation with God means, as we have seen, 
 coming into oneness of spirit with the Love that God 
 is. That is a universal Love in which there is "no 
 respect of persons," the love of a Father to whom all 
 His children are equally dear, whether regarded in 
 their individual or in their collective life. To think 
 that we can be reconciled to God without being 
 brought into oneness with that universal Love which 
 God is, is wilfully and inexcusably to deceive our- 
 selves. 
 
 4. Again, it is impossible to be reconciled to God 
 without being in the same act reconciled to man. God 
 is our Father, but each man is our brother; and the 
 child who thinks that he can be at one with such a 
 
THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE GOSPEL 209 
 
 Father as God is without being at the same time at 
 one with his brothers and sisters in the world, quite 
 misunderstands that Father's character. Nay more, 
 it is in man that God is made most manifest to us. 
 In Society, men should be found living together as 
 the one great family of God in this world. Therefore 
 Jesus said that if a man would bring an acceptable 
 offering to God he must first be " reconciled to his 
 brother"; and the Apostle asks: " If a man love 
 not his brother whom he has seen, how can he 
 love God whom he has not seen?" and he adds, 
 "This command have we of Him, that he who loves 
 God, love his brother also." It is a real and loving 
 Family that the great All-Father seeks to behold on 
 the earth. 
 
 4. We have seen that Humanity is ideally an 
 organism of which Christ is the Head. In every 
 organism each member has its own place to occupy, 
 its own function to fulfil, according to what it is fitted 
 to do. So in the great human organism there is for 
 each member a place to occupy, a function to fulfil 
 in obedience to the Head. This implies opportunity 
 for each to take his proper place and to do his appointed 
 work in loving union with all the other members of 
 the social Body. 
 
 5. Christ's great mission, for the accomplishment of 
 which He laid down His life, was the establishment of 
 the Kingdom of God. That means the reign of God, 
 the ascendency of His will, the rule of all that is pure 
 
 14 
 
210 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 and true, just and loving among men in every sphere 
 and aspect of life. It is impossible that the idea of 
 the Kingdom can be realised by men and women as 
 separate individuals merely, thinking that they can 
 love God in their spirits, while ignoring or indifferent 
 to the condition of their fellows in their individual or 
 in their collective life. 
 
 6. A spiritual Gospel is one which addresses itself 
 to that spirit in man which is the centre of his person- 
 ality. If a man's spirit be made one of holy love, or 
 the abode of God in His love, it will inevitably show 
 itself as a spirit of Love in his conduct in relation to 
 the whole of life and to all human beings. To say 
 that a man is converted to God whose spirit is not 
 made loving, or who shows no proof of Love in his 
 life, is a contradiction in terms. It is the want of this 
 Love in the practical everyday life that is the only 
 real argument against Christianity, and it is this, more 
 than anything else, that keeps the world from being 
 converted to God. If I am starving, for all that my 
 Christian brother cares, how can I believe in the Love 
 he tells me of? 
 
 To seek the removal of social evils and the perfecting 
 of the social and collective life is, therefore, essential 
 if we are to stand in a right relation to the universal 
 God and Father. But how is this social perfecting 
 to be reached, except through the response of the 
 individual members of society to that Divine Love 
 
THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE GOSPEL 211 
 
 which seeks to make them at one with itself and with 
 each other? The Christian conception of a perfected 
 Society is that of a great organism, each member 
 obeying the Head, and the whole acting harmoniously 
 as animated by the Spirit of Love, in mutual regard 
 and common service. There can be no power working 
 on Society from without so as to reform and perfect 
 it, save the Divine power of Holy Love operating 
 through the individuals that compose Society, and 
 only as Society as a whole becomes permeated by 
 that Spirit can its perfecting be reached. What stands 
 in the way is the natural self-love that usurps the place 
 of the Divine Love in man. Until this be changed 
 there can be no permanent social well-being. Of 
 course, everything that tends to remove injustices and 
 evils and to bring about more just and loving relations 
 amongst men, commands the interest and support of 
 all who belong to Christ. But it does not follow that 
 any and every scheme which men may deem good 
 must receive the adherence of Christians. The love 
 that God is is a wise and righteous love which seeks 
 the welfare, not of any particular class as such, but of 
 man as man, which ignores all class distinctions, and 
 has no respect of persons. If, however, there be any 
 class of men which is placed at a disadvantage in 
 relation to the life which God means all men to live, 
 whether physically, intellectually, or morally and 
 spiritually, it must be the endeavour of those more 
 favourably situated to free that class from its dis- 
 
212 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 advantages and to place all men, as far as may be, 
 on an equal footing of opportunity in relation, not to 
 mere material gain, but to true life. Especially, if 
 there be those who have no opportunity at all to live 
 as God means them to live, it seems a bounden duty 
 for Christians to see that it is in some way provided 
 for them — unless we can be certain that God never 
 meant them to be here at all. And if some classes 
 have more influence in the making of Society than 
 others, to them the appeal must be made in the name 
 of Christ and of God. But the Christian man knows 
 that there can be no ultimate perfecting of Society, 
 apart from the perfecting in Love of the individual 
 members of Society. No one has shown greater 
 earnestness in the cause of social reform than Count 
 Tolstoy, yet in his Manifesto of The one thing needful 
 he says : " Man attains this aim — his own and other 
 men's welfare — only through the inner alteration of 
 himself, by elucidating and strengthening in himself, 
 a rational religious consciousness, and then ordering 
 his own life conformably to this understanding of life. 
 As only burning material can ignite other material, so 
 only the true faith and life of one man, being com- 
 municated to other men, can spread and confirm 
 religious truth. And it is only the spreading and 
 confirmation of religious truth which improves the 
 position of men. And therefore the means of deliver- 
 ance from all those evils from which men suffer lies — 
 however strange it may seem — only in one thing, the 
 
THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE GOSPEL 213 
 
 inner work of each man upon himself" (with, of course, 
 its influence on other men). This is most true, and it 
 is just the design of the Gospel to lead men to the 
 experience and practice of this true personal life. It 
 is simply the false life instead of the true, the natural 
 self-love, self-seeking, self-pleasing, that keeps alive the 
 evils under which men suffer ; and if these evils are to 
 be removed their cause must be removed, this irreligious 
 self-love must be changed into the real love of God 
 and man. If such love were active in every heart and 
 wisely directed, Society would infallibly become what 
 we in our best moments desire to see and what God 
 means and seeks it to be. Oneness with God means 
 feeling with Him and working with Him to the end 
 that the men and women whom He loves as His 
 children shall become united as His family on the 
 earth. How else can we be true to His Fatherhood, 
 or be really at one with God ? 
 
 But many are losing faith in the power of the 
 Gospel appeal to the individual. They point to long 
 existing evils, and remind us of how little effect all 
 these appeals seem to have had. They say they are 
 weary of hearing them, and wish to see some more 
 direct action on the existing social order. It cannot 
 be denied that too little attention has been given to the 
 practical working out of the Christian spirit in social 
 life. Mere individualism has too largely prevailed in 
 the name of religion. It was not so in the early days 
 of the Christian Church. Under the pristine influences 
 
214 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 of the love of God in Christ, a real, practical love to 
 man was quickened and made itself manifest in many- 
 ways, to the changing of much that had ruled in 
 social relations. But it must be remembered that 
 Society cannot be changed in a day or in a century, 
 and that, although the spirit of real love to man has 
 filled many individual hearts, it has been often im- 
 possible to give complete practical expression to it. 
 If to-day the feeling for social redemption has grown 
 strong, it is due, we believe, to the cumulative influences 
 of Christian feeling which have passed on from age to 
 age and from heart to heart, gathering strength as they 
 have proceeded, till now they are demanding adequate 
 practical expression. It is certainly the duty of all 
 who seek to live in reconciliation with God to promote 
 every wise and just endeavour to bring all the machinery 
 of Society into harmony with the Divine will for man, 
 and so be co-workers with God in His purpose to 
 "reconcile all things to Himself." But what many 
 Christians are waiting for to-day is to see some well- 
 considered and feasible plan for the perfecting of 
 social relations. They love their fellows and long to 
 help them, but the way is not yet manifest by which 
 they can effectually help, except by holding forth and 
 seeking themselves to be true to the Christian ideal 
 for the individual. And, after all, this is perhaps the 
 only way by which the social ideal can be reached — 
 by each man and woman, of whatever class, endeavour- 
 ing in the circumstances in which he or she is placed, 
 
THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE GOSPEL 215 
 
 and by every available legitimate means, to be thor- 
 oughly loyal to the Christian ideal, which is, in other 
 words, obedience to Christ the Head. 
 
 We are sometimes told, indeed, that the ideal of the 
 Christian life is impracticable or unrealisable in the 
 arrangements of modern Society. One who writes 
 with intelligence in a daily newspaper says, " Men grow 
 tired of being presented with ideals which cannot by 
 any ingenuity of personal effort be woven into the 
 fabric of daily life. A certain sense of need for con- 
 sistency compels many men to cease trying what they 
 find impossible, e.g., to translate the dynamic force of 
 religious feeling into the working of the social mechan- 
 ism of which they are themselves part." We know 
 that this is true, and can sympathise with it. What 
 such men long to see is the social system altered so as 
 to make the Christian life of love possible. But is there 
 not a fallacy — or more than one fallacy — underlying 
 this ? Is it not the Christian spirit in the individual that 
 is to bring about those changes, instead of waiting to 
 see them brought about for it ? What else can ever bring 
 them? The Cross of Christ teaches that the higher 
 life of Love is never easy for man rooted in nature-life. 
 It means self-denial, the death of the lower self in its 
 initiative and at every step. To make it easy would 
 be to make it something else, until the Spirit of Love 
 becomes universal and the higher nature totally sup- 
 plants the lower. It meant for Christ Himself the Cross 
 in the society which surrounded Him. That Cross is 
 
216 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 the symbol of Christianity ; but if Christ's followers are 
 to shirk the Cross when it comes to them, how can 
 the world or they themselves be saved? It is this 
 shrinking on our part from the Cross in which we 
 glory as we see it borne by Christ, that keeps the 
 world back. Men would gladly be saved through the 
 Cross of Christ, but they refuse it in their own life. 
 They want their life made easy. It is for this reason 
 that our Christianity is so uninfluential. 
 
 If to act out the Christian law of Love would mean 
 discomfort, or it may be pecuniary loss to some of us, 
 we must take up the Cross that comes to us. We must 
 be willing to be "crucified with Christ," if we would 
 "live together with Him" in real oneness with God 
 and man and with our own higher selves. 
 
 It will not do to throw the blame on circumstances or 
 on the machinery of Society. At the same time, much 
 of the social machinery needs to be altered ; but we ask 
 again, how is the change to be brought about except 
 by the action of those who are brought into real recon- 
 ciliation with God and inspired by His Spirit of wise 
 and Holy Love? Apart from such inspiration and 
 action, the case of Society seems hopeless. Only 
 force remains, and we all know that " force is no 
 remedy." 
 
 The Gospel is here for the very purpose of inspiring 
 men with this spirit. Yet it is all too plainly manifest 
 that Love does not rule in the life of even Christian 
 nations. Has the Gospel in this aspect failed then ? 
 
THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE GOSPEL 217 
 
 or have we failed to grasp and preach and illustrate it 
 in all the breadth of its Divine application ? One of the 
 two alternatives must be true. What is needed is that 
 God's Gospel of At-one-ment be faithfully and earnestly- 
 preached in both its individual and social aspects. 
 Men must be made to feel that over all there is God, 
 the Common Father of us all ; that the first great thing 
 in order to any real good is to be right with God, 
 one with His will, inspired by His Love, and that it 
 is this that God in the Gospel of His forgiving Love 
 pleads with us to become. They must be fearlessly 
 told that they never do come to God unless they come 
 to Love; that it is impossible to be reconciled to God 
 unless they are at the same time reconciled to man; 
 that the Love with which we are called on to be at one 
 is a Love that goes out impartially to all human beings 
 (and to all God's creatures) in every aspect of in- 
 dividual and social life; that it not only acts with 
 strict justice towards all, but seeks to " do good to all 
 men as we have opportunity,'' and will make oppor- 
 tunities for service to others. The Gospel comes to 
 make us co-workers with God in making ourselves 
 and the world what God in His love seeks them 
 to be. 
 
 We are not here laying down conditions of Recon- 
 ciliation, but simply stating what the God who seeks 
 us to be at one with Himself is, what reconciliation with 
 God really means when it is thought out. All this 
 may not be clearly defined to the soul that responds 
 
2i8 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 to God's gracious call in the Gospel. But it is all 
 implicit in a real response to it, and it will show itself 
 explicitly as the light of the knowledge of God shines 
 upon the heart and the knowledge of duty visits the 
 conscience. Without a continuous and growing re- 
 sponse to God as He increasingly makes Himself and 
 His will known to us, we are amongst those " who draw 
 back." The hindrances to such a manifestation in the 
 life are great — the temptations that have to be fought 
 against and mastered, the crosses that we may have to 
 bear if we are to follow Christ in His oneness with 
 God, the sacrifices that we may have to make if we are 
 to show His Spirit. But without sacrifice, not on 
 Christ's part only, but on the part of His representatives 
 and followers, the world can never be brought into 
 oneness with God. Yet what real sacrifices do many 
 of us make ? Is it not rather some form of personal 
 gain that not a few of us look for ? 
 
 It is the Christian Church that needs first of all 
 revival by the fuller reception of the Spirit of its 
 Master. The Church has come too greatly to exist for 
 itself, and to seek the support of the world which it is 
 here to convert. It has been afraid of losing status, 
 and has failed to preach the Cross as Christ preached 
 it in both word and deed, and to utter in His name the 
 warnings which He gave against " riches " and engross- 
 ment with " the cares of this life " ; and now it is begin- 
 ning to find that "the common people," who "heard 
 Christ gladly," are losing faith in it and in its preaching 
 
THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE GOSPEL 219 
 
 as a means of help and salvation from conditions which 
 they are convinced are not according to the mind and 
 will of God. We should ask ourselves seriously, what is 
 the good of our Churches and Colleges and ecclesiastical 
 machinery, even of our Gospel preaching, if the God 
 of Love is not made manifest to men, as dwelling, not 
 in a distant heaven, but in the hearts of His children, 
 as living and acting through them in this present every- 
 day world ? Surely, if this be not the case, " the salt 
 has lost its savour," the lamp which Jesus said should 
 enlighten the world and by "good deeds glorify the 
 Father" has ceased to shine. God can only be seen 
 as His children manifest Him, and through men only 
 can He be the Helper and Saviour of men. Jesus gave 
 His life for the salvation of the world. He did it, 
 not that men should find lives of ease or of temporal 
 gain through His sacrifice, but that "we should 
 follow in His steps," and, if necessary, with Paul, 
 "fill up in our own persons whatever is lacking in 
 Christ's afflictions on behalf of His body the Church," 
 and for the accomplishment of His purpose in 
 the world. Not without sacrifice can the world be 
 saved. 
 
 If the Gospel has been preached in a manner too 
 individualistic, and if there are those who say they love 
 God yet give no evidence of love to their fellow-men 
 except as " spiritual beings " ; if men have been led to 
 believe that religion can be a purely individualistic 
 enjoyment, — the Gospel is not to be blamed for this. 
 
220 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 The Christian Gospel of Reconciliation is that of God 
 with the whole world; it is the Gospel of His love 
 for man as man. And if that Gospel fails to in- 
 spire our hearts with love for God and man, then 
 — whatever change and amelioration may be pos- 
 sible — there is no other hope for the world's real 
 salvation. 
 
 We have already said that if Christ had been received 
 when He first came, even the nation would have been 
 saved from the awful Judgment that fell upon it 
 through the resort of its Leaders to the arm of flesh 
 against the Roman power. That lesson ought not 
 to be forgotten at the present time. We know how 
 Christ mourned over the beloved city : " O Jerusalem, 
 Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy 
 children as a hen gathers her chickens under her 
 wings, but ye would not ! Now the things that belong 
 to thy peace are hid from thine eyes, and thy house 
 is left to thee desolate." He loved His people, and 
 longed to save them from the disaster which He 
 foresaw should be their fate if God's gracious visitation 
 in Himself was rejected. They laughed at His 
 warnings. But the doom fell — a doom from which 
 that nation has not yet recovered. Other nations have 
 in like manner suffered in more recent times because 
 the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of real practical Love, 
 has not ruled in them. To-day, Christ's spiritual 
 Gospel is able to save the world even socially ; but if 
 God as He comes to us in His Son be rejected, the old 
 
THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE GOSPEL 221 
 
 error will be repeated with the old consequences in a 
 new form. The word, through the prophet, comes to us 
 to-day as the call of God : " Look unto Me and be saved, 
 all ye ends of the earth; for beside Me there is no 
 Saviour." 
 
XIII 
 THE FINAL QUESTION 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 THE FINAL QUESTION 
 
 WE trust that from what has been said the relation 
 of the Cross to the Gospel of Reconciliation 
 and Forgiveness will be apparent. But we believe so 
 strongly in the reality of the Divine Forgiveness, and 
 see so many examples of its saving power, that we are 
 anxious that any possible obstacle to its experience 
 may be removed. It has been for the sake of the 
 Gospel, that it may continue to come to us in all its 
 power and freed from elements which hinder or pervert 
 its influence with many, that we have sought to re-state 
 the doctrine of the Cross. We are more anxious that 
 the Gospel should be believed in than to establish any 
 particular theory. If the Cross be regarded so that 
 men see it to be the means by which God comes to 
 them in His reconciling Love, that is the chief concern. 
 The Divine meaning and purpose of the Cross is to 
 bring us to God, so that His Love may displace self- 
 love in the heart and bring God Himself in His Holy 
 Spirit to live in us and act through us. Whatever has 
 that effect is truest for us. In preaching the Gospel 
 a detailed theory of the Cross is not necessary. It is 
 sufficient if it be shown to be that great sacrifice in 
 J 5 
 
226 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 which both the righteousness and the love of God were 
 supremely manifested — the completion of Christ's great 
 life-work of the at-one-ment of God and man, and the 
 inspiration to our own true life in the Spirit of Christ. 
 
 We can still use the old phraseology, although in 
 clearer light and with deepened meaning. When the first 
 Christians said that Jesus " died for our sins " or " bore 
 our sins," they spoke in the language of sacrifice, and 
 meant that Jesus died in order that God's Forgiveness 
 might be theirs. They saw God's love in His gift of 
 His Son as a sacrifice for their sins. We can see now, 
 that while Jesus truly died on account of our sins, and 
 bore our sins, no sacrifice was required in order to 
 forgiveness, but that God's giving up His Son to die 
 for us was the supreme proof of His forgiving love. 
 When Paul said that it was to demonstrate God's 
 righteousness in view of His passing over sin that 
 Christ died, he had primarily in view the doom of sin 
 under "the Law." We can see that there was no 
 externally given Law that had any such claim on God 
 as required to be met by the death of His Son. But 
 we can also see that God's righteousness in relation to 
 sin was demonstrated, both by Christ's representative 
 death to sin, and by His being given up to suffer the 
 worst consequences of sin, as these come on man 
 through the Divine punitive righteousness which makes 
 sin its own punishment till it shows itself destructive 
 of the true humanity. And we can believe that such 
 a manifestation of the evil of sin and of God's righteous 
 judgment on it was necessary in order that, while He 
 
THE FINAL QUESTION 227 
 
 was forgiving sin, His righteousness should be mani- 
 fested and men saved from the sin which has such 
 consequences. It was thus that Christ "died for our 
 sins," and that God was in Christ reconciling the world 
 to Himself, that, His righteousness being thus once for 
 all set forth, the Forgiveness already in His heart might 
 go forth to the world so as to save it. The Cross was 
 thus at the same time the supreme manifestation of the 
 Love of God and of His own suffering through sin. 
 It was through His Cross that Christ's Gospel of the 
 Heavenly Father's love received its complete and final 
 expression. 
 
 It is with the Gospel that the Church, as carrying on 
 the " ministry of Reconciliation," should be primarily 
 concerned ; and only with other matters as these bear 
 directly on the Gospel and its work individually and 
 socially. Although deeper questions lie behind it, the 
 Gospel is in itself a very simple thing, and it has proved 
 its reality in the experience of men. It is something 
 that stands out clearly, so that it can be seen and 
 believed by all on the ground of its proved efficacy as 
 God's remedy for sin and the means by which His 
 purpose in man's life can be realised. Nothing can 
 shake that which has so entered as a power of God 
 into human experience. But we do not breathe the 
 same intellectual atmosphere as even our fathers did. 
 Our most pressing duty at the present time is to remove 
 all that may tend to obscure the truth of the Gospel, 
 and to present it so that it shall appeal to the intelli- 
 gence of to-day. If it be widely and heartily believed 
 
228 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 at home, it will not only do its own work amongst 
 ourselves, but it will be speedily sent abroad for the 
 salvation of the world. When we have more real belief 
 ourselves, the Mission field will find a more complete 
 and a more spontaneous support. 
 
 But at a time when everything is questioned, there 
 are doubtless those who are not only unable to believe 
 any particular doctrine of the Cross, but who will ask 
 themselves — and, indeed, it is a question we should all 
 ask — How can we be sure that there is a Gospel at all? 
 How can we know that God is that God of pardoning 
 and saving love which the Gospel of Christ declares 
 Him to be ? To say that Jesus declared it will not be 
 deemed sufficient : it will be asked — " How did Jesus 
 know ? " 
 
 i. Let us say then, in the first place, that it is an 
 error to which Scripture gives no support to suppose 
 that the Divine Forgiveness is grounded on the Cross. 
 The Divine Forgiveness goes forth to men, not because 
 of the Cross ; on the contrary, the Cross came to Christ 
 because God was forgiving men. Instead of Forgiveness 
 being grounded on the Cross, the Cross is grounded on 
 the forgiving love of God. 
 
 Christ, we have seen, came preaching "the Gospel of 
 God." The Gospel that goes forth through His Cross 
 is not a different Gospel, but is that same Gospel, with 
 its full Divine attestation and in the completeness of its 
 power. The idea that the Gospel that Paul preached 
 was an entirely new Gospel, different from that which 
 Jesus preached, has misled many. Jesus preached 
 
THE FINAL QUESTION 229 
 
 " the Gospel of the Kingdom of God," and so did Paul. 
 To both Jesus and Paul it was a spiritual Kingdom. 
 To Paul it came in power through the Cross, as Jesus 
 believed and said it should do. It was, Paul said, 
 "righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit," 
 made ours through faith in Christ. Both Jesus and 
 Paul sought to make men members of God's Kingdom, 
 both called them to sonship. Jesus sought faith in 
 Himself as He presented Himself to men : it was 
 "their faith that saved them." Paul also preached 
 " salvation " through faith in Christ as Christ had been 
 finally presented to men. In Christ's earthly lifetime, 
 faith in Him made men partakers in the healing power 
 of God that manifested itself in Him, and, according to 
 Paul's teaching, it was also faith in Christ that made 
 men partakers in God's saving Grace. Both preached 
 salvation through faith in the Son of God ; only, Paul 
 asked for faith in the completed manifestation of God 
 in Christ. And, we repeat, that the result, in the case 
 of both, — although, of necessity, because of the com- 
 pleted Gospel, more widely in Paul's case, — was to 
 make men the true sons of God and members of His 
 spiritual and eternal Kingdom. 
 
 2. We need to remember what the Divine Forgiveness 
 is. We have already said it is not the annulling of all 
 the consequences of sin, but our restoration to the 
 consciousness of the forgiving love of God, whereby 
 new saving influences are set a-working within the 
 soul. It is sometimes said that there is no forgive- 
 ness in Nature ; but even in Nature there is certainly 
 
230 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 restorative action : and when we come to God we have 
 come to that which is much higher than Nature, to One 
 whose Spirit can work in us mightily to our entire 
 spiritual recovery and upbuilding in our true life before 
 Him. The Forgiveness is here, in God Himself, in a 
 Divine forgiving Love that goes forth to all the world. 
 We do not have to wait till it comes to us, but only 
 to receive God into our hearts as He has come to us 
 in Christ. 
 
 3. To find an answer to the question, How does 
 there come to be a Gospel of Forgiveness at all? or 
 How are we warranted in our belief in it? we must 
 bear in mind how we know anything about God's 
 character at all. Man's knowledge of God has been 
 of a very slow and gradual growth. We only know 
 what God is by means of His self-revelation in Nature 
 and man ; in the moral order ; in the experience of 
 those who have believed in Him, looked to Him, trusted 
 in Him, and sought to live truly before Him ; above all 
 in life wholly devoted to Him. The supreme record of 
 such revelation we have in the Bible, especially in the 
 writings of the Prophets and Psalmists of Israel, cul- 
 minating in Christ and His Apostles. The view of 
 those early prophets was no doubt limited, but ex- 
 perience showed it to be true as far as it went. Their 
 ideas were germinal ones, capable of an indefinite ex- 
 pansion, as they themselves were confident should yet 
 be made manifest. 
 
 The conviction of the reality of the Gospel came to 
 men in the first Christian age — came, so far as human 
 
THE FINAL QUESTION 231 
 
 channels were concerned, to Christ Himself — mainly in 
 connection with the teaching of those Hebrew prophets, 
 and specially, as arising out of their confidence in that 
 fuller manifestation of God in His Grace which should 
 be given by the coming of the Messiah : " A Redeemer 
 shall come to Zion, and to them that turn from trans- 
 gression in Jacob, saith the Lord " (Isa. lix. 20). A Day 
 of Divine acceptance was to dawn upon them (Isa. lxi. 
 1, etc.). " Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that 
 I will make a new Covenant with the house of Israel 
 ... for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will 
 I remember no more" (Jer. xxxi. 31-37)- "I will 
 sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean 
 ... I do this, not for your sakes, O house of Israel, but 
 for Mine own holy name. . . . Then shall ye remember 
 your evil ways, and your doings that were not good, and 
 ye shall loathe yourselves in your own sight for your 
 doings that were not good " (Ezek. xxxvi. 25-33, e tc. 
 etc.). Such were some of the prophetic assurances 
 which led to the expectation of the coming of God in 
 His grace to the nation. 
 
 Jesus was confident that God was thus actually near 
 His people, if they would only open their hearts to Him. 
 " This day," He said, " is the Scripture fulfilled in your 
 ears." If we ask how He came to have this confidence, 
 the true answer is, we believe, that it was implied in 
 that very conception of God as the Heavenly Father 
 which He entertained as His deepest conviction — which, 
 indeed, God must be as the sole Source of our being. 
 This was what made Him the true Christ. He felt 
 
232 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 Himself called to proclaim the Gospel of the nearness 
 of God in His Fatherly love, inspired, even constrained 
 to it. And He felt Himself endowed and fitted for His 
 mission. He had such a knowledge of God, such in- 
 dwelling of and union with the Divine, such a con- 
 fidence in the Divine love and in the nearness and 
 gracious relationship of God to men, such experience 
 of Sonship in His own Soul, that He went forth preach- 
 ing with confidence, telling the people to wait no longer 
 for signs and visitations from heaven, but to turn to the 
 God who was near them now in His Forgiving Love, 
 and who had sent Him to declare this to them : " The 
 time is fulfilled," He cried, " the acceptable year of the 
 Lord has come; turn to God and believe the glad 
 tidings which I bring you." He bade them look no 
 longer for the setting up of an outward Kingdom : let 
 them turn inwards, in true purpose of heart, and they 
 would find God; ";for, lo! the Kingdom of God is 
 within you." 
 
 Although few of them rose to the full conception of 
 the spirituality of the Kingdom, the first Christians 
 believed that Jesus was the true Christ, and they there- 
 fore believed in His " Gospel of God." For a moment 
 the Cross staggered them ; but they came to see it, in 
 various ways, as the supreme attestation of Christ's 
 Gospel. Paul, in particular, interpreted the Kingdom 
 of God spiritually, and regarded the Cross as that 
 which brought the Divine Forgiveness to men con- 
 sistently with the Divine Righteousness, and, therefore, 
 savingly. 
 
THE FINAL QUESTION 233 
 
 Is this belief in the Messianic forgiveness as pro- 
 claimed by Christ a valid foundation for our belief in 
 the Divine Forgiveness? Rightly understood, it is. 
 As we have said, we only know God through His 
 gradual revelation, chiefly in man, in history, and in 
 human experience. His graciousness was thus made 
 known to Israel, proclaimed by the prophets, and 
 realised in some measure by the nation. The days 
 were to come when it should be revealed in all its 
 fulness. This was done in that human life of Christ 
 which culminated in His acceptance of the Cross for 
 man's salvation. If we believe in God at all, we must 
 believe that He is most truly manifested in a human 
 life of which He is the inspiration, a life devoted to the 
 Highest and Best, wholly responsive to the Spirit of 
 God within. If there be any Divine revelation at all, 
 or any knowledge of God possible, it is here that we 
 shall find them most fully given us. In Christ, in His 
 perfect oneness with the Highest and Best — with God 
 in His Holy Spirit — we have truly "God manifest in 
 the flesh." How could we have Him more truly 
 manifest ? The Eternal Word which went forth creat- 
 ing is here speaking itself forth in a human form, the 
 highest form in which God can manifest Himself in 
 this human world. God the Creator is thus incarnating 
 Himself, and, in and through that sacrifice which is the 
 expression of the very life of God, is working towards 
 the redemption and perfecting of His creation. His 
 work in Christ is in line with, and is the consummation 
 of, all His previous working in the world. What we 
 
234 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 behold in Christ is the expression in human form of the 
 otherwise invisible Divinity within and above us all, and 
 which has been striving to find expression everywhere 
 in man. Nowhere can we look for a higher or truer 
 knowledge of God : for there is nothing higher than a 
 perfect Righteousness, Truth, and Love. In no way 
 can the ethical character of God be known save as 
 it becomes expressed in a human life obedient to the 
 Highest and Holiest that moves within, and one with 
 the guiding and overruling Divine Will or moral order. 
 It is often said disparagingly that man makes his God 
 in his own image. He cannot do anything else ; and if 
 he does not confine himself to his own individuality, but 
 looks to the highest manifestations in humanity, he 
 is in the right way for finding the knowledge of God. 
 For man is the highest work of God on earth, and man 
 in his truth, i.e., in his unity with the Highest, Holiest, 
 and Best that inspires him, is the truest representative 
 and revelation of God to man. Now, 
 
 i. Christ's whole life was the expression of the. Holy 
 and loving Spirit of God, the proof of His goodwill 
 toward men and of His gracious purpose for them. 
 " He went about doing good, healing all that were 
 oppressed of the Devil," and left a legacy of the highest 
 truth for our guidance and uplifting. 
 
 2. His acceptance of the Cross for our sakes was 
 the crowning proof of the Divine Love that moved in 
 Him towards mankind. The very fact that God thus 
 gave up His Son — moved Him to accept and surrendered 
 Him to endure the suffering and death of the Cross 
 
THE FINAL QUESTION 235 
 
 for our salvation — in whatever way we may explain the 
 Cross — was surely the clearest evidence of the going 
 forth to men of a Divine forgiving Love. As we have 
 seen, God Himself was not merely outside, but truly 
 suffering with and in His Son. The simple fact of 
 the Cross endured for our salvation is, therefore, the 
 highest and the abiding proof of the forgiving love of 
 God. We do not need to know what precisely was in 
 the mind of God or of Christ as to the necessity for 
 that Cross, in order to believe in the Gospel that goes 
 forth supremely through it. We know that, moved by 
 the Divine love, Christ accepted that Cross for our 
 sakes. That should be sufficient for our confident 
 belief in the Gospel of Divine Forgiveness. And, while 
 Paul gave that fuller explanation of the Cross in its 
 relation to Forgiveness (as it appeared to him) which 
 we have had before us, with him also the deepest ground 
 of confidence in the Grace that came to men in Christ 
 was the love of God for sinful men which the Cross 
 manifested. " God," he says, " commendeth His own 
 love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, 
 Christ died for us " (Rom. v. 8). " He that spared not 
 His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how 
 shall He not also with Him freely give us all things ? " 
 (Rom. viii. 32.) "Herein," says John also, "was the 
 love of God manifested in our case, that God sent His 
 only-begotten Son into the world that we might live 
 through Him. Herein is Love, not that we loved God, 
 but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the 
 propitiation for our sins" (1 Ep. iv. 9, 10). All that 
 
236 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 was done in Christ was due to the love of God, and 
 was the manifestation of that love. 
 
 3. That conviction of the consistency of Forgiveness 
 with Righteousness, which must be felt if the guilty 
 conscience is to rest with confidence in the Divine 
 Forgiveness, may also be ours if we remember that it 
 is the Forgiveness of God that thus comes to us. We 
 may be sure that God can never be inconsistent with 
 Himself. Even though we do not see how it is con- 
 sistent with Righteousness, we may be sure that it is so, 
 just because it is God's act. We have further evidence 
 of such consistency in the fact that God's forgiving 
 love becomes the means of saving men from sin to 
 Righteousness — the most potent means of doing so. 
 
 But, while confidence in God's forgiving love does 
 not depend on any theory of the Cross, — and, as a sure 
 matter of fact, it has been enjoyed by many holding 
 quite different theories of it, — if we see how truly Christ 
 was the Head and Representative of our Humanity, we 
 shall be able with Paul to see both the love and the 
 righteousness of God manifested in that voluntary 
 acceptance of the Cross by Christ, in obedience to the 
 will of God and for our salvation, to which the Gospel 
 history bears witness, as we have endeavoured to set it 
 forth. This is the distinctively Christian ground of 
 confidence. 
 
 And if we realise what sin is before God, how con- 
 stantly we need the Divine forgiveness, how our higher 
 life requires it as its very atmosphere, how truly sin has 
 
THE FINAL QUESTION 237 
 
 its seat in the self-love and self-will of our hearts, and 
 is the fruitful source of individual unhappiness and of 
 social misery, we shall feel how entirely opposed it is 
 to both the righteousness and the love of God, and how 
 necessary it was, if the world was to be awakened to a 
 higher life, if it was to be really reconciled to God and 
 saved from its sinfulness, that such a manifestation of 
 both the Divine Righteousness and Love should be 
 given as was actually made in the Cross of Christ. 
 
 Deeper consideration will, we think, show how un- 
 able we are to do without the old Pauline Gospel, how 
 truly we need Christ to be " made of God unto us, 
 Wisdom, even Righteousness and Sanctification and 
 Redemption." It will be felt that, without being like 
 the Pharisee of old, whom our Lord pictured praying in 
 the Temple, we cannot claim such a righteousness of 
 our own, or of " the law," as shall make us worthy of 
 " the glory of God " — how truly it is only in Christ 
 that man stands righteous before Him in that com- 
 plete righteousness of the spirit which alone is true 
 righteousness. Knowing the necessity for that Right- 
 eousness in which we are accepted becoming actual, in 
 our experience, — that "without Holiness no man shall 
 see the Lord," — and being sensible of the evil of our own 
 hearts, we shall despair of our ability to work out that 
 Holiness by our own unaided efforts, we will feel 
 the need of our being possessed by a Holier Spirit 
 made our own, so that Christ must also become 
 " Sanctification " unto us. And, finally, although we 
 may not look on physical Death as the wages of sin, 
 
238 THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION 
 
 we will see it claiming all mankind, and we shall look 
 in vain for any clear evidence of " Redemption " from 
 it, save in the case of Him who is the Christian's living 
 Lord and Head, and who by His Spirit becoming ours 
 is able, according to the analogy of all life, to make us 
 sharers in that Eternal life in God which is His life. 
 
 But, we repeat, the Gospel of Reconciliation has its 
 Source in that Love of the Eternal Father which lived 
 and moved and manifested itself in the life and death 
 of Jesus Christ as the Son of God in human form. 
 Had not God " so loved the world," and had He not 
 been forgiving men, that Cross would never have been 
 heard of. Jesus might, indeed, have been put to death 
 by His enemies, but that voluntary laying down of 
 His life by the will of the Father for the express 
 purpose of men's spiritual salvation would have been 
 awanting. It is this, in its relation to both God and 
 man, which, while it illuminates and explains all the 
 martydoms of human history, lifts the sacrifice of 
 Christ above them all, and gives it that unique position 
 and Divine power which it has manifested in the past, 
 and which it shall continue to manifest till time shall 
 be no more. And even then shall be sung " the Song 
 of Moses and of the Lamb." 
 
INDEX 
 
 Acceptance with God and final 
 salvation, 189, 194. 
 
 Acts, Book of, the Cross in, 96-98. 
 
 Assurance, importance of, 197-200 ; 
 how attained, 197, 198 ; Cal- 
 vinism and, 198. 
 
 Atonement, wrong use of the term, 
 15 ; properly At - one - ment 
 or Reconciliation, 15-22 ; in 
 New Testament, 16-18; in 
 Early English, 18, 19 ; in Old 
 Testament, 20-22; Jewish 
 opinion, 21. 
 originates with God, 19, 20 ; 
 nature of Old Testament sacri- 
 fices and "Atonements," 20- 
 24; heathen sacrifices, 25-27 ; 
 origin of idea of Atonement, 
 20, 25 ; not adopted by true 
 religion, 27 ; must be At-one- 
 ment from God's side, 27 ; 
 always open in Old Testament, 
 28 ; God's way of At-one-ment 
 in the Cross, 28 ; the evils 
 of the wrong idea, 28-31 ; 
 "Eternal Atonement," 29. 
 Paul's doctrine of, 35 f. See 
 Paul and Cross. 
 
 Believing, the means, not the con- 
 dition of salvation, 187. 
 
 Blood, sacrificial, 21 ; of Christ, 
 meaning of, 37, 38 ; to be 
 spiritually interpreted, 157, 
 158. 
 
 Caird, Dr. E., on the possibility of 
 sin, 66. 
 
 Calvinism and Reconciliation, 196 ; 
 and assurance, 198 ; the great 
 mistake of, 199. 
 Christ, unity in life, teaching and 
 Cross, 3 ; His purpose, 4 ; 
 "Jesus" and "Christ," 12, 
 135 f.; 161. 
 
 " made sin for us" 47-53 ; inter- 
 pretations, 47 ; not made a 
 sinner, 47-49 ; Paul's meaning, 
 49-53 ; ethical aspect, 50, 51- 
 
 His death "for our sins" as 
 viewed by Paul, 57-65 ; 68-80. 
 
 teaching concerning the doom of 
 sin, 75. 
 
 came preaching the Gospel, 89, 
 90. 
 
 and the Cross, 89-95 > tne crv on 
 the Cross, 94 ; ethical inter- 
 pretation, 102. 
 
 the ethical At-one-ment, 101-103; 
 life-work and the Cross, 104. 
 
 How Christ bore our sins, 109- 
 131. See Cross. 
 
 and the Race: the Head of 
 Humanity, 135-147 ; unique- 
 ness vindicated, 135-144, 163 ; 
 as God incarnate, 136-138 ; 
 mode of Incarnation, 136; 
 wrong expectations, 136-138 ; 
 necessary limitations, 137 ; as 
 the Head, 138, 145 ; complete- 
 ness, etc., 139; the "second 
 man," 139; the " Son of man," 
 139, 140 ; man before God, 
 141, 146 ; analogy of Nature, 
 141, 142 ; God's ideal realised, 
 142 ; recognition by Church, 
 
240 
 
 INDEX 
 
 etc., 142-144; "judicial" and 
 ethical work as the Head of 
 Humanity, 145-146 ; need of 
 a recognition of the Head, 142, 
 
 144. MS, H7- 
 
 the ideal and the real, 135-138, 
 161. 
 
 Teaching and life-work, relation 
 of the Cross to, see Teaching. 
 
 His sacrifice and salvation to be 
 spiritually interpreted, 157 f. 
 
 forgiveness and acceptance in 
 Him, 185, 187-188. 
 
 in Him we meet with God, 187 ; 
 what He is made to us, 188. 
 
 union with, 195. 
 
 and social salvation, 220, 221. 
 See Social. 
 
 His Gospel, 228, 229. 
 
 the grounds of His conviction, 
 232. 
 
 as the Revelation of God, 233, 
 234-236. 
 
 value for Humanity, 123 f. 
 Christianity in its power, 5, 6, 125, 
 
 130. 
 Church, the, needs revival, 218, 
 219. 
 
 the Gospel its primary concern, 
 227. 
 Comparative religion, 25. 
 Conditions, none in the Gospel, 
 181, 184, 187, 188, 197, 202, 
 217. 
 Covenant Supper, 156 ; the new 
 
 Covenant, 156, 157, 231. 
 Creation, its source, 169 ; its com- 
 pletion through the Cross, 175 ; 
 and the Gospel, 207, 208. 
 Cross, the, involved in the Gospel, 
 3 ; its importance and central 
 purpose, 6, 11, 83, 174, 225, 
 etc. ; theories of, 7, 8, 225, 226, 
 227 ; inability to believe, 9, 
 228 ; present day conceptions, 
 10; desire for re-statement, 1 1 . 
 
 difficulties created, 15. 
 
 Paul's doctrine of, see Paul. 
 
 in its historical setting, 89-106 ; 
 how it came to Christ at the 
 hands of sinners, 93, 109, no; 
 His acceptance of it, 89-95 5 
 no explanation given, 95 ; the 
 
 Spirit that proceeds from it, 
 95,96; and the first Christians, 
 96 ; and Paul, 98- 100 ; as a 
 saving power, 101 ; ethical 
 aspect, 101, 102 ; and Father- 
 hood, 103 ; and life-work of 
 Christ, 104; "judicial "aspect, 
 104-106. 
 
 Re-statement of , in its "judicial" 
 aspect, 109-131 ; objections and 
 difficulties, 109 ; how to view 
 it, no, in; God both Law 
 and Love, in; the Divine 
 moral order, ill, 112; sin 
 punished by increase of sinful- 
 ness, 1 12-1 17 ; individuals, 113, 
 114; communities, 115, 116; 
 human solidarity, 116, 117; 
 vicarious suffering, 117-119; 
 Christ's as the consequence of 
 men's sinfulness, 119; the 
 climax and self-judgment of 
 sin, 120, 122 ; Christ's accept- 
 ance of it in the will of God 
 and moral order, 120; God's 
 judgment on sin, 120, 121 ; 
 Humanity acting self-destruc- 
 tively, 121-125 ; the only way 
 in which God's righteousness, 
 in relation to sin could be 
 manifested, 121 ; the Wisdom 
 and the Power of God, 125 ; 
 Christ literally bearing our sins, 
 126, 127 ; the only way in 
 which their punishment came 
 upon Him, 127 ; God's con- 
 demnation of sin, 127 ; death 
 of, 128 ; why necessary, 128 ; 
 what Christ did for us, 128, 
 129 ; what the Cross was not, 
 130; spiritual importance of 
 judicial aspect, 130, 131. 
 
 summary statements of the 
 doctrine, 125, 127, 128, 129, 
 145, 146, 162, 163, 226. 
 
 uniqueness of, 163, 174, 239. 
 
 as the manifestation of the Love of 
 God, 167-178. See God. 
 
 must be within, 177; loyalty to, 
 217 ; in relation to faith in 
 the Gospel, 226 ; the simple 
 preaching of, 226 ; supreme 
 proof of Divine Love, 235, etc. 
 
INDEX 
 
 241 
 
 Dale, Dr., on human solidarity, 
 117; Mr. Moody's preaching, 
 202. 
 
 Davidson, Dr. A. B., on Atone- 
 ment in Old Testament, 21; Old 
 Testament sacrifices, 22 ; death, 
 
 77- 
 Death, as the doom of sin, 73—78 ; 
 not physical, 73-77 ! meaning 
 0I > 77> 78 ! Christ's teaching 
 concerning, 75 ; Paul's, 73, 75, 
 
 77- 
 Deissmann, on hilasterion, 38 
 
 (note). 
 Denney, Dr., on theories of the 
 
 Cross, 8 ; death as a penalty, 73. 
 Doctrines, what gives value to, 4. 
 Dorner, Dr., on Old Testament 
 
 sacrifices, 23 ; heathen, 26. 
 
 Early Christians and the Cross, 96, 
 98. 
 
 Election, 196, 198 ; the Scripture 
 doctrine the opposite of the 
 Calvinistic, 199. 
 
 Erskine, Thomas, The Uncondi- 
 tional Freeness of the Gospel, 
 184, 193 (and note); the Philo- 
 sophy of the Gospel, 191-195. 
 
 Eschatalogical setting of sayings at 
 the Last Supper, 155. 
 
 Ethical aspect of the Cross, 36, 50- 
 53, 81, 101-104, 129, 145, 146. 
 
 Evangelical doctrine, the central 
 element in, 65 ; the test of, 
 190, 191. 
 Christianity, its greatest defect, 
 
 30. 31- 
 Expiation, 19, 21, etc. 
 
 Fatherhood, the ruling conception, 
 78, 103 ; and man, 78-79 ; and 
 Christ, 232. 
 
 "Flesh," the, 26, etc.; nature of 
 necessary, 171 ; the source of 
 sin, 171, etc. 
 
 Forgiveness, the Gospel doctrine of, 
 63-65, 183-191, etc.; prior to 
 the Cross, 36, 228, 229 ; how 
 it goes forth, 103, etc.; in 
 Christ, 185 ; means coming 
 to God, who is Love, 186 ; how 
 it ' ' comes " to us, 200, 203 ; 
 16 
 
 importance and power, 225 ; 
 whatitis, 185, 186, 229 ; kindles 
 love, 186, 191 ; how there 
 comes to be a Gospel of, 230- 
 233 ; validity of our belief in, 
 233-236; consistency with 
 righteousness, 63, 64, 236- 
 238. 
 Form and substance, to be distin- 
 guished, 10, 57, 58, 70, 95, 96. 
 
 God, presence of, 11, 12, 186, 193. 
 
 manifestation of His righteousness, 
 63-65, 82, 83, 105, 106, 109- 
 131, etc. 
 
 purpose in the Cross, 83, 1 74, etc. 
 
 both Law and Love, in. 
 
 how He punishes sin, inf. 
 
 transcendence and immanence, 
 113, 176. 
 
 judgment on sin in Christ's 
 suffering at the hands of sinners, 
 120. 
 
 how alone it could be shown, 121. 
 
 the Cross as the manifestation of 
 His love, 167-178; need for 
 seeing this, 167 ; not outside 
 of Christ, 168 ; taking on Him- 
 self the sin of the world, id., 
 170, 173 ; His life of Perfect 
 Love that of self-sacrifice, 169 ; 
 the Cross makes it known, 170 ; 
 responsibility for man's nature, 
 171 ; only spiritual influences 
 possible, 171; His burden, ib.; 
 inadequate views of the Cross, 
 173 ; a fresh creative act, 174 ; 
 the completion of the Creation, 
 175 ; how His life comes to 
 possess us, 176 ; oneness with 
 God, 176, 177, 195; the Cross 
 must be ours, 177. 
 
 need of knowledge of, as revealed 
 in the Gospel, II, 181, 230 f. 
 
 not beliefs about, but receiving 
 
 Himself, 186, 193 f. 
 His love the source of all, 203, 
 238, etc. 
 Gospel, purpose of, 4, 193, etc.; 
 power of, 5 ; and the Cross, 
 n, 225. 
 
 goes beyond Old Testament, 64, 
 183-185. 
 
242 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Gospel, the chief concern of the 
 Church, 225, 227. 
 its place in history, 5, 227. 
 
 questions concerning to - day, 
 228. 
 
 preached by Christ, 89 ; the 
 Apostolic not different but 
 completed, 90, 161, 228, 229. 
 
 of reconciliation, 181-203 > how 
 it has been restricted, 181 ; 
 legalism, 181, 182 ; and the 
 sacrifice of Christ, 182 ; new- 
 ness and advance of, 183-185 ; 
 forgiveness in Old Testament, 
 183 ; universality and uncon- 
 ditioned freeness, 183 ; and 
 repentance, ib.\ the place of 
 the Cross, 184 ; fear of Anti- 
 nomianism, 185, 189; what 
 implied in the Gospel, 185- 
 189 ; not negation of all con- 
 sequences of sin, 185 ; coming 
 to God, who is Love, 186 ; 
 salvation from self, 187; 
 God comes to us in Christ, 
 acceptance in Christ, 
 187-188 ; not final salvation, 
 189. 
 
 Has this Gospel been fully and 
 widely preached? 189 -191; 
 the philosophy of it, 191-194; 
 reconciliation complete on God's 
 part, 195 ; Calvinistic view, 
 196 ; the Calvinistic error, 199 ; 
 the Gospel and assurance, 197- 
 200 ; universal and uncondi- 
 tional, 199,200; what complete 
 reconciliation on man's side 
 involves, 201 ; effective 
 preaching of, 202, 203 ; what 
 is wanted, ib. 
 
 in its social aspect, see Social. 
 
 the Church's chief concern, 227. 
 
 its place in history and experience, 
 227. 
 
 how can we be sure of, 228 f. 
 Gospels, the, and the Cross, 
 
 89-95. 
 Grace, and Fatherhood, 78, 79. 
 
 and law, 185, etc. 
 Green, Mr. T. H., on the Cross as 
 revealing the nature of God, 
 174. 
 
 Head of Humanity, Christ the, 119, 
 1 3S -I 47- S ee Christ. 
 of organism, 141 ; importance of 
 the first, 141. 
 Hollmann, on words at the Last 
 
 Supper, 153. 
 Holy Spirit, see Spirit. 
 Humanity, in Christ, 103, etc. 
 solidarity of, 116, 117. 
 and the Cross, 121-126. 
 rejection of Christ, 121 f. 
 as a unity, 147. 
 an organism, 142, 209. 
 
 Immanence and Transcendence, 
 113, 176. 
 
 Incarnation of God in Christ, 136— 
 138, 169, 233, 234. 
 
 Individual, the Gospel appeal to the, 
 213-216. 
 
 Jesus and the Cross, 3, 91 ; " back 
 to," 12 ; more than a prophet, 
 64 ; and " the ideal Christ," 
 135, 161. 
 and the Gospel, 89, 90, 228 f. 
 the true Head of Humanity, 135 f. 
 See Christ. 
 
 Jewish elements in Paul's doctrine, 
 60-62, 69-73. 
 
 Jewish Encyclopedia on "Atone- 
 ment," 21 ; on Paul, 71 (note). 
 
 Jowett, Dr., on theories of the 
 Atonement, 8 ; character of 
 Christ, 143 ; relation to Christ, 
 144. 
 
 "Judical " aspect of the Cross, 35, 
 50 ; the truth in it, 83, 85, 105- 
 106 ; theory of, 109 f. ; spiritual 
 value of, 130, 131, 159, 160. 
 
 Justice and punishment, hard views 
 of, 172. 
 
 Justification, 194. 
 
 Kenosis, the Eternal, 169. 
 Kingdom of God, Christ's aim, 3 ; 
 
 its beginning, 6 ; Gospel of, 89, 
 
 90, 209, 210. 
 Kohler, Dr., on " Atonement," 21 ; 
 
 on Paul, 71 (note). 
 
 Lamb, slain from Eternity, 172. 
 Last Supper, teaching at, 152 f.; 
 eschatological setting, 155. 
 
INDEX 
 
 243 
 
 Law, the, Redemption from, 58-62, 
 
 7°~73 ; primary with Paul, 80 ; 
 
 universal, 79 ; God and, 1 1 1 f. 
 Limitations, necessary in Christ, 
 
 137. 
 Lodge, Sir Oliver, on selfishness, 
 
 122. 
 Lofthouse, Mr., in Ethics and 
 
 Atonement, on the Cross, 122 
 
 (note). 
 Love, the end of the Gospel, 4, 
 
 216; want of, 7, 30, 216 f. 
 the principle of the new life, Sj 
 
 etc. 
 the nature of God, i6gi.; 186, 
 
 208, etc. 
 the Cross the crowning proof of 
 
 God's love, 235, etc. 
 the Cross as the manifestation of 
 
 the Love of God, 167-178. 
 
 See God. 
 
 Man, God's ideal of, realised in 
 Christ, 142. 
 must freely become God's child, 
 
 169. 
 has necessarily a will of his own, 
 
 171. 
 Christ man before God, 139, 141, 
 146. 
 Mill, J. S., saying as to Christ, 143. 
 Moody, Mr. D. L., contrast in his 
 
 preaching, 202. 
 Murray, New Eng. Diet, illustra- 
 tions of "Atone" "Atone- 
 ment," etc., 18, 19. 
 
 Nature, man's, 5, 49, 66, 171, etc. 
 Nature, producing a Head, 141. 
 
 Olshausen, on Rom. i., 32. 
 Oneness with God, 176, 177, 213, 
 
 etc. 
 Organism and Head, 141 ; Humanity 
 
 an organism, 142. 
 Owen, Dr. John, on the word 
 
 " Atonement," 18 ; as a Calvin- 
 
 istic Puritan, 196. 
 
 Paul, Wrede's view of, 10 ; and the 
 Law, ib., 80, etc. ; does not 
 teach "Atonement," 16 f., 36, 
 69, etc. 
 
 Paul, doctrine of the Cross, 35-53 ; 
 "judicial" and ethical, 35; 
 originated with God, 36 ; the 
 chief passages, 37-41 ; a demon- 
 stration of God's righteousness, 
 41, 42, 63, etc. ; in what sense 
 of propitiation, 38-41 ; judicial 
 aspect, 50 ; ethical, 50-53, 81 ; 
 Christ made sin for us, 43, 47 f. 
 his doctrine considered, 57~85 > 
 our relation to Paul, 57 ; 
 redemption from the Law, 57- 
 61 ; from sin, universal 
 reference, 61, 62 ; essential 
 elements in, 62 ; necessity for 
 a manifestation of God's 
 righteousness, 63-65 ; the 
 necessary doom of sin, 65-68 ; 
 Christ's death " for our sins," 
 68-80; Paul and Jewish beliefs, 
 70-72 ; Death as " the wages of 
 sin," 73-77 ; reality of penalty, 
 79 ; primary reference to " the 
 Law," 80 ; wrong evangelical 
 views of necessity for the Cross, 
 80 ; Paul's ethical view, 81 ; 
 its value, 81-83 5 trutn under- 
 lying "judicial" aspect, 83; 
 the question to-day, 04, 85. 
 how the Cross came to him, 98, 
 
 99- 
 life in the Spirit, 101. 
 not the forms, but the substance 
 to be accepted, 128, 129, 162, 
 163. 
 
 Passover Festival or its substitute, 
 significance of, 152-155; New 
 Testament references to Christ 
 as Paschal sacrifice, 157. 
 
 Penal elements, rejection of, how far 
 justified, 70-80. 
 
 Penalty as consequence and punish- 
 ment, 79- 
 
 Pfleiderer, on Paul's doctrine of the 
 Cross, 70, 71. 1 
 
 Preaching of the Gospel, 182, 189- 
 191, 202, 219, 220; of the 
 Cross, 225-227. 
 
 Progressive Religion, 96. 
 
 Propitiation under the Law, 22 f. 
 in what sense Christ is, 37-41. 
 
 Punishment of man's sin, in what 
 sense lighted on Christ, 127. 
 
244 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Question, the, for the present, 84. 
 the final, 225-239 ; theories and 
 preaching of the Cross, 225, 
 226 ; the Church's primary 
 concern, 227 ; How can we be 
 sure there is a Gospel of Forgive- 
 ness ? 228 f. ; Forgiveness not 
 grounded on the Cross, but the 
 Cross because of God's Forgiving 
 Love, 228 ; Christ's and the 
 Apostolic Gospel one, 229 ; 
 Paul and Christ, ib. ; What 
 Divine Forgiveness is, 229, 
 230 ; how we know any- 
 thing about God, 230; Scrip- 
 ture and Christ, 230, 231 ; 
 Christ's conviction of reality of 
 His Gospel, 232 ; the first 
 Christians, 232, 233 ; validity 
 for us, 233 ; the Revelation in 
 Christ, 233-236 ; consistency 
 of Forgiveness with Righteous- 
 ness, 236 ; the distinctively 
 Christian ground of confidence, 
 236, 237 ; need of the Pauline 
 Gospel in its essence, 237 ; the 
 Source in the Eternal Love, 
 238. 
 
 Reconciliation or At-one-ment, I5f. 
 The Gospel of, 181-203. See 
 
 Gospel. 
 complete on God's side, 195-197, 
 
 etc. 
 on the human side, 201, etc. 
 what it involves, 217. 
 of all things to God, 207, 
 208. 
 Repentance and the Gospel, 183- 
 
 185, 187. 
 Revelation, method of, III, 121, 
 
 230. 233' 
 
 R^ville, quoted, 126. 
 
 Revival, need of spiritual, 218. 
 
 Righteousness, the Cross a demon- 
 stration of God's, 41-43, 63-65, 
 69, 81-83, 101, 102, 120 f., 
 127, 129, 145, 146, 162, 
 163. 
 
 Resurrection, Christ's, inseparable 
 from His death, 52 ; importance 
 of, 81, 97, 122, 125. 
 none for the sinner, 77. 
 
 Rothe, on assumption underlying 
 theories of the Cross, 16. 
 
 Sacrifices, under the Law, 20-24 > 
 heathen, 26 ; of God and Christ, 
 see Cross ; of Christians, 218 ; 
 essential for world's salvation, 
 
 a. 
 
 Salvation from sin, God's purpose, 
 83 ; what necessary, 84. 
 spiritual, 158-162 ; is from self, 
 187, 193 ; final, 189. 
 Schmiedel, on words at Last Supper, 
 
 153- 
 
 Schmit, on the Son of Man, 140. 
 
 Schultz, on meaning of Kipper, 
 21 ; expiation, 21 ; Covenant 
 Supper, 156. 
 
 Self and self-love, the source of 
 evil and wrong, 4, 5 > °f sin, 
 65-67 ; not sin in the animal, 
 or in man before a higher law 
 made known, 67 : salvation is 
 from self to God, 187, 193, 
 etc. ; consequences of selfish- 
 ness, 122 (and note) ; opposed 
 to Divine Love, 211. 
 
 Servant of Jehovah, 85,92,118,119. 
 
 Shakespeare, illustrations of use of 
 "atone," etc., 18. 
 
 Silesius, Angelus, quoted, 178. 
 
 Sin, nature and root of, 4, 49, 65- 
 68, etc. ; its doom, 65 ; and 
 death, 73-79; its appearance, 
 171, 172; God's dealing with, 
 173 ; made its own punish- 
 ment, III f., 127; climax and 
 judgment, 120 f. ; self-de- 
 structiveness, 1 21-125 '> de acn 
 of, 128. 
 Christ made sin for us, 47—53. 
 
 See Christ. 
 how it slew Christ, 126, 127. 
 
 Sins, how Christ bore our, 109-131. 
 See Cross. 
 
 Slack, Prof., Early Christianity, 9, 
 10. 
 
 Social aspects, 247. 
 
 Solidarity, family and racial, 115; 
 human, 116, 147, 209. 
 
 Son of man, 119, 140. 
 
 Spirit, Holy, in relation to the 
 Cross, 3,4; proceeding from it, 
 
INDEX 
 
 245 
 
 95 ; how it teaches, ib. ; in 
 Christ, 125 ; the essential thing, 
 101 ; Christ in the Spirit, 162, 
 
 I9S- 
 
 Social aspects of the Gospel, 207- 
 221 ; importance of, 207 ; no 
 contradiction to spirituality, 
 ib. ; the Reconciliation uni- 
 versal in its scope, 208 ; of 
 God to man, 208 ; with God 
 as Love, ib. ; as Father of all, 
 208, 209 ; organic, 209 ; the 
 Kingdom of God, 209 ; spiritual 
 carries everything, 210; social 
 perfecting, how to be reached, 
 210 f. ; the Gospel appeal to 
 the individual, 213-216; the 
 social order, 215, 216; sacri- 
 fice called for, 215, 216, 218; 
 what is needed, 217, 218; the 
 Church needs spiritual revival, 
 218 ; Christ as national and 
 social Saviour, 220 ; conse- 
 quences of rejection, ib. 
 
 Stevens, Dr., statement of Paul's 
 doctrine, 69. 
 
 Stoic utterance as to Humanity, 147. 
 
 Teaching and Life-work of Christ, 
 the Cross in relation to, 151, 
 163 ; God the Father, but also 
 ultimate Judge of men, 151 ; 
 the doom of sin, 151, 152 ; 
 His life as a ransom, ib. ; at 
 Last Supper, 152-157 ; His 
 
 sacrifice to be spiritually inter- 
 preted, 157-159; place of His 
 work/w us, 159, 160 ; the Cross 
 His great final word, 161 ; why 
 Paul's attention centred on the 
 Death and Resurrection, 161 ; 
 the ideal and the real Christ, 
 161 ; Christ in the Spirit, 161, 
 162. 
 
 Tolstoy, Manifesto, 212. 
 
 Trench, Archbishop, on the word 
 "Atonement," 19 (note). 
 
 Universality and unconditionedness 
 of the Gospel, 63-65, 183 f. 
 
 Union with Christ and with God, 
 195, etc. 
 
 Validity of our belief in the Gospel, 
 
 228-239. 
 Veracity, the Divine, and the Cross, 
 
 71, 80. 
 Vicarious suffering in its highest 
 
 form, 117. 
 of servant of Jehovah, 1 18, 119; 
 
 of Christ, 119 f. 
 
 War-spirit, 116. 
 
 World, what it needs, II, 181, 202, 
 217; its history, its judgment, 
 
 «3- 
 regarded by God as a unit, 116. 
 Wrath of God, what it is, 170, 
 
 196. 
 Wrede, view of Paul's doctrine, 10. 
 
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 the study of the New Testament in Greek.' — Expository Times. 
 
 'Absolutely indispensable to the understanding of the New Testament.' — British 
 Weekly. 
 
 Selections from the Literature of Theism. Some 
 Principal Types of Eeligious Thought. With Introductory and 
 Explanatory Notes. By Prof. Alfred Caldecott, M.A., D.D., 
 King's College, London, and Prof. H. R. Mackintosh, M.A., 
 D.Phil., Edinburgh. Post 8vo. Nett $2.50 
 
 This volume has been prepared with the aim of bringing^ together within a small compass some 
 of the leading positions in the philosophy of religion. It is agreed on all hands, in our day, that 
 no one, except here and there an original genius, can expect to be in line with twentieth-century 
 thought who dispenses himself from reference to the positions held by great minds. It is by 
 training his mind in their high thoughts that he can expect to win power and insight for himself. 
 
 ' Will meet a very wide felt want by bringing within the reach of ordinary book- 
 buyers full summaries of the treatises of the great leaders of thought who have written 
 upon Theism.'— Bibliotheca Sacra. 
 
 'Who would ever have expected so beautiful and delightful a book with such an 
 unpretending and commonplace title ? . . . Those are the passages which make Descartes, 
 Spinoza, Martiueau, Janet live ; and those passages, interpreted as they are interpreted 
 here, make the study of the doctrine of God, even in its philosophical side, alive and 
 practical for all men.' — Expository Times. 
 
 St. Paul and the Roman Law, and other Studies on the 
 Origin of the Form of Doctrine. By W. E. Ball, LL.D. Post 
 8vo. Nett $1.50 
 
 'Reverent and acute. . . . We have said perhaps enough to show how varied and 
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 ' Dr. Ball has two rare gifts. He is a discoverer and a writer. . . . Every discovery 
 is made known by the same unconscious skill — the touch of nature. ' — Expository Times. 
 
 The Religious Controversies of Scotland. By Rev. 
 
 Henry P. Henderson, M.A., Dundee. Post 8vo. Nett $1.75 
 
 Contents : — Prof. Simson's Affair — The Marrow Men — Hume's Essay on Miracles 
 — The Playhouse Battle — An Ayrshire New Light — The Apocrypha Controversy 
 — Edward Irving — The Row Heresy — The Rise of Morisonianism — The Scotch 
 Sermons — Robertson Smith and the Higher Criticism — The Bods-Bruce Case. 
 This volume forms the first of a Series entitled 'Religion in Literature and Life.' 
 
 ' We can remember no book devoted to the topic which Mr. Henderson handles with 
 such ease and power. It has been read by us with genuine enjoyment and appreciation.' 
 —Principal Patrick, D.D. 
 
12 T. & T. Clark's Publications. 
 
 New Testament Theology; or, Historical Account of the 
 
 Teaching of Jesus and of Primitive Christianity according to the 
 
 New Testament Sources. By Professor Willibald Beyschlag, 
 
 Halle. Authorised Translation. Two Yols. 8vo. Nett $6.00 
 
 ' Dr. Beyschlag has achieved so large a measure of success as to have furnished one 
 
 of the test guides to an understanding of the New Testament. . . . These pages teem 
 
 with suggestions. ' — Methodist Recorder. 
 
 The Teaching of Jesus. By Professor Hans Hinrioh Wendt, 
 D.D., Jena. Authorised Translation. Two Vols. 8vo. Nett $5.00 
 
 ' An admirable translation of the greatest systematic study of the teachings of Jesus 
 thus far produced in Germany.' — Biblical World (Chicago). 
 
 ' No greater contribution to the study of biblical theology has been made in our time. 
 A brilliant and satisfactory exposition of the teaching of Jesus.' — Prof. J. Iverach, 
 D.D., in the Expositor. 
 
 Dr. R. F. Horton refers to Beyschlag's ' New Testament Theology ' and Wendt's 
 ' Teaching of Jesus ' as 'two invaluable books.' 
 
 Old Testament Theology. The Eeligion of Eevelation in its 
 Pre-Christian Stage of Development. By Professor Heemann 
 Schultz, D.D., Gbttingen. Authorised English Translation hy 
 Professor J. A. Pateeson, D.D. Two "Vols. 8vo. Second Edition. 
 
 Nett $6.00 
 
 ' A standard work on this subject may be said to be indispensable to every theologian 
 and minister. The book to get, beyond all doubt, is this one by Schultz, which Messrs. 
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 books we have had in our hands for a long time.' — Professor A. B. Bruce, D.D. 
 
 The Truth of the Christian Religion. By Prof. Kaftan, 
 
 Berlin. Authorised Translation. "With Prefatory Note by 
 
 Professor Flint, D.D. Two Vols. 8vo. Nett $5.00 
 
 ' Quite apart from the immediate question of obtaining a knowledge of the Ritschlian 
 
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 fertile and able writer. In the near future his view of theology, its essence and its 
 
 accidents, will exercise a deep influence in our land.' — Expository Times. 
 
 History of the Jewish People in the Time of Our 
 Lord. By Prof. Emil Schuber, D.D., Gottingen. Complete in 
 Five Vols., with exhaustive Index. 8vo. Nett $8.00 
 
 ' This monumental work by Schurer has made all other histories almost superfluous. 
 In no other account of the period is there to be found such wealth of learning and such 
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 ' Recognised as the standard authority on the subject.' — Critical Review. 
 
 ' Every English commentary has for some years contained references to " Schurer '' 
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 difficult times which even approaches him.' — Record. 
 
 The Ethics of the Old Testament. By W. S. Bruce, D.D. 
 Crown 8vo. Nett $1.25 
 
 ' An excellent work. ... I have found it most interesting and instructive. I hope 
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 The Formation of Christian Character : A Contribution 
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 8vo. Nett $1.50 
 
 'A book which combines with a scholarly grasp of the subject m, popular gift of 
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 'Altogether, this is a spiritually instructive, suggestive, and refreshing book. 
 Ministers of the gospel will find the volume extremely helpful in the presentation of 
 gospel truth in its ethical issues.' — Interior. 
 
T. & T. Clark's Publications. 13 
 
 Lexicon Syriacum. Auctore Carolo Brockelmann. Prsefatus 
 est Th. Noldeke. In handsome Eoxburghe binding. Nett $10.50 
 ( The appearance of a new Syriac Lexicon, designed to meet the wants of students, is 
 an event of considerable importance for the progress of Semitic studies at home and 
 abroad. The work will be welcomed on all hands as fulfilling what has long been the 
 most conspicuous lacuna in Semitic bibliography. . . . The publishers have earned, 
 and will certainly receive, the thanks of every Semitic student for thus coming forward 
 to remove what had almost become a scandal to international scholarship, the lack of a 
 student's dictionary of a language so important to the philologist, the historian, and 
 the theologian. '—A. R. S. Kennedy, D.D. (Professor of Oriental Languages in the 
 University of Edinburgh) in the Expository Times. 
 
 A Concordance to the Greek Testament. Edited by W. F. 
 Moulton, D.D. (Editor of the English Edition of Winer's Grammar), 
 and Prof. A. S. Geden, M.A. In crown 4to (pp. 1040). Nett $7.00 
 
 It is generally allowed that such a work Is much needed in the interests of sacred scholarship. 
 There exists no concordance whatever to the text of the Greek Testament as exhibited in modern 
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 Testament as it is set forth in the editions of "Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf (8th), and the 
 English Revisers. 
 
 ' A Concordance which must displace all others, and which will remain for many a 
 year the trusted companion of the student of the New Testament.' — Critical Review. 
 
 ' I have no hesitation in saying that this work is one of the most important contribu- 
 tions to New Testament study that has been made during the present century. The need 
 of such a work has long been felt by critical students. . . . The typographical execution 
 of the work is beautiful. It will be a boon to all New Testament students, and must 
 supersede all similar works. ' — Marvin R. Vincent, D. D. , Professor of Biblical Literature, 
 Union Theological Seminary, N.Y. 
 
 Biblico - Theological Lexicon of New Testament 
 Greek. By Prof. Hermann Cremer, D.D., Greifswald. 
 Authorised Translation. Demy 4to. Fourth Edition. Nett $8.00 
 
 This Lexicon deals with words whose meaning in the Classics is modified or changed in 
 Scripture, words which haue become the bases and watchwords of Christian theology, tracing their 
 history in their transference from the Classics into the LXX., and from the LXX. into the New 
 Testament, and the gradual deepening and elevation of their meaning tilt they reach the fulness 
 of New Testament thought. 
 
 ' Dr. Cremer's work is highly and deservedly esteemed in Germany. It gives with 
 care and thoroughness a complete history, as far as it goes, of each word and phrase 
 that it deals with. . . . Dr. Cremer's explanations are most lucidly set out.' — Guardian. 
 
 ' It is hardly possible to exaggerate the value of this work to the student of the Greek 
 Testament. . . . The translation is accurate and idiomatic, and the additions to the 
 later edition are considerable and important.' — Church Bells. 
 
 LOTZE'S MICROCOSMUS. 
 
 Microcosmus : Concerning Man and His Kelation to the World. 
 By Hermann Lotze. Translated from the German. In one 
 large Vol. 8vo (1450 pp.). Nett $5.00 
 
 ' The English public have now before them the greatest philosophic work produced 
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 for the circumstances of English thought, just at the present moment, are peculiarly 
 those with which Lotze attempted to deal when he wrote his " Microcosmus " a quarter 
 of a century ago. . . . Few philosophic books of the century are so attractive both in 
 style and matter.' — Athenaawm. 
 
 ' These are indeed two masterly volumes, vigorous in intellectual power, and trans- 
 lated with rare ability. . . . This work will doubtless find a place on the shelves of all 
 the foremost thinkers and students of modern times.' — Evangelical Magazine. 
 
 Pseudepigrapha : An Account of certain Apocryphal Sacred 
 Writings of the Jews and Early Christians. By Rev. W. J. 
 Deane, M.A. Post 8vo. Nett $2.00 
 
 ' It is the most complete book on the subject in the English language, and contains 
 the most ample information on these writings. It is indispensable to every scholar who 
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 library of every theologian.' — PatoN J. Gloag, D.D. 
 
 3 
 
i4 T. & T. Clark's Publications. 
 
 Delivery and Development of Christian Doctrine. By 
 
 Principal E. Eainy, D.D., New College, Edinburgh. 8vo. 
 
 Nett $3.00 
 
 ' We gladly acknowledge the high excellence and the extensive learning which these 
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 measure, the power of acute and brilliant generalisation.' — Literary Churchman. 
 
 BY THE LATE PROF. A. B. DAVIDSON, P.P., LLP., EDINBURGH. 
 
 ' Whatever subject Prof. Davidson touched, there are always two epithets which may be 
 applied to his treatment of it : it is masterly and it is judicial. No one had a better power 
 of penetrating to the heart of a subject, no one was more skilful in the discovery of charac- 
 teristics of an age, the drift of an argument, the aim of a writer. . . His mastery of a 
 subject was almost complete.' — Canon Dkivkr. 
 
 An Introductory Hebrew Grammar, with Progressive 
 
 Exercises in Eeading and Writing. By the late Professor A. B. 
 
 Davidson, D.D., LL.D., New College, Edinburgh. Eighteenth 
 
 Edition. 8vo. ' Nett $2.50 
 
 'A text-book which has gone into its tenth [now eighteenth] edition needs no 
 
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 the enlargement of some parts where brevity tended to obscurity, will add to the already 
 
 great merits and widely acknowledged usefulness of the book.' — Critical Review. 
 
 'The best Hebrew Grammar is that of Professor A. B. Davidson.' — British 
 
 Hebrew Syntax. Third Edition. In demy 8vo. Nett $2.50 
 
 ' The whole is, it is needless to say, the work of a master ; but it is the work of a 
 master who does not shoot over the learners' heads, one who by long experience 
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 Old Testament Prophecy. Edited by Prof. J. A. Paterson, 
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 The Called of God. With Biographical Introduction by A, 
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 Nett $2.00 
 
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 Waiting upon God. Post 8vo. Nett $2.00 
 
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 The Epistle to the Hebrews. {Handbook Series.) Crown 
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 ' For its size and price one of the very best theological handbooks with which I am 
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 The Exile and the Restoration. With Map and Plan. (Bible 
 
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 'A remarkable instance of Professor Davidson's gift of compressed lucid statement. 
 
 ... It may be safely said that nowhere within anything like the same narrow limits will 
 
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T. & T. Clark's Publications. 15 
 
 The Christian Doctrine of Immortality. By Rev. S. D. 
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 United Free Church College, Aberdeen. New and Cheaper Edition 
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 1 This is beyond all doubt the one book on the transcendent subject of which it treats. 
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 Life after Death and the Future of the Kingdom of 
 
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 Forerunners of Dante: An Account of some of the more 
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 The Hope of Israel : A Review of the Argument from Prophecy. 
 
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 ' It is obvious that the argument from Prophecy must require modification from time 
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 Truth and Reality, with special reference to Religion ; or, A Plea 
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 The Sinlessness of Jesus. An Evidence for Christianity. By 
 
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16 T. & T. Clark's Publications. 
 
 WORKS BY PROFESSOR F. 60DET, P.P. 
 
 (Copyright, by arrangement with the Author.) 
 
 For devotional warmth and practical application, Godet is perhaps unsurpassed by any modern 
 commentator amongst foreign Protestants.' — Guabdian. 
 
 Introduction to the New Testament. The Epistles of St. 
 Paul. By Prof. F. Godet, D.D., NeucMtel. 8vo (pp. 630). 
 
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 Two Volumes of the English Translation are now ready, viz : — 
 
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 Critical Review. 
 
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 Commentary on St. Luke's Gospel. 2 Vols. 8vo. Kelt $4.50 
 
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 Commentary on St. John's Gospel. 3 Vols. 8vo. Nett $6. 75 
 
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 Freeman. 
 
 Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. 
 
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 Commentary on St. Paul's First Epistle to the 
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 Defence of the Christian Faith. Crown 8vo. New and 
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 ' There is trenchant argument and resistless logic in these lectures ; but withal, there 
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 Nature and the Bible : Lectures on the Mosaic History of 
 
 Creation in its relation to Natural Science. By Dr. Fe. H. 
 
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 Literary World. 
 
T. & T. Clark's Publications. 17 
 
 BY THE LATE PROFESSOR A. B. BRUCE, P.P. 
 
 The Kingdom of God ; or, Christ's Teaching according to the 
 
 Synoptical Gospels. By the late Professor A. B. Bruce, D.D., 
 
 Glasgow. Sixth Edition. Post 8vo. Nett $2.00 
 
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 ' To Dr. Bruce belongs the honour of giving to English-speaking Christians the first 
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 The Epistle to the Hebrews: The First Apology for Chris- 
 tianity. An Exegetical Study. Second Edition. Post 8vo. 
 
 Nett $2.00 
 This book, the fruit of thirty years' study, is a companion volume to Professor 
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 The Training of the Twelve; or, Exposition of Passages in 
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 Discipline for the Apostleship. Fifth Edition. 8vo. Nett $3.50 
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 The Humiliation of Christ, in its Physical, Ethical, and Official 
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 BY PROFESSOR JAMES STALKER, P.P. 
 
 The Life of Jesus Christ. New Edition, in larger type, 
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 The Life of St. Paul. Uniform with the 'Life of Christ' in 
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 %* Small type Editions of both Volumes in the ' Bible Class Handbook Series,' 
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 The Resurrection of the Dead. By the late Prof. W. 
 
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 The Incarnate Saviour: A Life of Jesus Christ. By W. 
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 Weekly,' etc. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. Nett $1.00 
 
 ' It commands my warm sympathy and admiration. I rejoice in the circulation of 
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T. & T. Clark's Publications. 
 
 Messianic Prophecy : Its Origin, Historical Growth, and Eelation 
 to New Testament Fulfilment. By Dr. Edwaed Kiehm. New 
 Edition. "With an Introduction by the late Prof. A. B. Davidson, 
 D.D. Post 8vo. Nett $2.25 
 
 ' No work of the same compass could be named that contains so much that is instructive 
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 The Right of Systematic Theology. By Professor B. B. 
 
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 Pre-Organic Evolution and the Biblical Idea of God : 
 
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 Darwin ianism : Workmen and "Work. By J. Hutchison Stieling, 
 
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 ( Undoubtedly the most trenchant criticism of Darwinianism that has yet appeared. 
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 History of the Christian Philosophy of Religion, from 
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T. & T. Clark's Publications. 19 
 
 Handbook of Church History : From the Eeformation. By 
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 BY THE LATE PATON J. GLOAG, D.D. 
 
 Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels. By the late Paton 
 
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2o T. & T. Clark's Publications. 
 
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T. & T. Clark's Publications. 21 
 
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22 T. & T. Clark's Publications. 
 
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T. & T. Clark's Publications. 23 
 
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24 T. & T. Clark's Publications. 
 
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T. & T. Clark's Publications. 25 
 
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26 T. & T. Clark's Publications. 
 
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T. & T. Clark's Publications. 27 
 
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28 T. & T. Clark's Publications. 
 
 The World of Faith and the Everyday World. As 
 
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INDEX 
 
 Adams, Prof. J., Primer on Teaching 
 
 Adamson, Rev. R. M., The Lord's Supper 
 
 Adamson, Dr. T., Spirit of Power . 
 
 Alexander, W. L., Biblical Theology 
 
 Ancient Faith in Modern Light, The 
 
 Ante-Nicene Christian Library 
 
 Augustine, St., Works of . 
 
 Bain, J. A., M.A., New Reformation 
 
 Balfour, Dr. R. G-. Central Truths . 
 
 Ball, W. E., LL.D., St. Paul and Roman Law 
 
 Ballard, Frank, The Miracles of Unbelief . . 5 
 
 Bannerman, Dr. D. D., Doctrine of the Church . 32 
 
 Barty, J. W., LL.D., Duty of Christian Churches 2 
 
 Bayne, Dr. Peter, Free Church of Scotland . . 32 
 
 Beck, Prof., Works by 26 
 
 Bengel's Gnomon 37 
 
 Beveridge, W., The Westminster Assembly . . 10 
 
 Beyschlag, Prof. W., New Testament Theology . 12 
 
 Bible Class Handbooks 35 
 
 Bible Class Primers 35 
 
 Blake, Buchanan, Works by 22 
 
 Brockelmann's Syriac Lexicon 13 
 
 Bruce, Prof. A. B., Works by 17 
 
 Bruce, Canon R., Apostolic Order .... 10 
 
 Bruce, Dr. W. S., Works by 12 
 
 Caldecott and Mackintosh, Profs., Theism . . 11 
 
 Calvin, John, Works of .... 34 
 Candlish, Prof. J. S., Works by 8, 27, and 35 
 
 Caspari, C. E., Life of Christ 30 
 
 Caspers, Footsteps of Christ 28 
 
 Cave, Prof., Works by 22 
 
 Chapman, Principal C., Pre-Organic Evolution . 18 
 Christlieb, Prof., Works by . . . .31 and 39 
 
 Clark, Prof. W., Pascal 9 
 
 Concordance to the Greek Testament ... 13 
 
 Cooper- Maclean, The Testament of our Lord . 10 
 
 Crawford, J. H., Brotherhood of Man ... 21 
 
 Cremer's Greek Lexicon 13 
 
 Crippen, T. G., Christian Doctrine .... 34 
 
 Curtiss, Prof., Works by zo 
 
 Dahle, Bishop, Life after Death .... 15 
 
 Dalman, G., The Words of Jesus .... 11 
 Davidson, Prof. A. B., Works by . . . 14 and 35 
 Davies, Principal, Atonement ... -33 
 Deane, W. J., Pseudepigrapha ... .13 
 
 Deissman, Prof. A., Bible Studies .... 5 
 Delitzsch, Prof. F., Works by . . . .20 and 39 
 
 Deussen, Prof. P., Philosophy of the Upanishads . 2 
 Dictionary of the Bible . . .4 
 Dods, Prof. Marcus, Works by . 
 Dods, Marcus, Forerunners of Dante 
 Dollinger, Ignazvon, Works by 
 Domer, Dr. I. A., Works by 
 
 Duff, Prof. D., The Early Church 
 
 Eadie, Prof. J., Commentaries . 
 
 Ebrard, Prof., Works by . 
 
 Edgar, Dr. R. McC, A Risen Saviour 
 
 Ewald, Prof., Works by . . . 
 
 Expository Times .... 
 
 Fairweather, W., Works by 
 
 Falconer, J. W., Apostle to Priest , 
 
 Ferries, Dr. George, Growth of Christian Faith 
 
 Forbes, J. T., Socrates 
 
 Foreign Theological Library . 
 
 Forrest, Dr. D. W., Works by . 
 
 Funcke, Pastor, World of Faith 
 
 Garvie, Prof. A. E., The Ritschlian Theology 
 
 Geere, H. V., Nile and Euphrates . 
 
 Gloag, Dr. Paton J., Works by . 
 
 Godet, Prof. F., Works by 
 
 Gotthold's Emblems 
 
 Gwatkin, Prof., Works by . 
 
 Halcombe, J. J., The Gospels . 
 
 Hall, Newman, Works by . 
 
 Hamilton, President, Beyond the Stars 
 
 Hastie, Prof. W., Works by . . 21,25 
 
 Hastings, Dr. James, Works by 
 
 Heard, J. B., Works by ... 
 
 Hefele, Bishop, Church Councils 
 
 Henderson, Dr. Arch., Palestine 
 
 Henderson, H. F., Religious Controversies 
 
 Herkless, Prof., Francis and Dominic 
 
 Hill, Dr. J. H., St. Ephraem . 
 
 Hodgson, G., Primitive Christian Education 
 
 Hodgson, Principal, Theologia Pectoris , 
 
 Holborn, Rev. A., The Pentateuch . 
 
 Hudson, Prof., Rousseau .... 
 
 Hutchison, Dr. J., Works by . . . 
 
 Inge, Dr. W. R., Faith and Knowledge . 
 
 Innes, A. D., Cranmer .... 
 
 Innes, A. T., Works by ... 
 
 Iverach, Princ. J., Works by . . 
 
 Johns, C. H. W., The Oldest Code of Laws 
 
 Johnston, P. de L., Muhammad 
 
 Jordan, Louis H., Comparative Religion 
 
 Kaftan, Prof., Truth of the Christian Religion 
 
 Kant, Immanuel, Works by 
 
 Keil. Prof., Biblical Archaeology 
 
 Kennedy, Dr. J., The Note-Line 
 
 23 and 39 
 5 
 24 
 
 and 35 
 imd 35 
 
 Kidd, Dr. J., Morality and Religion . 
 
 Kilpatrick, Prof. T. B., Christian Character 
 
 Kbnig, Prof. Ed., Exiles' Book of Consolation 
 
 Krummacher, Dr. F. W., Works by . 
 
 Laidlaw, Prof. J., Works by 
 
 Lambert, J. C, The Sacraments 
 
 Lange, Prof. J. P., Life of Christ . 
 
 Lechler, ProfT, Apostolic Times 
 
 Lehmann, Pastor, Scenes from Life of Jesus 
 
 Lidgett, Rev. J. S., The Fatherhood of God 
 
 Lilley, Dr. J. P., Works by 
 
 Lillie, Arthur, Buddha .... 
 
 Lindsay, Principal T. M., Works by 
 
 Lotze, Plermann, Microcosmus 
 
 Luthardt, Prof., Works by . 
 
 Macgregor, G. H. C, So Great Salvation 
 
 33 and 39 
 
 M'Intosh, Hugh, Is Christ Infallible? 
 Mackintosh, Prof. R., Hegel . 
 Macpherson, J., Works by 
 Mair, Dr. A., Christian Evidences 
 
 Martensen, Bishop, Works by 
 
 Matheson, Dr. G., Growth of the Spirit of Chris- 
 tianity 
 
 Meyer, Commentary on New Testament 
 Milligan, Dr. G., Theology of Epistle to the Hebrews 8 
 Milligan, Prof. W., Resurrection of the Dead . 17 
 
 Moffatt, Dr. J., The Historical New Testament . 6 
 Monrad, Bishop, World of Prayer .... 31 
 Moulton-Geden, Concordance to Greek Testament 13 
 Moulton, Dr. J. H., Grammar of New Testament 
 
 Greek 2 
 
 Muirhead, Dr. L. A., Times of Christ . .' 7 and 35 
 Miiller, Prof., Doctrine of Sin . . . . 30 and 39 
 
 Oehler, Prof., Theology of the Old Testament . 39 
 Oosterzee, Dr. J. J. van, Works by . . . . 24 
 
 Orelli, Prof., Works by 20 and 39 
 
 Orr, Prof. J., David Hume 9 
 
 Patrick, Principal W., James 2 
 
 Plummer, Dr. A., Works by .3 
 
 Profeit, W., The Creation of Matter . . 3 
 
 Piinjer, Prof., Philosophy of Religion ... 18 
 
 Purves, Dr. D., The Life Everlasting 
 
 Rabiger, Prof., Encyclopaedia of Theology 
 
 Rainy, Principal, D.D., Christian Doctrine 
 
 Rashdall, Dr. Hastings, Christus in Ecclesia 
 
 Reusch, Prof., Nature and the Bible 
 
 Riehm, Dr., Messianic Prophecy 
 
 Ritchie, Prof. D. G., Plato 
 
 Ritschl, Albrecht, Justification, etc. 
 
 Rooke, President, Inspiration, etc. . 
 
 Ross, Rev. C. B., Our Father's Kingdom 
 
 Ross, Dr. D. M., Teaching of Jesus 
 
 Rothe, Prof., Sermons for the Christian Year . 
 
 Saisset, Emile, Modern Pantheism . 
 
 Sanday, Prof. W., Life of Christ 
 
 Salmond, Principal, Works by . 
 
 Sayce, Prof., Religion of Ancient Egyptians, etc. 
 
 Schultz, Prof., Old Testament Theology . 
 
 Schiirer, Prof., New Testament Times . 
 
 Schwartzkopff, Dr. P., Christ's Prophecies 
 
 Scott, Dr. T., New Testament Quotation 
 
 Shaw, Dr. R. D., Pauline Epistles . 
 
 Sime, James, Herschel .... 
 
 Simon, Principal, Reconciliation by Incarnation 
 
 Smeaton, O., The Medici .... 
 
 Smith, Dr. G., History of Missions . 
 
 Smith, Prof. T., Works by 
 
 Smyth, Dr. J., Truth and Reality , 
 
 Snell, F. J., Wesley and Methodism 
 
 Somerville, Dr. D., St. Paul's Conception of Christ 
 
 Stahlin, L., Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl 
 
 Stalker, Prof. J., Works by 
 
 Stanton, Prof. V. H., The Messiah . 
 
 Stead, F. H., The Kingdom of God 
 
 Steinmeyer, Prof., Works by . 
 
 Stier, Dr. , Words of the Lord Jesus 
 
 Stirling, Dr. J. H., Works by . . . 
 
 Strachan, J„ Hebrew Ideals 
 
 Tophel, G., Work of the Holy Spirit 
 
 Troup, G. E., To Young Christians . 
 
 Ullmann, Dr. C, The Sinlessness of Jesus 
 
 Vinet, Life of 
 
 Walker, J. Dawson, Gift of Tongues 
 
 Warfield, Prof., Right of Systematic Theology 
 
 Weiss, Prof. B., Works by . 
 
 Welch, A. C, Anselm .... 
 
 Wendt, Prof. H. H., Works by . 
 
 Whyte, Dr. Alex., Shorter Catechism 
 
 Witherow, Dr. T., Works by . 
 
 Woods, F. H., The Hope of Israel . 
 
 Workman, Prof. G. C, Text of Jeremiah 
 
 World's Epoch-Makers, The 
 
 Wright, Dr. C. H., Biblical Essays . 
 
 Zahn, Prof. Theodor, Sermons .