IT is a bold and hazardous task to say anything on this subject and I must tread with bare, hushed feet, for it is a holy realm which we are essaying to enter. It must be understood from the first that I am not going to thresh over a heap of theological straw. I am not going into that realm of abstract metaphysics where one can always prove any thesis one may happen to assume at the start. I shall keep close to human experience. The pillars of our faith must be planted, not on some artificial construction of logic, but deep down in the actual experience of Life. There are external principles of the spiritual Life which are as irresistible and compelling as the laws of physics or the propositions of Euclid. The task of the religious teacher is to discover and proclaim these elemental truths, but we always find it so much easier to fall back on dogma and theories which have been spun out of men’s heads! In the Gospels and in Paul’s letters the laboratory method prevails—the writers ground their assertions on experienced facts, they tell what they have found and verified, and they always ask their readers to put their truths to the test of a personal experience like their own. Our modern method must be a return to this inward laboratory method.

No one can carefully study the theories of the atonement which have prevailed at the various epochs of Christian history without discovering that there has been in them a very large mixture of paganism. They have been deeply colored by mythology and by the crude ideas of primitive sacrifice. They start, not with the idea of God which Christ has revealed, but with a capricious sovereign, angry at sorely tempted, sinning man, and forgiving only after a sacrifice has satisfied Him. They treat sin not as a fact of experience, but as the result of an ancestral fall, which piled up an infinite debt against the race. They all move in the realm of law rather than in the domain of personality. They are all, more or less, vitiated by abstract and mathematical reasoning, while sin and salvation are always affairs of the inward life, and are of all things personal and concrete. The first step to a coercive conception of the atonement is to get out of the realm of legal phrases into the region of personality.

Sin is no abstract dogma. It is not a debt which somebody can pay and so wash off the slate. Sin is a fact within our lives. It is a condition of heart and will. There is no sin apart from a sinner. Wherever sin exists there is a conscious deviation from a standard—a sag of the nature, and it produces an effect upon the entire personality. The person who sins disobeys a sense of right. He falls below his vision of the good. He sees a path, but he does not walk in it. He hears a voice, but he says “no” instead of “yes.” He is aware of a higher self which makes its appeal, but he lets the lower have the reins. There is no description of sin anywhere to compare with the powerful narrative out of the actual life of the Apostle Paul, found in Romans VII: 9-25. The thing which moves us as we read it is the picture here drawn of our own state. A lower nature dominates us and spoils our life. “What I would I do not; what I would not that I do.”

The most solemn fact of sin is its accumulation of consequences in the life of the person. Each sin tends to produce a set of the nature. It weaves a mesh of habit. It makes toward a dominion, or as Paul calls it, a law of sin in the man—“Wretched Man,” who sees a shining possible life, but stays below, chained to a body of sin. Sin, real sin, and not the fictitious abstraction which figures in theories, is a condition of personal will and action much more than a debt to be paid or forgiven. The problem is far deeper. The only possible remedy here is to get a new man, a transformation of personality. Relief from penalty will not stead. Forgiveness is not enough. Relief from penalty, forgiveness alone, might spoil us, and make us think too lightly of our own sin. No, it is not a judicial relief which our panting, sin-defeated hearts cry out for. We want more than the knowledge that the past is covered and will not count on the books against us. We want blackness replaced by whiteness, we want weakness replaced by power, we want to experience a new set of our innermost nature which will make us more than conquerors. We seek deliverance not from penalty and debt—but deliverance from the life of sin into a life of holy will.

There is still another aspect to sin which must be considered before we can fully appreciate the way of salvation which the Gospel reveals. Sin not only spoils the sinner’s life and drags him into slavery. It separates him from God. It opens a chasm between him and his heavenly Father, or to vary the figure it casts a shadow on God’s face. God seems far away and stern. The sense of warmth and tenderness vanishes. The sinner can see God only through the veil of his sins. This is a universal experience. The same thing happens in our relations with men. As soon as we have injured a person, treated him unfairly, played him false, a chasm opens between our life and his. We transfer our changed attitude to him. We dislike to meet him. We have no comfort in his presence. We interpret all his actions through the shadow which our deed has created. Our sense of wrong-doing makes us afraid of the person wronged.

The conduct of little children offers a good illustration of this subjective effect of sin, because in them one catches the attitude at its primitive stage before reflection colors it. Some little child has disobeyed his father and discovers, perhaps for the first time, that he has “something inside which he cannot do what he wants to with,” as a little boy said. When he begins to think of meeting his father he grows uncomfortable. It is not punishment he is afraid of, he has no anticipation of that. He is conscious of wrong doing and it has made a chasm between himself and his father. He reads his father’s attitude now in the shadow of his deed. He has no joy or confidence in meeting him. Something strange has come between them.

What does the little fellow do? He instinctively feels the need of some sacrifice. He must soften his father by giving him something. He breaks open his bank and brings his father his pennies, or he brings in his hand the most precious plaything he owns, and acts out his troubled inward condition. He wants the gap closed and he feels that it will cost something to get it closed.[7] That is human nature. That feeling is deep-rooted in man wherever he is found. He is conscious that sin separates and he feels that something costly and precious is required to close the chasm. Sacrifice is one of the deepest and most permanent facts of the budding spiritual life. Its origin is far back in history. The tattered papyrus, the fragment of baked clay, the pictorial inscription of the most primitive sort, all bear witness to this immemorial custom. It is as old as smiling or weeping, as hard to trace to a beginning as loving or hating. It is bound up with man’s sense of guilt, and was born when conscience was born. Dark and fantastic are many of the chapters of the long story of man’s efforts to square the account. Priests have seized upon this instinctive tendency and have twisted it into abnormal shapes, but they did not create it—it is elemental. The idea of an angry God who must be appeased and satisfied was born with this consciousness of guilt, it is a natural product of the shadow of human sin.[8] The historic theories of the atonement, inherited from the Roman church, were all formulated under the sway of this idea.

The two fundamental aspects of sin, then, are (1) its inward moral effect upon the soul, its enslaving power over the sinner, and (2) its tendency to open a chasm between God and man, to make God appear full of wrath. How does Christ meet this human situation? What is the heart of the Gospel? First of all, Christ reverses the entire pagan attitude. He reveals God as a Father whose very inherent nature is love and tenderness and forgiveness. In place of a sovereign demanding justice, He shows an infinite Lover. We must either give up the parable of the Prodigal Son, or accept this view of God. But this parable fits the entire Gospel. John was only uttering what Jesus Christ taught by every act of His life and what He exhibited supremely on His cross, when He said “God is Love.” To surrender this truth, and to start with the assumption of a God who must be appeased, or reconciled or changed in attitude is to surrender the heart of the Gospel, and to weave the shining threads of our message of salvation in with the black threads of a pagan warp. He who came to show us the Father, has unmistakably showed Him full of love, not only for the saint, for the actual son; but also for the sinner, the potential son. Either God is Love, or we must conclude that Christ has not revealed Him as He is.

But the great difficulty is that so many fail to see what Divine Love and human sin involve when they come together. It has superficially been assumed that if God is a loving Father He will lightly overlook sin and cannot be hard upon the sinner. They catch at a soft view of sin and patch up a rose water theory of its cure. This soft view has appealed to those who like an easy religion, and it has often driven the evangelical Christian to an opposite extreme, which finds no support in the Gospel. To arrive at a deeper view we must go back to Christ and go down into the deeps of love as we know it in actual human life.

True love is never weak and thin, and unconcerned about the character of the beloved. The father does not “lay aside” his love when he punishes his erring boy, and keeps him impressed with the reality of moral distinctions. It is the father’s intense love which wields the rod. All true corrections and chastisements flow out of love. Even Dante knew this, when he wrote on the door of Hell, “Love was my maker.” It is an ignorant and mushy love that cannot rise above kisses and sugar plums, and it is extremely superficial to set up a schism between love and justice.

But that is not all. Love always involves vicarious suffering. Love is an organic principle. It carries with it the necessity of sharing life with other persons, and in a world of imperfect persons, it means not only sharing gains and triumphs, it means, too, sharing losses and defeats. No man can sin in a sin-tight compartment. Suffer for his own sin the sinner assuredly will. But he does not stop there. Many innocent persons will suffer for it, too. This is one of the tragic aspects of life which has baffled many a lone sufferer like Job. Those who are nearest and closest to the sufferer will suffer most, but his sin has endless possibilities of causing suffering upon persons far remote in time and space. That ancient figure of the ripples from the little pebble, which sends rings to the farthest shores of the sea, is not overdrawn. Not one of us can estimate the havoc of his sin, or forecast the trail of suffering which it will leave behind it. So long as life remains organic there will be vicarious suffering.

But that is only one side of life. Holiness also involves a like suffering. There are no holiness-tight compartments. No man can be holy unto himself. Just as far as he has any rag of holiness he must share it—he must feel himself a debtor to others who lack—he must take up the task of making others holy. That costs something.

You cannot command or compel people into holiness, you cannot increase their spiritual stature one cubit by any kind of force or compulsion. You can do it only by sharing your life with them, by making them feel your goodness, by your love and sacrifice for them. When a martyr dies for some truth, men suddenly discover for the first time how much it is worth and they eagerly pursue it over all obstacles. In spiritual things we always make our appeal to the cost of the truth or the principle. Think of the blood which has been shed for freedom of conscience! Remember what a price has been paid in blood for the principle of democracy! Thus we speak of all the privileges of life. They are ours because somebody has felt that they were worth the cost, because somebody has died that we might freely have them. It is the tragedy of human life that we must suffer through the sin of others, and we must suffer also if we would carry goodness or holiness into other lives. Every bit of goodness which ever prevails anywhere in this world has cost somebody something.

This principle of vicarious suffering is no late arrival; it appears at every scale of life, heightening as we go up—becoming less blind and more voluntary. It was a central truth of Christ’s revelation that this principle does not stop with man; it goes on up to the top of the spiritual scale. It finds its complete and final expression in God Himself. God’s life and our lives are bound together, as a vine with branches, as a body with members. So corporate are we that no one can give a cup of cold water to the least person in the world without giving it to Him! But He is perfect and we are imperfect, He is holy and we sin. If the wayward boy, who wastes his life, pains the heart of his mother whose life is wrapped up in him, can we fling our lives away and not make our Heavenly Father suffer? The cross is the answer. He has undertaken to make Sons of God out of such creatures as we are, to take us out of the pit and the miry clay, to put spiritual songs in our mouths and write His own name on our foreheads, will that cost Him nothing? Again, the cross is the answer.Here we discover—it is the main miracle of the Gospel—that the original movement to bridge the chasm comes from the Divine side. What man hoped to do, but could not, with his bleating lamb and timid dove, God Himself has done. He has reached across the chasm, taking on Himself the sacrifice and cost, to show the sinner that the only obstruction to peace and reconciliation is in the sinner himself. “This is love, not that we loved Him, but that He loved us,” and this is sacrifice, not that we give our bulls and goats to please Him, but that He gives Himself to draw us.

Browning puts it all in a line:

“Thou needs must love me who have died for thee.”

This is the key to Paul’s great message which won the Roman Empire. It was not a new philosophy. It was the irresistible appeal to love, exhibited in Christ crucified. “He loved me and gave Himself for me;” “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Sacrificing love, the Divine Heart suffering over sin, God Himself taking up the infinite burden and cost of raising men like us into sons of God like Himself; this is the revelation in the face of Jesus Christ. The heart that can stand that untouched can stand anything.The power unto salvation, the dynamic of the Gospel is in the cross, which exhibits in temporal setting the eternal fact, that God suffers over sin, that He takes upon Himself the cost of winning sons to glory and that His love reaches out to the most sin-scarred wanderer, who clutches the swine husks in his lean hands.

But the appeal of love and sacrifice is not the whole of the truth which this word atonement covers. We have been seeing, in some feeble way, how God in Christ enters into human life, identifies Himself with us, and reveals the energy of Grace. But we cannot stop with “what has been done for us without us.” Sin, as has been already said, is an affair of personal choice—it is a condition of inward life. It is not an abstract entity, in a metaphysical realm. It is the attitude of heart and will in a living, throbbing person who cannot get free from the lower nature in himself. So too with Salvation. It cannot be a transaction in some realm foreign to the individual himself. It is not a plan, or scheme. It is an actual deliverance, a new creation. It is nothing short of a redeemed inward nature. Such a change cannot be wrought without the man himself. It cannot come by a tergo compulsion. It must be by a positive winning of the will. A dynamic faith in the man must cooperate with that energy from God. Something comes down from above, but something must also go up from below. Paul, who has given the most vital interpretation of both sides of the truth of redemption—the objective and the subjective—that has ever been expressed, uses the word “faith” to name the human part of the process.

Faith, in Paul’s sense of it, means an identification of ourselves with Christ, by which we re-live His life. As He identified Himself with sinning humanity, so, by the attraction of his love, we identify ourselves with His victorious Life. We go down into death with Him—a death to sin and the old self—and we rise with Him into newness of life, to live henceforth unto Him who loved us.

There is no easy road out of a nature of sin into a holy nature. It is vain to try and patch up a scheme which will relieve us of our share of the tragedy of sin—or to put it another way, the travail for the birth of the sons of God. The Redeemer suffers, but He does not suffer in our stead—He suffers in our behalf, [?p?? not ??t?]. He makes His appeal of love to us to share His life as He shares ours. It is Paul’s goal—a flying goal, surely—“to know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death.” The boldest word which comes from his pen was: “I rejoice in my sufferings on your behalf; and fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh, for His body’s sake, which is the Church.” (Col. 1, 24.) It is not repeating His words that saves us, it is reliving His life, co-dying, and co-rising with Him, and entering with a radiant joy, caught from His face, into the common task of redeeming a world of sin to a kingdom of love and holiness.In that great book of spiritual symbolism—the Book of Revelation—those who overcome are builded, as pillars, into the Temple of God, and He writes His new name upon them. The new name is Redeemer. Those who have come up through great tribulation and have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb are builded in as a permanent part of the Temple, where God reveals Himself, and they share with Him in the great redeeming work of the ages.

Whatever it has meant in the past, in the ages when the races were sloughing off their paganism, in the future the atonement must be vital and dynamic. It must be put in language which grips the heart, convinces the mind, and carries the will. It will name for us the Divine-human travail for a redeemed humanity. It will cease to signify a way by which God was appeased and it will come to express, as it did in the apostolic days, the identification of God with us in the person of Christ, and the identification, by the power of His love, of ourselves with Him. We shall pass from the terms which were inherited from magic and ancient sacerdotal rites and we shall use instead the language of our riper experience. We shall abandon illustrations drawn from law courts and judicial decisions and we shall rise to conceptions which fit the actual facts of inward, personal experience where higher and lower natures contend for the mastery. The drama will not be in some foreign realm, apart from human consciousness, it will rise in our thought into the supreme drama of history—the tragedy of the spiritual universe—the battle of holiness with sin—the blood and tears which tell the cost of sin and create in response a passion for the Divine Lover who is our Father. It will stop at no fictitious righteousness which is counted unto us, as though it were ours. We shall demand an actual redemption of the entire self which has become righteous, because it lives, in Christ’s power, the life which He lived.

We shall learn to tell the story in such a way that the cross will not seem to be brought in, as an afterthought, to repair the damage wrought by an unforeseen catastrophe. It will stand as the consummation of an elemental spiritual movement and it will be organic with the entire process of the making of men. With charm and power, Ruskin has told how the black dirt that soils the city pavement is composed of four elements which make, when they follow the law of their nature, the sapphire, the opal, the diamond and the dew drop. The glory and splendor do not appear in the black dirt, but the possibilities are there. When the law of the nature of these elements has full sweep the glory comes out. Man was not meant for a sinner, and to live a dark, chaotic life. There are far other possibilities in him. He is a potential child of God. The full nature has broken forth in one life and men beheld its glory. “To as many as receive Him, to them gives He power to become the sons of God.”