So far-reaching a confession of the spiritual freedom and the spiritual dependence of man as is shown in the principles of Christian incarnation and atonement has never been popular. As they passed through the popular mind incarnation was often and widely made to seem a thunderclap from on high and atonement a transaction of the heavenly courts. All generations have clamoured for signs; and because none, such as they desired, has been given they have invented signs for themselves. The spiritual union of person with person in a coincidence of knowledge, will, aims, and mutual love, is at once too natural to be remarked in ordinary life and too remote from what is remarked to focus attention. It is much easier to think of a God disguised in manhood than of one who has taken manhood into himself and is 'made man' by a communication of himself to the man's own self. A king can masquerade as a beggar—that is a simple affair; but for the king to become a beggar and the beggar a king, the one remaining, nevertheless, beggar and the other king, is beyond belief by men whose belief is bounded by the behaviour of things that can be seen and handled, and by the logic of space. And it is much easier to think of salvation as bargained for, or bought, or handed over, than as attained only in the union of love and the co-operation of persons. In this corruption of religion human freedom has too often either been lost sight of or made a fixed character of man as man, a mark distinguishing him from other creatures and things. He is supposed to be free, but not to have the capacity to grow in freedom. 'Freedom of the will,' according to this, is like the right to a vote. It is a thing-character, ready-made, in a man, as the right to a vote is a thing-character assured to a man of a certain age and standing. A man does not advance towards spiritual freedom and grow in it; he has it as a diamond has a degree of hardness that enables it to cut glass. It is, in fact, a natural quality, not a growing achievement of growth that still goes on. Therefore it does not need to be fostered either by the man himself or by God. And it cannot be lost. So men too often have said.

On the other hand we have seen, in our enquiry, that life in its progress from its first entrance upon earth seems to have had as its aim growth towards and in spiritual freedom. The force of life, in the channel that led to man, seems to have been directed towards securing the maximum of choice and of field of choice for him, the minimum of determination and of hindrance from without. We said that the brain is an organ of indetermination; we might have said that it is the organ of a spirit seeking its fulfilment through freedom in growth, and growth in freedom. No religion which does not show congruity with what we have learnt about life can seem to us in truth of touch with it. The popular forms of Christianity do not show this congruity. Even the officially instituted forms have, according to the manner of institutions, overlaid that truth and encumbered spiritual and moral life with tradition, habit, heritage that are become its burdens instead of its instruments of expression. Therefore we have to go to the prophet and learn of him, drink from his clear fountain of living waters. There, unquestionably, we find what we seek, religion in touch, in more than touch, with life. It is one with life, this religion given and shown us in the prophet of Nazareth.

Then and there we see that the Christian doctrines of incarnation and atonement should properly have an unmistakable connexion both with our own lives, their needs and aspirations, and with truth we have come to know through men of science. Those doctrines are, to begin with, an explicit recognition of a promise of freedom which the force of emergent life has striven for and secured, and which men are called upon to realize for themselves. That men shall fulfil their destiny more and ever more of life, it seems, must become theirs. That is, more and more of the spirit and life of God must become in very fact, not merely their own, but themselves. This the Christian speaks of as the incarnation or the extension of the incarnation of God in man. And, plainly, there is nothing in the teaching of Jesus, or in his work and person, which implies that this process is mechanical or that, being spiritual, it can be inevitable. God in the nature of things, of himself, cannot—will not, if you like, it is the same—compel union with him. Therefore men can escape their destiny of union with God by rejecting his proffer of more and greater life. They have their fate in their own hands; they may choose amiss.

Then, the Christian says, that other aspect of the love of God, which in fact is only other because we speak of it as though it were and look at it in a special point of view, his atonement or reconciliation of man with himself, comes into play. Here, too, love seeks to win love, will invites the co-operation of will, and wisdom pleads. No mechanism, no compulsion, nothing arbitrary or even commanding. 'Come unto me,' he says. And every effort love can make that man may be won is made, even to that of the agony and death of the lover that the loved one may be rescued from slavery to self, and brought into the life of love and the liberty wherewith Christ would make him free.

A deepening enslavement by sin, or a growing liberty in vital union with the Christ of God—these are the alternatives put before us in the Christian religion. And again we see life—or shall we say God?—striving to give freedom, yet with no preordained success. As in the plants and beasts life found no open way for that advance, so, although in man the way was found, men can bring it to an end merely by desiring and seeking no more than gratification of the narrow interests of a self that is bounded by self-seeking. It seems that life can be as effectually checked by this as, in a lower order, it was checked by the coating of cellulose on the vegetable cell. It is possible for a man so to imprison himself in self as to shut out God, so to build a wall about himself as to cut off from his life that fountain of living waters on which its advance and true continuance depend. He contracts into an eddy, a circling stream narrowed within set boundaries of himself. He becomes as the lower beasts, but worse than they because he is no beast.

The Christian says that when this process of cutting off and shutting out reaches completion, the man is in hell. And the language of symbol and pictorial imagination has spent itself in trying to express what that really means. Naturally, the symbolism and the painting have varied with the character of imagination at different times and in different nations. What we must tell ourselves is that they are no more than this, and that they may well both falter and fail before a horror so extreme.

The shutting-down, the extinction, of a man—for this is what it amounts to—who is capable of an indefinite advance in freedom and life, in love and wisdom and knowledge—that is, in God and fellowship—is a catastrophe with which the blotting-out of all the mighty beasts of the past is incomparable. Consider, if he were the only man? Yet is he the less what he is because he is one of millions? For one man, the Christian says, Christ would die, though it is for all men that he died. 'The very hairs of your head are numbered.'

One man in hell—think of it. One man who might have been united with God in an influx of inexhaustible new life lifting him from order to order of glory—that is what the Christian sees and what leads him, or has led him often, to describe such a loss in terms from which we shrink to-day. But if we learn to see what it is the Christian means, can we say that he goes too far? Or shall we not say that if we had at our command words fit to depict his meaning they would go even farther? No doubt we see plainly the absurdity of material fires and the religious and psychological falsity of the picture of human beings vainly desiring God, when we know that, as has been said by a great Christian, 'the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him, with half that certainty, as God, the Source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.' But the fact remains that to lose life in 'the second death,' to pass out of all fellowship whether with man or God, to shrink into an ever-shrivelling creature who cares for nothing outside its ever-narrowing and concentrating self-love, is for any live, loving, healthy-minded man or woman as terrible and repulsive a fate as ever a painter or poet or theologian of old times attempted to describe.

Yet it seems reasonable enough. If we will not live we shall not live. If God, the Christian says, is permitted by us to reconcile us with himself, he will reconcile us. If we do not bar out his fountains of life they will live in us as well-springs. We are wholly dependent upon receiving more of his life, but we cannot be compelled to receive it. We may even decline freedom and lose what we had of it, employing it amiss; it is not an inalienable character stamped upon us. We have grown into enough of it to be able to refuse to have more. 'Whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have.'