ption is an inward one, an ethical and spiritual work,
the transformation of character. He had said, not merely that the
transformation of man's character follows upon the work of redemption.
It is the work of redemption. The primary witness to the work of Christ
is, therefore, in the facts of consciousness and history. These are
capable of empirical scrutiny. They demand psychological investigation.
When thus investigated they yield our primary material for any assertion
we may make concerning God. Above all, it is the nature of Jesus, as
learned on the evidence of his work in the hearts of men, which is our
great revelation and source of inference concerning the nature of God.
Instead of saying in the famous phrase, that the Christians think of
Christ as God, we say that we are able to think of God, as a religious
magnitude, in no other terms than in those of his manifestation and
redemptive activity in Jesus.

None since Kant, except extreme confessionalists, and those in
diminishing degree, have held that the great effect of the work of
Christ was upon the mind and attitude of God. Less and less have men
thought of justification as forensic and judicial, a declaring sinners
righteous in the eye of the divine law, the attribution of Christ's
righteousness to men, so far at least as to relieve these last of
penalty. This was the Anselmic scheme. Indeed, it had been Tertullian's.
Less and less have men thought of reconciliation as that of an angry God
to men, more and more as of alienated men with God. The phrases of the
orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, Lutheran as well as Calvinistic,
survive. More and more new meaning, not always consistent, is injected
into them. No one would deny that the loftiest moral enthusiasm, the
noblest sense of duty, animated the hearts of many who thought in the
terms of Calvinism. The delineation of God as unreconciled, of the work
and sufferings of Christ as a substitution, of salvation as a
conferment, caused gratitude, tender devotion, heroic allegiance in
some. It worked revulsion in others. It was protested against most
radically by Kant, as indeed it had been condemned by many before him.
For Kant the renovation of character was the essential salvation. Yet
the development of his doctrine was deficient through the
individualistic form which it took. Salvation was essentially a change
in the individual mind, brought about through the practical reason, and
having its ideal in Jes