sins. The regeneration is to a new moral life. Through the
influence of Jesus, reconciled on our part to God and believing in His
unchanging love to us, we are translated into God's kingdom and live for
the eternal in our present existence. Redemption is indeed the work of
God through Christ, but it has intelligible parallel in the awakening of
the life of the mind, or again of the spirit of self-sacrifice, through
the personal influence of the wise and good. Salvation begins in such an
awakening through the personal influence of the wisest and best. It is
transformation of our personality through the personality of Jesus, by
the personal God of truth, of goodness and of love. All that which God
through Jesus has done for us is futile, save as we make the
actualisation of our deliverance from sin our continuous and unceasing
task. When this connexion of thought is broken through, we transfer the
whole matter of salvation from the inner to the outer world and make of
it a transaction independent of the moral life of man.

Justification and reconciliation also are primarily acts and gifts of
God. Justification is a forensic act. The sense is not that in
justification we are made just. We are, so to say, temporarily thus
regarded, not that leniency may become the occasion of a new offence,
but that in grateful love we may make it the starting point of a new
life. We must justify our justification. It is easy to see the
objections to such a course on the part of a civil judge. He must
consider the rights of others. It was this which brought Grotius and the
rest, with the New England theologians down to Park, to feel that
forgiveness could not be quite free. If we acknowledge that this
symbolism of God as judge or sovereign is all symbolism, mere figure of
speech, not fact at all, then that objection--and much else--falls away.
If we assert that another figure of speech, that of God as Father, more
perfectly suggests the relation of God and man, then forgiveness may be
free. Then justification and forgiveness are only two words for one and
the same idea. Then the nightmare of a God who would forgive and cannot,
of a God who will forgive but may not justify until something further
happens, is all done away. Then the relation of the death of Jesus to
the forgiveness of our sins cannot be other than the relation of his
life to that forgiveness. Both the one and the other are a revelation of
the forgiving love of God. We may say