n never dispense; it is both simple and sublime.
Nothing worth doing in human history has ever been done apart from it
or ever will be. It is no paradox to say that even a morally earnest
agnostic believes in the Atonement; at any rate he believes in the
all-essential truth without which there would never have been such a
thing as a doctrine of Atonement.

+No consistent theory in the New Testament.+--But now we come to the
consideration of this truth as it has passed over into Christianity. I
do not propose to give an accurate and exhaustive analysis of the
principal things that have been said about it, from the writings of St.
Paul downwards; that would only be wearisome to my readers and lead to
no particular result. But if I have succeeded in making clear the
psychological necessity for the existence of the idea of Atonement, it
will serve us as a guiding principle when we come to consider it in
relation to the sacrifice of Jesus. Many exegetes have undertaken to
show that the various New Testament writers held one and the same
theory of the relation of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of
sins; never was a task more hopeless. The Pauline, Petrine, and
Johannine theories, and that of the writer of the epistle to the
Hebrews, are not mutually consistent, and Paul is not always consistent
with himself. The principal thing they have in common is their belief
that the death of Jesus was of vital efficacy in the doing away of sin.
The symbolism in which they set forth this truth is borrowed mainly
from the Old Testament, and we have already seen what underlay that
symbolism even in its earliest use. Old Testament language about
sacrifice supplies the mental dialect of the New, and now that we have
the key to it we need neither be puzzled nor misled by it. Beneath all
that the New Testament writers have to say about the death of Jesus
there is the same grand old spiritual truth of Atonement which makes
religion possible. Before we resume our examination of the connection
between the death of Jesus and the doing away of sin, let us look for a
moment at what post-apostolic thought has had to say about it.

+The Fathers.+--From the beginning of the second century onwards the
Fathers of the church and their theological successors attempted a
variety of explanations of the way in which the death of Jesus achieved
potentially the redemption of mankind. It is not easy to say just when
one period of Christian thoug