o stood waiting for an opportunity to be of service. No
one grudged anything; every home and every bed would have been
cheerfully placed at the disposal of the shipwrecked mariners if they
had been wanted. Brave women, the wives and daughters of men who were
risking their lives on the sea every day, willingly encouraged their
husbands and sons in battling against the tempest in the endeavour to
save other husbands and sons whom they had never seen or heard of until
that hour of distress and need. And what a fight it was to be sure!
Never was a braver. Again and again these humble Cornish heroes dashed
into the raging billows to grasp and guide the ropes that bore a
flickering human life, and every time they returned with their helpless
burden a cheer went up from the watchers that drowned for a moment the
violence of the blast. No one thought of enquiring into the theology
of saviours or survivors. No doubt there were some among the former
who were oftener to be found at the public-house bar than at church,
but no one could have distinguished them from the orthodox Christians
who fought the waves shoulder to shoulder beside them; they were there
to save life, and in doing so their deeper manhood shone out with
divine splendour. But the most of the rescuers were good sound,
earnest Methodists who perhaps believed, or thought they believed, in
the eternal damnation of the unregenerate. But what became of their
doctrine in the face of an urgent human need and the call for
self-sacrifice to supply that need? It was utterly forgotten. There
is both humour and pathos in the fact that these convinced believers
tugged and tore at the ropes, and freely jeopardised their own lives in
a magnificent endeavour to save perishing bodies from temporal water.
There is the truth for you, the real Atonement. The heart creed is
usually better than the head creed, and in great moments buries the
latter out of sight. Here was the spirit of Christ, the true and
eternal manhood, the spirit that seeks to save at its own cost. Here
was the instinctive perception of the fundamental oneness of all life
and the recognition that the godlike thing is to seek to deliver life
from the clutch of death.

+All men instinctively believe in the Atonement.+--This is the deepest
and truest impulse of the human heart, as all men already know if they
would only trust their better nature to tell them what God wants from
his children. Here is an exp