nity.+--This is by no means an exhaustive examination of
New Testament teaching on the subject of Atonement, but it should be
sufficient to show two things: first, that the theories of the New
Testament writers concerning the redeeming works of Christ are not,
taken literally, mutually consistent; secondly, the truth implied in
all the theories is precisely that truth of Atonement which we have
already seen to be implied in all religion. The great thing which
impressed the primitive Christian consciousness in regard to the life
and death of Jesus was that this life and death were the most complete
and consistent self-offering of the individual to the whole that had
ever been made. In this self-offering was the one perfect
manifestation of the eternal Christ, the humanity which reveals the
innermost of God, the humanity which is love. To partake of the
benefits of that Atonement we have to unite ourselves to it; that is,
to employ the mystical language of St. Paul, we have to die to self
with Christ and rise with Him into the experience of larger, fuller
life, the life eternal.

It is just the same truth under every one of these different theories,
but if we persist in regarding them literally we shall miss it, for by
no kind of ingenuity can we square the theory of St. Paul with that of
the other writers; the way of putting it is different. But once we see
what the essential truth of Atonement is, we are no longer bound by the
intellectual symbolism of Paul or Hebrews or any other authority; we
can get beneath the symbol to the thing symbolised. The Pauline
principle of dying with Christ, the Hebrews idea of the eternal
sacrifice manifested in time, the Johannine thought about the outpoured
life of the eternal Christ, are all one and the same. Jesus did
nothing for us which we are not also called upon to do for ourselves
and one another in our degree. Faith in His atoning work means death
to self that we may live to God; as selfhood perishes on its Calvary,
the Christ, the true man, the divine reality, in whom we are one with
all men, rises in power in our hearts and unites us to the source of
all goodness and joy. Institutional, forensic, external, the Atonement
never has been and never will be. But vicarious suffering, willingly
accepted, is the great redeeming force by which the world is gradually
being won to its true life in God, for vicarious suffering is the
expression of the law that in a finite world t