to sketch the positive conception of the
Atonement, as St. Paul seems to put it before us. Christ inaugurates
the church of the new covenant, the new life of union with God. He
lays its basis in a great act of reparation to the righteousness of
God, which 'the old Adam' had continually outraged. This act of
reparation lies in a moral sacrifice of obedience, carried to the
extreme point by the shedding of His blood. This is the great
propitiation in virtue of which God is enabled, without moral
misunderstanding, to forgive freely the sins of any one who comes in
faith to unite himself to Christ, and set him free to begin the new
life.

The subject is a divine 'mystery,' and we shall never adequately probe
it. Nay more, one man's thought will rightly seem inadequate to
another, who has gained, or thinks he has gained, some special avenue
of insight into {216} the divine depths. But when we pass from special
points of view, which are necessarily more or less individual, and can
never become certainties for men in general--when we pass on to the
ground of what should be the common church belief, the statement of the
original revelation, it is not, it seems to me, liable to any of the
familiar moral objections, or indeed a subject of any special
difficulty. The difficulties experienced by the moral consciousness of
our age have been due to gross and unnecessary misunderstandings, of
which the following are, perhaps, the most considerable.

(1) The propitiation has become separated from the new life, for which
it merely prepares the way. It has been elevated, with disastrous
moral results, from a means to an end. Christ's work _for us_ has been
treated apart from His work _in us_, in which alone it is realized. He
alone can act _for_ all men, because He only can be their new life
within. But on this see vol. i. pp. 141 f, and _Ephes._ pp. 54 ff.

(2) The idea of injustice has been introduced into the 'transaction' of
the Atonement, and has been the most fruitful source of
difficulty;--but quite unnecessarily. There is a story that when
Edward VI was a child, and deserved punishment, another boy was taken
and whipped in his place. This monstrously unjust transaction has been
taken by Christian teachers as an illustration of the Atonement; and it
is truly an illustration of the Atonement as they misconceived it. But
the misconception is gratuitous: there is no real resemblance in the
two cases. For first, what