l life.

Yet this is a point at which difficulty is felt by many in trying to
grasp the Atonement. On the one hand, there do seem to be analogies to
it, and points of attachment for it, in experience. No sin that has
become real to conscience is ever outlived and overcome without
expiation. There are consequences involved in it that go far beyond
our perception at the moment, but they work themselves inexorably out,
and our sin ceases to be a burden on conscience, and a fetter on will,
only as we 'accept the punishment of our iniquity,' and become
conscious of the holy love of God behind it. But the consequences of
sin are never limited to the sinner. They spread beyond him in the
organism of humanity, and when they strike visibly upon the innocent,
the sense of guilt is deepened. We see that we have done we know not
what, something deeply and mysteriously bad beyond all our reckoning,
something that only a power and goodness transcending our own avail to
check. It is one of the startling truths of the moral life that such
consequences of sin, striking visibly upon the innocent, have in
certain circumstances a peculiar power to redeem the sinful. When they
are accepted, as they sometimes are accepted, without repining or
complaint--when they are borne, as they sometimes are borne, freely and
lovingly by the innocent, because to the innocent the guilty are
dear--then something is appealed to in the guilty which is deeper than
guilt, something may be touched which is deeper than sin, a new hope
and faith may be born in them, to take hold of love so wonderful, and
by attaching themselves to it to transcend the evil past. The
suffering of such love (they are dimly aware), or rather the power of
such love persisting through all the suffering brought on it by sin,
opens the gate of righteousness to the sinful in spite of all that has
been; sin is outweighed by it, it is annulled, exhausted, transcended
in it. The great Atonement of Christ is somehow in line with this, and
we do not need to shrink from the analogy. 'If there were no witness,'
as Dr. Robertson Nicoll puts it, 'in the world's deeper literature'--if
there were no witness, that is, in the universal experience of man--'to
the fact of an Atonement, the Atonement would be useless, since the
formula expressing it would be unintelligible.' It is the analogy of
such experiences which makes the Atonement credible, yet it must always
in some way transcend them