supremely, in His death. It is not the idiosyncrasy of one
apostle, it is the testimony of the Church, a testimony in keeping with
the whole claim made by Christ in His teaching and life and death: '_in
Him_ we have our redemption, _through His blood_, even the forgiveness
of our trespasses.' And this is what the Atonement means: it means the
mediation of forgiveness through Christ, and specifically through His
death. Forgiveness, in the Christian sense of the term, is only
realised as we believe in the Atonement: in other words, as we come to
feel the cost at which alone the love of God could assert itself as
Divine and holy love in the souls of sinful men. We may say, if we
please, that forgiveness is bestowed freely upon repentance; but we
must add, if we would do justice to the Christian position, that
repentance in its ultimate character is the fruit of the Atonement.
Repentance is not possible apart from the apprehension of the mercy of
God _in Christ_. It is the experience of the regenerate--_poenitentiam
interpretor regenerationem_, as Calvin says--and it is the Atonement
which regenerates.

This, then, in the broadest sense, is the truth which we wish to
commend to the modern mind: the truth that there is forgiveness with
God, and that this forgiveness comes to us only through Christ, and
signally or specifically through His death. Unless it becomes true to
us that _Christ died for our sins_ we cannot appreciate forgiveness at
its specifically Christian value. It cannot be for us that kind of
reality, it cannot have for us that kind of inspiration, which it
unquestionably is and has in the New Testament.

But what, we must now ask, is the modern mind to which this primary
truth of Christianity has to be commended? Can we diagnose it in any
general yet recognisable fashion, so as to find guidance in seeking
access to it for the gospel of the Atonement? There may seem to be
something presumptuous in the very idea, as though any one making the
attempt assumed a superiority to the mind of his time, an exemption
from its limitations and prejudices, a power to see over it and round
about it. All such presumption is of course disclaimed here; but even
while we disclaim it, the attempt to appreciate the mind of our time is
forced upon us. Whoever has tried to preach the gospel, and to
persuade men of truth as truth is in Jesus, and especially of the truth
of God's forgiveness as it is in the death of Jesus