be true to himself, not to say if he is ever to welcome
the Atonement, and leave his sin behind. We have no need of words like
sin and atonement--we could not have the experiences which they
designate--unless we had a higher than merely natural life; and one of
the tendencies of the modern mind which has to be counteracted by the
evangelist is the tendency induced by physical and especially by
biological science to explain the realities of personal experience by
sub-personal categories. In conscience, in the sense of personal
dignity, in the ultimate inability of man to deny the self which he is,
we have always an appeal against such tendencies, which cannot fail;
but it needs to be made resolutely when conscience is lethargic and the
whole bias of the mind is to the other side.

Passing from physical science, the modern mind has perhaps been
influenced most by the great idealist movement in philosophy--the
movement which in Germany began with Kant and culminated in Hegel.
This idealism, just like physical science, gives a certain stamp to the
mind; when it takes possession of intelligence it casts it, so to
speak, into a certain mould; even more than physical science it
dominates it so that it becomes incapable of self-criticism, and very
difficult to teach. Its importance to the preacher of Christianity is
that it assumes certain relations between the human and the divine,
relations which foreclose the very questions which the Atonement
compels us to raise. To be brief, it teaches the essential unity of
God and man. God and man, to speak of them as distinct, are necessary
to each other, but man is as necessary to God as God is to man. God is
the truth of man, but man is the reality of God. God comes to
consciousness of Himself in man, and man in being conscious of himself
is at the same time conscious of God. Though many writers of this
school make a copious use of Christian phraseology, it seems to me
obvious that it is not in an adequate Christian sense. Sin is not
regarded as that which ought not to be, it is that which is to be
transcended. It is as inevitable as anything in nature; and the sense
of it, the bad conscience which accompanies it, is no more than the
growing pains of the soul. On such a system there is no room for
atonement in the sense of the mediation of God's forgiveness through
Jesus Christ. We may consistently speak in it of a man being
reconciled to himself, or even reconciled to his