sins, but not, so far
as I can understand, of his being reconciled to God, and still less,
reconciled to God through the death of His Son. The penetration of
Kant saw from the first all that could be made of atonement on the
basis of any such system. What it means to the speculative mind is
that the new man bears the sin of the old. When the sinner repents and
is converted, the weight of what he has done comes home to him; the new
man in him--the Son of God in him--accepts the responsibility of the
old man, and so he has peace with God. Many whose minds are under the
influence of this mode of thought do not see clearly to what it leads,
and resent criticism of it as if it were a sort of impiety. Their
philosophy is to them a surrogate for religion, but they should not be
allowed to suppose (if they do suppose) that it is the equivalent of
Christianity. There can be no Christianity without Christ; it is the
presence of the Mediator which makes Christianity what it is. But a
unique Christ, without Whom our religion disappears, is frankly
disavowed by the more candid and outspoken of our idealist
philosophers. Christ, they tell us, was certainly a man who had an
early and a magnificently strong faith in the unity of the human and
the Divine; but it was faith in a fact which enters into the
constitution of every human consciousness, and it is absurd to suppose
that the recognition of the fact, or the realisation of it, is
essentially dependent on Him. He was not sinless--which is an
expression without meaning, when we think of a human being which has to
rise by conflict and self-suppression out of nature into the world of
self-consciousness and right and wrong; He was not in any sense unique
or exceptional; He was only what we all are in our degree; at best, He
was only one among many great men who have contributed in their place
and time to the spiritual elevation of the race. Such, I say, is the
issue of this mode of thought as it is frankly avowed by some of its
representative men; but the peculiarity of it, when it is obscurely
fermenting as a leaven in the mind, is, that it appeals to men as
having special affinities to Christianity. In our own country it is
widely prevalent among those who have had a university education, and
indeed in a much wider circle, and it is a serious question how we are
to address our gospel to those who confront it in such a mental mood.

I have no wish to be unsympathetic, but I