ronouncing according to the act on the criminal at the bar. To say
this, however, does not make these relations more intelligible. In
particular, to say that they are personal, as opposed to forensic, does
not make them more intelligible. If they are to be rational, if they are
to be moral, if they are to be relations in which an ethical life can be
lived, and ethical responsibilities realised, they must be not only
personal, but universal; they must be relations that in some sense are
determined by law. Even to say that they are the relations, not of judge
and criminal, but of Father and child, does not get us past this point.
The relations of father and child are undoubtedly more adequate to the
truth than those of judge and criminal; they are more adequate, but so
far as our experience of them goes, they are not equal to it. If the
sinner is not a criminal before his judge, neither is he a naughty child
before a parent whose own weakness or affinity to evil introduces an
incalculable element into his dealing with his child's fault. I should
not think of saying that it is the desire to escape from the
inexorableness of law to a God capable of indulgent human tenderness that
inspires the violent protests so often heard against 'forensic' and
'legal' ideas: but that is the impression which one sometimes
involuntarily receives from them. It ought to be apparent to every one
that even the relation of parent and child, if it is to be a moral
relation, must be determined in a way which has universal and final
validity. It must be a relation in which--ethically speaking--some
things are for ever obligatory, and some things for ever impossible; in
other words, it must be a relation determined by law, and law which
cannot deny itself. But law in this sense is not 'legal.' It is not
'judicial,' or 'forensic,' or 'statutory.' None the less it is real and
vital, and the whole moral value of the relation depends upon it. When a
man says--as some one has said--'There are many to whom the conception of
forgiveness resting on a judicial transaction does not appeal at all,' I
entirely agree with him; it does not appeal at all to me. But what would
be the value of a forgiveness which did not recognise in its eternal
truth and worth that universal law in which the relations of God and man
are constituted? Without the recognition of that law--that moral order
or constitution in which we have our life in relation to God and eac