or in highest tranquillity, comes the divine revelation.

The belief that the perfect life had actually been lived by Christ was
a help to men whose aspiration felt itself unsuccessful,--the very
height of the aspiration deepening the sense of failure. The mind
fastened on an actual and perfect goodness outside of itself. The
Stoic ideal kept a man self-watchful, giving him no higher personality
to look up to. There was in Christianity the feeling that the perfect
life has been lived, and this somehow may help to save me. This was
the core of the Atonement. All theories of it--ransom, substitution,
and the like--were intellectual explanations of the fact of experience.

Forgiveness is the soul's delighted sense that its sin is not mortal.
It comes only after sin has been felt as a burden. Conscious of
wrong-doing, man feels helpless and even accursed,--imagines or credits
stories of a fall, of measureless guilt, and an endless hell. What
gives poignancy to these ideas is the real sense of wrong-doing, which
projects a monstrous and exaggerated shadow.

The sense of duty, constantly worked, breeds in sensitive souls the
despair of an unattainable perfection. The outward ceremonial does not
help or enrich,--the moral and spiritual ideal tantalizes by its
impossibility. This happens even to the strenuously righteous. In the
gross wrong-doer, especially if he falls under the ban of society,
there is wrought a despair which probably expresses itself in a
hardened recklessness.

Among these "lost sheep" came Jesus as a friend. His love divined the
deeper soul within them,--its yearning for the good it had perhaps
ceased even to struggle for,--its untouched possibilities. He said,
"Be of good cheer! Thy sins be forgiven thee! Go in peace!" At his
word and touch, a new life sprang up in them,--a new force lifted
humanity in its lowest depths.

To this new sense of life out of death Jesus gave the name of _Your
Father's love_. He typified it in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
And as the appropriate attitude for this recovered sinner, he set, not
merely a glad and thankful acceptance of the gift, but the passing of
it on to others. He bound inseparably the receiving and the giving.
"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

Just the experience of the pardoned miser or harlot came to Paul when
he saw that in his pride and willfulness he had been persecuting the
holy and innocent, yet felt himself r