\ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/atonementpersonaOOmoberich ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY First Edition Reprinted Reprinted Reprinted 6s. Net Edition February 1901 July 1 901 . October 1902 November 1906 . March 1907 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY BY R. C. MOBERLY, D.D. LATE CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH, REGIUS PROFESSOR OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD NEW YORK LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 1907 ^5 'E/xot 5^ fiTj y€VOtTO Kavxaa-daL el firj ev t ... 77 Illustration of a father with an erring child, and the mother between them bearing the weight of penitence, carries our thought further — yet breaks down at the point ; for each is still not the other 80 Just here Catholic doctrine comes in. Christ IS God — not generi- cally but identically. Tendency of thought to fall short of this truth. Popular Tri-theism. Dread of Sabellianism deters " orthodox " thought from adequate insistence on the unity of Deity 81 Again, there is a real unity of humanity ; and Christ IS Man — not generically but inclusively. Only Adam besides could ever be Man inclusively : and even Adam in an inferior sense. The Humanity of Christ is the Humanity of Deity. Hence its unique capacity of universal relation— through Spirit. If we realize very imperfectly what this means, so we do what our own personal being means. Yet the prin- ciple that Christians are one with, and are /«, Christ, is inseparable from the whole New Testament ; and is the basis of the Sacramental, which is the characteristic, worship and life of the Church 86 Christ then is not an intervening third term ; because He is simply identical with the first, and simply identical with the second also 92 CHAPTER V THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST Jesus Christ is God as man. His Humanity not impersonal. Himself Personally expressed in and through humanity • 93 This Personal expression of Deity in humanity is always vt terminorum a human expression. In Incarnation He is never not Incarnate — not two, but One— God as man, rather than God and man. He is therefore a real revelation not only of the truth of Divine character, but also of the truth of human character 95 Christ as the revelation of human nature. His life of obedience — its main characteristic, dependence. His Personal char- acter as man, consists in being the reflection of Another. Dependence inwardly, as meditation and prayerfulness. Dependence in outward action, as obedience. The obedi- CONTENTS xxi ence always to God. Contrast between this and His sub- jection at Nazareth 98 The phrase " not of Myself." Importance of this. Capacity, in a sense, of independent selfhood. The complete self- repression no mere phrase, but an intense moral reality . 104 The relation to the Father asserted by Himself in Incarnation, is the relation of the Incarnate more directly than of the pre-existent 107 CHAPTER VI THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST Christ " was made " sin ; " condemned " sin. Reality of His relation to sin. Perfection of holiness, and perfection of contrition — the two impossibilities which would restore man to God — both realized in Him 109 Christ the perfect reflection of God, — in moral character, prayerful dependence, active obedience. Even for the per- fecting of these, the necessary climax of His life was death. The death of Christ unique even as the climax of discipline, and of temptation. His power to save Himself, with the will not to use it iii But it is also, in reference to past sin, an atoning and undoing. Perfect penitence requires an identity of the very self with holiness which is possible only to the personally sinless. Vicarious penitence, in some sort, a profound truth of ex- perience. Personalities not so distinct as we assume — often for sheer lack of unselfish will. Personality completed less in itself than in the reflexive correspondence of other per- sonalities 116 Is the penitence of the good really possible ? It is more possible than the penitence of the evil, which is reached through it. The case of a mother whose heart is broken for the sin of her child. Her capacity of this depends not upon her own possible share in the guilt ; but upon the completeness of {a) her own holiness, and {b) the love in her which makes her one with her child. Such oneness is {a) of nature, — which does not include actual sin, but does include natural capacity of temptation to sin, and {h) of love, which perfects the capacities of community in nature. Both these things only at most approximate in any mother . . . .121 But both deliberately assumed by Christ ; and realized in their perfectness only by Him whose love was quite literally xrii CONTENTS infinite, and whose consciousness of the nature and measure of sin was that of one who gazed upon the undimmed vision of the Holiness of God. With eyes full open to God He realized the fulness of the (otherwise unimaginable) con- sciousness of sin — within that bodily nature which had been the instrument, and was open to the galling access, of sin. Within the consciousness of sin He realized the appalling character, which is also the doom, of sin ; while by His own inherent self-identity with holiness He attained to the (otherwise impossible) conditions of a perfectly atoning penitence 126 Thus was penitence consummated, at the cost of a gradual, and voluntary, dissolution of Himself. Punishment, or pain, in any other sense but this, would not really have had an atoning character at all. But the destruction, by inches, of that nature in Him which constituted the avenue, or pos- sibility, of sin — and therefore also the instrument for the conquering of sin — was the absolute destruction of sin. In His death, sin was dead : and human penitence, which involves human holiness, once for all an accomplished fact 129 Note.— On the Cry upon the Cross 134 CHAPTER VII OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE The problem of the relation of the historic atonement to our- selves. Difficulty in the fact that it is historic ; and there- fore anterior to, and outside of, our personal history. Truth in the subjective plea against a transaction that is merely outward. Failure of the subjective plea, if nothing happened in outward history at all. Objective and sub- jective are terms mutually correlative — and inseparable. What either would mean apart from the other . . .136 The atonement was objective first that it might become subjective : historical fact that it might become personal experience. How ? preliminary answers, — belief ; con- templation ; love. To " love " and to " be in love with "—a person or a cause. Love does transcend exclusions. What we really love is never wholly without us . . . .143 But {a) is the atonement, then, merely an appeal to our emotions? Or {b) is any adequate response from our emotions within our possibility? The answer to both is " No." On these conditions the whole would quite certainly CONTENTS xxiii fail. The failure is within the meaning, and incapacity, of the personal " I " 148 The answers hitherto, then, are merely preliminary and sug- gestive. What is needed is the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Calvary without Pentecost is Calvary not yet in vital rela- tion with ourselves. The relation of atonement to man is incapable of explanation except in terms of Pentecost— the indwelling Spirit of Christ reconstituting and characterizing 151 CHAPTER VIII THE HOLY SPIRIT IN RELATION TO THE BEING OF GOD The unity of God is the basal truth. Revelation of Divine " Persons " explains and expands, but does not contradict, unity. Personality not to be defined by distinction in terms of negation. Nor does God work in several " parts." 'Tir6(rTa'J/?'.' ": ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. to suggest that current thought is apt to be confused in respect of the teaching which makes use of these words, in great measure at least because it is first confused as to its own meaning in the words themselves. There is one general suggestion, which equally applies to all three, which may be stated here. It is this : that whereas, in our experience, we are familiar with every one of these three things, punishment, penitence, and for- giveness, in a certain inchoate or imperfect condition, but with none of them in its own consummation of perfectness ; we are apt to frame our notions of what the words even ideally and properly mean, on the basis of our imperfect realization of them; and so to introduce elements and aspects, which belong only to their failure, into our ideal conceptions of what they themselves, in their own true nature, really are. No doubt, if all our experience is of their imperfectness, and all our conceptions must be based on experience ; it may be said, with a certain verbal exact- ness, that all our conceptions must be framed on the basis of imperfectness. But if we realize the fact of imperfect- ness ; if, even within the imperfect experience, we discern the tendency and direction in which (though we fail to attain it) the consummation of these experiences would ideally be found ; we may, on the basis of imperfect experience, approximately attain a true conception of what perfect realization would mean. This is the true use to make of imperfect experience. It is indeed only thus that we can discern the true meaning of free will, of love, of personality ; — of everything, indeed, to which our own con- sciousness bears inherent witness, but whose perfectnesb none of us has attained. This is to distinguish, in our experience, what it is that belongs to the lines of our true nature, and what to our own imperfect realization of it. This is the precise distinction which it is the aim of the present inquiry to make. But this is a widely different L] PUNISHMENT 3 thing from taking the imperfect experience as we find it ; and, without distinction, assuming blindly that whatever we there find, — in human free will, for instance, or in human penitence, — is itself a necessary element in what the words " free will " or " penitence " properly mean. It follows that our inquiry is ideal even more immedi- ately than it is practical. We desire not so much to find a working theory, say, of punishment, for our own ordinary use of it, as to find its ultimate meaning in the highest possibilities of human consciousness. Rudimentary experi- ence of punishment comes in chiefly as supplying the data for a theory which will certainly transcend all present experience ; but which, as the goal towards which even the earliest experience is working, will really illuminate and explain, as certainly as it transcends, all its own rudi- mentary beginnings. But it is time to come face to face with our inquiry. What, then, first of all, is to be the real meaning, for us, of the word " punishment " ? As a preliminary answer let us take what will embody at all events a good deal of the popular feeling as to the meaning of punishment. Punishment, according to this, may be described as pain ; deserved pain ; avenging pain ; pain that is, as pain, inflicted, from without, by another, — because of, and in proportion to, wrongdoing. The cause is the wrongdoing of the person punished. The action is the action of another. The object of the action is to hurt. And the hurt constitutes a kind of equation with the wrongdoing. If the person has been rather wicked, he has to be hurt a little. If he has been very wicked, he has to be hurt a great deal. If the question be asked, what is the further object to be gained by the suffering of the guilty person, the answer will be that there is no object within the person himself: that the object of punishment regarded as punishment is a public declaration or manifestation on 4 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. behalf of righteousness. It expresses the righteousness of the punisher ; it exhibits righteousness to all those who stand by and look on. But, in respect of the punished, the direct object of the punishment, as punishment, is simply that he should suffer. I may say that in these descriptive words, I have before me the view of punishment which I understand to be taken by Dr Dale, a view which the position commonly accorded to his volume on the Atonement would appear to stamp as at least a general and representative view. Not reforma- tion, he insists, but retribution is the essential view of punishment. It is not, to quote his own words, " a painful process to effect future reformation ; it is the suffering which has been deserved by past sin. To make it any- thing else than this is to destroy its essential character." ^ Again, " the only conception of punishment which satisfies our strongest and most definite moral convictions" .... " represents it as pain and loss inflicted for the violation of a law."^ "Suffering inflicted upon a man to make him better in the future is not punishment, but discipline." ^ " By some external force or authority he is being made to suffer the just consequence of his past offences. Whatever moral element there is in punishment itself — as punishment — is derived from the person or power that inflicts it." * I propose to criticize and to disallow the position which these phrases represent. But, before going further, I should like to point out that whilst these expressions of Dr Dale's tend certainly too much to an idea of punish- ment as an external transaction of an arithmetical or quantitative kind, there are, nevertheless, on analysis, at least three positive strains of thought underlying them, which we may, without hesitation, accept. The three are these : first, whatever its ultimate rationale may be, punishment takes the form of suffering : suffering of body, ^ P. 376. 2 p, 383, » p. 383. 4 p. 386. I.] PUNISHMENT 5 perhaps, but suffering anyhow, whether through the body or not, of mind and spirit. Secondly, this suffering is addressed to, and has direct correspondence with, a sense of guilt. It has no meaning, except in relation to the capacity, in the sufferer, of a consciousness of guilt. If I am to receive punishment as punishment, and to put some meaning into that word punishment as distinct from the merely physical sensation of pain, I must absolutely have some sense of right and wrong ; some capacity at least of self-judgment, and of saying of myself, in the light of what is right, that I am identified with wrong. Even at this stage I cannot help remarking in parenthesis that to correlate punishment with a capacity of self-consciousness in wrongdoing is not the same thing as to correlate it with wrongdoing simply — apart from consciousness of wrong; and that the difference between the two will work out very importantly in the result. Thirdly, it follows from what has been said about self-consciousness of wrong in the light of what is right, that the pain which is recognized as punish- ment is thereby recognized as somehow representing and proceeding from righteousness : it is a manifestation or mode of righteousness : it is, in some way, the effect or operation of righteousness declaring and effecting itself upon (at least) if not within, me. It is, then, not simply a hurting, but the hurting of righteousness , the assertion of righteousness in the form of the chastisement of unrighteousness. Now so far I have endeavoured to put, in my own way rather than in Dr Dale's, three thoughts which seem to be implied in Dr Dale's conception. But there is a fourth consideration, clearly indeed implied in the way in which the three have been stated, which should be emphasized as cardinal for any real understanding of punishment. It is then of real importance to insist that, whatever punishment means, it is impossible to punish anything 6 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [cHAr. other than a conscious personality. Punishment only has meaning in — and in reference to — a person punished. You can break to pieces a stick that has hurt you: you can burn to ashes a paper that contains a slander against you : but you cannot punish anything inanimate. If you talk of punishing an animal, or try to punish it in fact, you can still do this only so far as you first endow it, or assume it to be endowed, with personal qualities for the purpose. You assume self-conscious identity, you assume continuous memory, you assume a power of moral discrimination. It is not of course to my present purpose to ask how far the assumption may be true, or what is the relation of animal con- sciousness to personality ; but I repeat that the word punishment as applied to an animal only has meaning just so far as you tacitly assume certain personal characteristics; and the lower you go in the scale of animal life, the more totally unmeaning would the word become. It will be felt perhaps that it is possible for man to punish any animal that is capable, and so far as it is capable, of really caring for man. No doubt. But this is only to repeat the same principle in other words. Perhaps the root of personality is capacity of affection. At all events, to say that punishment is possible in proportion to capacity of affection is to make it correlative to a personal possibility. Now directly we set all this in the forefront of our thought about punishment, the question begins to present itself more forcibly than ever, whether we can simply acquiesce in the statement with which we began. If punishment is, in its real truth, an operation of righteousness, which is personal, dealing with moral personality, can it be anything like an adequate state- ment of the truth to say that punishment has exclusive reference to the past? or that pain, as pain, is in itself I.] PUNISHMENT 7 an object? or that there is any real equation between the pain, as pain, and the evil to which it relates ? There is always a certain verbal inexactness whenever we speak of the punishment of sin. It is the sinner who is punished, not the sin. So long as men think chiefly of punishment as the punishment of sin, the simply retributive and equational aspect may seem to be the prominent one. The amount of hurt inflicted is the simple expression, and measure, of the necessary antithesis of righteousness against unrighteousness. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, is a maxim which explains itself, with mathematical precision and clearness. But directly you begin to substitute the idea of punishing the sinner, the equation aspect ceases to be the dominant one. It gives place more and more to the thought of that moral purpose towards the sinner, of which the severity of punishment, the severity of the manifested antithesis against unrighteous- ness, is itself a necessary stage and part. It is true that punishment still takes the form of pain. But if pain is in any sense an immediate object, must it not be — in an operation of personal righteousness upon moral personality, — that the pain is of the nature of a means to an end?- — a moral means working to a moral end? And must not the true character and meaning of the punishment be found in the moral end to which it is a means? We are going now some way from Dr Dale ; and may perhaps easily be tempted to state, with too much breadth, the opposing view. But to say the very least, has not room — full room — to be made for this conception of punishment ? Turn for a few minutes to the thought exclusively of human punishment — the punishment of man by man. Is it not plain that we should have to exclude from the word "punishment" a very large 8 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. percentage — nay almost the whole — of what is ordinarily administered as punishment, — if we did not expressly include the idea of pain inflicted by righteousness upon the potentially righteous, with a view to making their potential righteousness actual? In the case of a parent punishing a little child, or the master punishing an ordinary schoolboy, this comes near to being the whole account of the matter. Of course the master or the parent may lose his temper, and become himself quite unideal. But so far as he represents truly the ideal action of righteousness, his action in punishing may itself be called the necessary mode of the operation, under the existing conditions, of love. It is the love — itself another aspect of righteousness — the love which, fixing its eyes upon the unseen possibilities of the child's true nature, discerns through what passage of pain he, though now marred by identification with unrighteousness, can be weaned and won from what he is to what he ought to be. But what is true so broadly of the parent, and true to a large extent of the ideal schoolmaster, by no means ceases to be true when we think of the relation of the judge to the prisoner standing in the dock for sentence. Even here it is true that punishment is rarely inflicted without the hope, at least, and desire, and purpose, that the punishment may be a means of moral good. It may be said, perhaps, that, at least in the case of the magistrate, any purpose such as this is only subsidiary and incidental : that here at least, punishment, in its primary significance, is directly retributive ; and, what is more, that the principles of retributive punishment, as judicially administered, imply the conception of what may fairly be called an equation between the quantum of past guilt and the quantum of inflicted pain. It may therefore be worth while to insist that both these u] PUNISHMENT 9 aspects, the retributive aspect, and the equation aspect, of human justice, belong indeed in fact to human justice ; but belong to it not as it is justice, but as it is human ; belong, that is, and can be seen directly to belong, to the necessary imperfectness of such corporate and social justice as is possible on earth. Thus it is true even of a school- master's justice, and much more of that administered by magistrates under the letter of statute law, that discipline must be administered by even-handed rule. What is the practical meaning of even-handed rule? It means that cases which themselves may be ever so diverse, if you look below the surface, must be treated in classes, as substanti- ally alike. It means in a word that the individual must be sacrificed to the community. Within narrow limits no doubt there is a modifying power. But speaking broadly it means that again and again a punishment must be inflicted upon an individual with a view to surrounding society, — that is to its general effect upon other people, — which would certainly not be the wisest, the best, or the justest, — if there were nothing whatever to be considered but the inner truth of the personality of the offender himself. Divine justice is exactly just to the individual. But then Divine justice presupposes omniscience. The attempt to conduct human justice on Divine principles, but with human faculties, would end simply in the overthrow of all justice whatever. Human justice, to be justice at all, must necessarily under human conditions, be rough, inexact, — that is (too often) unjust And yet human justice broadly represents, even when, in close detail, it travesties, the Divine. It is one of those instances in which a Divine reality is represented by a human counterpart ; but only on condition that the human counterpart maintains keen consciousness of its distinction from, in the last resort even its fundamental contrast with, that Divine which indeed it represents, but represents only lo ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. in rough figure, through incompetent material. Now it is exactly this inherent impossibility of being perfectly just, which fastens upon human justice the retributive as its most characteristic aspect. In justice that was ideal, because Divine, retribution would not (to say the least) be the one simple differentia of punishment. And the equation theory is only a further adaptation of the retributive. It is only when our thought is dealing with guilt or punishment as counters — that is, as imaginary existences abstracted from the personalities of the guilty or the punished, that the equation theory even appears to explain anything. Remember that sin means a condition of a personality, and that punishment is a treatment of a personality ; and at once it is felt that equivalence between sin and punishment, even if it were possible to establish any measure of equivalence, would have no meaning and lead to no conclusion at all. No one, indeed, who views these things from the point of view of personality and personal character, even professes to believe in such an equivalence. No schoolmaster really supposes that the bad boy, however adequately punished, is a good boy, or even is, by virtue of the mere quantum of punishment, any whit the less bad than he was. It may be quite right and wise to treat what may be called his " school account " as closed. But this only brings into relief the really obvious fact that this " school account " is a very external thing, and is far from wholly coinciding with that inward reality which it outwardly, no doubt, represents. We may say of it, as we said of human justice, that it is a sort of symbol or parable of something which it only symbolizes truly, so long as it does not claim identity with it. From this point of view we may recognize that all human punishment, the sentence passed by the judge upon the prisoner, no less than the treatment of the refractory schoolboy, aims at, and at least outwardly re- I.] PUNISHMENT n presents and symbolizes, a certain change in the culprit's own personality. Whether the culprit is at all inwardly changed by it, is another question. But outwardly at least and symbolically, the prisoner standing for sentence is made to occupy the attitude of a penitent accepting discipline. If his punishment really effects its proper object — its only proper object, so far as the prisoner personally is concerned — it does so not by the quantum of pain endured by him, but by the extent to which that pain is in him taken up into the change of self which we call penitence. Now the object, for several pages past, has been to try and break down the verbal antithesis, quoted just now, between discipline and punishment. I hold that we must emphatically claim that punishment, inflicted as discipline, is punishment. To rule out from the word " punishment " all suffering inflicted or accepted, in the name of righteous- ness, and unto righteousness as an end — to rule out all personal discipline meant for personal holiness — would be to rule out at least the far larger part of all that any of us has, in fact, ever known or meant by punishment. May we, then, go at once to the other extreme ? May we say that we know no punishment which is not dis- cipline? May we say broadly that the suffering in punishment is always, and only, a means? and that its whole real essence is restorative? It is precisely the premature tendency to embrace such an overstatement as this, which is in all probability the chief justification for the overstatement on the opposite side. To say that there is no punishment which is not restora- tive will not account even for all the facts familiar in human experience. It is plain that if we begin to punish with a moral intention in respect of the punished, hoping for his amendment ; our hopes may utterly fail. More and more, it may be, the depraved man becomes a human tiger. 12 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. Then we punish, if we have the power, not the less but the more. If all hope should die down utterly, it is then that punishment would reach its supreme culmination. It would be the final mark and seal of the consummated impossibility of forgiveness. Even indeed from the very first we punish — if it is ours to punish,— alike the hopeful and the unhopeful criminals : and certainly do not punish those who seem obdurate less than those of whom we have good hope. And human experience herein is in analogy with the revelation of God. We dare not explain away the awful word " Hell," as meaning only a purgatory. We dare not, until the possibility of Hell has been authoritatively explained away, deny the ultimate possibility of the idea of a punishment which is not restorative. How, then, do we now stand? It may be agreed, perhaps. First, that all punishment is of necessity exercised upon a moral personality, a personality, that is, which either is, or has been, capable of righteousness : which either still is to be won to righteousness, or has only become incompatible with righteousness through its own resolutely immoral will. Secondly, that all punishment takes the form of distress and pain, whether chiefly of body or of mind. Thirdly, that this penal distress is correlated with wrongdoing, which is in the wrongdoer, and of which the wrongdoer is, or is capable of being, personally conscious. Fourthly, that this correlation of pain, in a conscious moral personality, with wrong, is itself an opera- tion or effect of righteousness, which it manifests and vindicates. But even when we agree upon these four points, we are met with a distinction, of crucial importance, between two contrasted ways in which such righteousness may be manifested, in an erring personality, as pain. It may be manifested within the personality, in the direction of a gradual re-identifying of the personality with righteousness. I.] PUNISHMENT 13 Or it may be manifested upon, and at the expense of, the personality ; — the personality being regarded as something which righteousness can only be righteous by condemning with inexorable condemnation. The point at present chiefly urged is that of these two contrasted alternatives, neither may be excluded from our thought of possibility, and neither may be excluded from our use of the word " punishment." The word is applicable alike in the one case and the other, however different its import may become. And we may venture to suggest that attempts to conceive of punishment have too often broken down, because the conceptions really applied only to the one, or only to the other, of the two diverse characters of which punishment is capable. But there is something more to be said about the dis- tinction. Let us begin by asking what it is upon which the distinction turns. The answer is that it altogether turns upon the reception of punishment by the person punished. But this suggests another point about the character of the distinction. We have put the two senses of punishment as sharply contrasted. A process of love is indeed very different from a process of damnation. But it may not unreasonably be asked — How should the one word mean two such different things? And then, in another form, the same answer comes back ; that different as they are in their result, in origin and inception they are not different. They begin as one thing. As far as the chastising righteousness is concerned, they would also continue as one. The difference comes in, not so much from the different action of the punisher, as from the difference in the personality that receives the punishment. In other words, all punishment begins as discipline. In so far as my disciplinary suffering educates me towards penitence, it is itself a mode of my progressive capacity of righteousness. It is a process — as inchoate and imperfect 14 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. as you please ; but still it is a process, the ultimate climax of which, supposing that it could ever reach its ultimate climax, would be the real and consummated triumph of righteousness within myself. The antithesis of righteousness against unrighteousness is, of course and always, absolute and irreparable. And one aspect of punishment, from its most rudimentary up to its gravest stages, may be said to be the manifestation of this antithesis. But the very manifestation of this antithesis, in the way of punishment, in whatever inter- mediate sense it may be viewed as retributive, has, for its ultimate object, the welfare, not the hurt, of the sinner who is punished. Its latent retributive character (if the word may be used legitimately for the moment) is yet latent and secondary in reference to the primary purpose of punish- ment, which is a purpose of beneficent love. Only in proportion as this fades out of sight, through the sinner's determined impenitence, does the punishment begin to be characterized at all primarily as retributive pain. This purpose of beneficent love is, we may venture to suggest, the proper character and purpose of punishment. But this purpose, or process, may be defeated, by the obdurate wickedness of the person punished. Then the punishment, whose purpose was discipline, has failed of its purpose. The punishment, which has failed in its purpose as discipline, remains as vengeance. There always was this aspect, or possibility, about punishment. From the first it was true that, just in proportion as punish- ment was not, as discipline, effective : — ^just in proportion as it was not taken up into the character as penitence : — just in proportion (in other words) as it was not transmuted, within the personality, from an outward infliction of pain into an inward correspondence with righteousness : — ^just in that proportion it stood, — or was ready to stand, — as retribution pure and simple. And if the personality u] PUNISHMENT 15 should become, at last, the final antithesis to all capacity of penitence or righteousness, then the awful climax of punishment would be reached, when it is the inexorable manifestation of righteousness, — no longer, less or more, within the personal character, but at the expense of the personality, proved finally incompatible with righteousness. Righteousness, inexorably righteous, at the cost, — to the ruin, — of all that the very word " I " means, or can ever mean ; this is indeed the extreme damnation of hell. Hitherto we have been content to make use of such phrases as the " infliction " of punishment, by a " chastis- ing" righteousness. It is obvious, of course, that in all the lower analogues of punishment with which human experience is familiar, a punishment implies a punisher, exercising, with effect, the will to punish. But it is well to remember that infliction from without, by another, so far from being an essential element in all thought of punish- ment, tends more and more completely to disappear, as having no longer even an accidental place, in those deeper realities of punishment, which human punishings do but outwardly symbolize. The more we discern their process and character, the more profoundly do we recognize that the punishments of God are what we should call self-acting. There is nothing in them that is arbitrary, imposed, or, in any strict propriety of the word, inflicted. As death is the natural consummation of mortal disease, not as an arbitrary consequence inflicted by one who resented the mortal disease, but as its own inherent and inevitable climax ; so what is called the judgment of God upon sin is but the gradual necessary development, in the consistent sinner, of what sin inherently is. The whole progress of sin is a progressive alienation from God ; and the climax of such a progressive alienation is that essential incompati- bleness with God which we call hell. "The lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin ; and the sin, when it is i6 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. full-grown, bringeth forth death." ^ Nothing is further necessary for man's damnation, than that man, being in himself identified with sin, should be left by God alto- gether to himself. It is of considerable importance to insist upon this spontaneous or inherent character of the consequence of sin, in face of a tendency to emphazise the idea of the inflic- tion, and the inflicter, as part of the ultimate analysis of punishment ; and still more, whenever practical corollaries are drawn, representing God in the character of a merciless avenger, who has once pronounced, and will not be persuaded to withdraw, the sentence of His arbitrary doom. But apart from false imaginations such as these, the wrath of God, and the judgment of God, are themselves emphati- cally scriptural phrases. And if it is an aspect of the nature and being of God, as indeed it is, that (since righteousness is life, and life is righteousness) therefore sin must work out its own inevitable consummation as death ; it is plain that there is a sense in which the doom of sin may be truly called the judgment, because it is a corollary of the being, of God. But however legitimate, in their own way, such phrases may be, it is clear, on the practical side, that they can easily be pressed to the point of very serious error ; and clear that, if examined theologi- cally, they have (to say the least) to be qualified by conceptions in which the intervention of an external punisher has, from first to last, no place. The chastising, or avenging, of righteousness, may still be legitimate, or, indeed, indispensable, phrases ; but in the use of them it is certainly necessary to bear jealously in mind the very considerable qualification of meaning, without which they would still be liable to mislead. But if the word punishment is capable of these two — so widely diverging — developments and interpretations, it 1 Jas.i. i5(R.V.) I.] PUNISHMENT 17 is well to consider, a little further, the character of the contrast between the two. Let us take a case of conspicuous wrongdoing. A man is guilty of a cowardly murder. What are the penal consequences of his guilt ? No doubt in various ways the proper consequences may be averted or delayed. But (perversions apart) there are at least these two streams of proper consequence ; on the one hand, the police and the magistrate, pursuit, arrest, judgment, the gallows, all which might naturally be summed up as vengeance : and on the other hand, wholly apart from anything of this kind, the sting of inward guilt, the penal misery, inherent, progressive, — in the end (it may be) stifling even to life, — the penal misery of a murderer's consciousness. These two things, of course, are perfectly separable. Indeed we naturally think of them as separate. Consider, then, first, the vengeance of the gallows by itself. Of all such vengeful punishment it must be observed that, however righteous (in many aspects) the infliction of the vengeance may be, it does not, of itself, the least affect, or tend to affect, the criminal's character. There is indeed, in the public infliction of disgrace and punishment, a certain sense of homage rendered to righteousness. This homage to righteousness which the personal endurance (of whatever kind) represents, would be realized perfectly in the perfect contrition of the criminal. Where there is no such contrition, the true homage to righteousness in his external disgrace, is, so far as he is concerned, only symbolized, not attained. But only when all idea of his penitence is eliminated, does the punishment become purely and simply the retaliation of vengeance, inflicted from without by another: and the homage to righteousness is in no sense within, but at the expense of, the personality of the criminal. The murderer, because duly hanged, is not the less B i8 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. a murderer. Vengeance as such, whatever its degree, does not make, or tend to make, an equation with guilt. No conceivable equality between wrong done and pain suffered, could in itself so compensate as to cancel, or atone for, wrong. Regard the wrong done as debt, and it may be compensated. Regard it as a crime of which human law takes cognizance ; and the hold which human law has, or ought to have, upon it, may by a certain endurance be exhausted. But regard it as moral taint, a perversion of the self of the sinner ; and it is plain that no endurance of punishment can, in itself, change the fact of moral perversion. Of vengeful punishment, as such, it is strictly true, that " whatever moral element there is " in it, is in the punisher only, not in the punished. As far as the person of the sufferer goes, there is in it no moral effect, or even tendency: there is no affinity with righteousness: need we add that what is neither moral nor righteous can have no shadow of atoning capacity either? We have said that the murderer is not, merely because he is hanged, the less a murderer. It may have been right to inflict the extreme penalty upon him ; but the essence of the " he " is not, thereby, necessarily touched. Vengeance, as such, hell, as such, has nothing of satisfaction or atonement about it. But, we shall ask, was he not touched ? Did not some- thing come home to his heart ? Did not the spirit within begin, however dimly, to soften and change, in the lonely cell or on the scaffold ? If so, in however feeble or faint a degree, that is a thing, at once, essentially and altogether different in kind. We distinguished just now outward in- fliction from inward misery of conscience. Of course they are distinguishable. But, it is to be observed, that there is no element of outward infliction which may not minister to sorrow of conscience. Short of hell itself, we may say that all inflicted pain is, or may be, a contribution, though I.] PUNISHMENT 19 coming from without, and rough as yet and unshaped, towards what properly belongs to the sphere of remorseful penitence. All vengeful punishment in this life may be translated, as it were, by the fulness of its acceptance, from the side of vengeance to the side of penitence. It may be transmuted into penitence ; it may become the way of forgiveness. But in itself, as infliction from with- out, it symbolizes not forgiveness but vengeance. The gallows can in no sense be called a form of absolution. In themselves, so far from being an expression of forgiveness, they are the express antithesis to forgiveness. They are the final setting of the seal to the fact that the transgression is not forgiven. Yet even the gallows may minister, if indirectly, to contrition, and only just so far as they do so, have they any — even the smallest — tendency to diminish guilt, or to satisfy or to educate righteousness within. But the possibilities of penitence are inexhaustible. Consider, for a moment, the possible thought of a murderer for once ideally penitent. Now directly disgrace and punishment from without begin to be no longer inflictions merely from without ; directly they begin to be taken up and assimilated within ; the man has begun to go over (as it were) from the side of his sin to the side of the con- demnation of his sin. And if his penitence should be all that we are able in imagination to conceive its being; behold ! the punishment which he suffers, — no longer now as merely passive suffering, but as a subjective homage, as a willing sacrifice within the soul, — is transfigured, and touched with something of the light of what we may dare to call atoning satisfaction. Not the suffering in itself, but the inward acceptance of the suffering ; the homage to righteousness which is offered as suffering ; the self- consecration to sacrifice ; this, so far as it is true, is a real approach towards re-identification of self, in sacrifice, with righteousness. 20 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. In vengeful punishment, as such, there was, so far as the person of the sufferer was concerned, no moral meaning or tendency. For this very reason, all vengeful punishment of sin, all determined infliction, by the will of another, of suffering just in order to make suffer, all, that is to say, which is not an element or ingredient in the discipline of human penitence, — being, as it is, not a condition of, but the final antithesis to, forgiveness, — would, upon the hypothesis, and in proportion to the possibility, of a penitence really adequate, really perfect, become not merely unnecessary or dispensable, but, in the sight of Him in whom truth and righteousness and love are inseparably one, not only unloving, but unrighteous, and untrue. Is the man, then, still punished? That may be. In human justice probably he is. But this is partly at least because human justice contemplates not so much the individual as the society, and must think primarily of the effect of its action, not on the criminal but on other men ; and partly the infliction, even upon the penitent, of that full penalty which symbolizes the utter refusal of forgiveness, would find justification in the fact that humanity knows no standard by which to try, and has no proper right to accept, perfection of penitence. More- over it may be that the penitence could not as penitence reach its own consummation without this outward infliction of discipline ; an infliction which at the very moment in which, in the outward sphere to which it belongs, it seems symbolically to contradict forgiveness, does also, in the inner sphere of spiritual consciousness, inwardly serve to consummate the conditions which make a real forgiveness possible. In this regard the very gallows can become the consecration of a consummated penitence. Otherwise, except in this aspect as consummating penitence, and so far as the penitence could, as penitence, I.] PUNISHMENT ai be perfected completely without them, the very gallows, however humanly necessary, would have become, in inner truth, unjust. We cannot but observe that, the more ideally complete his penitence ; the more he accepts the penalty, renouncing it with full purpose of righteous will against himself as a murderer; the less is he in reality a murderer now. It would be another thing to say that human judgment could ever test, or ever be warranted in accepting, the full com- pleteness of a murderer's penitence. Nay, we may still doubt whether it is within the capacity of human penitence to be within measurable distance of such completeness. We need not say that even on the — perhaps impossible — hypothesis of a penitence absolutely perfect, the man ought, in human justice, not to be hanged. It may be still men's duty, on other grounds, to hang him, as it is certainly his righteousness to accept being hanged. But we do say that, if he still is hanged even upon that hypothesis — extreme, or, if you will, impossible — the hypothesis of a penitence quite absolutely perfect and complete ; this would, upon the hypothesis, only belong to the fact that human justice necessarily is a most external and unideal thing. It might be, in the rough ways of human justice, right to inflict the vengeful punishment still. But those who did so would, even in doing it, know that vengeance without mercy had already become, in the Diviner sphere of perfect justice and truth, a thing untrue and unjust ; that, in the unerring exactness of the truth of God, vengeance is not the due meed of a soul in which past sin has no longer any part, of a soul by grace really made one with holiness. Is he, the most penitent of penitents, still sent to his doom ? It may be ; but at least in such a case, observe how largely it is true that, what was punishment, is itself now so far transfigured, that we stand in some doubt 22 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. whether still to call it punishment. He suffers still? yes, but he blesses suffering; he chooses suffering: suffering now is the very expression of the effort of goodness in him. He is indeed the person who suffers. But he is, even more, the person who condemns sin, by passing sentence upon it even in himself: himself in inexorable contradiction against it, inexorable therefore towards himself, in that himself is identified with sin. This penal suffering in him can no longer be described as a retaliatory infliction by the will of another; for it has now become absolutely his own, the expression of his own extreme contradiction against any shadow of presence of wrong in himself; and just because it is his own will, rather than another's, therefore it is in him the very identification of himself with righteousness, the consum- mation, in himself, of an absolute antithesis against sin. Are we talking only of ideals, which no one has realized ? We shall indeed be obliged, with each one of our first three topics, to talk of ideals, if we wish really to see, in punish- ment, or in penitence, or in forgiveness, what the thing itself really is, and not merely what our imperfect realiza- tion of it has attained. What then, in this ideal case, is found to be the nature of the punishment ? Observe how more and more absolutely it tends to lose its aspect as vengeance inflicted by another from without. Its rationale cannot be found in this. So far as it was dis- tinctively from without, it is now all taken up, and translated into the expression, from within, of detestation of sin. It is the man's own inward homage to righteous- ness. As such, it ceases to find its character as inflicted pain. In addition, then, to the considerations already formu- lated, we may claim perhaps to have reached these further positions now; first, that it is only so far as it is not transfigured into a personal self - identification with I.] PUNISHMENT 23 righteousness, that punishment remains in the aspect of retribution ; secondly, that it is just in proportion as it is a process of self-identity with righteousness, that there is atoning capacity in the bearing of punishment; but thirdly, that precisely so far as it retains its character as inflicted retaliation, it has no atoning or restorative ten- dency whatever. The power of punishment to discipline, to sanctify, or to atone, is in it just in proportion as punishment, according to our ordinary language, ceases to be punishment, and becomes a mode of penitence instead ; for, if penitence were all perfect, there would be no penal suffering which was not, in the fullest sense, self-chosen. Either the suffering of punishment is more and more absolutely identified with penitential painfulness ; or it has nothing atoning or restorative about it. If things like these are true at all, the conclusion must certainly be suggested, that it is only with the greatest caution, and exactitude of definition, that the word "punishment" can be safely applied to the atoning sufferings of Christ. We need not indeed deny that it may be verbally possible to use the word " punishment " either of penitential or of retributive suffering ; either therefore of the inconceivable painfulness of an infinite contrition, or (so far indeed as the thought is conceivable at all) of the infliction, in anger, of an infinite vengeance. But wherever the word is verbally identified with this latter sense, the sense of retributive vengeance inflicted by another; there, and so far, we should certainly be justified in protesting against its use in connection with the doctrine of atonement, or the Person of Jesus Christ. For ourselves, in the meanwhile, it is sufficiently clear, (i) that all our punishment presents itself at first to our unreflecting thought under the aspect of retribution, objective and external ; (2) that, on reflection, we recognize that all our punishment has really the disciplinary motive 24 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. and meaning ; that is, it is really a means, so to change personalities which are now potentially righteous but actually sinful, as to make them, in consummated anti- thesis against sin, actually righteous: (3) that in propor- tion as our punishment realizes its own meaning, its out- ward hardness tends to fade into an inner severity of will ; retribution more and more is merged in contrition ; penal suffering comes ever increasingly to mean the suffering of penance rather than of penalty : but (4) that in proportion as it fails in that essential purpose which made it what it was, it does acquire more and more that simply retributive character, whose climax is not Calvary but Hell. This is the great alternative for ourselves. Either the sense and touch of penal suffering becomes more and more, within the spirit of the punished, a bracing of strength, a deepening of the personal homage to God, a progressive expression of contradiction against sin, a progressive identification of the real self with righteousness ; or else it is, as mere pain, futile and helpless, having in it no satisfying or restorative element, but destined only, in the last resort to become the extreme opposite — the precise alternative and antithesis — to any possibility of forgiveness. If we believe that the value and glory of punishment is in proportion as it becomes self-chosen, — taken up into personal abhorrence of sin ; it is possible that our own instinctive attitude may be modified towards all that familiar penal discomfort which we now have, or are likely to have, to bear. The leading instinct may by degrees be rather — not to shrink, to avoid, to beg off, to groan with self-pity ; but rather to accept, to use, and to make the most of it, as indispensable — as invaluable — means of beauty and of power. It is the punishment which the I.] PUNISHMENT 25 will wholly accepts, which is really, in quality, purifying. It is possible that, with such a fixed conviction, men might be really the readier to receive punishment, — that is, the pain and sorrow which may serve as discipline ; and more eager, by acceptance, to translate — or rather, duti- fully, to allow and accept the translation of — the pains and sorrows which do fall upon them, into the salutary sorrow and pain of the sacrince of penitence. CHAPTER II PENITENCE What shall we say that we mean by Penitence? It is something, no doubt, the germ of which lies deep within the universal experience of the human heart. Yet it is something which is, to natural experience, so incomplete, so unexplained and so inexplicable, — until it finds in Christianity its appropriate place, its divine explanation, and (we may add) its divine beauty and sweetness ; that we may with more exact truth describe it as a character- istic experience of the Christian consciousness. And its place in the Christian consciousness can hardly be exaggerated. Wherever the Christian consciousness is at all come, or coming, to itself, there penitence is at home. It is hardly too much to say that penitence is itself an inalienable aspect of the Christian consciousness. It was impossible, while speaking of punishment, to make any serious attempt to examine the ideas which were involved in it, without implying a good deal also as to the content of the word penitence. Yet there remains very much more to be said. The first thing to be said is very important, and would bear minute analysis, though it must be said shortly here. It is that we must necessarily conceive of penitence as a condition of a personality ; a personality which has affinity with, and is capable of, righteousness ; a personality which at the same time has self-consciousness of sin. So much is presupposed as a foundation for the possibility of penitence. 26 CHAP. iL] PENITENCE a; Penitence is an aspect, a climax, of conscience of sin. But conscience of sin would not be exactly conscience of sin, save in a personality which was capable of righteousness ; nay more, a personality of which righteousness was, in some way, the proper nature and necessity. Capacities of personal character, made in, and for, yet fallen beneath, God's image ; only on the assumption ot these can the word penitence have its distinctive meaning at all. Now wherever there is underlying Divine capacity, marred by the consciousness of moral evil, with which the personality is self-identified ; the first and simplest result is wretchedness. And even while our thought is at this stage, we may perhaps legitimately look out upon the whole vast sea of human wretchedness, and claim it all as something which in itself is directly correlative to possibilities that are only Divine. Wretchedness, indeed, as mere wretchedness, is not penitence. How dumb it often is, and pitiful, and perplexed, and ignorant of its own nature, and less than germinal ! There is nothing, with which, if we try to look out upon life from the Christian point of view, we should find ourselves more intimately familiar, than the wide, seething, restless dis- comfort and discontent of spiritual nature, which is not indeed, but which might be, and is to be, penitence. And we know how small a change, — nay, no change at all in outward circumstance — may transform the whole scene. A little turning of the face to the east, a little melting of the stiffness of heart, a little kindling of a new desire, a little lighting of the flame of the spirit, — and behold ! a new tinge faintly begins to flush upon, and to light up, what was nothing but gloom. The waves and the clouds are the same ; but they were mere leaden darkness, and they are the very material of the sunset glory. Mere sorrow has much to learn. But even in the sorrowing heart, as sorrowing, there is at least an implicit noble- 28 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. ness. We might say indeed much more than this. The sorrowing heart, as sorrowing, contains implicitly the whole mystery of penitence, which is the mystery of human per- sonality, and its inherent possibility of divinely spiritual life. Sorrow of heart is the signal prerogative of man ; and it marks his origin and his destiny, as, in real truth, divine. Again, to keep still to phenomena which are familiar, we recognize that penitence, in proportion as it is penitent, must be an emotion of love. If penitence expresses itself in sorrow, the spring and the cause of penitent sorrow is love. And not the spring and cause only. Love does not only make the tears first to begin. But, all through, they are love. Love is their essence. Love is their character. The first tear, and the last, is a sign, is an utterance, is an act, of love. " Behold a woman in the city which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping, and began to wash His feet with her tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His feet, and anointed them with the ointment." ^ What is the explanation ? " For she loved much." The sorrow is no mere accompaniment : it is the form which such love must necessarily take. If penitence is sorrow, it is so far like the lover's sorrow ; the lover who is in love with one whom he feels to be hopelessly far above him, perhaps in station, at least in goodness and love. It is not to him love and pain. But the love is the pain. And the pain, — he would not for worlds be free from it ; for it is the necessary condition, it is the evidence, under present conditions at least it is of the essence, of his love. An anodyne which would kill the pain, would benumb the love : slackened pain would be love's decaying: only living pain is living love. So * Luke vii. 37, 38. II.] PENITENCE 39 penitent sorrow is a sorrow that is blended with, and proceeds out of, love : sorrow that is the sign, the act, the utterance, and the relief, of love. Sorrow has become love's instinct, love's necessity. It is love which itself is heartbroken because of its own outrage against love. Here too, it is not love and sorrow: but sorrow which can be recognized as love, love which, just because it still loves, cannot but be sorrow. Again, we recognize sorrowing love, on another side, as itself a manifestation of vivifying belief. " Jesus, remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom." ^ These are the words of grace in one who will bear, as long as this world lasts, the undying title oi^^\hQ penitent thief." And nothing in his penitence appeals to our imagination with such extra- ordinary force as the limitless power of faith which it in- volves. In spite of conditions physically the most cogent and most crushing, out of the midst of the terrible realities of literal crucifixion, he can look up and see, in one who to the merely outward eye is but another criminal in his death agony, the LORD of death and of life. This is no dream dreamed softly in moments of ease. It is faith, without any help of outward sense, transcending and transforming the most appalling realities of outward sense. It is faith which sees at last, and (in spite of extremest disabilities) embraces as wholly real, the very thing which is most essential reality. It is a supreme triumph and marvel of belief. Belief, it may be said, should come before love: for love implies a basis, first, of belief. Yes, in logic perhaps it does ; but does it so always in life ? Often perhaps it is love which draws, towards goodness and towards God, those who, till they love, hardly believe ; and who now feel that they believe because they love. But after all, it is rather that we may not seem to have omitted them, that we glance now at these familiar aspects ^ Luke xxiii. 42. 30 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. of a deepening Penitence. These are full indeed of their own deathless interest. Yet these are not the lines of thought about penitence, which it most concerns our purpose at present to pursue. We want now to ask not so much of this or that aspect of penitence, however significant in itself, or however touching, as of the whole, and the meaning of the whole as whole. What we want to con- sider is the fullest import of the word /-leravoia, — containing sorrow, love, faith, and whatever besides, — as a real changed- ness of the life and the mind : nor indeed of the life and mind only — or anything else which can be even abstractly detached and considered apart from the unifying self; as a real changedness, then, not only of life or mind, but of the very self that lives and wills. In speaking of punishment we endeavoured to distin- guish, as following naturally upon sin, two distinct trains of penal consequence ; on the one hand the whole system of external punishment ; on the other the whole history and process of inner anguish of soul. And we ended by asking for the acceptance of these two principles ; — first that the whole content of the former is capable of being transferred, by dutiful acceptance, so as to become the mere material of the latter ; that is, all incurred pain may be transfused into penitence ; and secondly that except only just so far as it is in this way transfused, and ministers to, or re- appears as, penitence, penal pain is of no moral value to the punished personality at all. Righteousness may indeed be vindicated in the mere fact that I am severely punished. But except just so far as my punishment becomes, in me, the expression and voluntary sacrifice of my penitence, it is not within me^ but without, that righteousness is vindicated and becomes triumphant. On the other hand just so far as my punishment does really become my penitence, so far does righteousness win in my punishment a fuller triumph ; for so far is it true I II.] PENITENCE 31 that,— within my very self, as well as without, — punishment, translated into penitence, is in the highest sense, the victory of righteousness. We are familiar with many, very varying, degrees of penitence ; many of them indeed most real, but none wholly perfect. It is of considerable importance moreover for the truth of our conceptions about penitence that we should bear clearly in mind this fact, which as fact, is surely indisputable : the fact that we know every degree of penitence except that one which alone would realize the true meaning of the word. It is of course from experience that we are to judge. But much as experience teaches us about penitence, it is important to remember that all the penitence realized within our experience, is of necessity imperfect penitence. If then we desire to know not what imperfect penitence is by reason of its imperfectness : but what penitence, apart from its imperfectness, really would mean : we must be explicitly prepared not indeed to con- tradict but at least to transcend experience, and contem- plate something which we have never seen. Bearing in mind this truth, — which will become perhaps increasingly prominent, — we return to the thought that the penitent, just so far as his penitence is sincere, if he is, undeniably, himself the same man who sinned, yet, in a sense subordinate, but hardly less important, is really — 'is even essentially — different. Consider our instinct, — an instinct with only too much of reasonable basis — of the indelibleness of the effect of sin. When a man has sinned, and knows that he has sinned ; when the eyes of his spirit are opened, even in part yet really, to see sin as it is ; the fatal misery is that the sin which he so sees has become a very integral part of himself. From an external plague, a suffering, a load, a debt, he might be delivered. How can he be delivered from that which he himself is? 32 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. A man is deeply in debt. Find him means to pay the debt off, — or pay it for him ; and he will be free. A man is grievously ill. Treat the illness aright, find the proper means of cure ; and he will be perfectly well. There is, we observe, no contradiction here, for in fact, in spite of the form of our common phrase, it never was the real " he " who was ill. Ill or well, it was, so far, the same unaltered "he." The sickness, or the recovery, were as such, ex- ternal to the real self. He was externally affected by the sickness : he was externally affected by the recovery. But in sickness or in health it was the same " he." But it is not so when in perverse will, he has accepted and identified himself with sin. Sin in him is more than a load to be borne, more than a debt to be discharged, more than a slavery to be annulled, more than a sickness to be healed : nor will any one of these metaphors, or the scenery which belongs to these metaphors, symbolize adequately the whole truth of his case. For in all these metaphors, suggestive though they be as far as they go, the essential self remains untouched. So far as these metaphors go, the man loaded or freed from load, — the man in hopeless debt or with the debt paid, — the man enslaved or redeemed from slavery, — the man in sickness or recovered from sickness, — is the same man. On either side of each proposition the quality of the subject is un- changed. But sin enters within. Sin affects and perverts the central subject, the essential self Delivery therefore from accomplished sin must mean not only a change of the circumstances or settings or conditions of the central subject ; but such essential alteration in the subject him- self, that he himself shall both be what he is not, and shall not be what he really is. It is necessary for our purpose to try and realize in thought what a real deliverance from sin would mean. The true consciousness of the awakened sinner is iL] PENITENCE 33 indeed naturally overwhelming. He has sinned. He is sinful. The sin is so in him that he cannot but continue to sin. His past, his present, his future, all are caught and ensnared. How can he, who truly is sinful, become before God, truly sinless ? A real deliverance, to be possible at all, must embrace at once and transform past, present, and future. The least of these seems an impossibility. But indeed to leave out any one of the three is in fact to vitiate all. But on further thought we may perhaps perceive that the three are not so distinct as they had seemed to be. Thus the future is not really separable from the present. Except as an abstraction, ideally regarded, the future in practice means the continuance of the present, — the present carried on from moment to moment. Power to live sinlessly in and for the future means not something distinct or severed from the present, but a present power continuing continuously onwards, — a perpetual and un- broken present. The present, then, really contains the future. The future is an aspect of the present. Real possibility, or impossibility, of present holiness — so it be not ended or altered, — carries with it the future too. Again there is a sense, much more real than we some- times had thought, in which the past also is really an aspect of the present. For the past, as mere past, would not concern me now. But it concerns me as it affects what I now am, as it remains in me still, an abiding, alas ! and inalienable present. This may perhaps find illustration in the bodily life. If so many years ago I caught a cold, and iSo recovered from it that it left no trace, no effect at all on |my bodily record, that cold, as mere history, is no part of jwhat I am. But in so far as it, however imperceptibly, :ontributed to my physical sensitiveness or left any other :ontinuity of result, just so far the past fact remains in- ;rained as an element in my present bodily self. So the 34 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. act and the wish long ago, in so far as it made its con- tribution, however small, to my character, remains. Only if it made none, it is gone. Now it is characteristic of real moral evil, as of real moral good, that it cannot but affect the character of the self ; and our point at present is to urge that it is precisely in this way that the past sin so really touches me still. Because it is part of the character of the very self, and the self remains, therefore the past sin remains, for me and in me, still. It concerns me not as merely historical past, but as abiding in me, as present, still. It is this abiding presentness of the past in me, which is to me the real meaning — and terror — of the past. A past which was past merely, a past which had nothing in me as present at all, could have nothing in me as past. So the sin of the past is an abiding present ; and this we are conscious that it is in two distinguishable ways. It is in us both as present guilt and as present power. Closely allied as these are, we do not think of them as simply identical. The most complete removal of past sin as present guilt — which is what is often meant by the phrase forgiveness of sins — would not of itself remove, might perhaps hardly even touch, the hopelessness of its yoke as present power. Tell the passionate man that he is forgiven every outburst of which he ever has been guilty : forgiven freely, absolutely, from this moment : remove all shadow or suspicion of guilt ; yet will he not thereby have acquired a perfect mastery of temper ; when the provocation comes, he — the same he — will break into fever again. On the other hand, the completest removal of the tyranny of the past as present power, the completest imaginable capacity, for present and for future, of temperance or holiness, does not seem to go far towards undoing the passionate deed that is done, Le. towards cancelling the past as present guilt. The guilt of that which has been guiltily done seems to be abidingly contained in the fact of my self- 11.3 PENITENCE 35 identity with the past. It is part of that continuity which personality means. How is it possible to be rid of this — this necessary self-identity with the past, which seems to be still present in me as guilt, as inveterately as I am I ? It has been, then, constantly felt that a real deliverance from sin must necessarily have each of these two aspects. It must mean a real removal of the conscience of guilty which is the inherent presence of past sin in the soul. And it must mean such undoing of the power of sin, such effectual conquest of evil tendency and evil taste, as to make present and future holiness possible. It is one thing to be forgiven, to this moment, every touch of what has been wrong ; it seems like quite another to have the possibility — nay to have even the hope, — of living from henceforth the divine life of holiness. If, of these two, any real cancelling of the past is the harder logically to conceive ; there are moods in which, sweeping past logical difficulties into something of in- stinctive moral light, the penitent conscience can believe, without a qualm, that a reality of most true forgiveness, a cancelling of the uttermost past, is not possible only, but (as it were) under certain contingencies almost natural; while it shrinks back, daunted and despairing, from any real faith, or hope, of abiding holiness. The problem how the really unholy can be made to become really holy, — the actually sinful to be in the verity of Divine truth, actually righteous; is not yet solved, until both these difficulties are dealt with, and ,both are satisfied. f Of course the two are not really so distinct as they seem. The more deeply either is examined, the more is it found to be impossible, nay ultimately even unthinkable, in distinction from the other. But still it is with the one aspect rather than the other that our thought is immedi- ately concerned. Of what nature is the possibility of a 36 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. real redemption from the past? How can I, if I have lied, be not a liar ? How can I, if I have murdered, be not a murderer ? How can I, if I have sinned, be not a sinner ? We endeavoured in speaking of punishment, to insist, as emphatically as possible, that penalty, regarded as inflicted suffering, had no tendency whatever to cancel, or attenuate, guilt. But penalty is capable of translation into penitence. And behold, there is no degree of re- morseful penitence, from the lowest to the highest, which has not in it some dim element of this transforming possibility. The very moment we turn from the thought of inflicted penalty — be it what it may, — to the penal suffering of the remorseful conscience, we feel instinctively that there is a mighty change. It is not that remorse, in itself, is any- thing but misery. Remorse that begins and ends with being remorse, is a fruitless endurance, not a moral quality or progress. Remorse is not necessarily penitence. But however clearly we may see, in their fuller developments, the contrast between what is meant by remorse and by penitence, no eye can trace, in fact, the imperceptible degrees by which remorse, without conscious alteration of content, with hardly the faintest breath of some new meaning upon it, may become itself the material, and beginning, of penitence. Remorse is a thing which seems to us to begin very naturally. And since — whether explicably or not — remorse does in our experience deepen towards penitence, as simply, as silently, as if penitence were a possibility of the natural life, we may for the present moment, without asking whence or how this possibility has come into human nature, regard remorse as the germ of penitence, and penitence as that completeness which gives its true character and meaning to remorse. And if so, we cannot but recognize that remorse, in a low degree II.] PENITENCE 37 even at first, and more and more as it is disciplined and ripened towards penitence, — incomplete and unsatisfying though it may be; yet has, in marked contrast with vengeful infliction of punishment, this innate, progressive, and most characteristic tendency, — to bring change in to the essential character of the sinner's very self. If I have murdered a man, how can I not be a murderer ? Within a world made up of before and after — within, that is, the conditions of our own experience — it is indeed not possible that the past deed which is done should be ever undone. So far as the word '* murderer " has a strictly historical meaning — " one who did murder " ; so far, in a world of before and after like ours, it can never, being once true, cease to be true. But, in so far as the word "murderer" has any present meaning or implication, in so far as it makes any assertion at all about the present character or being ; we can see, even within the conditions of our own experience, that there is that in penitence — (in punishment therefore too so far as punish- ment is transfigured into and reappears as penitence) — there is that in penitence which, just in proportion as the enitence approaches nearer and nearer towards its own perfection, has a tendency, to say the least, towards making I the present assertion more and more unmeaning. One has lied, or one has stolen. Is he indeed, for ever, liar or thief? look at him — as his penitence deepens with |more and more of insight and of beauty. Is he untrue? Why his whole soul loathes untruth, loathes it everywhere and always — loathes it most of all in himself, and therefore loathes himself as liar. Visibly he is learning to loathe it, — with no shallow sentiment, but even as eternal truth and righteousness loathe it. He is transferred as it were to the side of eternal truth and righteousness. Call him liar: taunt him as liar : it may be that he does not resent or refuse. It is part of the loathing of the sin in himself that 38 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. he does not refuse for himself either pain or shame. It may be that penitence is so far incomplete which would shrink back from any shame of suffering. But beware! his meekness under taunt, his acceptance of suffering, is now itself the expression of the man's growing self-identity of spirit with righteousness. Beware lest that which is righteousness in him be in you not only the most dastardly form of spiritual cruelty, but also the most awful outrage against truth : — while you dare to blaspheme, as the spirit of a liar, what you ought to be able to recognize, in awe, as the very light of the sovereignty of the spirit of truth ! Yes, just in proportion as, in his self-surrender, he accepts shame as the penalty of lying, — he is in fact further and further from having anything in him of a liar. He is more and more personally identical with the righteousness and truth to which every form of untruth is intolerable. Call him false? Why he is the very antithesis to falsehood The past act has no place, as falsehood, in the present self. As falsehood at least the past is literally and absolutely dead. So far as it lives, it lives only as the very opposite, — as consummated victory over falsehood. We are trying to think, at this moment, not of an imperfect, but of a perfect penitence. A man has been in the depths, under the slavery of passion, or of drink. Imagine, if only for hypothesis' sake, not so much of penitence as you think you may probably hope for, but a penitence for once quite perfect. Think then of the clearness of his insight into the terribleness of that degradation which has become the very condition of his life, Think of the pain of the struggle against sin, and the anguish of shame because to abstain is so fierce a struggle and pain. He is impotent, even to anguish: and it is anguish of spirit to be impotent. Every step, every consciousness is a pain. Think of the pain of the disciplinary processes (which, even though pain, are his II.] rENITENCE 39 hope, his strength, his joy!), the pain of the sorrow, the depth of the shame, the resoluteness of the self-accusing, self-condemning, self-identifying with the holiness outraged, the self-surrender to suffering and penalty, the more than willing acceptance, and development in the self of the processes of scourging and of dying. Though every step be shame and pain, he flinches not nor falters, for moment by moment, more and more, his whole soul loathes the sin and cleaves to the chastisement; he will bear the whole misery of the discipline of penitence, that, at all cost of agony, even within the dominion and power of sin, he may yet be absolutely one with the Spirit of Holiness, in un- reserved condemnation and detestation of sin. The transformation of the thorough penitent is marvellous indeed — even to thought. The personality which had revolted from righteousness, and identified itself with the will of sin, is now re-identified with righteous- ness in its condemnation of sin, — in its condemnation, therefore, of himself Though others condone, he adjudges himself to shame. Self-disgraced, self-condemned, self- sentenced, he offers himself to voluntary punishment. He had outraged righteousness. But now, the true self is wholly ranged and identified, not with the revolting will, but with the righteousness, outraged, pleading, and condemning ; — at the conscious cost of all shame, all suffering, even death, to the self, because it is the self that has sinned. It will be felt, of course, that all this is ideal ? There is no penitence that reaches this ? Yes, it is ideal. Such penitence our experience does not know. And yet after all we are only pointing to something, the process and the tendency of which we do know well. We may not think that, within our present experience, that tendency can ever reach its climax. But however incomplete it may remain within experience, the tendency at least 40 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. is unmistakably there. The past guilt can, and does, even in the case of such penitence as our experience has seen and known, have manifestly less and less of present reality in the man. All penitence, no doubt, that we ever have known is imperfect. But to what does this innate, and progressive, tendency of even imperfect penitence bear witness ? Does it not testify to the ideal, if unattained, possibility of a penitence so unreserved, so perfect, so Divine, as — not to constitute indeed a breach in personal self-identity, but to make a contrast of such vital moment between the past and present truth of the self, that the self would really be no longer identified with that with which it really was identified ; that the dead past would, as present, really not be, or be only as the living antithesis to what it was ? It is to ideal penitence that our thought points. But it is ideal penitence that we desire to think of: for we desire to know what penitence really is, — not penitence as it is imperfect, but penitence as it is penitence: that is, to discern what penitence would be, if only it did ever reach the proper culmination of that which we do already know in process. Need we ask whether, in the case of such a consum- mated penitence, it could still be right to inflict punish- ment on the penitent? We might well ask what sort of punishment could be inflicted? For, in one sense of that word, the penal discipline is even now, fully complete. And, in the other sense, it would now be a sacrilege to talk of penal vengeance. Is it not true that such a penitence as we have tried to imagine would be itself, from end to end, truly suffering, truly penal? Is it not the case that the inmost secret of the meaning of that penal discipline would be found to be — not a remorseless infliction of external vengeance, I II.] PENITENCE 41 but the glory shining outwards from within, the glory — within the sphere and painfulness of evil — the glory of an inherently triumphant righteousness? And is it not therefore true that, in the presence of such a penitence in the spirit of one who had sinned, there would be in fact a change so profound, so essential, in the very nature of the self, as would be, in the sphere of divinely ideal truth, incompatible with vengeance, — because, through it, the past sin was already no part of the present at all ; the present had, however wonderfully, come to be itself the supreme antithesis of the past ? I have wished to be able to touch a point of view from which, under circumstances not unimaginable, that sentence upon the past, as part of the self, which we might call the sentence of absolving love, would be no less also the sentence of absolute righteousness and divine truth : and I seem to myself to discern it not by imagining conditions wholly unrelated with experience, but by imagining rather a completed development of tendencies which, even within experience, I do recognize amongst the wonders of the penitent life. In the light of these thoughts it is not too much to say that penitence, if only it were quite perfect, would mean something more like, at least, than we could, apart from experience of penitence, even conceive intellectually to be possible or thinkable, to a real undoing of the past ; — a real killing out and eliminating of the past from the present " me." Penitence is really restorative. Its tendency is towards what might truly be called "redeeming" or " atoning." It would really mean in me, if only it could be consummated quite perfectly, a real re-identification with the Law and the Life of righteousness. Unfortunately, a penitence such as this will be felt to be, after all, more ideal than actual ; an imagination not a possibility. It is a reasonable imagination because I %3 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. it is in accordance with — not against — what experience bears witness to ; but it is none the less not a practical possibility. Nay — the more clearly I discern what would be the supreme reality of penitence, the more does my very insight compel me to recognize the inherent impossibility of its consummation. That penitence — that transformation of moral character —should be possible at ally is a marvel, requiring to be accounted for. But a penitence so ideal, a change of character so absolute, as we have imagined, a severance from the past so complete, that the past would leave no scar, and have no place, of guilt or of power, in the present personality at all ; if it is on the one hand an element, and a necessary element, in spiritual aspiration and belief, is, on the other hand, definitely beyond the limit of this world's completed experience. No one, in this life, having sinned, is ever altogether as if he had not. And why is it inherently impossible? Just because the sin is already within the conscience: and the presence of sin in the conscience, if on one side it constitutes the need, and may incite to the desire, of penitence, on the other is itself a bar to the possibility of repenting. The sinfulness, being of the self, has blunted the selfs capacity for entire hatred of sin, and has blunted it once for all. I can be frightened at my sin ; I can cry out passionately against it. But not the tyranny only, or the terror, or the loathing, but also the love of it and the power of it are within me. The reality of sin in the self blunts the self's power of utter antithesis against sin. Just because it now is part of what I am, I cannot, even though I would, wholly detest it. It is I who chose and enjoyed the thing that was evil : and I, as long as I live, retain not the memory only but the capacity, the personal affinity, for the evil taste still ; as the penitent drunkard or gambler is conscious in himself, as long as he lives, of the II.] PENITENCE 43 latent possibility within himself — not of drinking only or of gambling, but alas ! of passionately enjoying the evil thing. And this is true in a measure of all sin. The more I have been habituated to sinning, the feebler is my capacity of contrition. But even once to have sinned is to have lost once for all its ideal perfectness. It is sin, as sin, which blunts the edge, and dims the power, of penitence. ..^ But if the perfect identification of being with righteous- ness which perfect consummation of penitence would necessarily mean, is ipso facto impossible to one who has sinned, just because the sin is really his own : what is this but to say — hardly even in other words — that the personal identity with righteousness in condemnation and detesta- tion of sin, which penitence in ideal perfection would mean and be, — is possible only to One who is personally Himself without sin ? The consummation of penitential holiness, — itself, by inherent character, the one conceivable atonement for sin, — would be possible only to the absolutely sinless. We are not concerned, here and now, with the other side of the question — How it is possible for the absolutely sinless, to have, or to take, such personal relation to sin that His inherent holiness could really be, and really suffer as being, penitential holiness. We are discussing at present no further problems beyond the one single question — what it is, on scrutiny, that penitence, as penitence, requires and is. And the more we try to run back to the root of the matter, the more we shall find our thought tied up to this irresistible — if paradoxical — truth : that a true penitence is as much the inherent impossibility, as it is the inherent y' necessity, of every man that has sinned. Need we go on to ask, under pressure of our own logic, why it does not follow forthwith — as, first, that adequate penitence is impossible, fundamentally, for every one : so, secondly, that the more each man has sinned, the less he 44 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. need dream of penitence ; for that penitence, hopeless from the first, is more and more progressively impossible, just in precise proportion as it is more necessary ? The fact is, we have said already too much — or too little. It is easy, perhaps, to prove our impossibility of penitence. There is no marvel in that. Those who find spiritual analogies in natural things are nowhere apt to be baffled so much as here. Penitence seems like a reversal of all analogies. It is a standing miracle in human life. But be the marvel what it may of its origin or possibility, it is at least undeniable among the experiences of the spiritual life. The proof of its impossibility, however logically simple, would find its disproof in every personal conscious- ness. It would not only darken the brightness of our sky. It would stultify almost everything that we have ever known to be true. It would cross out not only future hope; but all the deepest realities of experience. The logical proof would really prove too much. It would really cut us off— not only from the ideal consummation, but from any reality, of penitence at all ! Considering, indeed, of what quality penitence is, it is perhaps the greatest miracle of experience that any reality of penitence should be possible at all. And yet, possible or impossible, there it is — the most familiar, as well as the most profound, and transcendent, of spiritual experiences Are not all the annals of Christian consciousness full, from end to end, of penitence? And this penitence, this marvellous possibility, which so transcends, yet interprets, we might almost say constitutes. Christian experience ; this penitence which is almost another word for spiritual con- sciousness, do we not recognize it at once as more than humanly profound and tranquillizing ? as beautiful almost beyond all experience of beauty ? as powerful, even to the shattering of the most terrible of powers ? Inversion of natural history, — moral recovery, — re- II.] PENITENCE 45 identifying of the sinner's spirit with holiness ; so that he can at all really hate what really was the old self, and cling, through voluntary pain, to a real contradiction of the self: the touching beauty, which as beauty is un- surpassed, the tremendous spiritual and spiritually uplifting force, of the penitence of countless souls — men and women, boys and girls, — since the Kingdom of Christ began : what is it ? or whence is it ? — this im- possibility in them, which is nevertheless a fact? This humiliation, which is so exquisite a grace ? This weakness confessed, which is so paradoxically sovereign in power ? This upon earth, which is so incommensurate with earth ? This at least we may say about it : that it is no natural possibility, — it is not of themselves. There was that within themselves which witnessed for it, which needed it, which could correspond with it : but it was not, and could not have been originated, within themselves. Necessary as it was for themselves, it was yet, from the side of themselves, an unqualified impossibility. And yet again, though not of themselves, it is by far the deepest truth of themselves. If not of^ it is in^ thenj : and when in them, it is the very reality of what they are, — the central core and essence of their own effective personality. Though it cries aloud in them that it is not of them ; though it utterly transcends and transfigures them ; yet is it more, after all, the very central truth of themselves than all else that they have themselves ever done or been. In saying this, we are in part anticipating thoughts which lie beyond the range of our present subjects. But it is well to say at once that it is precisely the impossible which has been, and is, and is to be, the real. What is precisely impossible in respect of ourselves, is exactly real in the Church — the breath of whose life is the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Men do not always understand the depth of what 46 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. penitence means, because their conceptions of penitence are based so often upon its imperfectness or its failure. So they have been content to feel that they felt sorry ; content if their sorrow had carried them to some little touch of shame or suffering. They have hardly perhaps even aimed at an attitude towards sin — towards themselves as wilfully characterized by sin, — which would be nothing less than that inexorable condemnation which must be the attitude towards sin of the eternal Righteousness. Perhaps the least glimpse of the real meaning of penitence is at once confounding and inspiring. The true penitent con- demns and loathes sin, even in himself, not with a foolish shallow, half-insincere regret, but as God loathes and condemns it. After all, then, this penitence in the hearts of the penitent, of which we cannot but say things so para- doxical, — what is it, or from whence? It is the real echo, — the real presence — in their spirit, of Spirit ; Spirit, not their own, as if of themselves ; yet their very own, for more and more that Spirit dominates them and constitutes them what they are. It is, in them, the Spirit of human contrition, of human atonement ; the Spirit of Holiness triumphing over sin, and breaking it, within the kingdom of sin ; the Spirit at once of Calvary and of Pentecost ; the Spirit, if not of the Cross yet of the Crucified, who conquered and lived through dying. It is only thus, only from hence, that the least reality of penitence is possible at all. But this we may add in con- clusion, — that the reality of the penitence which is so familiar in Christian experience (if it may not be said to constitute Christian experience) is itself a guarantee of the possibility — nay more, of the certain realization, — of per- fectly consummated penitence. For, after all, this penitence which is so familiar in Christian experience, may truly perhaps be called, — wonder for wonder — an even 11.] PENITENCE 47 greater miracle, than, in comparison with it, the most ideal perfection of penitence would be. Is it not the Spirit of the Crucified which is the reality of the penitence of the really penitent ? Only there remains to the end this one immovable distinction. What was, in Him, the triumph of His own inherent and unchanging righteousness, is in them the consummation of a gradual process of change from sin to abhorrence and contradiction of sin. They are changed. But the fact of changedness remains. Unaided, of themselves, they did not conquer, and could not have conquered, sin. Nor do they so grow into oneness of Spirit with Him as to cease to be them- selves, who had sinned and are redeemed from sin. That past, which would have made their own penitence an impossibility, though no longer a living present, as character or as power, within themselves, is yet present with them just so far as this, — that they are still, though sinless in the Spirit of the Sinless, yet not simply sinless, but brought to sinlessness out of sin ; not simply pure but purified ; not simply blessed but beatified ; not simply holy but redeemed. The song of eternal praise is in their hearts, as of those who are eternally " the Redeemed," — towards one who is none the less eternally their Redeemer, because — no longer without but within themselves, — He is their own capacity of responsive holiness ; " for Thou wast slain, and didst purchase unto God with Thy blood men of every tribe and tongue and people and nation ; " — " worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain to receive the power, and riches, and might, and glory, and blessing ; " — " Unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, be the blessing, and the honour, and the glory, and the dominion, for ever and ever." I CHAPTER III FORGIVENESS There can be no question at all as to the exceeding prominence of the part, in the Christian religion, which belongs to forgiveness. For ourselves, as we look to God- ward, it is the hope, and the faith, without which all else would be to us as nothing. The simplest form of the universal faith is incomplete without this, — " I believe in the forgiveness of sins." The primary type of the universal prayer lays exceptional emphasis upon this, — "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us." In this form of prayer we have already passed from the thought of forgiveness as being, to Godward, our essential hope, to the thought of for- giveness as being, to manward, our indispensable duty. It is, characteristically, both. It is a duty towards men which, almost more than any other duty, stamps those who realize and fulfil it best, with the distinctive seal of the Spirit of the Christ. And it is a hope which may be said — intelligibly, at least, if not with theological exactness — to sum up all the aspiration and desire of Christians. " I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins " is, in its way, a description of the Christian calling as a whole. "Thy sins be forgiven thee," spoken unerringly by the voice of Divine truth and love, comes very near to the consummation of all human yearning. In either aspect, as primary moral duty, or as primary spiritual hope, it CHAP. III.] FORGIVENESS 49 stands plainly in the forefront of all that our Christianity means to us. In our creeds, in our prayers, in our teaching of others, in our hopes or fears for ourselves, few ideas, if any, are, or can be, more prominent than such as are repre- sented to men's thought by that familiar and fundamental phrase, the "forgiveness of sins." Without it Christian morality would be destroyed. Without it Christian faith would be annulled. Directly or indirectly, by conscious effort or by conscious default, it is everywhere, upon our lips, in our thoughts, in our lives. And yet; is it so absolutely clear — I do not say whether forgiveness is to us, after all, an assured or familiar experience, but whether we even know what we mean by forgiveness ? What is forgiveness ? Are we perfectly sure that, upon analysis, we shall be found to be attaching to that most familiar word, any defensible or adequate — or indeed any consistent or intelligible — meaning at all ? We begin with some obvious experiments, bearing not so immediately upon the grounds for the doctrine, as upon the meaning of the word. A child comes before parent or master for punishment, and the master lets him go free. The slave insults, or tries to strike, his lord ; and the lord refrains from either penalty or reproach. In cases like these, if we speak (as we well may) of forgiveness, there is no doubt what we most immediately mean. We mean that a certain penalty is not inflicted. Is this, then, what for- giveness means ? A remission of penalty ? a forbearing to punish ? This is, we may believe, quite genuinely, the first and simplest form in which forgiveness (whatever it may I at last be found to mean) begins to make itself intelligible. It would be a great mistake to brush aside with contempt the idea of forgiveness as remission of penalty. It really IS in this form that it first comes home to the consciousness bf the child. It may fairly be presumed that it was in this form that it first came home to the child-like consciousness D 50 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. of the race. It may even be doubted, perhaps, whether those who have not first felt something of it in this form are Hkely to get much further towards the understanding of it at all. We shall notice indeed that forgiveness cannot be ap- prehended even in this form, until certain earlier conceptions have been obtained. I cannot really feel myself excused from punishment, until I first feel that I have deserved to be punished ; until (that is) I have some idea both of wrong as wrong, and of the distress of punishment, and of that righteousness which is expressed in punishment of wrong. But we need hardly now go further back than the concep- tion of forgiveness as remission of punishment. Important, however, as it is to recognize this conception as a necessary stage, and true in its degree, in the process of gradually learning what forgiveness means ; it will never do to rest here. The theology which allows itself to be entangled in a theory of forgiveness of which the leading character is remission of penalty, will by and by (as not a few attempts to explain the doctrine of the atonement have shown) be landed in insoluble perplexities. Indeed we may perhaps broadly say that forgiveness cannot really mean as much as this without meaning more. The mind cannot really grasp this explanation without becoming, more or less explicitly, conscious that what it really means by the word has already transcended the limits of this explana- tion. If, at a certain stage, the explanation was true ; yet it dimly implied, even then, a good deal beyond itself. And what was once, in its own way, really true, becomes by degrees, to a maturer consciousness, so inadequate, that if pressed now as an adequate statement of truth, it carries with it all the effect — ^not merely of incompleteness but of untruth. The explanation does not say enough. Whatever place remission of penalty may have in forgiveness, we m.] FORGIVENESS 51 all feel that reality of forgiveness contains a great deal beyond this. " I will not punish you, — but I can never forgive," may be an immoral, but is not, on the face of it, a self-contradictory, position. I at least can hate the man whom I would not hurt. Again the explanation says too much. There may be such a thing as infliction of penalty which does not contradict — which may be even said to express — forgiveness. But in any case, the simple idea of not punishing is too negative and external to touch the real core of the matter. But there is another reason, more directly to our purpose, why forgiveness cannot be defined as remission of penalty. Such a definition would blur all distinction of right and wrong. Remission of penalty, as such, requires an explanation and a justification : and according to the explanation which justifies it, the character of not punishing varies infinitely. Now if I speak of forgiveness as a property of God, or a duty for man, I am speaking of something essentially virtuous and good : not of some- thing which may be either good or the extreme antithesis of goodness. I cannot admit either that forgiveness is an immoral action, or that an immoral action can be forgiveness. Remission of penalty must have a justifica- tion. If it has no justification, it is simply immoral. I cannot, for the forgiveness of the creed, or of the Lord's prayer, accept a definition which leaves the question still open, whether forgiveness is not the exact contradiction of righteousness. If this man is guilty of a heartless betrayal, and another of a dastardly murder, and a third it may be of an outrage more dastardly than murder; and I, having absolute power, use that power only to remit the punishments wholesale, without other purpose or ground except remission regarded as an end in itself: I am so far from illustrating the righteous forgiveness of God, that I do but commit a fresh outrage against 52 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. righteousness, in itself as cowardly as it is immoral. Thought is only misled by a use of the word which includes at once its truth and its caricature. The so-called forgive- ness which is itself an infamy, — which, in condoning sin, gives the lie to righteousness, — has nothing in common, except mere delusiveness of outward appearance, with the truth of forgiveness. It may look like it in the negative fact of not-punishing, or in the outward gesture and appearance of embracing ; but its whole reality of meaning is different. There may be travesties, or imita- tions, more or less resembling forgiveness. But there is only one true meaning of the word : and that is the for- giveness not of ignorance or of levity, but of righteousness and truth. The only real forgiveness is the forgiveness of God, — reproduced in man just so far as man, in God's Spirit, righteously forgives ; but caricatured by man, so far as man, otherwise than righteously, does the things which travesty and dishonour forgiveness, sparing penalty and foregoing displeasure — when righteousness does not. " Neither doth he abhor anything that is evil " is a terrible condemnation of the man who is ready to forgive every- thing alike. Forgiveness does not equally mean the truth and the travesty. Its definition cannot be found in terms merely of remission of pain or of anger, irrespective of the verdict of righteousness. When, and so far as, it is remission at all, it is remission because remission is righteous. It is the Divine reality — in God or in man. We are hampered no doubt by words. But just as with the word "love," while we cannot altogether help verbally using it for that yearning of person towards person which hideously travesties the true spirit of love, we yet educate ourselves towards true insight of soul by protesting that this is the libel not the truth, nor part of the truth, of what love really means ; so also with the word forgiveness. If we cannot wholly avoid the use iiLi FORGIVENESS 53 of the word of those who "forgive" unrighteously, yet must we maintain that clear insight of spirit into truth can only be won by refusing to let such caricature of forgiveness colour our central conception of what real forgiveness is. But if, on such grounds, we pass beyond the thought of forgiveness as not-punishing, — does it mend matters to try and increase (as it were) the content of the word, and say that it means a complete ignoring of guilt; a sort of make-believe that those who are guilty are not guilty? Such a view will have, no doubt, its relation to truth. To treat those who have done wrong as they would have been treated if they had not done wrong, is often a real element in the restorative character of forgiveness. But it will not do as an account of what forgiveness means. On the one side, it too does not yet say enough. On the other, it too depends for its moral justifiableness, on something as yet unexpressed. Forgiveness that is at all completely realized is something much deeper in character, — something altogether unlike, a mere treating as if. To treat a culprit as if he were better than he is, however important it may be experi- mentally, is in any case a means to an end. And its provisional character is enough to show that it is at best incomplete as an account of what forgiveness means. Moreover, even as a provisional experiment it needs to be justified. To treat a culprit as if he were innocent may sometimes be an intolerable wrong. To treat a culprit as if he were innocent, may sometimes be as an inspiration of the wisdom — the surpassing wisdom — of love like the love of God. What makes the difference between the one case and the other ? Is it not plain that the righteousness of such treatment has relation to some- thing in the personality of the culprit himself. It may not depend on the magnitude of his past fault ; but it 54 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. certainly depends upon something in his personal character now ; something in him (whether we say of present fact or of future possibility) which makes it what it is. Such treatment in him has an eye to his restoration to righteousness, and whatever restoration to righteousness in him would mean. It is relative to that in him which may be described as his possibility, or the reasonable hope of his possibility, of a real restoration. Such a hope may be remote. But however remote it may be, its reality is an absolutely essential ingredient in the mean- ing of treating him as guiltless, if such treatment is to deserve, for an instant, the name of forgiveness. Apart from this it would be not forgiveness but sin. This becomes, I think, plainer still, if we carry our thoughts of the contents of forgiveness one step further ; and say that in its fulness it would mean not only that we treated the culprit as if he were innocent in our outward behaviour, but that we really thought and felt towards him with all that undimmed fulness of reverent love which would have belonged to him as righteous and loving. For such a conception of forgiveness, while it does, for the first time, get rid of the sense of inadequacy which attached to all that was suggested before; does also bring out into sharp relief that moral confusedness which must inhere in every attempted definition of forgiveness — must inhere in it even in proportion to its adequacy — as long as we attempt to explain forgiveness abstractly or externally ; to explain it, that is, by the action or the sentiment of the forgiver, otherwise than in direct relation to that, in the personality of the forgiven, which gives to the act of the forgiver all its character and meaning. Forgiveness is not d transaction which can be taken by itself and stated as it were in terms of arithmetic. It is an attitude of a person to a person. It can only be understood in terms of person- ality. I cannot forgive a river or a tree. I cannot forgive III.] FORGIVENESS 55 an animal except just so far as I do (whether rightly or wrongly) recognise in it the attributes of a rational soul ; if I forgive a man, it is in relation to the meaning of that man's personality — its complex present, its immense possible future — that all which I do in the act of forgiving finds at once its justification and its explanation. But the more we deepen the content of the word forgive- ness ; the more we realize that forgiveness, however other- wise guarded or conditioned, is going to contain, on any terms at all, such elements as personal reverence or love ; the more does the question begin to press upon us, whether we can, or dare, at all largely forgive. If a man treats me and mine with outrageous wickedness : it is possible per- haps to imagine that I may be right in not trying to bring punishment upon him, but on what possible warrant can I look on him with reverence or love ? If I pronounce such actions and character good, nay if I do not unfalteringly condemn them as with the eternal sentence of God against evil: I do but, in wanton self-identification with his sin, make myself a renegade to righteousness. The more we think over it, the more we realize that when we talk of human forgiveness as a duty, or Divine forgiveness as our faith and hope ; the forgiveness which we mean is so intimately bound up with, so essentially de- pendent upon, those grounds within the personality of the forgiven which justify it ; that we cannot, apart from them, even apprehend aright what the nature of the thing itself is. Forgiveness is, in part, a remitting of punishment. It is in part a treating, nay even a recognising, of the person forgiven as good : and yet it is no one of these things simpliciter^ by itself. It is no one of them apart from that justifying cause, within the personality of the forgiven, which makes this treatment, and recognition, not unrighteous but righteous. God does not, in fact, remit penalty : He does not in fact justify, or pronounce righteous, except in relation 56 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap to something, on the part of the forgiven, which both vindi- cates the righteousness of His act, and explains the meaning of it. God's forgiveness is never simply unconditional. And as God's is not, so we recognise after all that man's is not to be. In one direction it is true that it is to be infinite " I say not unto thee until seven times but until seventy times seven." ^ Yet even this must be read in the light of that proviso which our Lord's words no less explicitly contain ; " If thy brother sin, rebuke him ; and if he repent, forgive him. And if he sin against thee seven times in the day, and seven times turn again to thee saying I repent ; thou shalt forgive him." ^ Forgiveness, then, if it is to be the truth and not the imitation of forgiveness (for even the imitation of forgiveness has its place in the complexities of human life) but if it is to be not the imitation but the truth ; if it is to be that real forgiveness which is the spontaneous action of righteousness, and not that indifference to sin which is itself a new sin ; is strictly and absolutely correla- tive to what may be called the " forgiveableness " of the person forgiven. Now whatever forgiveableness in him may turn out to mean : there are one or two conclusions which will follow at once from the proposition that forgiveness is correlative to forgiveableness. Thus : true forgiveness is never capri- cious : it is never arbitrary : we may even say it is never properly optional. True forgiveness is an act — or rather an attitude — not more of love than it is of righteousness and of truth. Truth and righteousness are not in contra- diction against love. They are love. God who is Love, is Righteousness and Truth. God who is Righteousness and Truth, is Love. Truth, Righteousness, Love, cannot be capricious or arbitrary. There is no arbitrary variation in the forgiveness of God Whether He forgives a man or not, depends wholly and only upon whether the man is or is not forgiveable. He * Mat. xviii. 22. '^ Luke xvii. 4. III.] FORGIVENESS 57 who can be forgiven by Love and Truth, is forgiven by Love and Truth — instantly, absolutely, without failure or doubt. And as, in God, forgiveness, upon the necessary conditions, so acts as if it were self-acting ; so would it also in me, in proportion to my perfectness of knowledge and character ; for Righteousness, Truth and Love, are not capricious. I indeed may fall short of them, retaining my anger after they have forgiven : or I may run too fast for them, forgiving (as I call it) while they still are displeased ; but they are sure and exact and unfailing and immutable ; for they are Righteousness and Love and Truth. Again, I may often be puzzled as to how far I ought, or ought not, to forgive. But this is only because I do not know. I am not able, in my ignorance, to discern whether such an one is rightly forgiveable, or no. But if my knowledge were adequate, there would be no residuum of mere option. Either he is forgiveable, or he is not. So far as he is not I ought not to forgive. But so far as he is, I ought. There is no stage really in which, at my option, he both may, and yet may not, be forgiven. If I may forgive, I must. A man does me terrible wrong. Suppose for one moment, that he is absolutely perfect in penitence. Yet I will not forgive. Then the sin, which was on his side, has gone over to mine. So far as I was identified with righteousness and truth, I should — not perhaps but inevitably — have forgiven. My non-forgiveness is my deflection from righteousness and truth. Or, on the other hand, one for whom I am respon- sible, defies all right, and exults in his defiance. And I, refusing to punish, receive him with open arms as righteous and good. Then, in still more directness of sense, the sin, without ceasing to be on his side, has come over to mine. I have but identified myself with his wickedness. In pro- portion as he is identified with wickedness, truth and righteousness pronounce him wicked ; and my acceptance of the wicked as righteous is my deflection from righteous- ness and truth. If, then, there is no true forgiveness but S8 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. the forgiveness of righteousness and truth ; and if this for- giveness is sure, invariable, even (as it were) self-acting, — in God, and in man too, just so far as man is identified with righteousness and truth ; we are thrown back more than ever, in desiring to understand what forgiveness means, upon that condition in the personality of the forgiven, upon which the righteousness of his forgiveness depends. But when we venture to give to the word forgiveness any meaning of this character at all, we are met, no doubt, by one or two very real difficulties of thought. Thus the question suggests itself, if forgiveness (with whatever provisoes) is made to be simply correlative to forgiveable- ness ; and if to say that a man is forgiveable means not merely that he may be, but therefore ipso facto that he ought to be, nay must be, forgiven : if forgiveness, that is, is a sort of automatic and necessary consequence of a certain condition of the culprit's personality ; are you not exactly taking out of forgiveness all that it ever had distinctively meant ? Are you not precisely and completely explaining it away? When you say you forgive, you are merely recognizing the growth towards righteousness of those who are already becoming righteous. You may call it forgiving only those who deserve to be forgiven. Is it really more than this, that you acknowledge the goodness of the good ; or, at all events, the imperfect goodness of the incompletely good? You merely do not contmue to condemn those who no longer ought to be condemned? So far as they are still wicked, you refuse to forgive them. So far as they are becoming righteous, they do not need any act of yours to forgive them. In other words, there is no place left for forgive- ness. Eitner, in accordance with truth, you still condemn. Or else, in accordance with truth, you acquit and accept. Where does forgiveness come in? Justice this may be. III.] FORGIVENESS 59 But has not forgiveness, as forgiveness, dropped out altogether? Either there is nothing that can be called forgiveness at all ; or, if there is, it is a forgiveness which can be said to have been, by deserving, " earned " : and is not forgiveness that is earned exactly not forgiveness ? We must be content to make, for the present, suggestions towards the answer to this question, in two somewhat different ways. This first: that words like "earning" or "deserving" are, in any case, unfair words. They are unfair because they imply that the condition of the personality which can be said, in any sense, to deserve forgiveness, is a condition which is originated by, and for which the credit is primarily due to, the person in whom it is found. But if that condition of the personality of the culprit, which is capable of responding to forgiveness, and to which forgiveness is correlative ; if the germinal possibilities of penitence in him, should be found, after all, to be due, in their first origins, to the loving righteousness, — not his nor of himself, — which is working for him to produce in him that forgiveableness which it will forthwith meet with the embrace of forgive- ness : then it may be that this not unnatural attempt to show that a forgiveness which is perfectly righteous involves a contradiction in terms, will be found to break down after all. We do not, in our view of forgiveness, undervalue the freedom and completeness of the action of God's love, or overvalue the power of man's initiative, in the mystery of atoning redemption. That at least is a charge to which we have no occasion to plead guilty. Had we laid down that human capacity of penitence, even in its faintest and most germinal beginnings, began from man's self, or be- longed to his natural powers, such a charge might con- ceivably lie. But any such suggestion is incompatible with the whole scope of our argument. Meanwhile, what- ever we may have further to suggest in relation to the 6o ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. possibilities of penitence, we can hardly be wrong in insisting on the mutual relation between penitence and pardon : penitence, so far as it is penitence, never, by any possibility, failing of pardon ; pardon being essentially that Divine acceptance, — nay anticipation, in acceptance, of the first divinely enabled identification of the personality with any movement towards penitence, in the light and warmth whereof alone the plant of penitence can grow or bear fruit. And secondly, leaving for the moment the abstract difficulty, we must ask whether, after all, it does not, for whatever it is worth, attach on any shewing, to any explanation of forgiveness which we can by any possibility accept: to any forgiveness, that is, which is not self- condemned as arbitrary and unrighteous, but is, or can possibly be, the act of God, who is unchanging righteous- ness and truth. If there are times when it seems that forgiveness would lose all its meaning if it could be called the necessary act of righteousness as righteousness ; it is certain, on the other hand, that we cannot really save the idea of forgiveness, by making it either not the act of righteousness, or the act of righteousness not as it is righteous, but as it is something else, not ultimately identical with righteousness. Yet even this instinct against which we are arguing represents a truth. That truth is exhibited to us, with a terrible emphasis, in the parable of the unforgiving servant. The most obvious teaching of that parable is that the fullest forgiveness of God towards man, in the conditions of the present life, is provisional, and may be revoked and reversed. This is one characteristic of forgiveness, as we have known it, upon which it is well to lay stress. As there is, upon earth, no consummated penitence, so neither is there any forgiveness consummated. The forgiveness which we receive in the Church upon III.] FORGIVENESS 6i earth, — in baptism, in absolution, and so forth, — takes for granted, and is dependent on, certain conditions. It is the recognition, by anticipation, of something which is to be, something towards which it is itself a mighty quickening of possibilities ; but something which is not, or at least is not perfectly, yet. Present forgiveness is Inchoate, is educational: it is the recognition indeed of something in the present, — but a something whose real significancie lies in the undeveloped possibilities of the future ; a something which is foreseen, and is to be realized, but which, in the actual personality, is not realized as yet. Earthly forgiveness — real in the present, but real as inchoate and provisional — only reaches its final and perfect consummation then, when the forgiven penitent — largely through the softening and enabling grace of progressively realized forgiveness — has become at last personally and completely righteous. It is not consummated perfectly till the culprit is righteous : and love does but pour itself out to welcome and to crown what is already the verdict of righteousness and truth. Meanwhile the living power of God's forgiveness in the present life grows more and more towards that con- summation. But, — if the consummation be never reached ; if the growth towards it be broken, and the conditions necessary for it rebelled against, and the personal progress turned into a progress in and towards unrighteousness : then that which had been forgiveness, inchoate, provisional, educational, — is forfeited and is reversed. It is not that it was unreal from the first. It was forgiveness, received and, in a measure, realized as such. But this is just the point of the catastrophe. The very realization of the provisional forgiveness, in proportion as it was realized, turns into the material of the condemnation. "Thou wicked servant, I forgave thee," that is the point of guilt —the forfeited forgiveness is the fatal wickedness — " and I 6a ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors till he should pay all that was due. So shall also my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from your hearts."^ The forgiveness, if its consummation be rebelled against, becomes, in itself, condemnation. On the other hand, if and when its consummation is perfectly reached — "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy lord " — the forgiveness may be said to be wholly merged in the glad welcome of an undimmed love. It is, then, of forgiveness not yet consummated, but inchoate and provisional : perhaps we should rather say it is of Love in its provisional and anticipatory stage, — recognising possibilities not yet realized, and by this anticipatory recognition marvellously quickening them ; it is of Divine Love at this stage, and under these con- ditions, that we do characteristically use the word " forgive- ness." There is no difference at all between Divine forgiveness and Divine love ; save in the atmosphere of conditions around and through which it is for the present working. Forgiveness is love, in its relation to a person- ality which, having sinned, is learning, and to learn, what the sin-consciousness of penitence means. In this sense the instinct which would shrink from re- garding forgiveness as a necessity of righteousness may, in part, be justified. Love is a necessity of righteousness ; and forgiveness only is an aspect of love. But love wears the form, and carries the name, of forgiveness — in its antici- patory and provisional relation to the penitent. We do call love forgiveness just when, and just because, the peni- tent, whose very life it is, yet makes and can make no claim to deserving it. In this sense it may still perhaps even be true that forgiveness is correlative to non-deserving. But love, under the conditions, could not not have forgiven. » Mat. xviii. 32-35. I III.] FORGIVENESS 63 The love forgives simply because it is love. And that for- giving love is the recognition, and becomes the possibility, of a personal righteousness in the penitent which still only is possible in him, in proportion as it is quite completely, and sincerely, disclaimed. But it is to be remembered that the parable of the un- forgiving servant, if it teaches on one side that the forgive- ness of God is provisional, and thereby contributes not a little to our understanding of the nature of Divine forgive- ness ; is also, in its outcome, directed to the lesson of the human duty of forgiving. It emphasizes, with most per- emptory insistence, the indispensable necessity of learning, on earth, to forgive. Now it is true that what has hitherto been said has been far away from all the scenery, and the problems, of human forgiveness. But it is necessary, not only that the forgiveness of man by man, as a primary duty of the Christian life, should be understood, if the life is really to illustrate it ; but that it should be understood in its relation to the thought of the forgiveness of man by God. Human forgiveness is to find its inspiration in man's experience of the forgiveness of God. God's forgiveness must find an expression of itself in man's forgiveness of man. The first thing which we have to do, in turning from divine to human forgiveness, is to draw certain distinctions. The exact lineaments of divine forgiveness could only be reproduced in human life quite perfectly, where the con- ditions were analogous. They are never quite perfectly analogous between man and man. Nevertheless, the analogy is so immeasurably more complete in some cases lan in others, that it is well to distinguish, and to con- sider first the instances in which that analogy most ipproaches to being perfect. The nearest approach is to found in the relation between a parent and a very mng child. Only through the thought of what forgive- 64 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap ness in the parent means can we quite grasp what it ought to be as towards the criminal who has brutally injured us. Think, then, of the attitude of a parent, patient, loving, and wise, in dealing with the naughtiness of a little child. The first thing which is obvious is that the parent loves the child anyhow. His whole treatment of the child, from the beginning of the matter to the end, may be described, not unaptly, as the process of the wise diplomacy of love. The second point to notice is that, to the view of this love, the child is never wholly identified with his naughtiness. Love thinks of the child quite apart from his evil-doing, and has for its aim throughout the effective distinction between the child's evil, and the child. Thirdly, the very love which sees most clearly the possibility, and aims most directly at the realizing, of this distinction ; though waiting and longing every moment to forgive, yet cannot wear the aspect of forgiveness while the child is wholly self-identified with its passion. So long as this self-identification is com- plete, and the child rebels against every concession to goodness ; so long the love, just because it is love, cannot but continue to manifest itself as displeasure. But fourthly, with the first dim touch or gleam of child-like regret and sorrow, the love which was waiting, opens its arms as love. It may still be grave, it may admonish, it may discipline, or it may simply embrace ; but whatever it does that is wisely and truly done, is felt as the action not of anger, but of love. And observe that these different attitudes are not optional, but necessary. Love dare not, can not — being love — forgive in the height of the passion. Love dare not, can not — being love — fail to forgive, from the moment when forgiveness is possible. He who affects to forgive, when love does not ; or he who lags behind, when love has forgiven, transgresses at once against both love and truth. It is hard no doubt to be always loving and true. It is I III.] FORGIVENESS 65 hard to discern, and not misread, the heart of the child. A child sent away for disobedience, offers shyly to come back. Is that shyness the wistful shyness of desire ? or is it the awkward shyness of defiance ? Those who stand in the parent's place, being foolish, may mistake. But upon the discernment of its true character, the parental duty de- pends. Is it wistfulness ? In that wistfulness, dim, child- like, half-unconscious as it is, may be the true germ of what, in its perfected blossom, would be the outpouring of the confession of the penitent. It may be that that mere wistfulness, if met with the open-armed embrace of forgiv- ing love, will produce forthwith the faltering word of regret, or the tears without words, which are, so far, the little self s true effort of repudiation of sin, and of personal allegiance to righteousness. This is, on earth, the nearest analogy by which we can read the working of Divine love. For the parent who is loving and wise, is in many respects in the place of God to the child. Yet even the nearest analogy falls short. For the most loving and the wisest of parents can never be to his child what God is to man. Parent and child after all, are inexorably distinct. The child may bear the likeness of the parent, in expression, in touch, in tone. By teaching, by example, by infection of love, the parent may so influence Jthe child that we may say, not unaptly, that the parent has laped the character of the child, — that the child has "caught and reflects the spirit of the parent. But press such words ; and after all we are speaking in metaphor. In the last resort it remains that the child is not the parent ; and the parent is not the child. The spirit of the child, be the likeness what it may, is distinct at last from the spirit of the parent. Or, if not hopelessly distinct, they begin to be one,— not because the child grows really into the spirit of the parent ; but in so far as both, child and parent alike, are in their several personalities really growing into that £ 66 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. oneness of the Spirit of God, which is the true Koivwvta of the saints. But to return. What, in the case supposed, does the parent's forgiveness mean? It is worth while to notice that the very meaning of the word forgiveness in such a case vitally depends upon the fact that the parent has com- plete command over the child, and has a proportionate re- sponsibility for the training of the child's moral character. The parent's forgiveness is something which only is possible to one who is absolutely ruler and judge and teacher and example all in one. It is only upon the basis of all these things that his forgiveness can be exactly what it is. But, on this basis, the forgiveness really means a loving re- cognition and embrace, on the part of authoritative right- eousness, of the first beginning or desire, within the child, towards that condemnation of sin in the self, which is the form through which a personality in which sin is in- herent, can become at all again identified with righteous- ness. And such forgiveness is the sunshine in which character grows. Even in the case of the parent and the child there is a sense, though a limited one, in which that earliest movement of desire within the child may be itself a result of what the parent is ; an effect, or echo, of dimly felt love, not its own. We do not quite know how far it may be sometimes literally true, that it was really the good- ness and love of the parent which, in the child who reflects ^he parent's character and influence (as his features and tone) constitutes the child's own primal possibility of yearning or repentant love. And so far the forgiveness of a parent, may in God's Spirit reflect, with wonderful near- ness, the meaning of God's forgiveness of sinful man. But if this, among human analogies, is the nearest to the Divine original, it is well to make this a standard of comparison, and interpret others in the light of this. Granted that if a child comes crying to its mother, the III.] FORGIVENESS 67 mother has a duty of forgiving: what if wicked men, without conscience or pity, combine to do all conceivable violence and wrong to both child and mother? Have the victims of violence, as such, no duty of forgiveness ? Undoubtedly they have. And yet it is plain at a glance that the word forgiveness cannot simply be taken over, without variation of meaning, from the one case to the other. I observed just now that the ideal nature of a parent's forgiveness could only be explained on the basis of certain assumptions involved in the truth that he stands in the place of God to his child. But every one of these assumptions must be set aside, or reversed, when I explain my forgiveness, as a victim, towards the man who treats me with outrageous wickedness. I do not stand to him in the place of God. I have, materially, no power to control his wickedness. I have no re- sponsibility for his moral character. I am not his judge. Nor have I any right — right, that is, ultimately before God, — to claim as of right, immunity from being persecuted. What then, if I forgive him, does forgiving him mean ? In the first instance it means, I conceive, simply this : that I, being what I know myself before God to be, disclaim for myself any right not to suffer. It is not, as yet, that I am recognizing something forgiveable in my tormentor ; it is not that I am blind for a moment to the horror of his wickedness ; or that I should not, if I had the power, severely condemn and chastise it ; but rather that I turn my face from the thought of it, declining to enter at all upon a judgment in which I disclaim all right and all concern. He is not responsible to me. And therefore I turn from him, as if he were an irresponsible agent, — a dumb animal, or a rock, or a tree, which God had allowed to be to me an instrument of discipline. In the first instance I shut my eyes to him and turn simply to the thought of God and myself; 68 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. dedicating myself in submission to the will of God. " As for me, I was like a deaf man, and heard not : and as one that is dumb, who doth not open his mouth. I became even as a man that heareth not: and in whose mouth are no reproofs. For in thee, O Lord, have I put my trust : Thou shalt answer for me, O Lord my God." ^ " They stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord and saying. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." ^ This first. But this, no doubt, is only immediate and preliminary. There will follow then, secondly, on this the one other thing which is possible, so long as he is obstinate in his wickedness still. This is the recognition that he is, after all, not a thing but a man ; and that as a man, though self-identified with wickedness now, he is capable of identity with goodness. To insist on dis- tinguishing, in the thought of him, between what he now is and what he might become : to go out, in thought, in desire, in aspiration, in prayer, on his behalf, towards that restoration, in him, of the true self, for which he himself never dreams of praying nor hoping ; to recognize what conceivably might be, even before it has at all begun to be: this so long as the man does not yet relent or falter in his wickedness, is all that is possible. This is all that is possible. But only think how much this means ! " He kneeled down and cried with a loud voice. Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep." Already, in these words, the thought of St Stephen is fixed upon the real human selves of his persecutors, with all their possibility of things divine, in utter contrast with that rebellion against light with which their act, in his death, was then identifying them : already in prayer he yearns forward towards the idea of such a contrast consummated and actual ; and he who does this, does, by anticipation, all. The man ^ Ps. xxxviii. 13-16. * Acts vii. 59. I III.] FORGIVENESS 69 who dies then and there under their wickedness, cannot, save in desire of faith, see the after possibilities. For the present that desire of faith exhausts what forgiveness can mean. And so in respect of those who have wronged us in other ways, not unto death ; while their wickedness still is rampant and impenitent, and we are wholly without power to influence them, our forgiveness takes the form of the consecrating of our will, the uplifting of our appeal, to God on their behalf. But how much this implicitly means becomes plainer as perhaps, in God's providence, the opportunities grow. The man is arrested, for instance, and sentenced — to death it may be, or to imprisonment ; and it chances to be in our power to visit, and to talk to him ; and it may be by and by to give him a hand towards fresh possibilities. Or the man is sick, and it is in our power to wait on him ; and sickness — or sickness and sympathy — help wonderfully to open his eyes. Or, with- out prison or sickness, things are changed with him ; and there are, or may be, touches of compunction, dim, far away, hard to catch, hard to help, yet suggestive still of possibilities in him rather smothered than dead. The forgiveness which was real from the first as prayer both realizes and manifests itself, as opportunities grow, in further acts, themselves necessary corollaries of the prayer. If indeed it should chance, in greater degree or in less, that the question of the punishment of the criminal should fall within our power ; our forgiveness might indeed mean remission of punishment ; but it is no less possible that it might mean infliction, not remission. ' For that is, in either case, a question of detail, a question of the more expedient method — regarded as a means to an end. Our forgiveness is found, neither in punishment nor remission as such; but in our clear view and un- swerving aim, of thought and heart, towards the end. 70 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. And the end is the effectual realization at last of such absolute antithesis between the sinner and his sin, as only is perfectly realized when he, the real he, is no longer a sinner but righteous. It seems, then, that, even for the purpose of studying the meaning and character of forgiveness between man and man, we are apt to be misled if we begin with the case of a victim suffering under triumphant wickedness. But if we begin with the relation of parent and child, because it is likest to the case of God with man, and study it in the light of God's forgiveness of man ; and so, from it, pass on to the question of forgiveness between equals, we shall reach a truer conception of what, even in the most ordinary cases among brethren, true forgive- ness does, or ought ideally to, mean. It may be that our imagination can picture scenes — death-scenes, perhaps in the hospital or on the scaffold, when the forgiveness of one who once was cruelly persecuted in his holiness, which could then take only the form of silent prayer for his persecutor, has passed on, without change in itself, through changing conditions of outward opportunity, until it is visibly like the forgiveness of a tenderly loving parent; until, that is, it is the persecutor who is lying — very helpless at once and very sorrowful ; while he who was the victim, having now on his side all material force, and reflecting in himself, as example and teacher and judge, the very light of the holiness of God — reflects God also in this^ that his love, like the love of God which is in it, yearns with fatherly tenderness as towards an erring child, striving by love to awake an outcry of re- sponsive desire, which it can — which it will — embrace as the real earnest of a personal self-identification with love. All this is really implicit in the fact, itself as fact not at all unfamiliar, that forgiveness must always retain its underlying character as a provisional thing, unless and I III.] FORGIVENESS 71 until it is consummated in the holiness of the penitent, and in the perfect embrace, by love because it is love, of the holy penitent because of the holiness that is in him. Certainly we do not forget the extreme imperfectness of human achievement in this, as in all directions of spiritual life. But none the less it is true that, when penitence once has begun, in any soul of man, however much it may seem to fall short of its meaning, nothing less than this is what it ideally means. It is a beginning, whose entire consum- mation, should it ever be consummated, would mean, in the perfect penitent, nothing less than a real and living righteousness. If it stops short of real separation from sin ; if it stops short of true allegiance to righteousness ; (and we are under no sort of delusion as to the universal experience of failure ; ) but if it stops short of these things, in stopping short of them it stops short of itself; for these things are the consummation of what penitence means. And forgiveness, when it reaches its consummation, is love's embrace of such a penitence as this. I cannot, then, understand less than this in the word forgiveness. And meanwhile I, or any man, — if through the life and death and life again, the accomplished work of the atonement of Jesus Christ, and our communion of spirit with it and with Him, we too look up in hope to be forgiven : what is the truth of the meaning, in us, of that hope ? Is it a hope that we, — the content of that word " we " remaining as it now is, untransformed, — shall nevertheless be excused from punishment? or shall be called by the name, or treated, apart from truth, as if we were righteous : whilst all the time we are but what we knov/ ourselves, in ourselves, to be ? Certainly this is not the true character of the Christian hope. If it were, the hope of forgiveness would carry with it no aspiration moral or spiritual. Forgiveness is no mere transaction outside the self, a mere arithmetical balance, 72 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. which leaves the self unchanged. Even the earliest touch, on the conscious moral life, of the most provisional for- giveness, must be a bracing touch, enhancing moral power, or (at the least) adding flame to moral desire. If it does neither, it is plainly foredoomed, as an experiment of love which already has failed. But if it does, or so far as it does ; already the content and character of the I who am forgiven is to that extent changed. And the full for- giveness to which in faith I aspire is a forgiveness on the part — not of weak indulgence but of righteousness and truth, a forgiveness on the part of the infinite God. It is the righteous love, which seeing in me at last the very righteousness of Christ, and seeing me only as one with the Spirit of righteousness which is the Spirit of Christ, em- braces in me the righteousness which really is there ; the righteousness which, though not of me, is now the very truth of what I, in Him, am. This is the consummation of the triumph of Love. Dare any one aspire to less than this ? or mean less than this by his hope to be forgiven ? The hope of forgiveness merely, which is not, of inherent necessity, the hope of a heart set upon personal righteousness, — is a pagan rather than a Christian hope. If I can have no heart for, and no belief in, the possibility, even within myself, of the righteousness of God ; I know not with what consistency of meaning I can ask — of God — to be forgiven. It is not so much for lack of possibility as for lack of desire, that men are tempted to put such a hope as this on one side. Nothing is really too high, in the Person of Christ, for those who have the heart to desire it, — and Him. Meanwhile, if our thought reverts to those who, to human eyes, have failed, and sunk : poor, lonely, drifting souls, with stunted capacities now, and shattered hopes, drawing in towards the shadow of dishonoured graves: the meaning of every hope that our love can frame for I in.] FORGIVENESS 73 their so late and faltering penitence, — for (if it be so now) their dying tears ; is that even these, scanty, late, and feeble though they seem, may yet be, in them, a real beginning of capacity, seen in God's sight to be a be- ginning, and real, — of what, in its full development will become nothing less than a personal self-identification, in love, with the love, which is also the holiness, of God. For him, too, — for the lowest in human seeming, as for the highest, our real hope of forgiveness consummated is a hope of righteousness : a hope of God's love altogether loving at last — what, through the marvellous working of God's love, has become at last altogether lovable. CHAPTER IV THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR The Christian doctrine of the Atonement has been variously expounded. The Christian doctrine of the Atonement, however expounded, has been vehemently impugned. And indeed there is one objection, often made against it, which is vital. Expound the action, or nature, of the Mediator how you will, it is said that any idea of a Mediator is impossible. Not so much anything in the detail of His work, but the very core of the idea presents itself to some minds as being, fundamentally, an immorality and an untruth. The problem, it will be said (legitimately enough) is this. Here is man. Here is one, that is, who is immoral and unholy in fact. By what conceivable action or process can the de facto unholy become actually holy ? And if the Christian answer begins to speak of a Redeemer, how is it conceivable (the mind asks) that any Redeemer's work, or endurance, or goodness, be it what it may, seeing that it is outside the personalities of men, should touch the point of pressing necessity, which is an essential alteration of what men are ? What is wanted is not that there should be a wonderful exhibition somewhere of obedience, or that somebody should be holy : not even that the amount or the value of holiness in the world should balance, and perhaps outweigh, the huge volume of unholiness. What is wanted is that these particular personalities should be holy, which are in fact the reverse. 74 CHAP. IV.] THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR 75 How can the particular thing which is required be touched by the introduction of " another " ? Here, if anywhere in the world, there can be no question of a fictitious trans- action, or an unreal imagining ; here, if anywhere, what- ever is not vitally and personally real is both mockery and despair. Now it may be that this is a case in which logic, by its very abstraction from experience, over-reaches itself. At all events, as a sort of preliminary reply, let us begin with a case which comes from the side of experience, rather than of logic. Consider, then, the case of a man in whose character we may happen to be interested very closely, and whose character is unmistakably bad. The daily hope and prayer in respect of him is that he may not be that which he is, and may become what he is not. But what is to be done? One thing is plain from the first. He must not be simply left alone. To leave him wholly to himself is to abandon hope. Instinctively you rather ask, who is there about him ? has he a mother ? a sister ? a high-principled companion ? a really good friend ? If he has ; there^ you say at once, is the point of hope. Everything will probably turn upon that friend. And then comes the second thought ; yes, but if parent, sister, friend, is to be his salvation, to be the living lever whereby he is himself really to become the very thing he is not, it will be no light task, no light pain, for the saving friend. What heaviness of heart there must first be, what anxious thought and care, what hoping against hope, what sense of effort disappointed, and love (as it seems) thrown away, what unwearying prayer to God, what patient bearing with folly, perverseness, and sin! If he who is the cause of all the trouble is himself with- out anguish, and without contrition, and will endure no discipline, and cannot entreat in prayer : how much of all the burden of all these things must the friend 76 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. bear first, in order that, and until, the man himself, who has seen and gradually felt these things in his friend, may be able, and willing, to bear them a little for himself. If the friend will not do this ; if no one will enter into the grief and sin, sharing it as if it were his own ; you have comparatively little hope. It is not a friend who will lecture, so much as a friend who will bear: not a friend who is ready to separate himself from, but a friend who is willing himself to enter into, the shadow of the cloud of misery and sin ; who has become already, in that willingness, a hope and an earnest of the penitent character, even of the man who does not, as yet, himself, repent, or amend, or (hardly even) desire. But this, of course, carries us but a little way. It stops very far short of the meaning of Atonement. Yet it may serve perhaps to make logic a little more cautious. The intervention of " another " is by no means so obviously irrelevant as it appeared to be. Whatever else it is, the case just supposed is at all events a most familiar experi- ence in life. And it so far illustrates the real moral and spiritual effectiveness which may be the outcome of the voluntary suffering of another, as to make it impossible to reject beforehand any theory of moral recovery, merely because it can be said to hinge upon the idea of another's suffering. But it will be felt that, even if it be not fundamentally impossible, the idea of an atoning mediator is, and must be, incompatible with any profound reality of justice. If A be the judge or king, and B the culprit, under what conceivable circumstances, or upon what conceivable principle of justice, can A fail to punish B, or allow C to intervene at all? It will perhaps be observed that our sense of the incompatibleness of any such intervention with justice rv.] THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR 77 becomes rigid and absolute, the moment we begin to use the terms, or conjure up the associations, of a system of judicial administration. The fact is that tribunals of human justice mislead our thought on this subject almost as much as they inform it. Human justice is necessarily both clumsy and rigid. The judge must administer general rules. General rules involve the sacrifice of the particular, to the average, interest. Continually the judge must do, for the sake of law, that is, for the sake of the general community, what is not really the wisest, or the justest, for the merely individual case. It is almost impossible to imagine the judicial circumstances, on earth, under which either judge or king would be perfectly free to decide, in reference to the requirements of moral goodness only, what would really be the wisest and the best for the ultimate welfare of a single wrong- doer. Moreover, even if the surrounding circumstances did not make this impossible, no human insight of wisdom would be adequate for it. Human justice that attempted to be divinely just, would break to pieces altogether. If indeed such freedom could be imagined, and wisdom withal that was adequate to wield it ; we should recognise by and by that the extreme rigidity of the practical assumption that every man is, absolutely and equally, dis- tinct from every one but himself, would begin to be at least a little less rigid. We should not indeed be in the habit of seeing guilty people let off, and others suffering in their stead: far from it: but we should perhaps be aware, of the possibility, in two different directions, of certain exceedingly dim and distant approaches towards what would look like this. On the one side, we should recognize at least that there might be cases, in which, if no one could exactly be a substitute for the guilty, yet at least some could more nearly approach to being so than others. It is something to 78 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. recognize that the impossibility is not, in all cases, absolute and equal : that there are at least degrees of impossibility. Degrees of impossibility imply, at least ideally, degrees of possibility also. A stranger, hired for money to undergo a loss of limb or liberty, would always be an insult to true equity. But one who was very closely identified with the wrong-doer in condition, or blood, or affection ; a tribesman dedicating himself for a tribal wrong ; the willing repre- sentative of a conquered nation, or army ; the father, on behalf of his own child ; the husband, for the sake of his wife ; is it impossible to conceive circumstances under which a willing acceptance of penalty on the part of some one of these, would as truly be the deepest hope of the transformation of the guilty, as it would be the crown of his own " nobleness ? Imagine, ideally, these three con- ditions : first that he who so intervened to bear did so at his own most earnest desire, of love ; secondly that he was so near to the guilty accused that he might claim a wholly exceptional right to represent him, — near as (under conceivable circumstances) husband might be to wife, or parent to child, or son to father ; and thirdly that this sacrifice of vicarious endurance was indeed the truest and the deepest way to produce the contrition and sancti- fication of the guilty ; and what follows ? We need not go so far as to say that any judge or lord on earth could accept the sacrifice. But we may possibly recognize that the impossibility which remains, depends not so much on any essential lack of ideal righteousness in that which might ideally be the consummation of righteousness in them all ; but rather in the many human limitations which would make any imaginable instance upon earth a mere resemblance or approximation to the ideal conditions, not a full attainment of them. It may be said, perhaps, that of the last two conditions asked for, neither could ever be quite absolutely realized. Between man and man, on IV.] THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR 79 earth, they probably could not. But what we may recog- nize, even between man and man, is some faint approxi- mation towards — even if never, or even nearly, a realiza- tion of — the conditions under which vicarious penalty would be not intelligible only, but the supremest mani- festation of righteousness as well as of love. There is another side also to the thought. If, in proportion to the just conceivable possibility of the legitimate identification of some other with the culprit we can conceive moral character in vicarious penalty; on the other hand, in proportion to the identification between the lord who judges and the person who has been wronged, we can understand the righteousness of a judging lord who should forego any kind of compensation or penalty; that is, in effect, should bear all the burden of the harm himself. If it is the king's own son who has been maltreated and robbed ; and if the king, in a mood of divine insight, truly sees that his free acceptance of this injury in the person of his son, will be the turning- point of the conversion to goodness of the robber, and it may be of a whole district of brigandage ; the very closeness of the identification between himself and his son makes possible an equity which, had the son been a stranger, would have been unrighteous. But, after all, such suggestions as these are most precarious. It is difficult to omit them ; for they represent some real truth. Yet they are by themselves so little convincing that, as matter of mere policy, it might have been more persuasive to leave them unsaid. Though men are not so absolutely distinct from one another as modern thought and life assume them to be ; though the father is in the child, and the child is a real repre- sentative of the father; though as there are family likenesses and national characters, so there are family and national responsibilities and consubstantialities ; yet, So ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. after all, no one man quite can be another ; if, in a flash, for a moment, we seemed to see them becoming almost as one, yet we fall back ; the essential distinction remains ; no one is another; the injustice of vicarious penalty is not done away. And in any case the language of human jurisprudence is confusing. The rough imperfectness, which is the best possibility of human judgment, cannot really light up the mystery of the perfectness of the judgement of God. We shall be carried somewhat further by another sort of instance, which at least is free from all the misleading rigidity of legal conceptions. Let A, then, be not the judge, but the father, — loving, wise, and true ; and B the child, who has gone very far wrong ; and C — the mother. And let her be thought of, not as in any respect either weak or cowardly, but as a wise and brave, as well as tender-hearted, woman. There is here no question of a legal obligation on the father to impose formal punishment ; but the problem is the real transformation of the character of the child. Do we not recognize at once that the pro- foundest hope for the child's real change lies in the reality with which the parents enter into his grief and shame; so enter into it, on his behalf, as to win it to be in him where in fact it was not, until it was first in them, and in him only from them? Do we not recognize, in particular, the place, in his discipline and his purifying, which may belong to the voluntary distress and endur- ance of the mother? This is no question, it is to be observed, of a penalty which the father insists on inflicting upon somebody, and which the mother intervenes to bear. Nothing whatever is inflicted by the father on the mother. Indeed, nothing is, speaking strictly, inflicted on any one by any one. The penalty which the mother bears is the penalty of contrition : it is rather an effort of discipline than a price of satisfaction ; it corresponds in idea not to IV.] THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR 8i punishment so much, regarded externally as a squaring of accounts, as to the moral discipline which, through self-abasement, self-condemnation, and self-surrender to penalty, wins its painful way to victorious goodness and peace. And she bears it — not as an inflicted sentence but as the spontaneous instinct and outflow of her own intensity of love. And finally, so far is it from being imposed by the relentlessness of an unforgiving father, that whatever she bears in this way, he too bears in her and with her; for in mind, in this matter, and in will, they are one. Whatever he may seem to exact, she exacts as completely as he. Whatever she is willing to endure, his sympathy too, and his will, and his yearning desire, are with her to the full in enduring. It is probable that this analogy carries us much further towards truth than any that can be borrowed from forensic justice. Nevertheless this too is an imperfect analogy. It carries us further, but it fails at the pinch. It is suggestive of much : but it certainly is not a parallel to atonement. For even here, after all, much as the parents* goodness may influence the child, yet they are distinct. The father is not the mother ; and the mother is not the child. Now it is precisely here, in the light, that is to say, at once of the suggestiveness of these analogies, and also of the hopeless inadequacy which we find to be inherent in them, that we are confronted by those great affirmations of fundamental doctrine, which lie at the basis of the "Atonement" of Christian revelation. It is at the very root of the Christian doctrine that He, who made atone- ment between God and man. Himself, in the fullest sense, was God and was Man. If He were man only, however perfectly, and not God : the whole idea of any reality of effectual mediation or atonement — without which Christianity, beautiful though it might be in idea, would not be Christianity — falls in a moment absolutely to the F 82 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. ground. If He were not God, the statement that He was a good man could be only an inexact and relative truth. Absolutely, on close analysis, it would not, and could not possibly, be true. Moreover if He were not God, the fact that He was good (in whatever sense it may be imagined to be true) would be a fact of no more moment to me, than the fact that Samson was strong, or Solomon wise, or S. Paul intrepid, or S. John beloved. They were, but I am not; and that is the difference between them and me ; and that is all. The more, indeed, they were these things, the greater the difference. And the more trans- cendently good He was, the more hopelessly unapproach- able would He be to me, — if He were only another man, and not God. From the point of view, however, of the Christian faith, this is the one absolutely cardinal and primary truth ; that, in the words of the Athanasian Creed, "Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man ; God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the world ; and man, of the substance of His Mother, born in the world ; perfect God and perfect Man." These are the familiar words, the authority of which is not likely to be challenged. But perhaps it may not be wrong to suggest that that which is understood and meant, even in the assertion of these familiar words, is apt to be ambiguous, and may very often be inadequate. My meaning may be very unsatisfactory when I say that the Father is God, and that Jesus Christ also is God ; or that I am man, and that Jesus Christ also is man. Such language sounds far too much as if we were thinking first of A and of B, and then C was subsequently introduced, who was like B in being also human, and like A in being also Divine. The word "also" and the word "like" are both of them instantly liable to misinterpretation. They seem to introduce the generic conception; as though the word "God" couid IV.] THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR S^ represent a genus or class, and there were more members of the genus than one. The truth is of course not so. To the thoughtful Christian the word God is an absolute and singular, — it cannot possibly be a generic — word. By a sort of economy or condescension of phrase, when we speak towards those who are without, we may use it generically "as there be lords many and gods many," or as when under the general heading "Theism" we include true and false conceptions of God alike. But whatever be the just ground for thus in speech classifying together the true and the imperfect and the false, to ourselves at least, when face to face with real truth, God is, and can be, but One. " Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord, is One"^ is a word not only not abrogated, but expressly re-enacted, in the Chris- tian faith. The Alpha and Omega, the beginning, and end, and sum, and meaning of Being is but One. We who believe in a Personal God do not mean a limited God. We do not mean one more a bigger specimen of existence, amongst existences. Rather we mean that the reality of existence itself is Personal. We mean that all the different abstracts, pushed back far enough, are personal, and the One same Personal : that Power, that Law, that Life, that Thought, that Love, are ultimately, in their very reality, identified in one supreme, and that necessarily a Personal, existence. Now such Supreme Being cannot be multiplied : it is incapable of a plural : it cannot be a generic term. There cannot be more than one all inclusive, more than one ultimate, more than one God. Nor has Christian thought at any point, for any moment, dared, or endured, the least approach to such a thought or phrase as " Two Gods." If the Father is God, and the Son God, they are both the same God, wholly, unreservedly. God is a particular, an unique, ^ Mark xii. 29. R.V. 84 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. not a general term. Each is not only God, but is the very same "singularis unicus et totus Deus." They are not both generically God, as though " God " could be an attribute or a predicate ; but both identically God, the God, the One, all inclusive, indivisible, God.^ Considerations like these, fundamental though they may be, are by no means unnecessary ; for there is, among Christians, not a little popular thought, which, meaning to be orthodox, is, in fact, more or less, Tri-theistic ; and which, just because it so far tends towards plurality of God, goes some way to provoke, and account for, the correlative popular tendency, and tenderness, towards Unitarianism. Just so far as Christian thought tends, in fact, towards making God a generic predicate ; the * " And sith they all are but one God in number, one indivisible essence or substance, their distinction cannot possibly admit separation. For how should that subsist solitarily by itself which hath no substance but individually the very same whereby others subsist with it ; seeing that the multiplication of substances in particular is necessarily required to make those things subsist apart which have the same general nature, and the Persons of that Trinity are not three particular substances to whom one general nature is common, but three that subsist by one substance which itself is particular^ yet they all three have it, and their several ways of having it are that which maketh their personal distinction?" Hooker, E.P.V, Ivi. 2. p. 246. * * The schoolmen are known to have insisted with great earnestness on the numerical unity of the Divine Being ; each of the three Divine Persons being one and the same God, unicus, singularis, et totus Deus. [But see Aquinas, Summa, p. I. Qu. xxxi. art. 2. Vol. xx. p. 153.] In this, however, they did but follow the recorded doctrine of the Western theologians of the 5th century, as I suppose will be allowed by critics generally. So forcible is St Austin upon the strict unity of God, that he even thinks it necessary to caution his readers lest they should suppose that he could allow them to speak of One Person as well as of Three in the Divine Nature, afe Trin. vii. 11. Again, in the (so-called) Athanasian Creed, the same elementary truth is emphatically insisted on. The neuter unum of former divines is changed into the masculine, in enunciating the mystery. " Non tres seterni, sed unus setemus." I suppose this means that Each Divine Person is to be received as the one God as entirely and absolutely as He would be held to be, if we had never heard of the other Two, and that He is not in any respect less than the one and only God, because They are each the same one God also ; or in other words, that as each human individual being has one personality, the Divine Being has three." Newman's Arians, appendix, note iv. p. 447. 3rd edn. IV.] THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR 85 necessary protest on behalf of the unity of God (necessary perhaps from the scientific and philosophical not less than from the theological side) will naturally begin to assert itself as a correction, rather than as a corroboration, of orthodox theology. If the thought that wishes to be orthodox had less tendency to become Tri-theistic, the thought that claims to be free would be less Unitarian. For centuries upon centuries, it is to be remembered, the essential unity of God had been, as it were, burnt and branded in upon the consciousness of Israel. It had to be completely established first, as a basal element of thought, indispensable, unalterable, before there really could begin the disclosure to man of the reality of eternal relations within the one indivisible Being of God. And when the disclosure came, it came not as modifying, — far less as denying, — but as further inter- preting and illumining that unity which it absolutely presupposed. Probably, however, there will be many minds which, if they put into words their instinctive feeling in respect of such thoughts as these, would express themselves somewhat in this way: they would say, we are afraid of saying too much : we are afraid, in such an assertion of unity, of explaining away the threefold distinction of Personality : we are afraid of reducing it to a threefold- ness merely of phrase, or merely of aspect : in a word, we are afraid of Sabellianism. It might possibly be enough to reply that if two truths, which intellect im- perfectly correlates, are nevertheless to be really held together, they are best held not by a refusal to affirm either positively, for fear of interfering with the other, but by a fearless assertion, in its turn, of each. But indeed these two truths are not simply held together, without any attempt at correlation. They do not come to us exactly, as it were, on the same level. The one S6 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. comes to us as more fundamental and primary than the other. The second is an element in, or method of, the first. And our direct answer is that we cannot possibly incur any Sabellian peril, whilst we firmly understand and maintain (what is fatal to Sabellianism) that that which IS revealed within Divine Unity is not only a distinction of aspects or of names, but a real reciprocity of mutual relation. One "aspect" cannot contemplate, or be loved by another. If we recognize that revelation discloses, within the one being of God, both subject and object at once, a mutuality of eternal contemplation, a mutuality of eternal love, no language that we can use about unity can be really Sabellian ; for any thought of mutual relationship between aspects of one, which differ only as aspects, would be wholly impossible. We may dis- miss then any fear of affirming the unity too much, and repeat that it must needs be inadequate thought, which would think of the Son as only being, generically, like to the Father, in being also, yet distinctly, God. What the Father is, that is the Son, not similarly but identi- cally, for He and the Father are One. From this we turn to the human side. " Perfect God and perfect Man." Now if the generic sense, as applied to God, is impossible : as applied to man it is at least inadequate and untrue. If He might have been, yet He certainly was not, a man only, amongst men. His relation to the human race is not that He was another specimen, differing, by being another, from everyone except Him- self. His relation to the race was not a differentiating but a consummating relation. He was not generically, but inclusively, man. The fact, indeed, even of our own distinctness one from another, is not (as has been already urged) so bald or so ultimate as we sometimes make it. The father is reproduced in the son : we know not how deep may be IV.] THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR 87 the community between brother and brother. If " we " defeated the Armada or Napoleon, — we who had no more hand in it than the French or Spanish infants yet unborn : if the felon's dishonour brands the whole family name : if Israel fled and died because Achan sinned ; or (more awfully still) if " Israel " put to death the Son of Man : then connections like these are no merely artificial make-believe, no idle form of fashion in phrase. Even the wider phrase "solidarity of humanity," is one which, as it has probably more meaning now than ever it could have had in the world before, so perhaps every day, and from every side at once, (the practical side, and the scientific, as well as the philosophical and the religious) is growing in directness and depth of signifi- cance. Whatever we do, we do not for ourselves alone. The attempt to make an isolated life is an impossible attempt. It is not as an individual that I can be measured or judged. What I am is what I am in relation to an environment. As child in the family, as school-fellow, as comrade, as citizen, as householder, to those around, rich or poor, good or evil, bright or sad, — I am determined more and more, by my relations. From the very lowest form of boon-companionship, or partner- ship in crime, to the life of perpetual service to man, and to God in man, this dependence and relativity of the individual life is in one way or other perpetually being realized. But once more, as between man and man, these things are a parable, an aspiration, a glimpse : they still always fall short. It is precisely here that the relation of Jesus Christ to humanity is unique. What others do but faintly suggest is realized in him. Other cases, if they illustrate it at all, must illustrate it at least as emphatically by what they are not, as by anything that they are. To think of Him merely in the light of the ordinary possibilities of 88 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. others, to think of the significance, or power, of His humanity as limited to His sole individual self-hood, is in- compatible with the very existence and meaning of the Church. He alone was not generically but inclusively man. The only relation which can at all directly compare with it, is that of Adam ; who, in a real — though a primarily external, and therefore inadequate — sense, was Humanity ; so that every succeeding instance of humanity is human by direct derivation from him, as very part and parcel of what he was. The reality and directness of our relation with Adam we feel only too cogently. It is useless to argue about it ; it is there. It is part of what we begin with. It belongs to that consciousness of the self which is anterior to any analysis or argument. Every pulsation of the blood in our veins, every limitation, or temptation, or dis- order, or decay, which, through the avenue of the body has come home to ourselves, and registered itself as part of our own private history and consciousness, is witness only too incontrovertible to the necessity and the absoluteness of our relationship with Adam. The nature, in and through which we live, is the nature which we have received by transmission from him. It is in us what it was in him first. We cannot separate ourselves from him. No indignation, no bewailing, no strenuousness of effort or resolve will avail to alter the underlying fact that our humanity is his humanity. From him it was derived to us ; and in us it retains all those natural qualities and tendencies, in which and through which our personality grows to self-conscious- ness and self-expression ; but which themselves, long before any personality of ours, for good or for evil took their stamp, as being what they were, in him. This is the only instance, actual or possible, with which the relation of Jesus Christ to humanity has been in scrip- ture, or can be, compared. But even in this one case the IV.] THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR 89 comparison is not completely adequate. It is valid as an illustration, but remains on a different, and dissimilar, level. The one is a fleshly relation, the other a spiritual. The one works automatically, materially, mechanically. The other is realized in a different sphere, and depends upon other than material conditions. The one is a natural property of bodily life, and follows, as it were blindly, from the fact that Adam was the original parent. The other is a Spiritual property, so sovereign, so transcendent, that it could only be a property of a Humanity which was not merely the Humanity of a finite creature, but the Humanity of the infinite God. Not that there is any absolute antithesis between spirit and body. Neither is body without spirit, nor spirit without body. What Adam is to the flesh, and, through the flesh, indirectly to the spirit also ; that is Christ to the spirit, and, through the spirit, indirectly also to the flesh, of all those who, as they are partakers, in flesh, of Adam, are made capable of becoming partakers, in Spirit, of Christ. We talk, indeed, ourselves, in a limited sense, of one man speaking or acting in the spirit of another ; and so far as it roes the phrase is not untrue ; yet it goes but a very little ray. That complete indwelling and possessing of even >ne other, which the yearnings of man towards man im- jrfectly approach, is only possible, in any fulness of the rords, to that Spirit of Man which is the Spirit of God : to le Spirit of God, become, through Incarnation, the Spirit of Man. No mere man indwells, in Spirit, in, or as, the Spirit of another. Whatever near approach there may be seen to be towards this, is really mediated through the Spirit of Christ. If I grow at last towards unity of spirit with my friend : it is not really that I am in him, or he in me ; but rather that the grace of indwelling Spirit which indwelt in him, and made him, in his own way, what he was, is not denied even to me. Experience of man with 9b ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap.- man, here as elsewhere, gives but a faint analogy of the meaning of the Divine. But, here as elsewhere, it would be a fatal mistake to interpret the meaning of the Divine only in terms of man's experience with man. After all, we do not fully attain to the meaning of a.nything here. We do but point towards, we do not realize, even that which we first and most claim to possess — self-conscious personality : we do not realize the conditions without which we ourselves should be unthinkable : what wonder if we can but point dimly towards, and cannot realize, the reci- procity of true intercommunion of spirits ? But what our limited being points towards, is real in God. If Christ's Humanity were not the Humanity of Deity, it could not stand in the wide, inclusive, consummating relation, in which it stands in fact, to the humanity of all other men. But as it is, the very essence of the Christian religion is the indwelling of the Spirit of Christ. " The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit." 1 "If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His." 2 No attempt will be made, in the present context at least, to enlarge further upon the methods or meanings of this mutual inherence, this spiritual indwelling, whereby humankind is summed anew, and included, in Christ.^ Nor need we at this moment attempt to enter into a discussion as to the meaning of the prerogative of free will, or that awful possibility which is inherent in it, whereby we may revolt, and reject, and put ourselves outside the life of Christ. Be that possibility what it may, it is not that that can interpret — for it is utter revolt and contradiction against — the meaning of the atoning work of Christ. The meaning of that work must be found, not in the mystery of the possibility of its being contradicted, ^ I Cor. XV. 45. ^ Romans viii. 9. * These subjects are further discussed in chapters viii. and ix. 1 IV.] THE PERSON OF THE MEDIATOR 91 but in the beauty of its unmarred effectiveness. And apart from man's power to revolt from it, which we do not now discuss, it certainly means inclusion within the Body of the Spirit of Christ. If there be those to whom such language sounds in the least degree either figurative or overstrained, it may, at the present stage, be sufficient to remind them of these three things. First, that its truth, as literal and vital, is absolutely assumed in all that St Paul has to say about the first, and the second, Adam. Secondly that not in one place only, but from end to end, language expressive of this truth is so reiterated and insisted on in the New Testament, that it may fairly be called the characteristic truth of the apostolic Church. If there is one corollary from the Deity of Christ, which, more than another, we may defy any man to eradicate from New Testament theology, without shivering the whole into fragments, it is the truth of the recapitulation and inclusion of the Church, which is, ideally at least, as wide as humanity, in Christ. And thirdly, that this truth is the obvious basis of the entire sacramental system and doctrine, that is, of the divinely distinctive worship, which is the divine expression of the faith and life, of the Church of Christ. What is Baptism, in its truest realization, but our in- corporation, as members, into the Body of Christ ? What is Holy Communion, but a feeding and living upon the Body and Blood of Christ? The beginning of life in Christ's Church is the free gift of membership in Christ. The crown of the most ideal and unfaltering life of communion is the consummation of personal union with Christ. The whole sacramental system symbolizes, ex- pounds, represents, yes and conveys — not mechanically ior magically, but intelligently, morally and spiritually, "this far more than merely human reality of inclusion rith and in Christ. I 92 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. iv. No doubt all this may be said to be merely preliminary. Nothing has yet been offered in the way of explanation of the nature, or meaning, of the atoning action of our Lord. But perhaps it is not in vain to try and take account even of the more external and pedantic barriers by which the, often unconscious, perverseness of the natural intellect tries to shut out our moral and spiritual consciousness from that assimilation of the basal truth of atonement, which is, in fact, its deepest necessity. And if perplexities of arithmetical character are to be met in terms of arithmetic ; at least, when pressed by the charge of moral injustice in the fact of the vicarious intervention of any mediating third term between God and man, we may point out that there is a necessary, and a very grave, misconception in the terms of the charge : for He can be no intervening "third," who is Himself — not similarly, not generically, but wholly, individually, identically — the " first," and wholly, individually, identically the "second" also; who is Himself, on the one side absolutely, on the other (if we will but have it so), at least with a Divine potentiality, "singularis, unicus, et totus" — et Deus et Homo. CHAPTER V THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST We now pass from the thought of the Person of Jesus Christ as, like Adam, and more even than Adam, the repre- sentative and inclusive summary of all mankind : and con- sider rather, in respect of Himself, what His self-expression in humanity meant ; and what is manifested in it as to the true relation of the human self to God. It has no doubt been often felt as a difficulty to con- ceive quite adequately of the reality of His being, as human, without going in thought too far, and conceiving of Him at once as two distinct Persons, a human person as well as a Divine. And so Christian thought has learned to shrink from speaking, or thinking, of Him as " a human personality," and has sometimes even made a sort of prin- ciple of speaking of the impersonal character of the humanity of Christ. But if there is error at hand in the one direction, there is certainly also error in the other. If there is a sense in which the assertion of a human person- ality runs easily into Nestorianism ; at least those who first asserted a human personality meant something, which the simple denial of the phrase may unduly disparage. To deny the human personality, however in some contexts necessary, is not without its own risks. There is, and there can be, no such thing as impersonal humanity. The phrase involves a contradiction in terms. Human nature which IS not personal, is not human nature. Human nature can only be the nature of a person : not exactly, of 94 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. necessity, of a human person : but of a person who being in himself at least human — perhaps more than human — is so far as his assumption of humanity goes, — adequately self-expressed in terms, and through conditions, of humanity. Of necessity, He is a Person : and He, the Person, is human. The root and origin of His Personality may not be human. But in so far as He is a Person now humanly incarnate, the word human has become a true attribute, truly predicable of His Personality. Of necessity He is a Person, and a Person who now expresses His very self, through human conditions and capacities, as man. The human acts, and human character, are the acts and the character, the expression and the revelation, of Himself Christ is, in fact, a Divine Person : but a Divine Person not merely wearing manhood as a robe, or playing upon it as an instrument ; but really expressing Himself m terms of Humanity : and thereby making Humanity — to the ut- most extent to which the conditions of mortal disability under which He took it were capable — a real and true re- flection and utterance of Deity. There was in Him no impersonal Humanity (which is impossible) ; tut a human nature and character which were personal because they were now the method and condition of His own Personality : Himself become Human, and thinking, speaking, acting, and suffering, as man. ,. """^ It would indeed never be true to say of Him, during the time of His humiliation, that He was nothing more than the Human expression of Himself For He was, all through, the Infinite and Eternal, God the Word, " upholding all things by the word of His power " ^ — "God only begotten, which is in the bosom of the Father." 2 But however impossible it might be that the infinite God should wholly be, in all aspects and attributes of Deity, expressed in Humanity: yet at least *Hebr. i. 3. ^John i. 18. K,V. margin. I v.] THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST 95 the Incarnate, as Incarnate, — God, in flesh, as man, — was never Himself otherwise than as He could be, and was, expressed through attributes and capacities of man- hood. The Incarnate did not oscillate between being God and being man. He was indeed always God ; and yet never otherwise God than as expressed within the possibilities of human consciousness and character. It was not indeed obscure to His consciousness that He, the Incarnate, was all the while something more than He was as Incarnate. "Before Abraham was, I am."^ " I and the Father are one." ^ " And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was." ^ These are not the words of I ^ One to whom His own essential being, or the origin, or , ^ *^ the goal, of Incarnation are, in any sense, obscured. But (I ^ this continued self-consciousness, in Himself, of inherent >^f ' Deity ; this steady view, before and after, in the way of ^'\ what we should call memory towards the past, and )sr anticipation towards the future ; is not incompatible with , ^ the principle that, in respect of the experience of Incarna- tion itself, its tasks and its sufferings, its works and its self-restraints, its mind and its character, He was God always and only in the way in which the human con- Iitions which He had chosen were capable of being an xpression of God. We do not gain, but greatly lose, I respect of the true impressiveness of the Incarnate fe, if we imagine Him, at fitful intervals, as jumping away (so to speak) from the disabilities of the chosen condition of His self-expression, in order to make a display, — outside the limits of the Humanity in which He purported to be speaking and acting, — of non-human Deity. We greatly obscure the significance of His works of power unless we regard them as the works which properly belonged to the perfect human self-expression ^ John ix. 53. '^Johu x. 32. ^ John xvii. 5. 96 ' ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. of God : and not as works of God intruding, so to speak, across human conditions, — of God quite apart from all realities of human propriety, or human power. Whatever He said with human lips, whatever He did, acting amongst men in the place and figure of man, (though, no doubt, said and done by One who had not lost, in Himself, self- consciousness of Deity,) was nevertheless always said or done — not by Deity, as it were, acting barely as Deity, but by Deity conditioned by Humanity ; by Human capacity, and Human character, according as these had become, and therefore were shown to be capable of becoming, the real expression and method and living utterance, of Deity. It is really of considerable importance to rid our imaginations of a certain dualism (in its way somewhat parallel to the Nestorian dualism, though issuing from a very different side, and with a very different history and motive) according to which the Person of Christ is currently conceived as being in such sense both God and man, that He is, in point of fact, two. There is Deity there, and there is also Humanity. He can speak, think, and act, sometimes under the conditions of one nature, sometimes under the conditions of the other. As God He does this ; and as man He does that, and another thing partly as God, and partly as man. This distinction has been very prevalent indeed in the language of Christians. Assuredly no kind of irreverence was in- tended, nor any reality of dualism. Yet the language, on cross-examination, will be found to be largely dualistic. ^he phrase " God and man " is of course perfectly true. But it is easy to lay undue emphasis on the " and." And when this is done, — as it is done every day, — the truth is better expressed by varying the phrase. " He is not two, but one, Christ." He is, then, not so much God and man, as God in, and through, and as, man. He is one I I v.] THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST 97 indivisible, personality throughout. In His human life on earth, as Incarnate, He is not sometimes, but con- sistently, always, in every act and every detail. Human. The Incarnate never leaves His Incarnation. God, as man, is always, in all things, God as man. He no more ceases, at any point, to be God under methods and conditions essentially human ; than, under these essentially human methods and conditions. He at any point ceases to be God. Whatever the reverence of their motive may be, men do harm to consistency and to truth, by keeping open, as it were, a sort of non-human sphere, or aspect, of the Incarnation. This opening we should unreservedly desire to close. There are not two existences either of, or within, the Incarnate, side by side with one another. If it is all Divine, it is all human too. We are to study the Divine, in and through the human. By looking for the Divine side by side with the human, instead of dis- cerning the Divine within the human, we miss the signi- ficance of them both. We are not, then, to be in the least degree afraid of the fullest realization of the humanness of Christ; for the human experience, in its directest reality as human experience, is first itself the revelation of the character of God : and secondly, in revealing God, it is a revelation also of what human character and capacity, even under con- ditions of extremest disability, really are and mean. We quite miss the revelation of Humanity in Jesus Christ, if we insist on denying that its highest manifestations are predicable of Humanity at all. And even the revelation of Deity in Him we degrade and depreciate, if we insist on finding it only, or even as much, in certain (as it seems to us) abnormal effects; and not rather in the even daily tenour of a character, which just because it was quite perfect as human, — perfect in reference to the everyday difficulties of perfectness, — was therefore not G 98 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. so much by virtue of material miracles (which might possibly be otherwise accounted for) as in the achieve- ment of moral perfectness, (which could have but one interpretation only) an unmistakable manifestation, in the central essence and meaning of human nature, of the character and power of God. .^We look, then, at the picture of the Incarnate Christ, — not at some elements in it, but at the whole as a whole ; and feel that in the whole of it there is manifested to us — as, on the one hand, the inner character of God, so, on the other hand, the true inner character, or, in other words, the true Godward relation, of man. The more unreservedly we are able to think of Him, the Incarnate, as, in His In- carnation, really human, in feeling and act, in consciousness and character ;. (even though that very human character and consciousness are all the while — and He, in them, is not unconscious that they are — the direct image and utterance of God ;) the more possible will it be to us to enter, with real sympathy and intelligence, into the teach- ing of His Humanity, and to see in it alike what humanity needed, and what humanity achieved, for perfect accept- ance with God. For our present purpose we may conveniently distin- guish two primary needs, and achievements, in the work of the Mediator. There is on the one hand, the sanctification of the present : on the other, the cancelling of the past. There is the rendering to Godward (which is also, in another aspect, the exhibition before men) of the offering of a living Holiness, in human conditions and character : and there is the awful sacrifice, in humanity, of a perfect contrition. For practical purposes we may speak of these respectively, as — the one the offering of Obedience, and the other the offering of Atonement : or again as the one the offering of the life, and the other the offering of the death. These last are not, of course, accurate distinctions. v.] THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST 99 For obedience is not really separable from atonement. Obedience is atoning ; and the atonement itself can be ex- hibited as one great consummation of obedience. Again the life and the death are not really in contrast. Whatever is true of either, is in some degree true of the other. The death is the true and proper climax of the life. Only in death is the climax of obedience reached ; while the life is a sacrifice from end to end. Nevertheless the distinction is true in the main, and is convenient. The life, as apart from the death, is character- ized more immediately by the homage of perfect obedience than by the agony of extreme penitence. The death, viewed apart from the life, is characterized even more by the anguish which was requisite to perfect contrition, than by the normal homage to the character of God which con- sists in being holy. And of these two, if the sacrifice of atonement, the effectual cancelling of accomplished sin, is the more directly our subject in these pages as a whole ; yet it will be indispensable, before turning exclusively to ^ that, to think first a little of the other side. Primarily, then, for the present, our thought is of the life of consummate obedience, as a perfect manifestation, and offering, of holiness : holiness in terms of human condition and character ; yet a perfectly adequate holiness ; a re- sponse worthy of the holiness of God. How, in this aspect, shall we chiefly characterize the picture of the life as a I whole? The essential point of the truth, the truth which sums up all other and more partial truths, would seem to be this. It is a life of unreserved, unremitting, absolute, and clearly conscious, dependence. / 'The centre of His life is never in Himself. He is always, explicitly, the mani- festation, the reflection, the obedient son and servant, of another. ^.. There is no purpose of self ; no element of self- will ; no possibility, even for a moment, of the imagination of separateness ; no such thing, we may even say, as a 100 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. consciousness alone and apart. He is the representative agent of another, the Son of the Father, the Image of God. This is the entire description of His life and consciousness. " I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent Me . . . ye know neither Me nor My Father ; if ye knew Me, ye would know My Father also." ^ " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." ^ "I am come in My Father's name, and ye receive Me not ; if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive." * " Many good works have I shewed you from the Father ; for which of those works do ye stone Me?"* And it is in this context that we should probably do the fullest justice to the exact signifi- cance of those great words " I and the Father are one " ^ — words, it is to be remembered, which are spoken actually by the Incarnate, the Christ, the Son of Man, in time, and in place, and through human brains and lips, — not simply, across infinities, by the Eternal Logos. This relation then of absolute dependence upon Another — the Father, that is, God ; is the essential reality, never at any point relaxed or impaired. He can be indeed assailed by suggestions from without — the liability to this insult He has deliberately taken upon Himself— suggestions of the world, and of the flesh, and of the devil : but such sugges- tions, though they may torture and insult by presenting themselves with human intelligibleness, present themselves only to be absolutely repelled — repelled, as of course, for the sake, repelled in the fulness of the strength, of His unreserved union of dependence upon His God. There are two directions, both thoroughly intelligible to us, in which this essential dependence upon God expresses itself: and the two are in mutual correspondence with each other. The one is active and outward. The other is in- ward and contemplative. The one is the shaping of the » John viii. i6, 19. ^ John xiv. 9. » John v. 43. * John X. 32. " John x. 30. v.] THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIS^ J ^;:; ;.s9a; life. The other is the feeding of the mind. The one is obedience, made manifest in all that is, or is not, either said or done ; the other is communion of spirit, maintained in the way of secret meditation and prayer. Nothing really is more characteristic of the life than its continual prayerfulness. A general attitude or atmosphere of relation towards God does not for a moment take the place, or dispense with the need, of explicit prayer. The explicit prayer is direct, habitual, and of long continuance. It is not by mere passivity, but by active uplifting, by deliberate and strenuous effort, that the spirit within is kept serene and strong. " Jesus also having been baptized, and praying, the Heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost de- scended in a bodily form as a dove upon Him." ^ " Great multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed of their infirmities. But He withdrew Himself in the deserts and prayed." ^ " And it came to pass in these days that He went out into the mountain to pray ; and He continued all night in prayer to God."^ "And after He had sent the multitudes away. He went up into the mountain apart to pray ; and when even was come, He was there alone." * " And it came to pass about eight days after these sayings. He took with Him Peter and John and James, and went up into the mountain to pray. And as He was praying, the fashion of His countenance was altered," etc.^ " And it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto Him, * Lord teach us to pray,' " etc.* " And He spake a parable unto them to the end that they ought always to pray and not to faint." ^ " And every day He was teaching in the temple ; and every night He went out, and lodged in the mount that is called the mount of Olives, and all the people came ^ Luke iii. 21. 2 Lu^e v. 16. » ^v 8iavvKT€p€V(ov €V TjJ TTpoo-evxy Tov diov. Lukc vi. 12. * Matt. xiv. 23. ' Luke ix. 28, 29. • Luke xi. i. "^ Luke xviii. i. io2"^At0I:fEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. early in the morning to Him in the temple, to hear Him." ^ " And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly ; and His sweat became as it were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground." ^ There is a correspondence between the quiet majesty of the day, and the earnest com- muning of the night. Whether it be in the way of the tranquil wisdom of His doctrine, penetrating at once and uplifting and confounding ; or whether it be in the exercise of the prerogative of power which belongs to the unex- plored truth of human nature whose relation is perfected with God ; — whether it be for teaching or for what we call miracle ; — what He is amongst men is the counterpart of what He is towards God : He is Sovereign in majesty over man and over nature, by day, because His nights are spent in the communing of prayer with His God. Correlative to this is the perfect obedience on the side of the active life. It cannot be too much insisted on that the life of Christ is so characteristically obedience, that in it, and in it alone, Js the complete revelation of what obedience means. ^'It is clear also, upon reflection, that the obedience which is so characteristic of His life is rendered always to God, His true Father, not to any man. There is obedience, of a kind, — submission, that is to say, and conformity, within strictly defined limits — to some human beings under some conditions, — the conformity of love to a loving mother and to her husband ; the conformity of silent endurance to the madness of Jewish priests or of Roman soldiers. But this, even at its highest, is something not merely less complete, but different in kind from the obedience, at every moment, to His God. " He went down with them, and came to Nazareth ; and He was subject unto them " ^ does not mean that He was wholly dependent on them for the inspiration of His every emotion and thought. It means that He conformed to their wishes * Luke xxi. 37, 38. '^ Luke xxii. 44. • Luke ii. 51. I v.] THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST 103 in outward things, in which it was right that He should § / j conform to their wishes. They had, up to a certain ^^^ ^ ^ point, a claim : and the claim was frankly and fully ^> C*^^^^ recognised. But that the claim had absolute limitations, f ^J^'^^ He had just shown them, with emphasis, amongst the doctors in the Temple at Jerusalem. So different indeed is this relation towards them from the real meaning of obedience, as the meaning of obedience is revealed in His Godward life, that the difference would be conveniently expressed if we drew a contrast between being not dis- obedient, and being obedient. He was, to them, not disobedient. He traversed no wish of theirs to which He could conform, consistently with the Divine principle of His life. On the contrary, it was part of the Divine principle of His life that He should, as far as possible, so conform. But His dependence on God itself constituted the very essence of His life and consciousness. > It was no negative abstinence from disobeying. It was the one positive principle which included all He did, and all He thought. There was nothing in Him which was not constituted what it was, by His unceasing continuity and completeness of dependence. He did nothing, said nothing, willed nothing, apart from God : nothing which was in such sense His, that it was not, ipsofactOy as fully God's in Him. His own phrases about Himself are full of this disclosure. "Jesus answered him. My Father worketh even until now, and I work." ^ , . . "Jesus therefore answered and said unto them. Verily, verily I say unto you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father doing ; for what things soever He doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner. For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth." ^ ..." I can of Myself do nothing; as I hear, I judge: and My judgment is righteous; * John V. 17. " John v. 19, 20. I04 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me." 3 • • • " The works which the Father hath given Me to accomplish, the very works that I do, bear witness of Me that the Father hath sent Me." 2 . . . « As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father; so he that eateth Me, he also shall live because of Me." ^ . . . " They said therefore unto Him, Where is Thy Father? Jesus answered. Ye know neither Me nor My Father ; if ye knew Me, ye would know My Father also." * . . . " Jesus there- fore said. When ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself, but as the Father hath taught Me, I speak these things. And He that sent Me is with Me ; He hath not left Me alone ; for I do always the things that are pleasing to Him." ^ ..." I speak the things which I have seen with My Father ; and ye also do the things which ye heard from your father." * " We must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day : the night cometh, when no man can work." ^ ..." If I do not the works of My Father, believe Me not. But if I do them, though ye believe not Me, believe the works ; that ye may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father." ^ , . , "Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me ? The words that I say unto you, I speak not from Myself ; but the Father abiding in Me doeth His works." ^ Phrases like these reiterate for us, with great emphasis, the central truth, that the focus or centre of His being as man, was not in Himself as man, but in His Father, that is, God. Considering indeed who the self is who speaks, there is something most remarkable, and strangely suggestive, in the reiterated emphasis with which He ijohnv. 30. ajohnv. 36. » j^hn vi. 57. * John viii. 19. 'John viii. 28, 29. "John viii. 38. ' Jdin ix. 4. •John x. 37, 38. 'John xiv. 10. I v.] THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST 105 repeats the negative, disclaiming either initiative, or capacity, as belonging to Himself. " I can of Myself do nothing." " The Son can do nothing of Himself." " The words that I speak unto you I speak not of Myself." There is no evading the directness of the phrases. "Not of Myself" is not only a form of assertion which is capable of being applied to the Son of God incarnate ; but it is plain that we shall miss a truth which is specially emphasized for us, if we do not allow the very fullest weight to the negative which it asserts. It becomes, then, a matter of importance to insist that, in expressing Himself in reality of manhood, and the feelings, emotions, and conditions of manhood. He deliber- ately put on — not indeed the personal capacity of sinning, but at least (if we may use the expression) the hypothetical capacity of sinning, the nature through which sin could naturally approach and suggest itself: and therefore, that the statement just made, that the centre of His being as man was not in Himself but in God, is not so much a tautological truism, as a most important truth. There was, so far, in His human nature, the natural machinery for, or capability of, rebelling, that the reiterated negative, " not My own," " not Myself," does deny something. To say that He was dependent upon God does not say simply and merely, though it does say by implication, that He was dependent upon Himself. To be clothed with human flesh, and to be accessible to human emotions, though it does not mean the actual setting up of a human self in antithesis to His divine self; does at least mean a providing with the natural capacities for separation and rebellion ; it does mean that the pressure towards rebellion could be felt, and that there could be stem repression and effort in obedience, so that the consummation of obedience could be, and was, learned, through inward, as well as outward, suffering. If there was not an actualized, there K'. io6 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. was (so to speak) an imaginary and hypothetical possibility of a distinct self, willing otherwise than in accordance with God's will ; a possibility which is not really possible, for it would have meant literally chaos, the very self-contradiction of the Being of God ; but which, nevertheless, dimly images itself at some supreme moments, to the imagination, and gives at least some meaning to the refusal of separateness. There would be no meaning in the assertion made of God as God, that He " spoke not from Himself" or that " He did nothing of Himself" The solemnity of such assertions, as made of the Incarnate, depends upon this ; that He had taken to Himself the external capacity, and as it were machinery, for selfishness. *' There was a hypothetical or conceivable selfishness, — the possible imagination of a rebellious self, — not actual indeed, nor actually possible without chaos: yet something to be, by moral strain, controlled and denied ; something which made self-denial in the Incarnate, not an empty phrase, but a stupendous act or energy of victorious moral goodness. Of Himself He uses the phrase self, in this manner, in order to deny it. He uses it, not of His Eternal Being, as God, but of that human possibility which, if it could have been realized, would have been rebellion. And it is this strange, dim, vision or idea of a possibility — which nevertheless is not possible, — ^which gives their deepest dread and mystery to some of the most mysterious — and most appalling — ^ moments of all : such as " now is My soul troubled ; and what shall I say? Father save Me from this hour. But for this cause came I unto this hour. Father glorify Thy name."^ And above all, the awful cry of Gethsemane ' i\ "O my Father, if it be possible let this cup pass away from me." ^ — ^which yet passes on at once, in the same cry, into "nevertheless not My will but Thine, be done!"^ " Not as I will, but as Thou " : " not My will, but Thine " : * John xii. 27. * Matt. xxvi. 39. « Luke xxii. 42. I v.] THE OBEDIENCE OF CHRIST 107 this, it may be, is the nearest approach to the impossible possibility of separation. ^^But even in this form it is unspeakably terrible to contemplate. And meanwhile this whole thought is a commentary, full of the most mysterious significance, upon His Human obedience. Some glimpse at least it gives us into the truth that His unceasing dependence, of moral and spiritual being, upon His God, is not an idle assertion as of a mere necessity which could not be otherwise; it is not mere inert passiveness (as it were) of unmoved self-identity, but a real energy, and revelation, of active and most stupendous obedience. The secret then of His exhibition of obedience, His revelation of the true rationale of human life, is here: He was absolutely loyal in dependence; He was absolutely without any self-reservation, any nursing of separateness of self: He was the exposition, by willing reflection, of Another. So it was that He was the perfect exhibition, (under conditions not only of human nature in its glory, but of most limited and suffering mortality) of the Being and character of God. There is one other consideration which follows from what has been said. It will be felt that the things said, in their own character, and with them the passages of S. John's gospel with which they are chiefly connected, belong primarily to the exposition of the essential relation, between God, regarded as Incarnate, between Jesus Christ, the Human expression of Deity, and the God on whom it was His human perfectness altogether to depend. They are not primarily words of revelation as to the timeless relations between the First and the Second Persons of the Eternal Trinity. There may indeed be a very deep connection between the one of these relations and the other. The tracing of such a connection would belong chiefly to the explanation of io8 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. v. the causes, so far as they are in any way cognizable by us, why it was in the Person of the Eternal Logos that God was Incarnated. But whatever there may be to be said on such a subject, the passages themselves ought not to be cited, at least so directly or primarily, as theological statements about the Persons, as such, of the Eternal Trinity : as rather about the essential truth of the relation of the Incarnate, as Incarnate, to the Eternal ; the relation of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, to His God and Father, — obedient dependence on whom was the Breath of His Life. CHAPTER VI THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST The relation of Christ to sin, as the Atoner, is more mysterious than that of His relation, in obedient life, to holiness. But nothing can exceed the directness with which the relation to sin is emphasized in scripture, or the cardinal place of this relation in the Christian creed. The relation to sin is absolute, unreserved, personal — though the sin is not in Himself. "Him who knew no sin, He made to be sin on our behalf."^ Elsewhere the relation to sin is stated in a different way, " God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as an offering for sin, condemned sin in the flesh."' The central point in these two forms of statement is by no means obviously the same. In either case indeed the act is the act of God — God the Eternal, the Essential, the One God. In either case the act is the act of God, wrought in and through Jesus Christ ; through Him, that is, who is the perfect expression of God in terms of human conditions, and consciousness, and character; through God the Incarnate, God the Son of Man ; through the Son of Man who, because He is Son of Man, is therefore, of necessity. Son of God. But this act of God through Christ, this act of the Incarnate, which is the act of the Eternal, is described in two varying forms. The one says that He "was made sin," the other that He, in flesh and for flesh, " condemned sin." * 2 Cor. V. 21. ' Rom. viii. 3. 100 no ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. The considerations which are before us in the present chapter are such, it is to be hoped, as will naturally tend to bring the two modes of thought, from apparent contrast, more and more towards real coincidence. He condemned sin — that is, there is an aspect of the Atonement according to which it can be summed up as a pronouncing, by Jesus Christ, of the judgement and sentence of eternal Righteousness against all human sin. It is He who is the judging and condemning Righteous- ness. He was made sin — that is, He the eternal Righteousness, in judging sin, judged it not in another, but judged it rather, as a penitent judges it, within Himself; He surrendered Himself for the judgement that He pronounced; He took, in His own Person, the whole responsibility and burthen of its penance ; He stood, that is, in the place, not of a judge simply, nor of a mere victim, but of a voluntary penitent — wholly one with the righteousness of God in the sacrifice of Himself. Remember what it is that the idea of Atonement requires. The idea of effectual atonement for sin requires at once a perfect penitence and a power of perfect holiness. Man has sinned. Man is unrighteous. If I am un- righteous, what could make me absolutely righteous again? If indeed my repentance, in reference to the past, could be quite perfect, such penitence would mean that my personality was once more absolutely one with Righteousness in condemning sin even in, and at the cost of, myself. Such personal re-identity with Righteous- ness, if it were possible, would be a real contradiction of my past. It would be atonement, and I should, in it, be once more actually righteous. If such relation to the past were possible, it would by the same possibility be possible also that my life, now and henceforth, should be, in outward activity and I VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST iii in inward spirit, perfect, — the flawless homage of a Divine obedience. In relation to the past, the present, and the future, I should have become quite perfectly and con- tinuously and Divinely righteous. For atoning and living Righteousness there are necessary a condemnation which would perfectly obliterate from the spirit the presence of past sin ; and the present and unceasing homage of perfect righteousness. But if these two things are necessary, it is just these two things which are, in universal human experience, alike ideal and alike impossible. Both these things were attained, in literal perfection of full fact, in the life and in its climax, which is the death, of the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. It is worth while to say with some emphasis that we, in the present chapter, have nothing, properly, to do with the relation of Him, or of these things in Him, to us ; with the, question how, what He was, or what He did, really alters or really characterizes, in any one of us, our own personality. That is a large part indeed of any intelligible statement of the doctrine of Atonement. But, quite apart from us, it is our object for the present to recall and con- sider what these things were in Himself, Now nothing is more familiar than the thought of Jesus Christ on earth as being, within the conditions of mortality, the perfect reflection of the will, the perfect expression of the character, of the Eternal God. For He was the Eternal God, expressing Himself in, and as, human character, within those penal disabilities of humanity, of which death is at once the symbol and the climax. In two ways we think of Him as a revelation, within humanity, of God. First, in the mutual relations of human life, we think of Him as revealing the moral character, the goodness and love, of God. " Have I been so long 112 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. time with you, and yet dost thou not know me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." ^ And secondly, in the relation of man to God — the absolute dependence of unbroken communion between the limited and mortal and the Eternal — He reveals the true secret, and the possible glory, of mortal humanity. It is of Him, the disabled, the limited, the mortal, that S. John can say, " We beheld His glory, glory as of the only-begotten from the Father: "2 "We have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us." * This Godward relation of man, wholly dependent, and reflecting flaw- lessly that whereupon he depends, expresses itself within mortal conditions, inwardly and outwardly : in outward action it is manifested as obedience that never wavers ; in inward consciousness it realizes itself as the un- interrupted communion of meditation and prayer. Besides, then, the moral revelation of God as Love, which is in every contact of Christ with other men, the Divine Righteousness is visibly reflected in His perfect obedience, and consciously realized in the effort of His perfect prayer. The prayerfulness of spirit is not a thing wholly separate from the active obedience ; it is but another aspect of that same reality, the mirrored reflection of the Divine glory, in the Godward relations of human character. It is no part of the present purpose to try to draw this thought out, or illustrate in detail its manifestations in the human life. Consider rather how, even in this aspect, the death is the necessary climax of the life. We are as yet thinking of the life of Christ not as atonement but as obedience ; not as in reference to the past, or the undoing of accomplished sin, but as in reference to the present, as being the homage of a living holiness, * John xiv. 9. * John i. 14. » I John i. a. VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 113 the mirroring of Divine character in mortal obedience, — human will as the adequate response to, and expression of, infinite Righteousness. Even in this aspect, that the conscious identity of will with God (expressed on one side in unceasing prayer, on another in unceasing obedience) might stand triumphant over the utmost straining of all counter-influences which could possibly be brought to bear against it, it was necessary that the drama of Bethlehem and Nazareth should find its culmination on Calvary. For what did He who was God express Himself in and as man, under the dis- abilities of humanity suffering and mortal, but that this homage of obedient righteousness, this will-identity of man with God, might shine out through, and in, precisely the conditions of mortal suffering? He would serve God as man. He would perfect obedience in fallen human nature ; and therefore He must be liable to feel, that He might triumph through and over, the uttermost solicitation to which His human consciousness could make His Person accessible, towards the possibility of deflection, if but for a moment, of His suffering will from God. ^'^^^ Lo, I am come to do Thy will, O God " — " a body didst Thou prepare for me."^ The body was the avenue of access of suffering, and, through suffering, of temptation. Whatever may be true of angels or devils, the body is the avenue of consciousness to men. The body, then, was to be, in Him, at once the scene, and the instrument, of that absolutely victorious crushing of temptation which is the offering to the Father of a mortal will perfectly Identical with the absolute righteousness of God. .- But it could not be but that the body itself would be wrung to death in the process. In a sense indeed this is true — and it is a truth not of terror so much as of hope — about every single child of man who shall die. * Hebrews x. 5-7. H 114 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY ' [chap. We do not yet know the possibilities of humbling or of purifying discipline which may lie hid within the experi- ence of dying. But this is another thought, which we do but glance at in passing. For the climax of temptation, for the climax of solicitation addressed through the body to the will, it was necessary that the body should be pressed to the point of its own destruction? to the point, that is, at which the stress of temptation should literally have exhausted its whole possibility. We do well in this connection to remember that sin is deadening to sensitiveness, both of body and spirit ; that to consciousness of guilt there is a sense of actual righteousness in suffering ; and that increasing infirmities make death itself (as it were) more and more natural. Remember, in the light of familiar experience such as this, that in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, — as the whole harmony of bodily life was unique in its perfectness, so the sensitiveness to pain, and the humiliation of weak- ness, were unique : and as the right to life, and the dignity of life, were unparalleled, so the outrage — the utter contradiction — involved in dying was immeasurable. Again, remember, that the death of Jesus Christ was wholly unlike the death of any martyr, — not only in the fact (vast as that is!) that the martyr is always only strong with and in Jesus Christ ; but also in proportion as the power of Jesus over His torments and His tormentors was unique. It is true that every martyr's suffering is, in a sense, self-chosen. Every martyr's prison is necessarily locked, as men have sometimes said with a strange blindness of scorn, "upon the inside"; that is, every martyr properly so-called could have avoided his suffering by an act of will, — and only by a certain strain of will he has come to be where he is. But thi^ after all, is only true of him within limits, — and it is becoming every moment less true, as his sufferings VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 115 intensify. Once, at a certain point in the past, it was true; but every pang carries him further from the possibility of not suffering ; he cannot foil the power of pain in mid-course, neither can he repair any damage that is done. But here, — in Jesus Christ, — all the power of all His murderers is His own, and in His own hand. Very slowly He is passing through the anguish which kills by inches. Voluntarily, from moment to moment, He is choosing the pain ; voluntarily He is being crushed under the deadly pressure of the effort of evil against Him. Only try to imagine the unimaginable pressure of this last concentrated temptation upon His human will. For none apart from Himself can put one pang upon Him. One moment's unwillingness to suffer — and He can wholly be free! Every separate item in the anguish is allowed by Himself. One moment's reluctance on His part, one moment's impulse to draw back, even one moment's hesitation of will, might instantly have ended it all. But that moment never came. He who but now healed the severed ear with a touch, He who might wield when He would (He said it last night of Himself) the might of twelve legions of angels, is not shorn now of His power. " Let the Christ, the King of Israel, now come down from the cross, that we may see and believe " ^ — so they shouted in their mockery — " He saved others ; Himself He cannot save."^ It was not the power that was lacking, but the will. "Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I may take it again. No man taketh it away from Me; but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." * The power was not lacking if there had been — if there could have been — the will to exert the power ! But the power, if used — the power with the will to use it — would ^ Mark xv. 32. * Matt, xxvii. 42. ' John x. 17, 18. ii6 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. have proved the very opposite to what they supposed. It was the power, with the will to hold it unused, which proved Him to be what He was. And the fact of the power, with the pressure of every element of His human consciousness to use it, are the measure of the majesty of the restraining will, the perfecting of obedience in man to God. Do we not recognize thus how the tearing of the body inch by inch to its own destruction is necessary for the climax, not only of what we distinguish as bodily suffering, but of that supreme strain on the flawless identity of the will,^ in suffering human nature, with God, which is the guileless offering of a perfect obedience ? But in all this there is no direct thought of the death of Christ, as reparation or atonement, in reference to consum- mated sin. I know indeed that no aspect of that death can really be viewed completely in isolation. Much of what has been said already only finds its full meaning in the light of aspects which have been kept out of sight. But we know that when a man has fatally sinned it is not enough, even if it were possible, that he should be now, and from now, however good and obedient. There must be something in the direction of undoing of the past, without which indeed the present obedience would not be in its true sense really possible, but which certainly cannot be ex- pressed only in terms of present obedience. Now we, so far, have been trying to express the neces- sity and the meaning of Calvary, as it were, in terms of present obedience. And for this very reason what has hitherto been said must be felt to be only a part — to many minds or moods the lesser part only — of the meaning of the Cross. Assuredly the death of Jesus Christ had another relation. It was not obedience only, but atone- ment ; not only perfect, in the present, as homage ; but sovereign, in relation to accomplished sin, as undoing. * Hebrews x. lo. VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 117 He had taken upon Him, as the living expression of Himself, a nature which was weighed down — not merely by present incapacities, but by present incapacities as part of the judicial necessary result of accepted and inherent sinfulness. Human nature was not only disabled but guilty ; and the disabilities were themselves a consequence, and aspect, of the guilt. In respect of this guilt of sin, consummated and inhering, human nature could only be purified by all that is involved in the impossible demand of a perfect penitence. Except it had also the character of perfect penitence atoning for the past, even the splendid perfectness of His present will-offering of obedience would be less than what was required for the re-identifying of human character with God. Remember what perfect penitence would involve. It would involve nothing less than a perfect re-identification of the character and the will — in a word, of the whole personality — with righteousness : an identification with righteousness immediately in the form of inexorable con- demnation of every shadow of unrighteousness even in, and at the cost of, the self Now the absolute perfectness of such a personal self-identifying with righteousness is made once for all impossible by any act of personal identity with sin. The least real affinity of the self with sin impairs the possibility of that perfect self-identity with righteousness which is necessary for the consummation of perfect peni- tence. Penitence, in the perfectness of its full meaning, is not even conceivably possible, except it be to the person- ally sinless. Is penitence possible in the personally sinless? I should perhaps be entitled to emphasize in reply each of these two thoughts : the first, that if the perfection of aton- ing penitence cannot be achieved by the personally sinless, it will become on reflection more and more manifest that it cannot be either achieved or even conceived at all ; and the ii8 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. second, that it is just this — the voluntary sin-bearing of the sinless, the self-identity with righteousness in condemnation of sin of One whose self-identity, though sinless, could take the form of surrender of the self in the very attitude of the ideal penitent, which is, if anything is, vital to the whole history and being of the Gospel, or the Church, of Jesus Christ. But I do not wish to urge anything at this moment from the side of dogmatic authority. Is reality of penitence for personal sin really possible in what is not the self-identical personality that sinned ? We might answer perhaps by saying that, in greater degree or in less, it is a fact of everyday experience. The law of vicarious suffering or vicarious energy, as a principle run- ning everywhere throughout human life, is not suspended when we pass within the region of consciousness of sin. Others do in fact suffer and sorrow on their reprobate's behalf, not only with their reprobate, but more deeply and keenly than he does or can for himself. Not only the pain is in their lives, but the shame is in their hearts — in pro- portion, it may be, to his shamelessness and their love. Nay, more, this reality of shame in them, the product of the nearness of their love, is your strongest element of hope for him. If there are those, near and dear, who with un- dimmed purity of heart and undiscouraged love will not weary of entering into the burden of his shame — thank God ! you feel that, in the atmosphere of that vicarious penitence wrapping him round, and stealing, almost as it were imperceptibly, as the breath of love, into his life and soul, you would almost dare to pledge the certainty of his coming salvation. In that intense reality of a penitence which is vicarious lies the heart of your hope for him of a personal penitence. Do we give full weight to the truths which lie in this direction ? We have done well, no doubt, to learn both to under- stand and to emphasize the distinctive value of each several I VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 119 personality, regarded as apart by itself. Individual re- sponsibility, individual value, individual meaning and destiny — it is vital that we should learn this lesson to the full. But even this, vital though it be, is a truth which can be pressed beyond the proportion of truth. Is it not true that we have in many ways overdone our lesson, and exaggerated, in common thought and theory, the mutual exclusiveness of human personality ? Are we not all, after all, much more of one piece than we are willing to recognize ? We cannot either do or suffer, cannot lose or win, cannot, however secretly, either sin or repent, to our- selves alone. Whatever is really personal to, or a part of, ourselves tends to become, in greater degree or in less, by processes gradual but sure, personal to and a part of many selves besides. If we take our stand on the truth that no man can be, or can stand for, another, we may at least recognize that even this truth, even in this form, is not equally true in all cases. It is capable, at least, of degrees. Even the naked thought of the substitution of one person for another is not, under all conditions, equally unimaginable. "One Englishman for another" is more reasonable as a principle of equity among the South Sea islanders than in the police-courts of London. It IS not very profitable to try to construct illustrations, not one of which can possibly be adequate ; but yet — a brother for a brother, a wife for a husband, a father for a child — there may be more potency of meaning behind such phrases than our off-hand logic or our mechanical systems can allow. True, we never reach the climax quite. But if each remains separate still, we can at least see real degrees of approach towards something more than a superficial or imaginary unity. If those who sometimes, in stature and tone and eye, seem most really to reproduce one another's image, have added to I20 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. this outward (itself more than an outward) resemblance, a real affinity of mental capacity and conviction, the same intellectual affinities, the same tone and temper as well of character as of thought; and further than this, are joined together in one spirit of mutually devoted affection, each finding his joy in the life, and more than ready to share all the trial and death, of the other, you do not indeed transcend their inexorable distinctness ; but you do see glimpses at least of a truth more ultimate about them than the distinctness — a truth of which their distinctness is no longer so much the contradiction as the necessary condition ; so that the very distinctness needs and claims to be, if not annulled, yet merged at last in a reality of unity more ultimate and more essential than itself. If we do not, most of us, go far in fact towards this transcending unity, this may only too possibly be because, intrenched in the circle of our own self-regard, we are only too well content not to go out into the vital ex- periences of another — far less of those who need us throughout the world : we shrink from the self-expenditure of sympathy, and prefer the sundered to the corporate life, hiding away ourselves, for ourselves, within ourselves. But we can hardly blind ourselves to the fact that the Christian Spirit, as such, is always making towards such a transcending of the barriers of sundered personalities — such a living of each not only for but in others ; and that those who have possessed it most eminently are those whose spirit has had the most eminent power of reproducing itself in the spirits of others. This rather is the crown — than the breaking down — of personality. Never perhaps is the good man so completely, so royally, himself as when the inherent force of what he is, is be- coming the vital principle of what others are also with him. Need I plead that sympathy is a Christian ideal in a sense far higher than that which we are mostly VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 121 content to allow to the word? Or that, if there is one region more than another from which that sympathy cannot be excluded, because it is there most vitally at home, it is the region of the suffering and shame which are the outcome of consciousness of sin. But it will perhaps be felt that, real and potent though sympathy in penitence may be, at least the penitence of the sympathetic friend cannot be as penitence so real or personal as that of the culprit himself. On the contrary, even this, so far as it is true at all, is true only by reason of the extreme limitations of our power or will to sympathize. It is true in proportion to our incapacity of unselfishness. But wherever the power of unselfishness begins to approximate at all towards its ideal there we shall be able to find, even within experience, that the penitence of the good man, on behalf of his reprobate, not only anticipates and leads the way and shapes the possibility towards the penitence of the reprobate himself, but also that it is far keener, far deeper, far more real as penitence than anything of which as yet the reprobate is personally capable. It is the presence of sin within the personality which blunts the edge of detestation of sin. I long to hate, and I do hate in a measure, the sin which tyrannizes over my free will. But just because it is my own, because it still has place and power within my own consciousness of sin, therefore I cannot hate it with the full single-hearted intensity of hatred with which another might hate it whose self was untainted by it; with which I should hate it if all its disabling power were wholly melted, and I were personally one again with the righteousness of God. Is the penitence of the sinful self the deepest reality of penitence ? I will ask you to think of a father, or a mother — pure, holy, tender, loving-hearted — whose own beloved only child, son or daughter, is branded with the 122 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. deep reality of irretrievable disgrace. I will ask you first to compare the grief of such a mother over the shame of a stranger, and over the shame of her own, her best- beloved. Even towards the stranger there might be the deepest concern, the tenderest, truest, most winning and restorative sympathy. But the shame, which is her own child's, is her own. For herself^ the light is gone out of her life. Her heart is not merely, as in the other case, tenderly concerned. Her heart is broken. And then, secondly, compare this grief of the mother with the grief of the child, whose own the shame is. Her own the shame is, because the sin is her own — it is part of her very self. But this very fact that the sinful will IS her own, while it may fill her penitence with wildness and alarm, blunts its edge, and dims its truth. The wild alarm, whose climax would be despair, the conscious haunting presence of the sin, is a paralyzing, not an intensifying, of the power of penitence. The penitence of the child may be fiercer and wilder ; but it is, in comparison, shallow, mixed, impotent, unreal. But the mother's anguish is not less anguish, but more, because it is without that confusing presence of the sin. If it is less despairing, it is more profound. Even now the sorrow of the child is checked, steadied, solemnized, uplifted, by the felt sanctity of the mother's sorrow — a sorrow at once more heartbroken and more calm of heart : a sorrow more sorrowful truly, yet, even in sorrow, more identified, somewhere far back even now, with a trust which cannot die. Yes, it is the mother's heart which is broken for sin ; broken even, it may be, unto death. The child's heart is less likely to break. The true realization of shame, the true steady insight into sin, is dulled, not sharpened, by the indwelling of sin. The heart of the child is not able to break — at least yet. Only long afterwards, if at all, when penitence has at VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 123 last done its slow, penetrating, tranquillizing work, will sin, as sin, be felt and seen as it is. Meanwhile the penitent anguish of the mother who is holy is, even in proportion to her reality of holiness, more undimmed, keener of edge, deeper in truth, — in the shame of the child with whom, in nature and in love, she is wholly self-identified — than it is, than it can be, in the child of whose mind and will the sin itself is still part. It is sometimes hastily assumed that the possibility of anything, in such a mother, which can really be called penitence, depends upon the fact that the mother is herself at least partly responsible for the sin. How much more might she have done, which she has not done, to guard her child against it ? At the least, is it not through her, in measure, that the child is partaker of the nature in which Adam sinned, and all mankind is sinful ? Such thoughts, if brought forward to set the illustration aside, strangely misconceive the truth. It is quite true, in fact, that there may be a sense in the mother of a responsibility which is partly her own. Indeed no human mother can wholly be without this. But this, so far from constituting, in her, the possibility of a genuine penitence, is the one thing which really spoils the perfectness of it In proportion as the fault of the mother is graver, her capacity of true penitence vanishes. If the child's sin is mainly the mother's fault, to look for any deep realities of penitence to the mother would be a contradiction and absurdity. She must needs be callous more or less ; she may even be exultant. It would be quite impossible that her heart should break. The conditions, in fact, which we find in the holy mother are precisely the opposite of what they would be if her power of peni- tence corresponded with her share in the sin. Her power of penitence, that is penitence indeed, depends not upon the extent to which the guilt is her own, 124 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. but rather upon the extent to which it is not It depends upon two things ; and will be found to vary in depth, in precise proportion as these two things are real in her. The first is the extent of her own self-identifica- tion — not with guilt but with holiness. This does not, of course, reach absolute identity with holiness. But the nearer her approach to perfect holiness, the greater, not the less, will be the depth of her capacity of anguish of heart. And the other is the completeness of her capacity of identifying her very self with the being of her child. The smallest touch of selfishness blunts the edge of this. Its perfectness would be the very triumph of love. Here again, it is true in fact that no earthly mother has reached the absolute perfectness of love, any more than the absolute perfectness of holiness. But in each case the tendency and the character are clear. It is in proportion as she approximates towards perfectness of love on the one side, as towards perfectness of holiness on the other, that the capacity deepens in her, more and more, of penitence absolutely heartbroken for sins which are not — and because they are not — her own. So far as the holiness alone is concerned, we might find other cases as illustrative as that of a mother. But perhaps there is no other relation, in human experience, which enables us equally to realize how far unselfishness can go towards the self-identifying of one person with another in the unity of nature and of love. Of nature and of love! The unity is primarily in nature. Its foundation is a physical reality. But notice how much more this may mean in one case than another: how much more, for example, it does me«n of a true mother to her child than of an English traveller to a fugitive African. Bone of her bone, and flesh of her flesh, her child was to her as a very expression of herself. In her child she lived. In her child's growth and good- ness she expanded. In her child's fall she fell. If unity VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHKIST 125 of nature is predicable not only of these, but also of such as seem furthest away from each other, the highest and the lowest in humanity, do not let us therefore be deceived into levelling down the proper idea of the phrase (even, so to say, upon its physical side) to the least which it is capable of meaning. Rather, the most which it is capable of meaning in familiar experience is as a hint to suggest how very much more, than our experience, lies within the true ideal possibilities of the phrase. But whatever be its unexplored possibilities, no doubt one aspect of the unity of nature is an equality of status, a sharing of common conditions both of faculty and of disability. The one shares the nature of the other. That is, the modes of consciousness, the avenues of pain and ease, sorrow and joy, are broadly in the one what they are in the other. And if under stress of temptation the one has fallen, the other does not view the meaning of the temptation, or the fall, as a spectator merely from without. The same sense of temptation can, through avenues of the same nature, have intelligible access to the consciousness of the other. What has happened is not merely appre- hended from without. It can, with whatever shock of horror, be felt from within. The power of entering into the consciousness of the sinful requires — not indeed a will that has actually sinned, but at least a conscious presence, in the nature, of the instruments, as it were, and capacities for sinning — an avenue for the appeal of sin to the con- sciousness — if only the will could conceivably be to sin ! The underlying conditions for sin-consciousness are there ; and with them a certain capacity of being degraded in the degradation of those in whom the same nature is a mode of sin. But it must be enough to have indicated thus what possibilities do really underlie the meaning even of what often seems to us to mean so little as the union of a common human nature. 126 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. Meanwhile, whatever is true fundamentally or potentially in nature springs into its full and vivid realization in the rich self-expenditure of conscious love. It is here that we recognize most of all what the depth may be of a mother's identification with her child : we recognize that in the power of love it is what it is ; and recognize also thereby that if the love were but greater and more perfect still, the unity also could mean what now it can not. If its obvious limit is the limitation of love, what would the capacities be of union, with the living experience of another, of one whose love was absolutely without limit ? If the sorrowing mother serves best to illustrate what human union may mean, in nature and in love, she illustrates it by what she is, rather as whetting the imagination than as sating it : she illustrates it by what she is, only as a sort of preliminary to suggesting it by what she fails to be. We look at infinite things in the light of most finite experience. Our human illustrations do approximate: they are strikingly real. Yet they are more striking still in the silent witness which they ever bear to that beyond themselves, whose reality they postulate, of whose nature they are eloquent, by whose breath they are ; but which transcends them still. So we pass on, at times perhaps hardly even knowing how far our words are more immediately spoken of that human mother, or of Him whose Spirit finds an echo in her love. But remember, in either case (for the one includes the other), in reference to what it is that we have dwelt on the thought of this possibility, between human beings, of unity — in nature and in love. It is in reference to con- summated sin. It is that we may see the better what is involved if a person, whose own the sin is not, is thus really, in nature and in love, united with the experience of sin. What is that experience of sin in one of whose person the actual sin is not part ? There are some two or three thoughts which are vital VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 127 to the conception of it. Let us put first this capacity of self-identity with the sinful, which we see — not con- summated, indeed, but much more than suggested, in the case of the holy mother. Remember that it is true of her just in proportion as she makes real these possibilities of nature and of love. So far as she at all falls short, or shrinks back, from what her direct union of nature might mean, or so far as there is a limit, somewhere, to the self- expending effort of her love, so far, behold ! after all she is not personally touched — or not touched to the quick : she can look on — and let her culprit go : her heart need not break — for the shame is not in it ! But if on one side her shame, unto death, can only be the result of a rare completeness of unity of nature realized in love, on the other hand it depends also upon a com- pleteness, no less rare, of realization of sin. And again, if the absolute perfectness of sympathetic self-identity with others, in the full truth of the words, is possible only when the union of nature is unlimited, because the love is literally infinite ; it is at least as plain that a full realiza- tion of the character and consequence of sin is possible only in the light of a full realization of the character of holiness — the undimmed vision of the Being of God. That mother of whom we spoke, if she is herself evil- minded, escapes scot-free from the burden of penitence for her child. But the holier she is in her own spirit, the keener is her sense of the intolerable anguish of un- holiness : the holier she is, the more deeply, the more personally, is she stricken. The sinner confused with sin, which dims and paralyzes every personal power, cannot see or feel sin as it is. He cannot fully know what its nature is ; he cannot really understand the consequences which it contains : these things are to him in great part words without meaning: and even so far as he does understand and is trying to hate, his very hatred for his I 128 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. sin is qualified by a liking which is still within himself. It is only Another, wholly self-identified with him in all that can be meant by natural union, quickened and realized in the fire of an infinite love ; and yet, without impulse of sin, gazing full on the undimmed vision of the holiness of God ; who can be stricken on his behalf with the full sense of the infinite horror of sin. To know God as He is, to measure with full insight all the Beauty of Holiness, to be conscious of its infinite good- ness and power; this is, in One self-expressed within a nature to which the capacities and disabilities of unholiness belong — to One self-brought within the instruments of sin, the galling insult of temptation, the conditions of mortal consciousness and mortal anguish ; this is to realize with a personal consciousness which stands wholly unique and alone, without a parallel, without a comparison, the whole depth that is in sin. To the spirit of such an one sin as it is — all its origin and history, its horrible development, its inherent hideousness, its appalling consummation, the agony of its despair, its alienation from goodness and from God, its banishment from light, or beauty, or hope, its inherent spiritual death : all these things which sin contains, and without the knowledge of which sin is not known, are absolutely open and clear — in the light of the infinite contrast of the realized glory of God. If these things cannot but be known to God the Omniscient; yet God, as self-expressed in human con- sciousness, God Incarnate in Jesus Christ, deliberately took to Himself, in the nature which had sinned, the consciousness of these things from the point of view of sin. It was then, in Him, no mere vision — however appalling, or however true ; no mere spectacular insight into truth. He had deliberately made Himself one with man, one in nature, one in love: one with an absoluteness of unity, such as the union of the perfectest mother with her VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 129 child does, after all, but dimly and distantly shadow : one with man. Himself man, Himself Humanity : — that the consciousness of man herein, that consciousness of sin which sin made impossible to man, but without which man could not consummate his atoning penitence for sin : that the full consciousness of sin, in the full light of holiness, might be His own personal consciousness ; and the condemnation of sin — no longer only from without, but from within — through the power of self-identity with holiness in the act of self-surrender as penitent, might be consummated in Himself. Is not consummation of penitence, that penitence whose consummation sin makes impossible, the real, though impossible, atonement for sin? And are not these just the things which would consummate penitence, — first, a real personal self-identity with the consciousness of sin, in its unmeasured fulness, as seen by God ; secondly, a real personal self-identity with the absolute righteousness of God ; and thirdly, by inevitable consequence, a manifestation of the power of inherent self-identity with righteousness in the form of voluntary acceptance of all that belongs to the consciousness of sin, — a realiza- tion, not of holiness merely, but of penitential holiness ? For this is penitence; perfect re-establishment of the absolute personal identity with righteousness, in the form of unreserved embrace of whatever is necessary to consummate the perfect condemnation of sin — within the self-consciousness and at the cost of the self He, then, on the Cross, offered, as man to God, not only the sacrifice of utter obedience, under conditions (themselves the consequence of human transgression) which made the effort of such perfect will-obedience more tremendous than we can conceive ; but also the sacrifice of supreme penitence, that is, of perfect will- identity with God in condemnation of sin. Himself being I I30 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. so self-identified with sinners, that this could take the form of the offering of Himself for sin. He voluntarily stood in the place of the utterly contrite — accepting insult, shame, anguish, death — death possible only by His own assent, yet outwardly inflicted as penal ; nay, more, in His own inner consciousness, accepting the ideal consciousness of the contrite — which is the one form of the penitent's righteousness : desolate, yet still, in whatever He was, voluntary; and in that very voluntariness of desolation, sovereign. He did, in fact and in full, that which would in the sinner constitute perfect atonement, but which has for ever become impossible to the sinner, just in proportion as it is true that he has sinned. The perfect sacrifice of penitence in the sinless Christ is the true atoning sacrifice for sin. Only He, who knew in Himself the measure of the holiness of God could realize also, in the human nature which He had made His own, the full depth of the alienation of sin from God, the real character of the penal averting of God's face. Only He, who sounded the depth of human con- sciousness in regard to sin, could, in the power of His own inherent righteousness, condemn and crush sin in the flesh. The suffering involved in this is not, in Him, punishment, or the terror of punishment; but it is the full realizing, in the personal consciousness, of the truth of sin, and the disciplinary pain of the conquest of sin ; it is that full self-identification of human nature, within range of sin's challenge and sin's scourge, with holiness as the Divine condemnation of sin, which was at once the necessity — and the impossibility — of human penitence. The nearest — and yet how distant ! — an approach to it in our experience we recognize not in the wild sin-terrified cry of the guilty, but rather in those whose profound self-identifi- cation with the guilty overshadows them with a darkness and a shame, vital indeed to their being, yet at heart tranquil, vi.l THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 131 because it is not confused with the blurring consciousness of a personal sin. That mother whom we imagined — if the sin is indeed in her child — she would not, for all the world, choose rather to have the sin without the horror of the shame of sin. It is the shame, as shame, which is also the hope. The anguish itself is the pledge, is the living movement, of spiritual life. Her own broken heart — it is the very ex- pression of God in her. It is God in her, even if, and even whilst, it is also the bowing of her head, in anguish of spirit, unto death. In its measure it has caught some echo of the awful paradox of that mysterious, that two-sided, that incompatible cry — so spiritually desolate, yet so tranquil in spirit — "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? " ^ If, from our point of view, the point of view of the imperfectly penitent, penitence must include meek accept- ance of punishment, remember that punishment, so far as it ministers to righteousness, is only itself an element in penitence. What would have been punishment till it became penitence^ is, in the perfectly contrite, only as penitence. It is true that penitence is a condition of suffering. The suffering of penitence may quite fairly be termed penal suffering. But whatever suffering is involved in penitence is part of the true penitent's freewill offering of heartwhole condemnation of sin. To the penitent, in proportion as he is perfected, there is no punishment outside his penitence. And so, in the great mysterious sacrifice of Calvary, there is (save indeed in the action, outward merely and symbolic, of Roman soldiers or of Jewish priests) no question really at all of retribution, inflicted, as by an- other, from without. There is no external equating of sin with pain. That dying on Calvary — so unthinkable in its injustice, if inflicted as retributive penalty — so Divine, * See Note at the end of the Chapter, p. 134. 132 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. beyond all imagination of beauty or power, as the crushing, in flesh, of sin ; it is, indeed, from within that we must look to see what it meant, and was. It was the property, the power, of inherent righteousness, self- identified for consummation of penitence, with sinful man. There is no element here — either on the one hand, of the infliction, or, on the other hand, of the endurance, of vengeance. This death of pain, physical and spiritual — it is the spontaneous action of inherent righteousness, the glory and triumph of inherent righteousness under conditions under which righteousness itself could only be triumphant as righteousness thus ! He did not — of course He did not — endure the ven- geance of God. We do not deny this only because, in every instinct of our being, we feel that it would be — as indeed it would — too shocking and too blasphemous even for thought ; but because we are able positively to recognize that, whilst it would, by implication, deny both the Divine character of the Eternal Father, and the Divine Being of the Incarnate Son, it would also, not by implication only but directly, contradict the entire conception of the atonement The vengeance of God is not anyhow conceivable as a method — on the contrary it is the direct negation — of atonement. The vengeance of God is the final consummation of sin unrepented, unatoned, unforgiven, unforgiveable. The Cross is not the symbol of unforgiveness ! No, but with undimmed insight into sin, such insight as no spirit of man could bear. He offered Himself to consummate that reality of penitence by which alone real conscious- ness of sin (the universal property of humanity) could be righteously transformed and dissolved into — could grow into and become and be found to be, after all, more essentially, more abidingly, — a real identity with the absolute righteousness of God. VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST ' 133 He did not — of course He did not — endure the damna- tion of sin. But in the bitter humiliation of a self- adopted consciousness of what sin — and therefore of what the damnation of sin — really is, He bowed His head to that which, as far as mortal experience can go, is so far, at least, the counterpart on earth of damnation that it is the extreme possibility of contradiction and destruction of self. He to whom, as the Life of life, all dying, all weakness, were an outrage to us inconceivable, bowed Himself to Death — Death in its outward form inflicted with all the contumely as of penal vengeance — Death inwardly accepted as the necessary climax of an experience of spiritual desolation, which, but to the inherently holy, would have been not only material but spiritual death. In mortal agony of body, in strain in- conceivable, through the body, on the mind and the will, in isolation of spirit (man's true consciousness towards sin) — He died. The consummation of penitence carried with It the straining, to their breaking, of the vital faculties, the dissolution of the mortal instrument. But that dissolution was the consummation of penitence ; and the consumma- tion of penitence is the consummation of righteousness by inherent power finally victorious through and over the utmost possibilities of sin. Sin, when in its final struggle it had slain by inches that through which alone it could ever draw near to Kim, in slaying what was mortal of Him had slain wholly itself. Where penitence has been consummated quite perfectly, that very consciousness, which was heavi- ness of spirit for sin, has become the consciousness of sin crushed, and dead. Sin slain, sin dead: this is in the sacrifice of penitence ; this is in the death of the Cross. " Behold ! the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world ! " 134 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. NOTE TO PAGE 131. On the Cry upon the Cross. I have received some very friendly censure for making this reference to the cry on the Cross, in so far as the reference implies a certain interpretation of that cry, which is thought to conflict with its deeper significance. The suggestion, if I rightly understand it, is that the cry both in its own actual words, and still more when interpreted in context either with the 22nd psalm as a whole, or with the expostulatory tone which is characteristic (in a certain aspect) of the Old Testament prophets who prefigured the Messiah, is mainly a pleading to God against failure, and the sense of wrong in failure. That is to say that it is the cry as of a self-sacrificing righteousness which has not succeeded in that which was the very animating purpose of its sacrifice ; that it is the cry of a protest, such as is familiar in Jeremiah, against unmerited failure, — the sense not of suffering only, but (as it were) of the demonstrated uselessness of suffering. In this view it would be emblematically represented not simply by the blended penitence, and withal tranquillity, of the mother dying of a broken heart ; but rather by her additional consciousness (if so it were) in dying, that even this last surrender of herself had been in vain : for that the child, unmoved and un-won, had but fled contumaciously into further evil, so that the mother's very death seemed manifestly to have been for nothing. It is further suggested that it may perhaps be conceived to be an inherent necessity of human consciousness of extreme self-sacrifice, before it can reach its own perfectness of consummation, that the vision of the mind should be clouded from seeing or feeling its own in- alienable victory. It is true, no doubt, that, in the moral sphere at least, such sacrifice must, in its own essential nature, be triumphant. Yet it is conceivable that it may belong to the very climax of the trial in which such righteousness finally consummates its triumph, that the sense of victory should be obscured to the consciousness ; that the sense of failure, and expostulation against failure, the sense of sacrifice thrown away, and suffering uselessly borne, may be a necessary ingredient in the bitterness of the cup of sacrifice. And if it be objected that this, however conceivable as the very climax of trial in sinful and ignorant man, is not conceivable in the human consciousness which was the very expression of the Person of God : it may perhaps be answered that it is conceivable that it was I VI.] THE ATONING DEATH OF CHRIST 135 just for this that He divested Himself of the very qualities which were most His own; taking upon Him, by deliberate condescension, that very limitedness of imagination and knowledge which would con- stitute the supreme bitterness of His suffering in sacrifice: that, in a word. He most showed in this the sovereignty of His own character as God — by the extent to which He became, as it were, other than God, by the limitation even of His own clear insight and conscious- ness of self, for the purpose of making the cup of sacrifice full. On all this I desire to make no other comment than that I do not feel called upon, because of it, to alter what is written in the text. It may all be true. I certainly am not disputing it. In some measure at least an interpretation which distinguishes infinity from finiteness, and insists upon the limitation of mortal faculties, must needs be in the direction of truth. But at the most it seems to me only to add a further thought to those which I had suggested before. It may make them incomplete, but it does not make them untrue ; and if they are true, it is certainly not incompatible with them. It is obvious more- over to add that there are not any words, in the history of the world, whose meaning it would be so little reasonable to attempt, or expect, to exhaust, by any single strain of interpretation whatever. CHAPTER VII OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE Among the earliest, and among the most beautiful, of the pictures of the Risen Lord in the Gospel history is that in which He pleads with the warm-hearted but over-confident disciple, who had so misconceived, at the crisis. His purpose and character, and who had been — all good intentions notwithstanding — so easily beguiled into denying Him. The question with which the Risen Christ challenges St Peter, — and many a faint-hearted follower from the days of St Peter onwards, — is a question which turns wholly upon the reality of personal affection for Himself. " Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me ? " And in truth there is illumination, as well as pathos, in the question. There is something in it which goes far beyond the touching associations, or the transitory accidents, of a merely personal piece of reminiscence. It has a world-wide reference. It touches an eternal principle. As the question which pierced to the depth of the contrite conscience of St Peter ; as the question which set before him, in a moment, the challenge of the truly Christian life ; as the test of his restoration to dutifulness and to apostleship ; we feel that its words contain, or are capable, at the least, of representing, the inner secret of the life of the Church. But there are times when we wander far enough from the simplicity of a relation to the Person and Cross of 136 CHAP. VII.] OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 137 Christ, which can be simply expressed as the dependence of a personal love. And even if the personal love were clearer and more devoted than it is, there are times when we should be perplexed to determine upon what exactly the personal love was based ; or in what way the work of Christ — even if we dared be certain that we loved Him — made essential difference in ourselves. This then is the question which we approach in the present chapter. In what way does the atoning victory of Christ become an effective reality in ourselves ? No Christian doubts that the Atonement is central, and vital, to the Christian creed. In the life, and in the death, of Jesus Christ, is the real heart's hope of every child of man. Yet we are perplexed oftentimes by conflicting theories, developed as interpreta- tions of the Atonement ; so perplexed, in some cases even so wronged, nay outraged, by the things that are said to us, that we stand some of us in doubt, not only whether we can possibly make it intelligible to our consciences, but even whether, after all, we ought to tolerate or receive it at all. One primary difficulty to our thought is the conviction, naturally immovable, that, whatever happened on Calvary, did not happen to us. With what justice, with what reality, we inevitably ask, can we claim its attributes, or character, for our own ? If in any sense it is true that Calvary, with all that Calvary involved, — Calvary, and the consummation of the sacrifice of the Crucified, — is the central fact in the history of the world : what, after all, putting make-believe aside, is the real relation of Calvary to me ? Whether we go to more ancient, or to more modern, forms of current explanation, — whether the paying of a ransom, or the cancelling of a debt, or the substitution of a victim, is our leading metaphor, — there is one thing which seems, at first sight, to belong alike to all views which start from the great historical event, and find their explanation 138 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. within that: namely that, characterize it how they may, they seem to make atonement a transaction, historical, final, consummated long ago : — a transaction (I do not ask at this moment between whom ; but at all events) far anterior to, and wholly outside of, the reality of ourselves. And so, partly in protest against every possible form of conception of what is felt to be so artificial, as a transaction^ dramatically completed, and essentially outside ourselves: and partly in obedience to the correlative instinct that the only conceivably effective atonement must be somehow, where the seat of the necessity lies, within the personality that has sinned ; human consciences rise in revolt against the entire doctrine of an accomplished atonement. It may be that neither of these two instinctive principles is based altogether on truth. Yet there is enough of popular truth in both of them, to make the protest which is based upon them a reality, needing to be taken into rational and serious account. And th^ positive meaning of the protest is itself truer than the statement of the principles on which it is based. It is true, even if the truth is too often urged without balance, that any atonement which is to be ultimately effectual for me, must find its ultimate reality within what I am. It is true that an atonement which is, to the absolute end, external only : which finds no echo, no place, as moral characterization, within the individual personality ; can be to him, at last, no more than a possibility of atonement which now has failed, and is past. It is through consciousness of the truth which is true on this side, that we in this generation have become familiar with two contrasted sets of theories of atonement, — set over against one another under titles whose theological history is (to say the least) singularly unfortunate, as respectively " objective " and " subjective " theories. These words have been made to be badges of con- tradictory views. On the one side it is pleaded that if VII.] OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 139 the need lies in the sin which is, personally, the sinner's very own, nothing can touch the real point of the need, which is not, like the sin, within the sinner. And so, when the question is asked as to the real and permanent import of Calvary, the emphasis is apt to be laid upon the moral effect, the touching example, the eternal appeal which the picture of Calvary must for ever make upon the thoughts, and hearts, and lives of men. It is a marvellous incident — or marvellous suggestion — of history. Whether it be exactly incident, or suggestion, is not, it is sometimes insinuated, from this point of view, the question of most moment. For it is not as a transaction that it is either appealed to, or conceived. It is rather the idea than the fact: rather the inspiration which comes from it than its own achievement: rather the outflowing force of moral motive, than the external completeness of a consummated work, which constitutes both its reality and its power. But if we adopt this language, and say that the truth of the atonement must be chiefly moral: and that its true reality is to be looked for subjectively within the conscience, rather than objectively on Calvary and the Mount of the Ascension ; and if we would so correct, or explain away, the point of view of the historic Church ; (a position to which, in all ages, one vein of mystical thought has tended to approximate ;) we are met, on the other hand, by arguments, trenchant and confounding, which would shew, both from human experience the imperative need, and from Scripture the most reiterated and solemn assertion, of a redemption wrought effectually, once for all, through the Blood of Jesus Christ There are few modern writings on the atonement so widely read or so influential as that of Dr Dale. It will be remembered how the leading motive of his volume, and perhaps it may also be said his chief power, lie in this, — I40 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. in his accumulated proof that, without tearing the New Testament to pieces, you cannot separate from it its cardinal belief in the effective reality of a historical and objective atonement. It will be remembered also that the same faith, often in its most crudely objective form, itself constitutes the living religious force of a vast pro- portion of the conviction and practice that are, at least amongst Protestant communities, most vitally and effectively Christian. But in truth the very antithesis itself is, on examination, artificial and unreal. For here, as elsewhere, the words subjective and objective are only relatively, not really, opposed. So far is either of them from really denying, that each in fact implies and presupposes the other ; nor can either of the two, in complete isolation from the other, be itself ultimately real. The word objective is used, by those who make a point of using it, to mark their insistence that the sacrifice of Christ was in itself real and adequate, "a full perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world ; " and that it is so, whether I, or another, apprehend it as such or no. Of course it is so. What they so far contend for is altogether necessary and true. It is not upon the power of apprehension in one man, or in another, that the right- eousness of God in Christ depends for being righteous, or for crushing sin. It was anyhow Divine righteousness, which, in and as man, broke down the power of sin. But if it is to be — as in purpose and in capacity it assuredly is — my righteousness, crushing sin for and in me ; it is clear that it is not so, irrespectively of all that I can still either do, or be. It is of necessity that I should be in a certain relation with it : and upon my relation to it its relation to me will ultimately depend. In some form every one recognizes that this is true. In itself, and to VII.] OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 141 others whose life it has become, it is what it is, irrespec- tively of me. But to me, if I have no relation to it, it is as though it were not. An objective fact that is not apprehended in any sense subjectively, is to those who have no subjective relation to it, as if it were non-existent A fact objectively existing, in itself, without relation to any apprehending mind, is an impossibility to thought. Light may have indeed other qualities or effects ; but it is not light save to a capacity of seeing. What is the light of noonday to a man born blind ? To others, who know what sight is, it is real : but as far as he is concerned it does not, as light, exist. It is identical with its con- tradictory. To say that white, as white, is precisely identical with black, is to deny its existence as white altogether. The sunlight, apprehended by no creature, would yet be real to the apprehension and will of the Creative mind ; but outside the apprehension of God or man, outside all relation to mind, it could have neither meaning nor reality at all. It is in its aspect as spiritually realized that it is, in fact, real. Thus those who plead for an objective atonement are right ; — but would not be right, if its objective reality could be irrespective of realization subjectively. What those, then, really demand on the other hand who plead for an atonement which would not be atone- ment after all, if its ultimate meaning were not a moral or subjective reality, is itself no less vitally necessary and true. But perhaps the word "subjective" is not used in this context so much as a term selected for defence by those who defend it: but rather as a term imputed for reproach by those who repudiate it. And as such the Lterm is mixed up with associations which obscure and belie its meaning. Men use the word to stigmatise what is unreal as unreal. Men speak of the appearance of a nightmare or a ghost as subjective, meaning that it is I 142 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. the mere creature of illusory imagination, which mistakes non-existence for reality. Now so long as the word is in familiar use to denote the hallucinations of a brain diseased, misconceiving untruth as truth: so long will it serve in theological discussion, whether upon the Atonement or the Eucharist, largely to caricature thought which it is incapable of representing truly. We need to get rid of the unworthy and false associations of the word. Subjective does not mean imaginary, or un- authorized. It does not suggest something unrelated to eternal truth ; real only to the individual — in pro- portion as he, with no reason beyond himself, imagines it to be real. Subjective truth rather is that which is true in and to the apprehending capacity of the individual, because the individual has learnt aright to apprehend and see a truth, whose reality is not dependent on himself. What is real in and to my mind is therefore subjective to me. It is subjectively that the objective is realized. For its reality to me, for its reality to any- one, the objective waits for, and depends on, its correlative subjective. What is not subjectively real to any mind at all cannot be real objectively — ^just as light could not be light if no faculties of seeing existed : nor could matter be Kocr/ios save to mind. The two, then, are really inseparable, as convex and concave. Objective, that is wholly without subjective realization, is the same as non-existent. Subjective, that is not objective also, is hallucination. So with the Cross and its atoning sacrifice. The sub- jective or moral theory that finds all its meaning within us men and our individual consciences, and makes but little of the act external, objective, historical, consummated adequately and once for all : — this, in trying to realize for itself the meaning of atonement, is really cutting off (as it were) the blossom which should become fruit, from the root VII.] OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 143 by which it lives. On the other hand the simply objective theory which forgets the place of the Cross within Christian life, which says, " Go your way : be content : the atonement was once a transaction, with such and such meaning between God and Christ : but you have nothing in it, except to believe that it is a fact, finished and done : " — this goes far to deprive the root of that fruit-bearing capacity which is its own inherent and proper meaning. The ultimate realization is indeed to be within us — the very transfiguration of ourselves. The sacrifice of Christ, as merely external to us, does indeed include all possibility, but as yet it only is as possibility; it is potential, it is preliminary, — and it is provisional. The sacrifice is to be, in its final consummation, the real transformation of us all. But it is to be so in us because it was first the historical sacrifice, consecrated on Calvary, unique, all-sufficing ; real between God and man in the Person of Jesus Christ, — and to each of us, as individuals, seen and believed in external objective history. It is, so far as each one of us is concerned, objective first, that it may become subjective. It was real to God- ward in Christ, that it might become the reality, in Christ, of men. It is real in others that it may be real in us. It is first a historical, that it may come to be a personal, fact. Calvary, and the Ascension, precede any thought or apprehension of ours. But Calvary, and the Ascension, are none the less to become an integral part of the experience and reality of our personal conscious- ness. If Calvary and the Ascension were anything less than the most real of historical realities, there would be in fact no possibility of their translation into our personal characters. But if even Calvary and the Ascension were past history merely, they would not after all have saved, or have touched, us. An atonement, then, moral or spiritual, ought never to 144 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. have been suggested as an alternative to the historical sacrifice of the Creed, or as a correction of it ; for it is itself an element necessary and integral, in the meaning of the historical sacrifice. Nor ought any question to have been raised between an objective and a subjective atone- ment: nor ought either to have been maintained in the way of antagonism against the other. The real question should have been not whether the Christian atonement is a fact, wrought without us, or a moral and spiritual alteration within : but rather, seeing that it must be both, and that either of these two is to mean the other, we should ask. How does it happen, by what power and by what means, that what is primarily an external fact consum- mated in history, can and does become the essential reality in the characterization of the personalities of men ? How can the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, consecrated on Calvary for eternal presentation, become in me — not a personal reality only, but the main constitutive reality of my own individual personal being? If we have been content to be long in working back to this question, it is the result of a belief that upon this question — upon its answer no doubt in the fullest sense, but even upon the framing of the question aright, — depends in large measure the insight of our generation into that supreme reality of the atonement, which just because it is deeper at once and simpler and wider than human experience, has been seen by different generations of Christians so differently, and yet has been vital, and has been true, to them all. This then is the form of our question — how can, in this matter, the objective be the subjective? The deed enacted, once for all, without, be the quality of the con- sciousness, within, of ten thousand times ten thousand of the children of men? The question is not whether it is so, but How? VII.] OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 145 Now, no attempt will be made to reach the full answer to this question in the present chapter. For the present we must be content with an answer which is preparatory rather than adequate : suggestive, perhaps, of more than it attempts to explore: and possibly even, as it stands, superficially at least and verbally, (though not really, to those who discern what lies beneath simple experiences,) capable of being made use of to confuse, as well as to establish, the faith of the Church. Speaking practically then, rather than abstractly, we may say that the first preliminary to the real translation of all that is signified by Calvary into a constitutive fact of my own inner being is that, looking externally upon it as a fact of history, I should apprehend it, believe it, con- template it, and love it. It is worth while to observe that I cannot begin, unless, to me at least, the history is truth. Even upon the extreme hypothesis that the sort of unqualified moral allegiance, of which we are speaking now, would be possible towards what was, in fact, a beautiful allegory: it would certainly not be possible save to one who mistook the allegory for fact. I do not analyze now the paradox f the position which could suggest that the highest ucation of human character ever dreamed of might be ased upon a lie, or a phantasy ; but I note that the thought f possible untruth must be absolutely shut out from the onsciousness which is to be really educated by it. From the beginning, the reality of Calvary as objective history is a postulate, without which nothing really can follow at all. The first point, then, is to apprehend and believe it as K'ue. This is faith in the lower and barer sense of the ^ord: — to recognize that the fact indeed is so; and to ave some insight into the meaning of the fact. All our jaching, as teaching, historical or doctrinal, goes to make this foundation sure. I 146 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. But secondly, it is something far beyond this primary apprehension or belief, when we say that our moral advancement further depends upon our contemplation of what we believe. Those do not grow into the likeness of the Cross who merely believe in their hearts, however sincerely, that the Cross was, in fact, once borne for them by their Lord. We speak now of a concentration of faculties by intellectual and moral effort. We speak of study, careful and minute, — a tracing of meanings and purposes, of connections and corollaries, — an insight into the relations and significance of details, — a vivid recalling, as into present life, through the powers of imagination taught carefully and disciplined, of all the wonder of those unique scenes, and all the mystery of that central Personality, in whose uniqueness only they have their meaning, or were, or are, what they are ! In a word we speak of that sort of framework of intimacy of knowledge, which is the direct correlative of love. Our third point, then, is love. The most diligent study would be nugatory : nay the most genuine intimacy would tend rather to severance and contrast than moral union : unless the intimacy were but an aspect of love. " Lovest thou Me?" Real, personal love, uplifted and uplifting, love for the Crucified because of the Cross, love even for the Cross because of the Crucified : this is perhaps the most obvious, and the most indispensable, of practical conditions for the real translation of the scene without into the material of the character within. I do not stay to analyze the possibility in us, of such love. We know of what sort it is as a practical duty, and we know something of its transforming power, long before we can realize whence, or how, it is possible. But this phrase " to love," after all, is a phrase which has been used for so many purposes, that it is shorn, for us, of a large part of its proper power. Quite apart from positively degraded uses, we use it for the VII.] OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 147 feeblest kinds of affection, not touching the real truth of love. Partly it is for this reason that we have reserved another special form of phrase for cases in which we can recognize the real informing and constraining force of love. If you say of a man not only that he loves, but that he is in love withy either a person or a cause, you intend to emphasize, by that phrase, a distinction between on the one hand an emotion quiescent if not passive, — one of the many shifting judgments of approval to which in turn man's mind and feeling give assent; and on the other hand a passion, dominant and sweeping, which carries all else before it with torrent force, filling all the mind and shaping all the actions, giving new zest, new power, possibly even new capacity and new character to the whole life of the spirit which has felt at last what is to be " in love." " Lovest thou Me ? " It is difficult for our imagination to emphasize too strongly what the meaning would be of " being in love with " Christ, crucified and risen ; or to how much it would be the practical key in the way of the translation of the spirit of Calvary into the animating spirit of individual Christian life. What engrossing of faculties, what absorption of desire, what depth of thought, what wistfulness of kindness, what strength of will, what inspiration of power, — to endeavour or to endure, — would forthwith follow, with spontaneous, silent, irresistible sequence, if once we were " in love " ! So all-inclusive indeed is the meaning of love, that it is needless to distinguish from love, as though it were a separable point, the effort of personal imitation and approach. Consciously or unconsciously, love is imitative. What I am really in love with I must in part be endeavouring to grow like : and shall be growing like, if the love is really on fire, even more than I consciously endeavour. What I am really in love with characterizes 148 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. me. It is that which I, so far, am becoming. In love then, at least, though perhaps not separably from love, there is much imitation, conscious and unconscious, of the Spirit which revealed itself to the world on Calvary. There may be no inherent beauty in asceticism. There may be no form of asceticism which is not, sometimes, the product of mean and selfish impulses ; which does not, sometimes, draw justly upon itself the condemnation, and even contempt, of healthy consciences. But alas! for us if we cannot also, in this context, see how directly the ascetic spirit may be the irresistible out- come of pure love. The daily unselfishness — more and more smiling and spontaneous — the quiet stringency and gladness of detailed self-discipline; do we not see how this, as the unconscious, or the conscious, imitation of the Cross, by one who is in love with the Crucified, may be just the natural homage, the relief which will not be denied, of a devoted love, welling up and bubbling over in act? Be it what it may as cold self-conscious rule, at least as the expression and relief of over-flowing love, asceticism, even the exactest, is not only blameless but beautiful. It is also, in very large measure, a practical token of the thing we are looking for : a secret of the process of the real translation of Calvary, con- templated and lovedy into the inmost characterizing reality of the spirit of the loving worshipper. But in dwelling so long on contemplation and love as if within these lay the secret of the answer to the question asked just now, we lay ourselves open, no doubt, to more questions than one. Thus it may be asked whether, on this interpretation, the only real value of Calvary and the Ascension, as historically objective realities, is to supply a basis for my emotions to work upon? They constitute, no doubt, a marvellous revelation ; an over-mastering appeal ; a perfect example ; a supreme » VII.] OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 149 object and motive for love. Is this all? Is this, and this only, their part in my redemption? And, if so, are they really indispensable at all ? Would not the appeal and motive be the same, if I really believed in them as appeal and motive, even if they never actually happened ? It might be strange, perhaps, that the deepest of all effects should follow upon a mistaken estimate of fact. But, strange or not strange, would not the same effects after all really follow in fact from an erroneous belief in Calvary and the Ascension, as from a true one, if only the erroneous belief were sufficiently protected from every suspicion of doubt? And if so again, then is not the whole thing a reappearance, in very thin disguise, of what we always understood by a subjective theory of the atone- ment, — rather than, what it seemed to promise to be, any real reconciliation or synthesis of subjective with objective ? There is one form of question — with branching con- sequences. And here is another. If contemplation, imitation, love, are adequate as the keynotes of ex- planation, it may well be asked — is such a contempla- tion or such a love as is required, itself within the possibilities of the human character? Are my conditions such, that this process of emotional transformation, can be by me maintained, or even begun? And the answer must certainly be that, consistently with the conditions of human experience, on the basis of human initiative or human accomplishment, — no^ it is not a possibility! To offer to me, being what I know myself to be, the sacrifice of Christ as an incitement, or an example, is not useless only — but worse than useless. It is, you urge, the most beautiful of ideals. But — the loftier the ideal, the more absolutely is it, to me, unapproachable. It is, you urge, the most moving, the most constraining, object of affec- tion. I can see that it is so— or that it ought to be. ISO ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. But even while I assent with part of my mind, there is that in me by which I feel and know that / cannot altogether be in love with an object of love so inaccessible to me, — ^just because it is more supremely lovable than I can conceive or desire. No ; on its side — even / can see that everything is indeed complete: but — on my side — it is the " I " which is incapable. To appeal to me for what is impossible to me, is only to convict and to crush. I need something first which will not merely make appeal to, or draw out, the best that is in me ; but which will change and transform the very meaning and possibility of that fatal word " I." The word " I " is the point at which all such theory breaks down. Surely discussions of atonement, — of its relation to me or mine to it — have often been in vain, because they have tried to explain it apart from any examination of the meaning of the fatal word " I," — as though the word " I " were a word of obvious meaning, and as though from first to last, throughout the process the word retained its one obvious meaning unchanged. Its meaning is far from remaining either simple, or un- qualified. On the contrary, the whole clue to my apprehension of Atonement lies, it may be, in the chang- ing content and significance of that one keyword " I." This is the answer to the second question. And from the second we go back to the first. And here again we have to answer No ! It is not all, nor anything approaching to all, the part borne in my redemption by Calvary and the Ascension that they should offer to me a model, or a motive, or an object of love. But what is far more, and is an integral part in any understanding or explanation of the Atonement, — the life of Christ, consecrated upon the Cross, consummated in the Ascension, itself constitutes the very basis of the possibility, nay more, of the vital and present and experienced reality VII.] OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 151 of that change in the meaning of the " I " and its capacities, without which any motive or model or ideal object for affection, would serve only to condemn and destroy. We, then, have not reached — we have hardly as yet even touched upon — the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter would lie in the exposition, and realization, of Pentecost. The atonement as a transaction without ourselves — expound it how you will — is not yet consum- mated for us. In terms simply of a transaction without ourselves, the mystery of the atonement cannot be ex- pounded. This is why so many expositions of the atone- ment are, to us, justly inconclusive, or worse. They have tried to explain the method, or justice, of its relation to us. And they stop short at a point at which its rela- tion to us is not yet properly real. What Jesus in Himself suffered, or did, on Calvary, you may perhaps explain in terms of Calvary. The meaning of His Ascension into Heaven, you may in some part at least explain without looking onwards to its further effects. But/'the relation of what He did to us, its working, its reality for and in us, you can only explain at all in terms of Pentecost. An exposition of atonement which leaves out Pentecost, leaves the atonement unintelligible — in relation to us. For what is the real consummation of the atone- ment to be ? It is to be — the very Spirit of the Crucified become our spirit — ourselves translated into the Spirit of the Crucified. The Spirit of the Crucified, the Spirit of Him who died and is alive, may be, and please God shall be, the very constituting reality of ourselves."' Here as always when we come to the deeper truths of Christian exposition, all is found to turn, not on explaining away, but on making vital and real, that membership, unity, identification with Christ, which is so familiar a feature of Scriptural language. He who could say with the most unaffected sincerity, " I determined not to know anything 152 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified," ^ said also "far be it from me to glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world," ^ and " I have been crucified with Christ ; yet I live ; and yet no longer I but Christ liveth in me." ^ I am appealing only to our own language, familiar indeed as language at every turn, which yet we find it too often almost impossible to assimi- late or to conceive. "Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of Thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink His Blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His Body, and our souls washed through His most precious Blood, and that we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us." Now we have made no attempt at all hitherto to enter upon the exposition of Pentecost, the crucial doctrine — professed so often, and so often without a meaning! — of the Holy Spirit, as constituting the Church. But at least the things which we have tried to say may serve to illustrate the cardinal principle, that Calvary is the condition, precedent and enabling, to Pentecost The objective reality is completed first, that it may be indeed subjectively realized. Christ is crucified first and risen before our eyes ; that Christ crucified and risen may be the secret love and power of our hearts. Calvary without Pentecost, would not be an atonement to us. But Pentecost could not be without Calvary. Calvary is the possibility of Pentecost: and Pentecost is the realization, in human spirits, of Calvary. The Spirit of the crucified Christ could not become our spirit, nor we live on, and by. Him, till Christ was crucified, and ascended, and enthroned. The Spirit of human penitence could not be ours, till penitence had been realized in humanity. The Spirit of human * I Cor. iL 2. 2 Gal. vi. 14. » Gal. ii. 20. VII.] OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE 153 righteousness could not be ours, till humanity, in the consummation of penitence, had become perfectly one with the righteousness of God. Human penitence, human atonement, human righteous- ness, — all are first before our eyes, as external objects, that they may be the secret of our hearts, that they may be the very truth of ourselves. But the transforming power, the power of real reflection and effective allegiance, is not to be found in ourselves. Or, at least, the question has to be seriously raised, — What do we mean by ourselves ? What is the true account of human personality? And the answer to this question can only be given in the light, if not in the language, of Pentecostal doctrine, the doctrine of the Holy Ghost. It is Pentecost, it is the gift pro- gressively transforming, it is the indwelling of the Spirit of Holiness, the Spirit of the Crucified, which is the trans- figuring of human personality : a transfiguring in which at last, for the first time, self has become fully self, and the meaning of human personality is consummated and realizedy^ CHAPTER VIII THE HOLY SPIRIT IN RELATION TO THE BEING OF GOD We need then some study of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, in order that we may understand the meaning of human personality. But before we apply this doctrine to the elucidation of human personality, it is necessary first to make some attempt to measure what we mean by the doctrine itself. What are we eally able to understand about the Holy Spirit, in reference, first, to the Personal Being of God ? The first condition for understanding (in any sense of the word) the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, is to begin by giving the utmost possible emphasis to the truth, which is as essential to the theologian as to the philosopher, — of the unity of God. God cannot be multiplied. " God " is a word which defies the possibility of a plural. To dally for a moment with any doubt or qualification of the absoluteness of the truth of the unity of God, is to empty the word itself of its essential significance. " The Lord our God, the Lord is One :* is a principle which necessarily, underlies every thought and every phrase of the Atha- nasian creed. If the Son is God, He is absolutely, and identically God — singularis^ unicuSy et totus Deus^- And the same is true also of the Holy Ghost. The Three Persons are neither Three Gods, nor Three parts of God. Rather they are God Threefoldly, God Tri-personally. Of course no human phrases are positively adequate. But nega- ^ See above, page 84. IM CHAP, riii.l THE HOLY SPIRIT 155 tively at least we must get rid, so far as we may, of positive misconceptions. It is God, not "a" God, nor a "part of" God, — it is God who eternally is, who thinks who wills, who designs, who creates, who ordains : it is God who eternally is, who loves, who condescends, who "deviseth means," who takes hold of man, who reveals, who redeems : it is God who eternally is, who attracts, who informs, who inspires, who animates, — it is God who, in Himself, and God who, even in His creatures, physical or spiritual, makes from all sides Divine response to Himself. The personal distinction in Godhead is a distinc- tion within, and of, unity : not a distinction which qualifies unity, or usurps the place of it, or destroys it. Historically, the unity of the Godhead, was impressed on the consciousness of Israel, as the religious representa- tive of man, for some two thousand years, before the stage in religious evolution was reached, at which any further revelation was possible of what was meant or contained within the unity. And as the further conception of God Incarnate, — God revealed within, and as, the moral and spiritual perfectness of man, — dawned by degrees, slowly, imperiously, compellingly, upon the consciousness of men of special moral and spiritual capacity of insight ; it was most assuredly not as the revelation of another God, or of another than God, but as the express image and actual revelation of God Himself, the One, the All-in-all, the Eternal, that the disciples learned to believe in, and to worship, Jesus Christ our Lord. And certainly in what He said Himself about the " other Paraclete," the " Spirit of Truth," Jesus Christ is not for a moment unteaching the fundamental verity that God is One. The teaching when it comes takes hardly the form of a new revelation at all. It is not ushered in with the dignity or the surprise of a new and amazing declaration as to the essential Being of Deity. Rather 156 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. it comes in a quiet, practical way, as explaining the meaning of His own bodily absence ; and how that absence could be, after all, a nearer and truer presence of Himself, and therefore of God, than could possibly be represented or expressed by bodily nearness in a material order of things. It is of course, in its own truth, a new revelation. It is the beginning of a new epoch — mysterious indeed, from the standpoint of everything that had been either attained or conceived before — in the revelation of the meaning of life, and specially the relation of created Life to God. It is the opening of new vistas of conception, such as we can only realize in part, about the essential Being of God Himself. But such a revelation, however in fact august or far- reaching, is in form made almost incidentally, as a necessary sequel, an element implied, and necessary to be discerned, for a full grasp of the conception of what Incarnation itself properly meant. The one thing which it emphatically is not^ is any correction or unsaying of the age-long truth of the essential unity of God. It is the more necessary to begin by insisting on this fundamental principle, because, though there are few who would have the temerity to deny it in words, it has not really an adequate place in general or popular Christian thought. It can hardly be doubted that, among those who wish to make a point of being orthodox, there is a great deal of practical Di- or Tri- theism. The word Person, as applied to the distinctions within the Divine unity, — though it is by far the best word, and, for us, the only word possible: and though, contrary to what is sometimes supposed, we may venture to think that it represents (or rather that it is capable of) a considerable advance even upon the suggestive Greek word 'YTroo-Tocrts : has nevertheless its drawbacks. We are profoundly accustomed to human persons, and perhaps to take for i vm.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 157 granted, moreover, a somewhat shallow philosophical conception as to where the essence of human personality lies. We are accustomed too much to conceive of personality primarily as distinctness. A and B and C are separate personalities : that is to say A is not B, and B is not C. When we are asked what we mean by " personalities," we are too apt to reply by underlining the word "separate." The fact that A is distinct, as a separate centre of being ; the fact that A is not any other than A ; this lies very near the heart of what we popularly conceive personality to mean. Now I believe that this is not the ultimate truth even of human personality : but it is not human personality that I am discussing now. It is in any case certainly not a key to the truth or meaning of the Threefoldness of Personality in God. And so long as we carry it with us into Theology from our (supposed) human experience, we are carrying with us an idea which is sure to work some confusion. Supposing for a moment that this "/> «^/" lies at the heart of the distinction of one human person from another ; in any case " is not " is not the heart of the distinction of the Three Persons of Deity. I am borrowing a phrase which has become happily familiar to very many, if I say that whereas "mutual exclusiveness " may seem indispensable for the under- standing of the distinction of human persons : for the understanding of the distinction of Divine Persons it is no less indispensable that we should grasp, — or at least should see that it would be necessary to grasp, — the opposite conception of " mutual inclusiveness." " I am not you " — " I, in respect of being I, am quite in- dependent of you" — these are statements, which even if they be not ultimate truth, at all events run very far back, on earth. But, in God, no Person is, or can be, at all without the other. The Father is inseparable from 158 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. the Son, and the Son from the Father : and the Spirit, inseparable from either, is the bond of the Union of Both. The word Person is the true word in itself. But the word Person, seen in the light of certain human assump- tions, leads human minds, if not to what is really a practical Tritheism, at all events to an undue and dangerous separation between the Persons, and the opera- tions — I had almost said the characters — of thp Eternal Father, and the Eternal Word, and the Eternal Spirit, which are One God. Historically perhaps this separation has assumed its most terrible proportions in some monstrous theories of the atonement, according to which, at least in their popular form, the Persons of Deity have been not only distinguished, but separated, — not only separated but very sharply contrasted ; — and that, not in operation only but in moral attributes, — in the will of Goodness and Love. But even among those who would utterly repudiate such awful travesties of theological truth as these, are there not many who practically regard the Divine Persons as if they were separate — in being and in operation ; shrinking with a sort of orthodox horror from seeming to introduce any One into the sphere which belongs — not to Him, but to Another Person? The Father is regarded as apart from the Son : and the Son as apart from the Father ; and the Spirit as to be clearly sundered from Both. And then each must have a separate sphere of operation assigned to Him ; and His sphere must be kept apart from the spheres of the Others ; and scruples and perplexities begin to arise as to the relation of the sphere or work respectively — say of the ascended Son to that of the Spirit ; as if God were divided, and in parts. And perhaps the question presents itself to scrupulous minds, whether really they do, — or can, — believe the Holy Spirit to be Personal, without ipso facto making Him distinct VIII. THE HOLY SPIRIT 159 from God, — the God who " is Spirit," and whose Spirit He is! Again, as a result that partly follows from undue separation, there are those who practically omit from their lives the third part of the Creed altogether. They believe in God : and in the life and death of Jesus Christ. But though of course they repeat the Creed as a whole, belief in the Spirit finds no place in their lives : they have really no adequately intelligent conception to attach to the words. Or if, without such adequate conception, they nevertheless make much of the use of the words, then the words them- selves, becoming unduly familiarized, are, through familiarity, debased : they speak lightly of the Spirit, or the gifts of the Spirit, not knowing at what a cost they misuse the name, and lower in themselves the power of the thought, of the presence of the Eternal God. But if perils like these are easily incurred through the common associations of the human word person : it may be asked, perhaps, whether, when these are removed, the word Person really carries, for us, any positive illumination of thought about the Being of God ? Above all it may be asked, whether the word Person itself, however inevitable in Latin or English, does not represent a retrogression of thought, in comparison with the Greek of the early Councils ? T/Dcis wrotrTao-cis, Mta ovcrta, or even T/3cts VTTOo-Tao-cts, Mia vTToo-Tao-is — there is something in the very bravery of the paradox which is fascinating. Three Subsistences, of One Substance: Three Existences of One Essence: or even Three Subsistences of One Subsistence ; Three Existences of One Existence ; this seems at first sight to be nearer in expression to that mystery for which we strive to find an utterance ; and not even to suggest the perilous complete- ness of separation which begins to creep in at once with the phrase — "Tres Personae Unius Substantias." Yet however valuable these expressions may be to us^ as i6o ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. correcting our misapprehensions of the word Person ; they are really inadequate substitutes for that word. This is none the less true to modern thought, even if it be supposed that historically, in the first instance, as new words, the words II/ooo-cDTra or Personae may have carried with them some intellectual loss. There is something essentially lacking in the word'YTroo-Tao-ts. And just for this very reason ; that, with all its subtle suggestiveness, it is still, so largely, an impersonal word. It is abstract rather than actual, a conception rather than a living whole. When St Augustine says, in often quoted words "Tamen cum quaeritur Quid tres? magna prorsus inopia humanum laborat eloquium. Dictum est tamen Tres Personae non ut illud diceretur, sed ne taceretur;"^ unspeakably valuable though the caution is, and has always been felt to be, yet he really has said too much. There was after all some- thing positive which was needed ; and something which, with whatever lack of full completeness, only the word " Person " really supplied ; or had, at least, the capacity of supplying. The word Person has a fulness and totality of meaning of its own, and certainly nothing short of the in- clusive completeness of personal being can be predicated, at any moment, of God — whether Father, Son, or Holy Ghost. If, negatively, we can be rid of the associations privative and exclusive which are supposed to be inherent in the word : we shall recognize, on the positive side, that the word expresses a truth which we must assert, and can assert with intelligence. Our intelligence is, on the one side, positive and real, and on the other side, explicitly limited. And both consequences follow from the nature of our own knowledge of personality. It is urged that it is hard for us to under- stand a Trinity of Personality. Naturally it is so. The 1 De TrinitatCt V., cap. ix. lo, p. 838; cp. also VII. iv. 9, p. 860; VIII. L p. 865, etc. VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT i6i basis of our understanding of personality is experience. We can understand no personality at all, divine or human, in Trinity or in Unity, except so far as we have first realized something, in personal experience, of what it means. If we were not persons, with an experience of personality antecedent to either reflection in thought or expression in words, we could not either explain the meaning of the word, or receive explanation from others. Persons, analyzing their own consciousness of personality, to others who begin by sharing (as matter of experience) in the same consciousness, can give some account, intelligible to both, of the meaning of the experience which is anyhow common to both, before it is analyzed or understood at all. But as it is only upon the basis of this experience that any understanding is possible at all : so is it impossible that any understanding should really travel outside of what is contained, implicitly at least if not explicitly, within the experience. Now in a sense we are travelling beyond our experience whenever we assert an Absolute or Supreme Personality at all, — whenever, therefore, we assert the Personality of God. We are passing outside our explicit experience ; we are asserting something which transcends what we have realized. But we are not passing outside what is necessarily implied within our own experience. Our own consciousness of personality, when cross- examined, bears witness, as on the one hand to its own inherent character and demand : so, on the other, to its own universal and necessary incompleteness. That which our experience universally requires, for any possible account of itself, is nowhere, in our experience, realized. Our personality, though real as far as it goes, is a partial, tentative, and incomplete personality : and as such only explicable at all upon the hypothesis of a meaning of the word Personality, without which indeed even our L 1 62 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. present experience would have neither sense nor signifi- cance, but which could only find its realization in God. Up to this point we may fairly be said to "under- stand" Divine Personality. We can understand the idea of the completeness of those attributes of which we are conscious of the possession, and conscious of the incompleteness. And we can understand the proposition that that idea of their completeness is an absolute intellectual necessity to give rational meaning to our incomplete experience. A will partially free is only intelligible at all upon the assumption that, ideally at least, there is such a thing as freedom of will that is no longer partial. A character more or less advanced in loving is a phrase positively chaotic except in the light of an ideal conception of perfect love. But if so much of the idea of Divine Personality is implicitly contained in our own personal consciousness : is there anything in the Christian revelation of Divine Personality, and particularly Divine Threefoldness in Personality, which is not so implicitly contained? Cer- tainly I have no wish to answer such a question, at this point, in any dogmatic manner. I do not assume that we know all that is implicitly contained within ourselves. More may well be implied in our consciousness than as yet the greatest among us have explored. On the other hand I do not assume that any human analysis however perfect must ultimately of necessity cover all the ground. To put it in the most guarded and moderate way, I see no reason for assuming that what is implicit in human personality must exhaust the meaning of personality in God. And my point at the present moment is that if, or just so far as, there is in the revelation of the Triune Personality of God any element whatever which is not. on analysis, within the necessary implications of human ▼III.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 163 personality ; just so far it necessarily follows, from the very terms on which alone we can understand any personality, human or divine, at all, that those elements cannot be, in any proper sense of the words, intellectually intelligible to us. There is a certain note of reverent agnosticism which it is well to strike with some emphasis here. It is wonderful indeed to what an extent the finite can express and reflect the infinite. But it is not natural, after all, to suppose that the infinite will be adequately measured by the finite. I would speak with reserve, seeing how much of capacity of the infinite is in the nature which has become, once for all, the expression of God. Yet I may safely protest against the assumption, made too lightly (even if unconsciously) on the other hand, that our faculties are adequate for an intellectual grasp on the whole of the revelation: or that scriptural truths about the Threefold Personality can only be saved from being rejected as irrational, by being brought into direct, and measurable, relation with the realized consciousness of man. I am certain that whatever is completely outside human consciousness in this matter, is also of necessity outside human intelligibleness. This is a thought to be urged not so much in the way of apology — as an excuse to hide or palliate failure. Rather it is a principle of most positive and illuminating importance. It is a principle to be pressed forward, with emphasis, into the utmost prominence, as indispensable for intelligence. And in the light of it, we certainly shall not be likely to set out with any antecedent expectation of being able to explain or to apprehend that supreme all-inclusive consciousness, which, being One, is mutually Three ; and being mutually Three, is One. But if we cannot realize as from within, the conscious- ness of God : and can see quite clearly beforehand that we so obviously and necessarily cannot realize it, that it 1 64 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. would ipso facto not be Divine consciousness if we could : there are nevertheless some propositions about it, which we can see, as from without, to be necessary truths. One such is of crucial importance for our present purpose. We can see that Personality of Supreme, or Absolute, or Eternal Being, cannot be without self-contained mutuality of relations. Wisdom in unique solitariness of existence, would have neither meaning nor content as wisdom. Will, existing absolutely alone, would not be will. Even yet more obviously. Love existing as a sole and single unit, could not possibly be Love.^ If God is Personal at all : and if Will and Wisdom and Love are elements in the conception of Personality : it follows, from analysis of the necessary meaning and implications, even of the inchoate personality of which we ourselves are conscious in ourselves, that Divine Personality cannot mean a merely sole and unrelated unit. There must be in Itself both subject and object ; and moreover a mutual relation of subject and object : that is to say a mutually personal relation. There must be mutuality of con- templation, mutuality of Love. What, as subject, finds its object within itself: must itself also, as object, be contemplated and loved, by that object, within itself, which becomes subject in contemplating and loving. Less than this does not constitute a real mutuality : and real mutuality is the one thing which I can see to be an intellectual necessity in my thought of Divine Personality, — so necessary that Divine Personality cannot even be thought without it. But the mutuality would not be real, unless the subject which becomes object, and ^ A somewhat striking saying has been quoted from the Valentinians, in the midst of a context which is not valuable at all : see Hippolyt. Ref. omn. Hser., Lib. vi. 29. 'Ettci Se ^v yovijuos, eSo^ev a^T'qa-lv, ^v oAoSj rj Si dyaTrrj ovk &rTiv dydirrjf edv firj y rh dyaTriofievov, I I VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 165 the object which becomes subject, were, on each side, alike and equally Personal. I am not sure that this is not the one thing in respect of Divine Personality of which we can with most unfailing certainty be said to have a real intellectual grasp. We see not merely that an inherent mutuality is authoritatively implied or revealed. We can see that it is intellectually impossible that it should be otherwise. We can see that eternal Personality, without mutual relation in itself, could not be eternal Personality after all. This position is of great importance to us in more directions than one. In the first place it is the final and absolute answer to all those who might have been inclined to suppose that our primary insistence on the Unity of Deity was too sweeping in tone ; and therefore unorthodox in the direction of Sabellianism. But the tendency of Sabellian thought is something widely different. This would conceive of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as diverse manifestations or aspects of one single God. He reveals Himself now as Father, now as Son, and now as Spirit. All three manifestations are true. But He who so diversely manifests Himself, is still one indistinguishable He. Now this may have some character of truth about it, up to a certain point, which it is wholly beyond our power to define. But there is one crucial defect about it, a defect which, for us, condemns the language as impossible. For it degrades the Persons of Deity into aspects. Now there can be no mutual relation between aspects. The heat and the light of flame cannot severally contemplate, and be in love with, one another. Whereas real mutuality, — mutuality which involves on both sides personal capacities, — is the one thing which we most unflinchingly assert But while we insist, in the most uncompromising way, upon the essential unity of God, it is well to remember tliat the solitariness of the unit is not the only, or the i66 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. highest form, under which we are capable of conceiving unity. The unity of all-comprehensive inclusiveness is a higher mode of unity than the unity of singular dis- tinctiveness. And the form or mode under which the highest unity is in fact revealed to our imagination is that living unity, which absolutely requires some kind of dis- tinctness as a conditio sine qua non for its own possibility, — the unity of infinite love. The unity is not the unity of number, but the unity of the Spirit. And it is as " the bond of peace, which is love " that the unity of the Spirit is characterized.^ But again, when we try to think of the supreme unity of the Spirit, as love, it is necessary to repeat the caution against allowing our imagination to interpret the words too exclusively in the light of present human experience. It is probable that to many of us the unity of love sounds far less real as unity than the unit of number, and that it may seem little less than a quibble of words to rank it, seriously, as unity, higher. Why so? Because our present experience is mainly of love between persons, whose absolute distinctness from one another we assume (and exaggerate in assuming) as the basis of love. Such distinctness, amounting to severance, we read into our conceptions of love, and so transfer it, with our conceptions of love, to any sphere, or relation, of which love is pre- dicable. But this assumption of severance is precisely the assumption against which we feel ourselves free most emphatically to protest. This is once more to make the negation " is not " cardinal to the very idea of personality ; while tne extent and range of the " fs not " are tacitly pressed tar beyond any point at which they can be asserted legitimately. If it is to be logically allowed that any kind of distinctness, in any sense, involves the correlative possibility of the use of some kind of negation \ 1 Eph. iv. 3 with Col. iii. 14. VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 167 yet for us it is probably almost, if not quite, impossible to assert such a negative without over-asserting it. Thus to say that the Father is not the Son, and that the Son is not the Spirit, whatever element there may be in it of truth — and of course there is truth in it, — is yet to say, to our apprehensions, too much. For each is God, the One God ; and all are inseparable. You may say, no doubt, that the Father was not Incarnate. But the Son who was Incarnate, was the complete expression, in humanity, of the Father. He was the actual, and adequate, revelation of the Father, — the brightness of His glory, the express image of His Person. In flesh He could say of Himself, remonstrating with the blindness of His disciples, " Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip ? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," ^ and "I and the Father are one." ^ It is difficult to see how words could go further in the assertion of veritable oneness ; which yet is other than mere (and so to say) mechanical identity, not because such identity would be a more perfect form of oneness ; but because such identity, by destroying the possibility of mutual relation, would destroy the very basis of that highest oneness which is oneness in the Spirit of Love. It would substitute verbal tautology for a living unity. The unity, such as it was, would become a truism : but, as truism, it would be no longer worth asserting ; it would be unity, indeed, but without either meaning or life. Again you may say that the Son did not descend at Pentecost. But the indwelling of the Spirit is the one possibility, — is the vital reality, — of the Son's indwelling. To have the Spirit is to have the Son. No one can have the Spirit, and not thereby have the Father and the Son : neither is there any other conceivable possibility of having ' John xiv. 9. ' John x. 30. i68 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. the Father and the Son, save in, and as, personally in- dwelling Spirit. "If a man love Me, he will keep My word : and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make our abode with him."^ How? And so, further ; " He that abideth in the teaching, the same hath both the Father and the Son." ^ Again how ? This is the answer ; " Hereby know we that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He hath given us of His SpiriC^ "Hereby we know that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He gave us" * It is thus that the state- ment that His withdrawal from them was for their advan- tage is fully explained and justified. " Nevertheless I tell you the truth ; It is expedient for you that I go away : for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I go, I will send Him unto you." ^ It is thus that the promise of His own return to them is abundantly verified. "A little while and ye behold Me no more: and again a little while and ye shall see Me.^ ... ye there- fore now have sorrow : but I will see you again and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you." ^ "I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of Truth : whom the world cannot receive ; for it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth Him : ye know Him ; for He abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you. Yet a little while, and the world beholdeth Me no more ; but ye behold Me: because I live, ye shall live also. In that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you." ^ Observe, it is not for an instant that the disciples are to have the presence of the Spirit instead of having the ^ John xiv. 23. * 2 John 9. ^ i John iv. 13. * I John iii. 24. * John xvi. 7. " John xvi. 16, 19. ' John xvi. 22. • John xiv. i6-ao. VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 169 presence of the Son. But to have the Spirit is to have the Son, Again it is not for an instant that this is a sort of indirect or secondary mode of having the presence of the Son ; as we, in our bodily existence in space and time, are forced into current phrases which make "presence in the spirit " a sort of apology or substitute (and some- times a very lame one) for " reality " of presence : quite the contrary : this is the only mode of presence which could be quite absolutely direct, and primary, and real. Any presence of the Son other than this ; any presence of the Son other than as Spirit, within, and as, ourselves, characterizing and constituting the very reality of what we ourselves are ; would be, by comparison, remote, in- effective, unreal: nay, it would be, after all, a form of absence, a substitute for the presence which alone can be called true or real. There are not, then, three separate spheres of spiritual operation upon us, which the good theologian is to be careful to demarcate exactly, and not confound : the sphere of the operation of the Father, and the sphere of the operation of the Son, and the sphere of the opera- tion of the Holy Ghost.^ The operation is the operation of One God, Father at once and Son: and both, in and through Spirit. All these are truths which our minds very quickly outrun and obscure, finding that they have already under- stood far too much, whenever they make the apparently * ** Whatsoever God doth work, the hands of all three Persons are jointly and equally in it according to the order of that connexion, whereby they each depend upon other. And therefore albeit in that respect the Father be first, the Son next, the Spirit last, and consequently nearest unto every eflFect which groweth from all three, nevertheless, they all being of one essence, are like- wise all of one efficacy. Dare any man unless he be ignorant altogether how inseparable the Persons of the Trinity are, persuade himself that every one of them may have their sole and several possessions, or that we being not partakers of all, can have fellowship with any one? Hooker, V. Ivi. 5, p. 248. I70 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. obvious assertion (which in some sense, that is hard for us to limit adequately, no doubt represents Divine truth) that the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Holy Ghost. Indeed, even while we admit that there is a place, and a cogent necessity, for the negative assertion, we may perhaps legitimately doubt whether even the contra- dictory affirmative, (not as a substitute for, but as supplement- ing, the negative,) might not also, in its own way, express to thoughtful minds as much, or almost as much, of the incomprehensible completeness of the Being of God. But to go back a little. There is another line of thought along which we are greatly helped by a firm grasp of the intellectual position that Personality which is supreme, all-inclusive, and eternal, must contain mutuality of relation within itself For in the light of this thought we can see, in a way which is practically useful, the limit of the suggestiveness of even the most suggestive analogies in human consciousness, which have been used to illustrate the Divine Threefoldness in unity. Such analogies are, up to a certain point, of very real value. They have often served to make minds really see that there is more complexity in existence than their primd facie logic had been prepared to tolerate, or admit to be possible. They have often given real glimpses of profound meaning to statements which had once been thought really meaningless. When St Augustine, expounding the Apostles' Creed, explains that the spring, and the river, and the glass of water drawn from the river, are alike one and the same, " water," ^ — though the glassful is not the river, and the river is not the spring : or that the root, and the trunk, and the branches, are all one "wood," — though the branches are not the trunk, nor the trunk the root : he is really, so far, helping minds to mental insight beyond and behind a difficulty, originated in the mind, ^ Dejidi et symbolo^ i^jy pp. 73, 74. VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 171 which, if the mind were not helped, would have made belief impossible. - But though they help the mind beyond its first confidently dogmatic incredulity, such analogies really carry the mind but a little way towards under- standing the Trinity ; and clearly break to pieces if pressed too far. And so with the more serious analogies of his formal treatise De Trinitaie. There is the "Trinity" in man of (i) his own rational capacity, (2) his reflexive contemplation of his reason and himself reasoning, (3) the love which he feels for himself and the reason that is in him. There is the "Trinity" of memory, and reason, and will. Or, in outward acts of sight, there is (i) the visible object, (2) the impression thereof upon the eye, and (3) the conscious attention, which is the unifying of the other two. Or there is, in imaginative memory (i) the recalled impression of things seen or heard, (2) the consideration of them, (3) the recalling and considering will.^ Again, from other sides we are familiar with the old analogy of the family — man made at last complete as father, and mother, and child. Again, man at once is body, soul, and spirit. Again man is emotion, and reason, and will. Again man is rational and moral and spiritual, and in these three, is one. The very multiplicity of these analogies, while it does not show that they have had no use, is at least a caution against assigning any very high value to any of them. Each in its way is a sugges- tion, and possibly for the moment a really illuminating one. ^ " As the sense of human personality grew deeper, particularly, as we have seen, under Christian influence, its triune character was generally recognized. Augustine marks an epoch in the subject, and is its best exponent. *I exist,* he says, * and I am conscious that I exist, and I love the existence and the consciousness; and all this independently of any external influence.' And again, • I exist, I am conscious, I will. I exist as conscious and willing, I am con- scious of existing and willing, I will to exist and to be conscious ; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence.'" Illingworth, B. L. III., p. 71. 172 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. But neither any one of them, nor (still less) all together, go far towards enabling uni-personal man to enter into the consciousness of Tri-Personality. Moreover there is always a considerable danger about a line of thought which depends upon emphasizing distinction of qualities. If I distinguish a Trinity of Righteousness, Wisdom, and Love, I am not only substituting abstract for personal terms; but I make it exceedingly difficult to predicate Righteousness of Wisdom, or Wisdom of Righteousness, or either of these of Love, or Love of either of these. I may find indeed a new dialectical reason for the inseparableness of the Persons of the Trinity, and say, as many have said with Athanasius, that the Son must be coseval with the Father, because the Eternal Father can never have been sundered from His own Eternal Wisdom ; but to say this involves the perilous consequence that the Eternal Father, if, or in so far as. He can in thought be distinguished from the Eternal Son, or the Eternal Spirit, must vi terminorum be distinguished also from Wisdom, and from Love. I have then not only substituted a term which does not suggest personality ; but I have destroyed the possibility of a personal inter- pretation of my term. The three terms cannot rightly be distinguished as being severally Righteousness, Wisdom, and Love ; when Righteousness, Wisdom, and Love must of necessity be predicated of every one of the three terms severally. Perhaps no one can read the orations against the Arians without feeling the difficulty under which Athanasius laboured, in having to deal with thoughts of this character without the illuminating assistance of the word Personality.^ The suggestions then which have been quoted do not carry us more than a little way. In comparison with the vagueness of suggestions like these, we are touching firm ^ Su Note A, at the end of the chapto:. viii.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 173 ground intellectually, when we assert the necessity of mutuality of relation in the Being of God ; and certainly there is not one of these illustrations which adequately realizes what we mean by mutuality. Then there is another illustration, which is put forward on somewhat different ground, as necessary to thought. "We shall see," writes Mr Illingworth, "that human personality is essentially triune, not because its chief functions are three — thought, desire, and will — for they might perhaps conceivably be more, but because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. A person is, as we have seen, a subject who can become an object to himself, and the relation of these two terms is necessarily a third term." ^ But even of this statement, however true it may be as far as it goes, I think we shall feel that it has carried us but a very little way towards realizing the conception of a threefoldness of personality, in which subject is also object, and object is also subject, and the logical relation between them is itself both. And yet, even at the very moment that our imagination necessarily stops short of it, we can see intellectually that (whether it be in Twofoldness or Threefoldness, or more) it is precisely this relation of personal mutuality, and nothing less than this, which our own intellectual necessity requires. The difficulty no doubt, with all analogies is their limitedness ; and all these fail alike in that they all give us aspects or relations which, however intelligible as aspects or relations, are not personal ; and are not mutually subject and object to one another. There is however one other analogy or illustration, on which I should like to dwell a little further. It does not transcend this inevitable limitation. It is not therefore adequate. It will not perform the impossible requirement of making Tri-Personality intelligible, as from within, to ^ Bampton Lectures, III. p. 69. 174 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. uni-personal consciousness. And yet there are directions in which it appears to me to throw somewhat more light upon this mystery of thought, than the analogies which have been more familiarly used. This is the threefoldness which is involved whenever I describe or distinguish what a man is in the following relations. First, then, there is the man as he really is in himself, invisible, indeed, and inaccessible, — and yet, directly, the fountain, origin, and cause of everything that can be called in any sense himself. Secondly, there is himself as projected into conditions of visibleness, — the overt expression or utterance of himself. This, under the conditions of our actual experience, will mean for the most part his expression or image as body, — the touch of his hand, the tone of his voice, the shining of his eye, the utterance of his words: all, in a word, that makes up, to us, that outward expression of himself, which we call himself, and which he himself ordinarily recognizes as the very mirror and image and reality of himself. And thirdly, there is the reply of what we call external nature to him — his opera- tion or effect. There is the painting, or the Cathedral, which expresses the very spirit of artist or architect, — the palpable realization of his secret vision within. There is the deathless poem of the poet : the regenerated people — which is the work of the noble politician's life of sacrifice : there is the sublime insight of the inspired theologian which has become the daily light of the life of tens of thousands : there is the devoted love in the hearts of others which has sprung up in them as inevitable response, kindled by the devotion of his love to them. In a word, there is the echo or image of himself, responsive to himself, which comes back to him, as from without: the response of outside objects to himself: or rather his own response which he has wrought out to himself, in, and out of, that which had been, or had seemed to be, beyond, and VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 175 apart from, himself. There is that effect, or extension, of himself, by which what had been distinguishable from him- self, comes to be wholly informed by, and alive with, and therefore a real expression or method of, himself. It is he himself, by virtue of what he is within himself, — but by virtue of it as exerted, expressed, or uttered, — who has really had the power of so informing and wielding that which seemed outside himself, that it too has become a response to his utterance, — the response which he himself has wrought, — and, so far as its capacity extends, an image therefore also of what he himself is. The music of the musician : the poetry of the poet : the work which the devoted pastor has wrought: there are times at least in which we feel that in these we come nearer to the man's very self than is, in any other way, even conceivable. At the least, no conception of himself, could be anything approaching to adequate or complete, of which such things did not form — not a part only but a very overshadowing and vital element. And meanwhile in the larger thought of himself which includes these things, and dwells with special emphasis on the thought of his operation, not as external effect which as such has ceased to be himself, but as his self-wrought work of response to himself, in which himself is the more perfected and magnified ; there do seem to be at least suggestive glimpses such as give real help to the mind, if not towards grasping Tri-Personal consciousness, at least towards an intelligent conception of the Divine reality of the Holy Ghost. It will be felt, however, with some justice, that apart from other criticisms to which this analogy (like others) may be liable : it is impossible that any analogy can be really adequate which would find a perfect mirror of the Trinity in any form of strictly uni-personal consciousness or work. No analysis of what is contained within a 176 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. solitary consciousness, however suggestive, can possibly be adequate. This is why the "family" analogy, rough and external as it is in itself, has yet a valuable place among analogies. For in fact no man's personality is complete in himself, or in anything that is solely regarded as an operation of himself It is in the reflexive corre- spondence of other personalities that any man approaches his own completeness. The more truly he is echoed and reproduced in others, the more nearly does he approach to the complete possibility of himself. Perhaps for this very reason an analogy which introduces his operation and effect, especially when conceived in the form of the regeneration of others, is more hopeful than any analogy which avowedly consists in analysis of his solitary con- sciousness. But no analogy drawn from an imperfect personality can truly mirror the Trinity of God. And every personality is imperfect, which is not yet con- summated (in a way we can but dimly foreshadow) in mutual relation ; that is, as perfectly echoed and com- plemented in the personality of others. I do not know, meanwhile, whether the attempt to make use of such suggestiveness as the word response may contain, will have been felt just now by any one to be open to objection, on the ground that it does not obviously lead us to the doctrine of the Personality of the Holy Ghost. It does in fact lead us further in this direction, a good deal, than many words which are in familiar and helpful use. But it seems worth while to enter some protest against allowing such a considera- tion as this to come in for the present, at all. The doctrine of the Personality of the Holy Ghost, however dutifully accepted, is in no case a doctrine that is easy to be intellectually understood. It is almost certainly a mistake to let a doctrine of this kind, which is certainly true, but which we can, at the best, but imperfectly apprehend, VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 177 come in to deter us from dwelling upon those aspects of the nature and work of the Spirit, which are also true, and which our intelligence can more definitely follow. Thus the Holy Spirit is not less " a gift," because a gift is not itself a personal term. We undoubtedly do well to make the most of the lower aspects of the truth, if only that we may go on from them to the higher. The truth that He is Personal, is certainly not to warn us off from such conceptions about Him as are to us most naturally intelligible. If we are ever to reach a higher under- standing, we shall do well to give full scope and play to the lower first. Whatever would for us be true of the Spirit, — as gift, as inspiration, as empowerment, — if the Spirit were rightly spoken of always and only in the neuter gender as avrb, is certainly no less true, even if at many points it may be felt to be inadequate, when we advance further on towards realizing, as well as avowing, that He is indeed Avtos. It may be worth while to emphasize this insistence by dwelling for a few moments upon a parallel instance of its importance. When minds are at work, not upon the (mystery of Tri-Personality, but upon the primary Theistic ith of the Personal Being of God : there are stages at ^hich an antithesis will present itself to the imagination )etween the comparative limitedness of the personal :onception, and the grand immensity of the impersonal. >uch a sense of contrast is perfectly natural to minds rhich approach the question of Theism from the region )f abstract philosophical thought ; and still more to those [which approach it from the region of physical science. Either Existence, First cause, ultimate Unity, etc., on the >ne hand, or on the other Law, Energy, Harmony, perhaps 5ven such pervading principles as ether, or electricity, seem indefinitely vaster than anything which experience of the word personality suggests. The fact is that we M 178 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. have no direct experience of personality except as ex- pressed by man — with and through a material stature and strength which we feel to be comparatively con- temptible. And at a certain stage of imagination, it is almost impossible to get rid of the instinct of measuring personality by men's bodily stature, conceiving of it as if it necessarily existed in about six-foot lengths of matter. No wonder that the lightning should seem to be, as a conception, indefinitely larger than such a conception of personality as this. Now it need hardly be said that at the stage at which such abstract words as Energy or Law seem immeasurably to transcend the Hmitedness of the personal conception, it would be most unwise to try to press any man's mind into nevertheless accepting such a misconception as would be involved, to him, in the unexplained proposition that God is Personal. It is precisely because the proposition has presented itself thus to their minds, that many men have felt that their intellectual self-respect absolutely required the rejection of the proposition. We do not rise to the true idea of God by clinging tight, at any and every stage, to a personal form of statement into which we can put no intelligible meaning. On the contrary, it is often definitely helpful, even amongst people who have no doubt of the doctrine, and are, in intention and life, quite definitely religious, to drop for a time the personal, and sub- stitute for it the abstract, form of phrase. We may do it a little even with such scientific abstractions as Force or Law. Much more do we help ourselves by doing it with the religious abstractions Omnipotence, Wisdom, Righteousness, Perfectness, Love. "Love is my shepherd : " "I believe in the Almightiness of Good- ness : " "I am sure of the pardon of Righteousness : " "I commit myself to perfect Wisdom : " "I will try to feel VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 179 trust in the lovingness of Love itself:" the habit of dwelling upon such thoughts as these, substituting in each case an abstract term for the personal name of God, would on the one hand utterly make impossible some of the commonplaces of devout, but unintelligent, religion. No one would continue to say " There is One above " — as though in certain somewhat higher regions of space, amongst the tens of thousands, or millions, of existences, there was to be found " one " who did this, or willed that, or had to be, in one way or another, attended or submitted to. No one would ever say " It is our duty to submit " — as though to a tyrant will which it was morally, as well as materially, prudent not to challenge. "Submit" to perfect Wisdom ! " Be resigned " to perfect Love ! No one would set himself, on imperfect and unworthy con- ceptions of prayer, to try and bend the will of God to his own : as though God needed information, or guidance, or urging, that He might know what was wise, or might become what was kind ! On the other hand such a habit would itself be a stage towards the mental realization that these abstractions themselves, so far from really transcend- ing personality, or being wider than it in range or in- clusiveness, were but several elements within the ultimate meaning of personality itself. It is through accustoming itself to them, and to thought in terms of them, that the mind would gradually realize, with a more and more complete and instinctive fulness, that every one of these — Law, Power, Cause, ultimate Being, Reason, Wisdom, Holiness, Love, — and others like these — of necessity is, in its ultimate climax of meaning. Personal : and moreover that as they all are severally Personal, so are they ultimately all the same one, identical. Personal : and that this is what we mean by the Personal God : not a limited alternative to unlimited abstracts: but the transcendent and inclusive completeness of them alL i8o ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. Now just as in this case we prepare ourselves for a very much higher appreciation of Personality, by dropping for a time the personal language, and speaking not of He and Him, but of qualities or properties, which at least are not, as such, obviously personal : so in respect of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, it is at least more than possible that we may ultimately gain, not lose, in richness, by keeping the doctrine that He is Personal for a while, as doctrine, in the background ; not using it to crush or disallow our more rudimentary apprehensions of the work of the Spirit, whether regarded as gift or as response ; but rather reserving it to be, in ways which we may, or may not, fully understand, their ultimate climax and crown. No one then should ever refuse, or treat with suspicion, any meaning which he may seem to himself to attach to the " Spirit of God," on the ground that such meaning may appear to ignore His several Personality, and realize Him less as Person than as quality. Incomplete it is bound to be. But doubtless it is, so far as it goes, a perfectly true and significant line of thought. Let us give all the meaning that we possibly can to the presence of the Spirit of God as " It." Let us lose no item of the significance which we are capable of attaching to the thought of God's Spirit as gift, as influence, as quality, as echo, as effect. Let us freely pursue any such line of thought as is suggested by saying that to imagine God without the Holy Spirit is to imagine Him, per impossibile, as so contained within Himself as wholly to be without operation or effect. By and by, it may be, we shall rise beyond these things ; — but we shall rise by and through these things, and not through evacuating or disallowing them, — to understand, with greater fulness, or with less, that the influence or quality, the operation or effect, the echo or response, is itself also Personal VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT i8i Personal as the Personal Presence of God, — in God Himself, for His Spirit is Himself, and He " is Spirit " : Personal moreover, as the Personal Presence of God — in all creatures made by Himself responsive to Himself, as in the order or beauty of inanimate nature : Personal moreover, as the Personal Presence of God, more wonder- fully still, in all created spirits, made capable by Himself of personal response to Himself; Personal in their possi- bility of spontaneous homage, their answer to God of Divine contemplation and love ; Personal as the inmost constitutive reality of their God-echoing personalities. When we present to ourselves, in any such manner as this, the thought of God the Holy Spirit : at all events when we think of Him at all thus in relation to man : it is clear that we are thinking of what is, in fact, a result of the Incarnation. It is thus indeed, as sequel and con- summation of the accomplished completeness of the In- carnation, that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit begins to be unveiled to man's thought at all : as sequel, because the manifestation of the Holy Ghost must follow, and could not precede, the Incarnate Life of God : as con- summation, because the significance and work of Incarna- tion and of atonement would be after all, without the Presence of the Holy Ghost, (that is, the Presence of God as Spirit within man's central self,) incomplete. And if it is in, and through, and for the necessary completeness of, the Incarnation (as it is), that the doctrine of the Holy Ghost first begins (and begins at first incidentally in manner enough) to be presented to human consciousness at all : the reflection that this is so may perhaps encourage us to consider, somewhat more fully, to what an extent it is true that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity altogether is revealed in connection with, and (if we may venture to say so) in terms of, the Incarnation. If it is thus that the doctrine of God the Holy Ghost first presents i82 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. itself as a sequel to, or element in, the full meaning of the mystery of Incarnation, still more, of course, is it in and through Incarnation that the Person of God, the Word, is revealed to man. It is of course a mere truism to say this. And yet we may hardly have re- cognized to what an extent this mere truism may justify the further suggestion, that the terminology under which the great Revelation of the Trinity is made, in its final and most authoritative form, is terminology which, as terminology, is conditioned by the fact of the Incarnation. " Baptizing them into the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" In context with our present thought, can we refrain from recognizing that it is through, and out of, rather than irrespectively of, the condi- tions and significance of Incarnation, that the Second Person of the adorable Trinity is revealed specifically under the title " Son " : and the Third Person specifically under the title " Ghost " or " Spirit " ? It is hardly necessary, I hope, in saying this, to guard beforehand against being supposed to suggest that it is only in the Incarnation, or as result from it, that God the Son, or God the Holy Ghost, have reality of Personal distinguishableness from God the Father. Not so. The Three Persons of Godhead are co-eternal. Nevertheless, whatever profoundly true relation to the eternal distinctions between the Persons of Godhead may have been represented — first by the historical facts of Incarnation, and secondly by the terms which are correlative to those facts : what is suggested is that the terms in which the truths are expressed (as distinguished from the ultimate reality of the truths which lie behind those terms) are terms which rise more immediately out of the temporal facts of the Incarnation, than out of the Eternal relations of Divine Being. The words "Father" and "Son" are, of course, mutually correlative words. Moreover it is plain that these words, as used in human VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 183 language, present themselves to human understanding, as a metaphor borrowed from human experience. It is worth while to justify, for a moment, the use of the word metaphor, because the word has been abused and is justly suspected: and the use and abuse need to be carefully and accurately distinguished. If, for example, our Lord's words in the third or sixth of St John, are explained as " metaphor " ; this often means that they are explained away, as having a certain resemblance or analogy to truth, instead of being really true themselves. This of course is wholly illegitimate. The mistake arises as a result of a tacit (but false) assumption that a metaphorical truth is ipso facto " less true " than what we call a literal one. The fact is that almost every word of deep spiritual import is a metaphor : that is to say, is expressed in terms of a likeness drawn immediately from material things. It is so with " sin " ; it is so with " grace " ; it is so with " justification." " Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness" is a metaphor or analogy from material starvation. But it is a disastrous, though deeply ingrained error, to assume that the material experiences are absolutely, and the spiritual only relatively, and less really, true : or that the meaning of the words in a material context is the true gauge and measure of their meaning when spiritually applied. This instinct is nearly the precise reverse of truth. The material experience is as a sort of parable or hint which serves to suggest a term for describing the spiritual. But the term, as borrowed for spiritual use, means something not less, but far more, than ever it meant in the material sphere: the spiritual significance outruns the material, not only in width of content, but in profoundness of truth. Spiritual hunger may be rarer than material among men who are still largely animal : but spiritual hunger, where realized, is more 1 84 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. overwhelming, more intense, more real, as hungery than physical decay for lack of food. And it would be obviously fatuous to measure the awful significance of such metaphorical words as sin, or judgment, or grace, or spirit, by the meaning which the words once bore in material experience ; though the words were borrowed from material experience, and their material meaning served as the first suggestion by which some expression was given to the spiritual idea. It is plain, then, that in the legitimate sense of the word, the correlative terms " Father " and " Son *' are words of metaphor ; that is to say, that the words, in human use, have their primary significance in the region of human experience: and that all other uses are based upon, and borrowed from, however completely they may trans- cend, this. And the same of course is obviously true of the word Uvevfia, Spirit, or Breath. It follows from this that however illuminating, on some sides, may be the revelation which the words contain : it is true also that men's minds have always to be on their guard against being misled by the words. They are clearly capable of being interpreted amiss. And it is notorious that, as a matter of fact, men's minds have found very con- siderable difficulty in guarding adequately against some misconceptions, which have been chiefly suggested by the words. It was an old problem to find illustrative instances which would show how an effect might be neither later, nor lesser, than its cause. But however complete may have been the success of theological teachers in this direction, it can hardly be doubted that the problem was caused by the extreme difficulty, to human thought, of using the terms "Father" and "Son" at all, without projecting too materially, across the concep- tion of the Eternal Being of God, the shadow of the .associations of these human words ; without (that is to VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 185 say) carrying both the distinction which the words imply between the two, and the inferiority and posteriority of the one to the other, much further than they ought to be carried. Now I cannot but suggest that this difficulty, which has been felt in all ages of the Church, is materially lightened, if we are willing to recognize that the terms themselves, as applied to the Persons of the Godhead, have their primary reference rather to the manifestation of God in the Incar- nation and its outflowing consequences, than to the Eternal relations regarded in themselves. I say their primary reference ; because it would seem impossible for a Christian to doubt that there must be that in the Eternal relations of the First and the Second Persons of the Trinity, with which the words "Father" and "Son" have a real and legitimate correspondence; even if it be true that these words, being primarily occasioned by the conditions which the fact of Incarnation established, might seem by themselves to overstate to our imaginations that Eternal relation with which they nevertheless profoundly corre- spond. For the most part it is difficult to test such a suggestion as this by the language of the New Testament ; because the mighty fact of the Incarnation so absolutely dominates the entire revelation of the New Testament, and characterizes and shapes all its thought and language ; that it is comparatively rarely that we can, in the New Testament, stand aside (so to speak) in thought or even in phrase, from that one dominating conception. But it is certainly very significant, that in the one passage which, more clearly than any other, goes back behind the fact of the Incarnation, or the consciousness of the Incarnate, to speak of the eternal relations, as such, within the eternal existence of Deity, — that is to say, the first fourteen verses of the Gospel of St John, — the word " Son " (and with it the correlative word " Father ") does drop out altogether, 1 86 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. and another word takes its place. It will be recognized at once that the title Aoyos, or Word, while it is full indeed of its own mysterious significance, is wholly without the strong suggestions — of sharp distinction and emphatic subordination — which it is so hard to separate from the words Father and Son, so long as they are thought of as descriptive primarily of the Eternal, rather than of the Incarnate, relations. But what is it that is practically meant, in the many familiar contexts of the New Testament which will occur to our minds, by emphasizing this prominence of the idea of Incarnation, as that to which the words primarily refer, and in which they find their directest and most unqualified fulness of significance ? It is that the Fatherhood of God is, in the most unqualified directness and inclusiveness of that word, towards man ; and that Sonship, as predicated of God, is predicated most absolutely and unreservedly of God qud Incarnate, If then we should venture to paraphrase the great Name of God — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, — describing the Threefoldness thus ; viz. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in His Infinity, as Himself; God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man, body, soul, and spirit, — the consummation, and interpre- tation, and revelation, of what true Manhood means and is, in its very truth, that is, in its true relation to God ; God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness — the Beauty and Holiness which are Himself — present in things created animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their Divine response to God ; constituting above all in created personalities, the full reality of their personal response: we should be expressing, not indeed the whole truth of the Being of God, which no words of ours can express, but at least a conception which is absolutely true as far as it goes ; and moreover the sort of conception which is probably most intelligible to us, — and intelligible exactly viiL] THE HOLY SPIRIT 187 along the lines suggested by the Three Names selected, in human language, to constitute an intelligible revelation to human thought.^ The important thing to observe, for our present practical purpose, is that to speak, in one phrase, of God in His eternal self-existence, and of God Incarnate as man — a revelation to man at once of God's nature and of man's relation to God — is by no means altogether the same thing as to speak of the First Person in the eternal relation of Divine Being, and of the Second Person in the eternal relation of Divine Being : and moreover that the correlative phrases Father and Son, whatever analogy they may have with the eternal distinctions of Deity, do not corre- spond with, or give expression to, these eternal distinctions, quite so directly, or closely, or unreservedly, as to the relations between God the Eternal and God the Incarnate, between God as God, and God as Man. And if this is true, or even partly true, of the terms in which the Divine Name is revealed to the Church, to be its formula, on earth, of Baptismal admission and distinctively Christian blessing : still more is this thought true, and emphasized as true, when the phrase used is not so much " from God the Father, and from God the Son," as rather " from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ." Here it is unmistakably the Human designation, — with whatever august associations of awe and worship — upon which the emphasis is laid. And as a matter of fact, it is this form, which, with comparatively few exceptions, is the characteristic formula of the New Testament. This emphasis upon the Incarnation is sufficiently marked, when the formula is threefold, as in the familiar words of benediction — "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be 1 See Note B, at the end of the Chapter. 1 88 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. with you all." ^ It is really more marked still, in the still more familiar repetition of a twofold formula, — " Yet to us there is One God the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto Him ; and One Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through Him."^ «Xo offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ." ^ " To the only God our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and power, before all time and now, and for ever more. Amen."* It is the new relation, in the Person of Jesus Christ, at once of God to Man, and of Man to God (not the Eternal relation between God and the Aoyos), which is before the thought throughout the Epistle to the Ephesians — " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ." ^ . . . " having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto Himself," ® . . . " according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Him ... to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth." ^ . . . " God being rich in mercy . . . quickened us together with Christ, . . . made us to sit with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus . . . for we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared. . . . Now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ" ^ . . . " according to the eternal purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord." ^ . . . "to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God." ^^ . . . « unto Him be the glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus unto all genera- tions for ever and ever." ^^ " There is One Body and One Spirit, even as also ye were called in one hope of your 1 2 Cor. xiii. 14. ^ i Cor. viii. 6. ^ j pg^^ ^ ^_ * Jude 25. 5 Eph. i. 3. « Eph. i. 5. ' Eph. i. 9-10. 8 Eph^ ji^ 4^ ^^ 5^ jQ^ 12, » Eph. iii. 11. 1" Eph. iii. 19. " Eph. iii. 21. VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 189 calling ; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all." ^ " Even as God also in Christ forgave you." ^ " Hath any inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and God." ^ " Giving thanks always for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father"* . . . " as servants of Christ doing the will of God from the heart." * In context with all these phrases there can be little doubt as to the exact significance of the salutations with which this epistle both opens and closes ; " Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ." ^ " Peace be to the brethren, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in uncorruptness." ^ St Paul's thought is not upon the Eternal relations of Deity, as such. His thought is upon the master-fact of the Incarnation of God. It would not be nearly so correct to paraphrase his words as a blessing "from the First and from the Second Persons of the Eternal Trinity " as rather " from God the Eternal and from the Incarnate, both God and Man ; in whom the Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of Man, were ideally consummated, and perfectly revealed." It is the expression of Deity in Humanity, it is the inconceivable glorification of Humanity, as a true and worthy expression of Deity, it is, in a word, the Incarnation, which absolutely dominates all these thoughts and all these phrases from one end of the epistle to the other. And the " Spirit " is the direct outcome of the Incarnation, the Spiritual relation which the Incarnation has made possible, the realization and presence of the Incarnate within the selves of men. " Christ in whom, having believed, ye were sealed with the 1 Eph. iv. 4-6. 2 Eph. iv. 32. ' Eph. V. S. * Eph. V. 20. » Eph. vi 6. ' Eph. vi. 23-24. 8 Eph. i. 2. igo ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. Holy Spirit of promise which is an earnest of our inheri- tance " ; — ^ ..." that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ the Father of glory may give unto you a spirit {8(^r] vfuv irv€vfia) of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him." ^ . . . " for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father " ^ ..." in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in [the] Spirit " * (cv Trvcv/xart). , . . "that ye may be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inward man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith," ^ "giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is One Body and One Spirit."^ " Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption." ^ " Be filled with the Spirit." » " The sword of the Spirit which is the word of God."^ . . . "with all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit." ^° And if this sort of insistence be true in respect of the Epistle to the Ephesians, it will be true also in respect of the same forms of Christian salutation wherever they occur. But the connection of thought is itself established so inveter- ately and clearly, that we catch the echo of it, with more or less directness of expression, in the opening verses of almost every single epistle of the New Testament. " Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." These words occur, with hardly a variation, at the opening of the Epistles to the Romans, i and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 2 Thessalonians, Titus and Philemon. With the addition of mercy, " Grace mercj^ and peace," the same formula holds for i and 2 Timothy. I Thessalonians varies only by a change of order " unto the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ : grace to you and peace." Of all 1 Eph. i. 13, 14. 2 Eph. i. 17. 3 Eph. ii. 18. * Eph. ii. 22. ^ Eph. iii. i6, 17. " Eph. iv. 3, 4. ' Eph. iv. 30. " Eph. V. 18. » Eph. vi. 17. " Eph. vi. 18. I VIII.] THE HOLY SPIRIT 191 St Paul's epistles only that to the Colossians contains (in the revised text) as formula of salutation " Grace to you and peace from God our Father." But even there the very next verse proceeds "We give thanks to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, having heard of your faith in Christ Jesus " ; and through- out the epistle the doctrine is unmistakably the same as that of the Ephesians. The Epistle to the Hebrews contains no salutation : but the opening verses are a splendid statement of the doctrine of the revelation of the eternal God " at the end of the days '* in the person of " a Son " (margin of R. V.) who is at once the perfect image of the glory of the Eternal, and also the atoning Man. St James writes as "the servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ." St Peter as an "apostle of Jesus Christ . . . according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ " ; and again as " a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained a like precious faith with us in the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ: grace to you and peace be multiplied in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord." St John writes his general epistle because "our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ " ; and sends greeting to the "elect lady," "grace, mercy, peace, shall be with us, from God the Father, and from Jesus Christ the Son of the Father." St Jude " a servant of Jesus Christ " writes " to them that are called, beloved in God the Father, and kept for Jesus Christ : mercy unto you, and peace and love be multiplied." What is the meaning of the perpetual recurrence of these titles ? Why is everything, from end to end of the Church life in the New Testament, and in the mouth of every single writer, consistently in the Name of " God our 192 ATONEMENT AND PERSONALITY [chap. Father and the Lord Jesus Christ"? Why is it always these two? why is it that in only one single instance, that of I Peter, is there any explicit mention of the Spirit in immediate juxtaposition with these two ? Is it a maimed Trinitarian formula ? The fact is that the thought which dominates the minds of the apostolic writers is not so much the thought of the Eternal Threefoldness of the Being of God : they are not thinking directly of the doctrine of the Trinity as such : they are not thinking of the Being of Godhead as such : but they are thinking of the transcendent fact of the Incarnation of Deity in flesh. The whole horizon of their thought is immediately occupied by the thought of God, in His Eternity, and God, in His Incarnation. They are not speaking of Two Persons of the Trinity, with the omission of the Third. They are not speaking of Persons of the Trinity, as such, at all. The second term of their thought is not God the Eternal Aoyos, but God incarnated as man : the flawless expression, in Human nature^ of God. Now however much it may be said that the Eternal Word, and the Incarnate Christ, are personally One : it is quite clear that the two terms are not simply interchangeable. The Word was not Incarnate from Eternity. And though every attribute of the Eternal Word is predicable of the Incarnate personally; it is of course not true that every such attribute is predicable of Him as Incarnate. If the Infinite expresses Himself in conditions of finiteness ; that finiteness does not itself bear the predicates of infinitude. It is, then, expressly of the infinite, as finitely expressed ; it is of the Incarnate, as incarnate ; it is of the Human revelation of God ; it is of the transformation of the meaning of Humanity which results from the revelation of its capacity of expressing God, and is guaranteed to it in the fact, independent of age, of the actual consummation of that expression ; it is of the Divine victory in Humanity, — the Divine con- viii.J THE HOLY SPIRIT 193 secration of Humanity for ever; it is of this, and not directly at all of the eternal relations within Divine Being, that their imagination is wholly full, when they write all their writings, and think all their thoughts, in the Name of " God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ." Moreover there is another direction, in which we may venture to say that the term the Divine Logos, and the term Jesus Christ our Lord, are not, as terms, simply identical. The Logos indeed "became flesh." But having become flesh. He was man : — man to eternity, in the highest perfection — which is also the revelation and true measure — of what manhood ideally means : man, for a brief term of years, under all the extremest disabilities of material and mortal life. The central characteristic of His manhood, as revealed in mortal life, was the absoluteness of His relation of dependence upon God. Now it is not at s TOV p.ri v(f)€(TTO}Ta Aoyov vlhv Qcov dvaKaXeiv. According to this view the phrase " let us make man in our image, after our likeness," is only like the word of a man who should talk to, or encourage, himself. 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