It can never
be exhausted. There is no view of it (including even that miserable
caricature which we have just considered) that is altogether without some
elements of truth. There is no view which embodies the whole of the
truth. Each generation is meant to read that secret of God, which was
uttered to mankind from the Cross of the Christ, a little more clearly
than its predecessors. No theology of the Atonement which is not both
new and old, can be a true theology. It must be old, because the
disclosure was made under the form of historic facts which belong to the
past. It must be new, because each age, in the light of the progressive
revelation of God, interprets the disclosure under the forms of its own
experience, scientific, moral, spiritual, which belongs to the present.
"Therefore is every scribe that is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven,
like unto a householder which bringeth forth out of his treasures things
both new and old."

But the present point is, that we should realise the far-reaching
significance of the disclosure of God made on and from the Cross. Human
history is like a long-drawn-out drama, in which we are actors. How long
is that drama, stretching back beyond the long years of recorded history
to our dim forefathers, who have left their rude stone implements on the
floors of caves or bedded in the river drift, the silent witnesses of a
vanished race. And how short is that little scene in which we ourselves
appear, while, insignificant as it is, it is yet our all. And we ask, we
are impelled to ask, what is the meaning of the whole vast drama? What
is the meaning of our own little scene in it? No questions can be
compared in interest and importance to these two. And the answer to them
both, so we shall try to see, was given once in time from the Cross. That
is one of the chief aspects under which we shall regard the Cross of
Christ, as the key which unlocks the mystery of human existence, and of
my existence. There is no more majestic or pathetic conception than that
of the veiled Isis. But the Cross is the removal of the veil, the
discovery of the Divine Secret.

* * * * *

Before, however, we proceed to our main subject, it will be well to set
first before our minds a few elementary considerations.

The existence of God appears to be necessitated in order to account for
two things: (i) the appearance of control in the universe; (ii) the facts
of moral consciousness.

(i)