he sinner. And,
therefore, the desire to escape from punishment, if natural and
instinctive, is also non-moral, for it is the desire to shirk God's
remedy for sin, and doomed never to realise its hope, for it is the
desire to reverse the laws of that Infinite Holiness and Love which
governs the world.

Yet this must be understood with one all-important reservation. For the
worst punishment of sin, is sin itself, the alienation of the soul from
God, with its consequent weakening of the will, dulling of the reason,
and corrupting of the affections. And it was from this punishment, from
this "hardest hell," which is sin, or the character spoiled and ruined by
sin, that Christ died to deliver us.

It follows that it is high time to dismiss all those theories of the
Atonement which ultimately trace their origin to the enduring influence
of Roman law. There is no remission of penalty offered to us in the
Gospel of Jesus Christ. The offer which is there held out to us, is that
which answers to our deepest need, to the inmost longings of the human
soul, "the remission of our _sins_."

The idea of a penalty owing to the "justice" of God is a thoroughly
legalistic one, the offspring of an age which thought in terms of law. It
deals throughout with abstractions. The very word "justice" is a general
notion, a concept, the work of the mind abstracting from particulars.
Justice and mercy are used like counters in some theological game at
which we are invited to play. "Penalty," again, is a term which serves
to obscure the one important fact that God, as a Moral Person or, rather,
as the One Self-Existent Being, of Whose nature and essence morality is
the expression, can only have one motive in dealing with sinners, and
that is, to reconcile them to Himself, to restore them to that true ideal
of their nature, which is the Image of Himself in the heart of every man.
Who can measure the pain and anguish which that restoration must cost, to
the sinner himself, and (such is the wonderful teaching of the Cross) to
God, the All-Holy One, Who comes into a world of sin in order to restore
him?

There is no room here, at all events, for light and trivial thoughts of
sin. That charge might be levelled, with more excuse, at the view that
sin only incurs an external penalty, from which we can be cheaply
delivered by the sufferings of another.

And theories of the Atonement which centre in the conception of penalty
are often only mo