fact, a party to it, and His
murderers were in a sense only the instruments of a beneficent,
foreordained plan. God accepts this sacrifice as a full and complete
equivalent for all that humanity deserves, but we must individually
appropriate it by faith or it will not avail for us; we shall go to
hell all the same. If on the other hand we do claim the benefit of
this finished work, the merits of the Redeemer are imputed to us; we
are held to be justified before God, and are gradually sanctified by
the Holy Spirit operating within our souls and fashioning us into the
moral likeness of our Lord.

+Conventional view both true and false.+--To say that these statements
are wholly untrue is impossible, for they everyone contain a truth of
considerable value, but as popularly stated they are misleading. This
view of the Atonement is unethical, and, in my judgment and that of
many others, has wrought a good deal of mischief in the past and
bewilderment in the present. Some readers of these pages will no doubt
find fault with me for stating it so baldly, and will maintain that no
front-rank theologian or preacher would enunciate it in these terms
to-day. Once again I can only repeat that they use language which
implies it, and it seems impossible to resist the conclusion that they
are driven to use the vaguer language because of their own feeling that
the balder statement, which their predecessors made without hesitation,
is intellectually and morally impossible, and yet they do not know what
to put in its place. They are reluctant to give up the belief that in
some way or other the death of Jesus on Calvary actually effected
something in the unseen by making God propitious toward us and removing
the barrier which prevented Him from freely forgiving human sin. Of
course they add other and valuable elements in their discussion of the
theme, but this is their central idea and they seldom get away from it.
The typical theologian never seems to think of looking at the death of
Jesus from the purely human point of view, and yet surely this is the
only legitimate thing to do when trying to get at the heart of the
subject. It is what we should do in any other case of a like kind; we
should never dream of doing anything else. We have no business to
begin speculating upon transcendental questions until we have examined
the purely human causes of such an event as the crucifixion of Jesus.
When an adherent of the so-called orthod