he subject of considerable controversy, and, on
the whole, the Reformers were less reasonable than the Catholics, as is
the case to some extent even to-day. The Roman Catholic doctrine of
Atonement is much nearer to the truth than conventional Protestant
statements about the "finished work" and so on. One considerable
section of sixteenth-century Protestantism held and taught the doctrine
of the total depravity of human nature, and insisted on the idea that
Jesus bore the actual penal sufferings of sinners. Calvinists held
that these sufferings had value for the elect only. Against these
views Socinianism arose as a protest, but tended to reduce the Passion
of Jesus to a sort of drama enacted by God in the presence of humanity
in order to excite men's contrition and win their love.

+The modern lack of a theory.+--Modern evangelical thought has done
very little with all these theories except to make them impossible; it
has no consistent and reasonable explanation to put in their place.
The popular kind of evangelical phraseology is that which continues to
represent Jesus as having borne the punishment due to human sin;
salvation is spoken of as though it meant deliverance from the
post-mortem consequences of misdoing.

+More about sin.+--In all these theories it is evident that the death
of Jesus is closely connected with the forgiveness of sin and that the
forgiveness of sin is the vital element in the Atonement. In order to
understand the truth about this let us return to what has already been
said on the subject of sin and pursue it a little farther. I have
already pointed out that sin is selfishness pure and simple, and that
that definition will cover all its manifestations. There is no sin
that is not selfishness, there is no selfishness that is not sin. All
possible activities of the soul are between selfishness on the one hand
and love on the other. If people would only accept this simple
explanation of a great subject, it would get rid of most of the
confusion of thought that exists in regard to it. The life of love is
the life lived for impersonal ends; the sinful life is the life lived
for self alone. The life of love is the life which does the best with
the self for the sake of the whole; the sinful life is the life which
is lived for the self at the expense of the whole. The desire for
gratification at some one else's cost, or at the cost of the common
life, is the root principle of sin. Sin ag