losion in a coal-mine, and forthwith every
mother's son above ground volunteers to go down into the choke-damp to
snatch his buried comrades from the sleep of death. A few months ago
one such disaster took place in a Durham colliery. Most of my readers
will remember that in the newspaper reports of the incidents that took
place at the pit mouth were the following: A father who was brought to
the surface was asked whether he lost hope during the long hours of his
imprisonment below without food or light. "No," was the reply, "for I
knew my boy would be in the rescue party, and that nothing would turn
him back until he found his father, dead or alive." The suffragan
bishop of the diocese, along with a number of other clergymen and
nonconformist ministers, remained all night amid the scene of sorrow at
the pit mouth, doing his best to comfort the mourners as their loved
ones were brought up dead. As morning broke he mounted a heap of
cinders and, without making any attempt to conceal his emotion, spoke a
few manly words of brotherly exhortation and Christian love to his
deeply moved congregation of toilers and sufferers. One poor woman,
with unconscious irony, exclaimed to the bystanders: "He doesn't seem
like a bishop! He is just like one of ourselves." That servant of God
has never preached the Atonement more effectually in all his life--by
getting together of man and man, and man and God, through the spirit of
self-sacrifice. He stands in the true apostolic succession, the
succession of men like Saul of Tarsus, the erstwhile persecutor, who,
under the inspiration of the love of Jesus, lived to say, "Who is weak
and I am not weak? Who is offended and I burn not?"

Go into any home where the spirit of self-sacrificing love is trying to
do anything to supply a need or save a transgressor, and you see the
Atonement. Follow that Salvation lassie to the slums, and listen to
her as she tries to persuade a drunken husband and father to give up
the soul-destroying habit which is such a curse to wife and child, and
you see the Atonement. Go with J. Keir Hardie to the House of Commons
and listen to his pleading for justice to his order and you see the
Atonement. Hear the prayer of mother-love for the erring, wandering
son, and you have the Atonement. See that grey-haired father patiently
pleading with selfish, hot-headed youth, or yielding up his own
hard-won possessions to pay the gambler's debts and save the family