name, and you have the Atonement. Nothing can stir the human heart so
much. All the great deeds of history derived their inspiration from
it; all the little heroisms of our common everyday life are the
declaration of it. There is not a single one of all our thoughts and
activities but has some relation to it; we are either living for
ourselves individually and separately or we are living for the whole.
If the former, we are the servants of sin; if the latter, our lives are
already part of the Atonement.

+Jesus and the Atonement.+--It is easy to see how much the world owes
to Jesus in this regard. I cannot tell what the world might have been
if there had never been a Jesus, but certain it is that the sacrificial
life and death of Jesus have meant the inpouring of a spirit into human
affairs such as had never been known in the same degree before. Here
for the first time men saw a perfect manifestation of the life that is
life indeed, the life that pleased not itself, the life that entered
into and shared human disabilities as though they were its very own,
the life that in the presence of selfishness must inevitably become
sacrifice, the life of Atonement. In a sinful world that life had to
come to a Calvary, but in so doing in refusing to shield and save
itself it became the greatest moral power and the greatest revelation
of God that the world has ever known. What we succeed in doing some of
the time, Jesus did all the time; when all men are able to do it all
the time the Atonement will have become complete and love divine shall
be all in all. "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!" cried Julian the
apostate; and Christian faith can reverently add--

"Jesus is worthy to receive
Honour and power divine;
And blessings more than we can give
Be, Lord, forever thine."

Faith in Jesus is faith in the Atonement and faith in our own
Christhood. It means the upraising of the true life, the eternal life,
within our own souls. Until His spirit becomes our spirit, His
Atonement has done nothing for us, and when it does we, like Him,
become saviours of the race. It must be so, for the spirit of love is
the same both in God and man; in the presence of need, no matter what
the need may be, that spirit must continue to give itself without stint
until the need is supplied and all that would tend to separate between
the individual soul and the eternal perfect whole is done away.

But then, someone will say, what has