ind is supposed to be specially averse.

Thus it becomes credible--we say so not _a priori_, but after
experience--that there is a _divine necessity_ for it; in other words,
there is no forgiveness possible to God without it: if He forgives at
all, it must be in this way and in no other. To say so beforehand
would be inconceivably presumptuous, but it is quite another thing to
say so after the event. What it really means is that in the very act
of forgiving sin--or, to use the daring word of St. Paul, in the very
act of justifying the ungodly--God must act in consistency with His
whole character. He must demonstrate Himself to be what He is in
relation to sin, a God with whom evil cannot dwell, a God who maintains
inviolate the moral constitution of the world, taking sin as all that
it is in the very process through which He mediates His forgiveness to
men.

It is the recognition of this divine necessity--not to forgive, but to
forgive in a way which shows that God is irreconcilable to evil, and
can never treat it as other or less than it is--it is the recognition
of this divine necessity, or the failure to recognise it, which
ultimately divides interpreters of Christianity into evangelical and
non-evangelical, those who are true to the New Testament and those who
cannot digest it.

No doubt the forms in which this truth is expressed are not always
adequate to the idea they are meant to convey, and if we are only
acquainted with them at second hand they will probably appear even less
adequate than they are. When Athanasius, _e.g._, speaks of God's
_truth_ in this connection, and then reduces God's truth to the idea
that God must keep His word--the word which made death the penalty of
sin--we may feel that the form only too easily loses contact with the
substance. Yet Athanasius is dealing with the essential fact of the
case, that God must be true to Himself, and to the moral order in which
men live, in all His dealings with sin for man's deliverance from it;
and that He has been thus true to Himself in sending His Son to live
our life and to die our death for our salvation. Or again, when Anselm
in the _Cur Deus Homo_ speaks of the satisfaction which is rendered to
God for the infringement of His honour by sin--a satisfaction apart
from which there can be no forgiveness--we may feel again, and even
more strongly, that the form of the thought is inadequate to the
substance. But what Anselm means is that sin mak