bstitute. He comes in our nature, and He comes
into our place. He enters into all the responsibilities that sin has
created for us, and He does justice to them in His death. He does not
deny any of them: He does not take sin as anything less or else than it
is to God; in perfect sinlessness He consents even to die, to submit to
that awful experience in which the final reaction of God's holiness
against sin is expressed. Death was not _His_ due: it was something
alien to One Who had nothing amiss; but it was our due, and because it
was ours He made it His. It was thus that He made Atonement. _He_
bore _our_ sins. He took to Himself all that they meant, all in which
they had involved the world. He died for them, and in so doing
acknowledged the sanctity of that order in which sin and death arc
indissolubly united. In other words, He did what the human race could
not do for itself, yet what had to be done if sinners were to be saved:
for how could men be saved if there were not made in humanity an
acknowledgment of all that sin is to God, and of the justice of all
that is entailed by sin under God's constitution of the world? Such an
acknowledgment, as we have just seen, is divinely necessary, and
necessary, too, for man, if sin is to be forgiven.

This was the basis of fact on which the substitutionary character of
Christ's sufferings and death in the Atonement was asserted. It may be
admitted at once that when the term substitute is interpreted without
reference to this basis of fact it lends itself very easily to
misconstruction. It falls in with, if it does not suggest, the idea of
a transference of merit and demerit, the sin of the world being carried
over to Christ's account, and the merit of Christ to the world's
account, as if the reconciliation of God and man, or the forgiveness of
sins and the regeneration of souls, could be explained without the use
of higher categories than are employed in bookkeeping. It is surely
not necessary at this time of day to disclaim an interpretation of
personal relations which makes use only of sub-personal categories.
Merit and demerit cannot be mechanically transferred like sums in an
account. The credit, so to speak, of one person in the moral sphere
cannot become that of another, apart from moral conditions. It is the
same truth, in other words, if we say that the figure of paying a debt
is not in every respect adequate to describe what Christ does in making
the A