tonement. The figure, I believe, covers the truth; if it did not,
we should not have the kind of language which frequently occurs in
Scripture; but it is misread into falsehood and immorality whenever it
is pressed as if it were exactly equivalent to the truth. But granting
these drawbacks which attach to the word, is there not something in the
work of Christ, as mediating the forgiveness of sins, which no other
word can express? No matter on what subsequent conditions its virtue
for us depends, what Christ did had to be done, or we should never have
had forgiveness; we should never have known God, and His nature and
will in relation to sin; we should never have had the motive which
alone could beget real repentance; we should never have had the spirit
which welcomes pardon and is capable of receiving it. We could not
procure these things for ourselves, we could not produce them out of
our own resources: but He by entering into our nature and lot, by
taking on Him our responsibilities and dying our death, has so revealed
God to us as to put them within our reach. We owe them to Him; in
particular, and in the last resort, we owe them to the fact that He
bore our sins in His own body to the tree. If we are not to say that
the Atonement, as a work carried through in the sufferings and death of
Christ, sufferings and death determined by our sin, is vicarious or
substitutionary, what are we to call it?

The only answer which has been given to this question, by those who
continue to speak of Atonement at all, is that we must conceive Christ
not as the substitute but as the representative of sinners. I venture
to think that, with some advantages, the drawbacks of this word are
quite as serious as those which attach to substitute. It makes it less
easy, indeed, to think of the work of Christ as a finished work which
benefits the sinner _ipso facto_, and apart from any relation between
him and the Saviour: but of what sort is the relation which it does
suggest? It suggests that the sinners who are to be saved by Christ
can put Christ forward in their name: they are not in the utterly
hopeless case that has hitherto been supposed; they can present
themselves to God in the person and work of One on whom God cannot but
look with approval. The boldest expression of this I have ever seen
occurs in some remarks in the _Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review_ on
the doctrine of St. Paul. The reviewer is far from saying that a