he whole grace of the
gospel, and to rob it of every particle of its motive power.

To do justice to the truth here, both on its religious and its ethical
side, it is necessary to put in their proper relation to one another
the aspects of reality which the terms substitute and representative
respectively suggest. The first is fundamental. Christ is God's gift
to humanity. He stands in the midst of us, the pledge of God's love,
accepting our responsibilities as God would have them accepted,
offering to God, under the pressure of the world's sin and all its
consequences, that perfect recognition of God's holiness in so visiting
sin which men should have offered but could not; and in so doing He
makes Atonement for us. In so doing, also, He is our substitute, not
yet our representative. But the Atonement thus made is not a
spectacle, it is a motive. It is not a transaction in business, or in
book-keeping, which is complete in itself; in view of the relations of
God and man it belongs to its very nature to be a moral appeal. It is
a divine challenge to men, which is designed to win their hearts. And
when men are won--when that which Christ in His love has done for them
comes home to their souls--when they are constrained by His infinite
grace to the self-surrender of faith, then we may say He becomes their
representative. They begin to feel that what He has done for them must
not remain outside of them, but be reproduced somehow in their own
life. The mind of Christ in relation to God and sin, as He bore their
sins in His own body to the tree, must become their mind; this and
nothing else is the Christian salvation. The power to work this change
in them is found in the death of Christ itself; the more its meaning is
realised as something there, in the world, outside of us, the more
completely does it take effect within us. In proportion as we see and
feel that out of pure love to us He stands in our place--our
substitute--bearing our burden--in that same proportion are we drawn
into the relation to Him that makes Him our representative. But we
should be careful here not to lose ourselves in soaring words. The New
Testament has much to say about union with Christ, but I could almost
be thankful that it has no such expression as mystical union. The only
union it knows is a moral one--a union due to the moral power of
Christ's death, operating morally as a constraining motive on the human
will, and begetting in