believers the mind of Christ in relation to sin;
but this moral union remains the problem and the task, as well as the
reality and the truth, of the Christian life. Even when we think of
Christ as our representative, and have the courage to say we died with
Him, we have still to _reckon_ ourselves to be dead to sin, and to _put
to death_ our members which are upon the earth; and to go past this,
and speak of a mystical union with Christ in which we are lifted above
the region of reflection and motive, of gratitude and moral
responsibility, into some kind of metaphysical identity with the Lord,
does not promote intelligibility, to say the least. If the Atonement
were not, to begin with, outside of us--if it were not in that sense
objective, a finished work in which God in Christ makes a final
revelation of Himself in relation to sinners and sin--in other words,
if Christ could not be conceived in it as our substitute, given by God
to do in our place what we could not do for ourselves, there would be
no way of recognising or preaching or receiving it as a motive; while,
on the other hand, if it did not operate as a motive, if it did not
appeal to sinful men in such a way as to draw them into a moral
fellowship with Christ--in other words, if Christ did not under it
become representative of us, our surety to God that we should yet be
even as He in relation to God and to sin, we could only say that it had
all been vain. Union with Christ, in short, is not a presupposition of
Christ's work, which enables us to escape all the moral problems raised
by the idea of a substitutionary Atonement; it is not a presupposition
of Christ's work, it is its fruit. To see that it is its fruit is to
have the final answer to the objection that substitution is immoral.
If substitution, in the sense in which we must assert it of Christ, is
the greatest moral force in the world--if the truth which it covers,
when it enters into the mind of man, enters with divine power to
assimilate him to the Saviour, uniting him to the Lord in a death to
sin and a life to God--obviously, to call it immoral is an abuse of
language. The love which can literally go out of itself and make the
burden of others its own is the radical principle of all the genuine
and victorious morality in the world. And to say that love cannot do
any such thing, that the whole formula of morality is, every man shall
bear his own burden, is to deny the plainest facts of the mora