. There is something in it which is
ultimately incomparable. When we speak of others as innocent, the term
is used only in a relative sense; there is no human conscience pure to
God. When we speak of the sin of others coming in its consequences on
the innocent, we speak of something in which the innocent are purely
passive; if there is moral response on their part, the situation is not
due to moral initiative of theirs. But with Christ it is different.
He knew _no_ sin, and He entered _freely_, deliberately, and as the
very work of His calling, into all that sin meant for God and brought
on man. Something that I experience in a particular relation, in which
another has borne my sin and loved me through it, may help to open my
eyes to the meaning of Christ's love; but when they are opened, what I
see is the propitiation for the whole world. There is no guilt of the
human race, there is no consequence in which sin has involved it, to
which the holiness and love made manifest in Christ are unequal. He
reveals to all sinful men the whole relation of God to them and to
their sins--a sanctity which is inexorable to sin, and cannot take it
as other than it is in all its consequences, and a love which through
all these consequences and under the weight of them all, will not let
the sinful go. It is in this revelation of the character of God and of
His relation to the sin of the world that the forgiveness of sins is
revealed. It is not intimated in the air; it is preached, as St. Paul
says, 'in this man'; it is mediated to the world through Him and
specifically through His death, because it is through Him, and
specifically through His death, that we get the knowledge of God's
character which evokes penitence and faith, and brings the assurance of
His pardon to the heart.

From this point of view we may see how to answer the question that is
sometimes asked about the relation of Christ's life to His death, or
about the relation of both to the Atonement. If we say that what we
have in the Atonement is an assurance of God's character, does it not
follow at once that Christ's teaching and His life contribute to it as
directly as His death? Is it not a signal illustration of the false
abstractions which we have so often had cause to censure, when the
death of Christ is taken as if it had an existence or a significance
apart from His life, or could be identified with the Atonement in a way
in which His life could not? I do