not think this is so clear. Of
course it is Christ Himself who is the Atonement or propitiation--He
Himself, as St. John puts it, and not anything, not even His death,
into which He does not enter. But it is He Himself, as making to us
the revelation of God in relation to sin and to sinners; and apart from
death, as that in which the conscience of the race sees the final
reaction of God against evil, this revelation is not fully made. If
Christ had done less than die for us, therefore--if He had separated
Himself from us, or declined to be one with us, in the solemn
experience in which the darkness of sin is sounded and all its
bitterness tasted,--there would have been no Atonement. It is
impossible to say this of any particular incident in His life, and in
so far the unique emphasis laid on His death in the New Testament is
justified. But I should go further than this, and say that even
Christ's life, taking it as it stands in the Gospels, only enters into
the Atonement, and has reconciling power, because it is pervaded from
beginning to end by the consciousness of His death. Instead of
depriving His death of the peculiar significance Scripture assigns to
it, and making it no more than the termination, or at least the
consummation, of His life, I should rather argue that the Scriptural
emphasis is right, and that His life attains its true interpretation
only as we find in it everywhere the power and purpose of His death.
There is nothing artificial or unnatural in this. There are plenty of
people who never have death out of their minds an hour at a time. They
are not cowards, nor mad, nor even sombre: they may have purposes and
hopes and gaieties as well as others; but they see life steadily and
see it whole, and of all their thoughts the one which has most
determining and omnipresent power is the thought of the inevitable end.
There is death in all their life. It was not, certainly, as the
inevitable end, the inevitable 'debt of nature,' that death was present
to the mind of Christ; but if we can trust the Evangelists at all, from
the hour of His baptism it was present to His mind as something
involved in His vocation; and it was a presence so tremendous that it
absorbed everything into itself. 'I have a baptism to be baptized
with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.' Instead of
saying that Christ's life as well as His death contributed to the
Atonement--that His active obedience (to use the t