n the Resurrection. There is no doubt that in
speaking of the death of Christ as that through which the forgiveness
of sins is mediated to us we are liable to think of it as if it were
only an event in the past. We take the representation of it in the
Gospel and say, "Such and such is the impression which this event
produces upon me; I feel in it how God is opposed to sin, and how I
ought to be opposed to it; I feel in it how God's love appeals to me to
share His mind about sin; and as I yield to this appeal I am at once
set free from sin and assured of pardon; this is the only ethical
forgiveness; to know this experimentally is to know the Gospel." No
one can have any interest in disputing another's obligation to Christ,
but it may fairly be questioned whether this kind of obligation to
Christ amounts to Christianity in the sense of the New Testament.
There is no living Christ here, no coming of the living Christ to the
soul, in the power of the Atonement, to bring it to God. But this is
what the New Testament shows us. It is _He_ who is the propitiation
for our sins--He who died for them and rose again. The New Testament
preaches a Christ who was dead and is alive, not a Christ who was alive
and is dead. It is a mistake to suppose that the New Testament
conception of the Gospel, involving as it does the spiritual presence
and action of Christ, in the power of the Atonement, is a matter of
indifference to us, and that in all our thinking and preaching we must
remain within purely historical limits, if by purely historical limits
is meant that our creed must end with the words "crucified, dead, and
buried." To preach the Atonement means not only to preach One who bore
our sins in death, but One who by rising again from the dead
demonstrated the final defeat of sin, and One who comes in the power of
His risen life--which means, in the power of the Atonement accepted by
God--to make all who commit themselves to Him in faith partakers in His
victory. It is not His death, as an incident in the remote past,
however significant it may be; it is the Lord Himself, appealing to us
in the virtue of His death, who assures us of pardon and restores our
souls.

One of the most singular phenomena in the attitude of many modern minds
to the Atonement is the disposition to plead against the Atonement what
the New Testament represents as its fruits. It is as though it had
done its work so thoroughly that people could not belie