ends on some kind of relation to Him. All things have
been delivered to Him by the Father, and it is by coming under
obligation to Him, and by that alone, that men know the Father. It is
by coming under obligation to Him that they know the pardoning love of
the Father, as well as everything else that enters into Christian
experience and constitutes the blessedness of life in the Kingdom of
God. Nor is it open to any one to say that he knows this simply
because Christ has told it. We are dealing here with things too great
to be simply told. If they are ever to be known in their reality, they
must be revealed by God, they must rise upon the mind of man
experimentally, in their awful and glorious truth, in ways more
wonderful than words. They can be spoken about afterwards, but hardly
beforehand. They can be celebrated and preached--that is, declared as
the speaker's experience, delivered as his testimony--but not simply
told. It was enough if Jesus made His disciples feel, as surely He did
make them feel, not only in every word He spoke, but more emphatically
still in His whole attitude toward them, that He was Himself the
Mediator of the new covenant, and that all the blessings of the
relation between God and man which we call Christianity were blessings
due to Him. If men knew the Father, it was through Him. If they knew
the Father's heart to the lost, it was through Him. Through Him, be it
remembered, not merely through the words that He spoke. There was more
in Christ than even His own wonderful words expressed, and all that He
was and did and suffered, as well as what He said, entered into the
convictions He inspired. But He knew this as well as His disciples,
and for this very reason it is beside the mark to point to what He
said, or rather to what He did not say, in confutation of their
experience. For it is their experience--the experience that the
forgiveness of sins was mediated to them through His cross--that is
expressed in the doctrine of Atonement: He died for our sins.

The objection which is here in view is most frequently pointed by
reference to the parable of the prodigal son. There is no Atonement
here, we are told, no mediation of forgiveness at all. There is love
on the one side and penitence on the other, and it is treason to the
pure truth of this teaching to cloud and confuse it with the thoughts
of men whose Master was over their heads often, but most of all here.
Such a statement