for sin, knows that
there is a state of mind which is somehow inaccessible to this truth,
and to which the truth consequently appeals in vain. I do not speak of
unambiguous moral antipathy to the ideas of forgiveness and atonement,
although antipathy to these ideas in general, as distinct from any
given presentation of them, cannot but have a moral character, just as
a moral character always attaches to the refusal to acknowledge Christ
or to become His debtor; but of something which, though vaguer and less
determinate, puts the mind wrong, so to speak, with Christianity from
the start. It is clear, for instance, in all that has been said about
forgiveness, that certain relations are presupposed as subsisting
between God and man, relations which make it possible for man to sin,
and possible for God, not indeed to ignore his sin, but in the very act
of recognising it as all that it is to forgive it, to liberate man from
it, and to restore him to Himself and righteousness. Now if the latent
presuppositions of the modern mind are to any extent inconsistent with
such relations, there will be something to overcome before the
conceptions of forgiveness or atonement can get a hearing. These
conceptions have their place in a certain view of the world as a whole,
and if the mind is preoccupied with a different view, it will have an
instinctive consciousness that it cannot accommodate them, and a
disposition therefore to reject them _ab initio_. This is, in point of
fact, the difficulty with which we have to deal. And let no one say
that it is transparently absurd to suggest that we must get men to
accept a true philosophy before we can begin to preach the gospel to
them, as though that settled the matter or got over the difficulty. We
have to take men as we find them; we have to preach the gospel to the
mind which is around us; and if that mind is rooted in a view of the
world which leaves no room for Christ and His work as Christian
experience has realised them, then that view of the world must be
appreciated by the evangelist, it must be undermined at its weak
places, its inadequacy to interpret all that is present even in the
mind which has accepted it--in other words, its inherent
inconsistency--must be demonstrated; the attempt must be made to
liberate the mind, so that it may be open to the impression of
realities which under the conditions supposed it could only encounter
with instinctive antipathy. It is necessar