as a limit, in so far as God is God and not man, and must
have relations to the human race which its members do not and cannot
have to each other. (_b_) There is the demand that the Atonement shall
be exhibited in vital relation to a new life in which sin is overcome.
This demand also is entirely legitimate, and it touches a weak point in
the traditional Protestant doctrine. Dr. Chalmers tells us that he was
brought up--such was the effect of the current orthodoxy upon him--in a
certain distrust of good works. Some were certainly wanted, but not as
being themselves salvation; only, as he puts it, as tokens of
justification. It was a distinct stage in his religious progress when
he realised that true justification sanctifies, and that the soul can
and ought to abandon itself spontaneously and joyfully to do the good
that it delights in. The modern mind assumes what Dr. Chalmers
painfully discovered. An atonement that does not regenerate, it truly
holds, is not an atonement in which men can be asked to believe. Such
then, in its prejudices good and bad, is the mind to which the great
truth of the Christian religion has to be presented.

[1] Of course this does not touch the fact that the whole 'authority'
of the Christian religion is in Jesus Himself--in His historical
presence in the world, His words and works, His life and death and
resurrection. He _is_ the truth, the acceptance of which by man is
life eternal.

CHAPTER II

SIN AND THE DIVINE REACTION AGAINST IT

We have now seen in a general way what is meant by the Atonement, and
what are the characteristics of the mind to which the Atonement has to
make its appeal. In that mind there is, as I believe, much which falls
in with the Atonement, and prepares a welcome for it; but much also which
creates prejudice against it, and makes it as possible still as in the
first century to speak of the offence of the cross. No doubt the
Atonement has sometimes been presented in forms which provoke antagonism,
which challenge by an ostentation of unreason, or by a defiance of
morality, the reason and conscience of man; but this alone does not
explain the resentment which it often encounters. There is such a thing
to be found in the world as the man who will have nothing to do with
Christ on any terms, and who will least of all have anything to do with
Him when Christ presents Himself in the character which makes man His
debtor for ever. All men, as St. P