aul says, have not faith: it is a
melancholy fact, whether we can make anything of it or not. Discounting,
however, this irrational or inexplicable opposition, which is not
expressed in the mind but in the will, how are we to present the
Atonement so that it shall excite the least prejudice, and find the most
unimpeded access to the mind of our own generation? This is the question
to which we have now to address ourselves.

To conceive the Atonement, that is, the fact that forgiveness is mediated
to us through Christ, and specifically through His death, as clearly and
truly as possible, it is necessary for us to realise the situation to
which it is related. We cannot think of it except as related to a given
situation. It is determined or conditioned by certain relations
subsisting between God and man, as these relations have been affected by
sin. What we must do, therefore, in the first instance, is to make clear
to ourselves what these relations are, and how sin affects them.

To begin with, they are personal relations; they are relations the truth
of which cannot be expressed except by the use of personal pronouns. We
need not ask whether the personality of God can be proved antecedent to
religion, or as a basis for a religion yet to be established; in the only
sense in which we can be concerned with it, religion is an experience of
the personality of God, and of our own personality in relation to it. 'O
Lord, _Thou_ hast searched _me_ and known _me_.' '_I_ am continually
with _Thee_! No human experience can be more vital or more normal than
that which is expressed in these words, and no argument, be it ever so
subtle or so baffling, can weigh a feather's-weight against such
experience. The same conception of the relations of God and man is
expressed again as unmistakably in every word of Jesus about the Father
and the Son and the nature of their communion with each other. It is
only in such personal relations that the kind of situation can emerge,
and the kind of experience be had, with which the Atonement deals; and
antecedent to such experience, or in independence of it, the Atonement
must remain an incredible because an unrealisable thing.

But to say that the relations of God and man are personal is not enough.
They are not only personal, but universal. _Personal_ is habitually used
in a certain contrast with _legal_, and it is very easy to lapse into the
idea that personal relations, because distinc