t from legal ones, are
independent of law; but to say the least of it, that is an ambiguous and
misleading way of describing the facts. The relations of God and man are
not lawless, they are not capricious, incalculable, incapable of moral
meaning; they are personal, but determined by something of universal
import; in other words, they are not merely personal but ethical. That
is ethical which is at once personal and universal. Perhaps the simplest
way to make this evident is to notice that the relations of man to God
are the relations to God not of atoms, or of self-contained individuals,
each of which is a world in itself, but of individuals which are
essentially related to each other, and bound up in the unity of a race.
The relations of God to man, therefore, are not capricious though they
are personal: they are reflected or expressed in a moral constitution to
which all personal beings are equally bound, a moral constitution of
eternal and universal validity, which neither God nor man can ultimately
treat as anything else than what it is.

This is a point at which some prejudice has been raised against the
Atonement by theologians, and more, perhaps, by persons protesting
against what they supposed theologians to mean. If one may be excused a
personal reference, few things have astonished me more than to be charged
with teaching a 'forensic' or 'legal' or 'judicial' doctrine of
Atonement, resting, as such a doctrine must do, on a 'forensic' or
'legal' or 'judicial' conception of man's relation to God. It is all the
more astonishing when the charge is combined with what one can only
decline as in the circumstances totally unmerited compliments to the
clearness with which he has expressed himself. There is nothing which I
should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which
is expressed by these words. To say that the relations of God and man
are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statute--that sin is a
breach of statute--that the sinner is a criminal--and that God
adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his
case. Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth, and it is
surprising that any one should be charged with teaching it, or that any
one should applaud himself, as though he were in the foremost files of
time, for not believing it. It is superfluously apparent that the
relations of God and man are not those of a magistrate on the bench
p