d in the Atonement, to the mind in which men around us live and
move and have their being, is no doubt a difficult and perilous task;
but if we approach it in a right spirit, it need not tempt us to any
presumption; it cannot tempt us, as long as we feel that it is our
duty. '_Who is sufficient for these things! . . . Our sufficiency is
of God._'

The Christian religion is a historical religion, and whatever we say
about it must rest upon historical ground. We cannot define it from
within, by reference merely to our individual experience. Of course it
is equally impossible to define it apart from experience; the point is
that such experience itself must be historically derived; it must come
through something outside of our individual selves. What is true of
the Christian religion as a whole is pre-eminently true of the
Atonement in which it is concentrated. The experience which it brings
to us, and the truth which we teach on the basis of it, are
historically mediated. They rest ultimately on that testimony to
Christ which we find in the Scriptures and especially in the New
Testament. No one can tell what the Atonement is except on this basis.
No one can consciously approach it--no one can be influenced by it to
the full extent to which it is capable of influencing human
nature--except through this medium. We may hold that just because it
is Divine, it must be eternally true, omnipresent in its gracious
power; but even granting this, it is not known as an abstract or
eternal somewhat; it is historically, and not otherwise than
historically, revealed. It is achieved by Christ, and the testimony to
Christ, on the strength of which we accept it, is in the last resort
the testimony of Scripture.

In saying so, I do not mean that the Atonement is merely a problem of
exegesis, or that we have simply to accept as authoritative the
conclusions of scholars as to the meaning of New Testament texts. The
modern mind here is ready with a radical objection. The writers of the
New Testament, it argues, were men like ourselves; they had personal
limitations and historical limitations; their forms of thought were
those of a particular age and upbringing; the doctrines they preached
may have had a relative validity, but we cannot benumb our minds to
accept them without question. The intelligence which has learned to be
a law to itself, criticising, rejecting, appropriating, assimilating,
cannot deny its nature and suspend