iritual--which is, indeed, but
one form of belief in God--pervades the Bible from beginning to end. It
knows nothing of our abstract and absolute distinctions; to come to the
matter in hand, it knows nothing of a sin which has merely spiritual
penalties. Sin is the act or the state of man, and the reaction against
it is the reaction of the whole order, at once natural and spiritual, in
which man lives.

Now the great difficulty which the modern mind has with the Atonement, or
with the representation of it in the New Testament, is that it assumes
some kind of connection between sin and death. Forgiveness is mediated
through Christ, but specifically through His death. He died for our
sins; if we can be put right with God apart from this, then, St. Paul
tells us, He died for nothing. One is almost ashamed to repeat that this
is not Paulinism, but the Christianity of the whole Apostolic Church.
What St. Paul made the basis of his preaching, that Christ died for our
sins, according to the Scriptures, he had on his own showing received as
the common Christian tradition. But is there anything in it? Can we
receive it simply on the authority of the primitive Church? Can we
realise any such connection between death and sin as makes it a truth to
us, an intelligible, impressive, overpowering thought, that Christ died
for our sins?

I venture to say that a great part of the difficulty which is felt at
this point is due to the false abstraction just referred to. Sin is put
into one world--the moral; death is put into another world--the natural;
and there is no connection between them. This is very convincing if we
find it possible to believe that we live in two unconnected worlds. But
if we find it impossible to believe this--and surely the impossibility is
patent--its plausibility is gone. It is a shining example of this false
abstraction when we are told, as though it were a conclusive objection to
all that the New Testament has to say about the relation of sin and
death, that 'the specific penalty of sin is not a fact of the natural
life, but of the moral life.' What right has any one, in speaking of the
ultimate realities in human life, of those experiences in which man
becomes conscious of all that is involved in his relations to God and
their disturbance by sin, to split that human life into 'natural' and
'moral,' and fix an impassable gulf between? The distinction is
legitimate, as has already been remarked, w