not be so completely an action that it
ceases to be a passion; it cannot be so completely achieved that it
ceases to be accepted or endured. And in this last aspect of it the
original character which it bore in relation to sin still makes itself
felt. Transfigure it, as it may be transfigured, by courage, by
devotion, by voluntary abandonment of life for a higher good, and it
remains nevertheless the last enemy. There is something in it monstrous
and alien to the spirit, something which baffles the moral intelligence,
till the truth dawns upon us that for all our race sin and death are
aspects of one thing. If we separate them, we understand neither; nor do
we understand the solemn greatness of martyrdom itself if we regard it as
a triumph only, and eliminate from the death which martyrs die all sense
of the universal relation in humanity of death and sin. No one knew the
spirit of the martyr more thoroughly than St. Paul. No one could speak
more confidently and triumphantly of death than he. No one knew better
how to turn the passion into action, the endurance into a great spiritual
achievement. But also, no one knew better than he, in consistency with
all this, that sin and death are needed for the interpretation of each
other, and that fundamentally, in the experience of the race, they
constitute one whole. Even when he cried, 'O death, where is thy sting?'
he was conscious that 'the sting of death is sin.' Each, so to speak, had
its reality in the other. No one could vanquish death who had not
vanquished sin. No one could know what sin meant without tasting death.
These were not mythological fancies in St. Paul's mind, but the
conviction in which the Christian conscience experimentally lived, and
moved, and had its being. And these convictions, I repeat, furnish the
point of view from which we must appreciate the Atonement, _i.e._ the
truth that forgiveness, as Christianity preaches it, is specifically
mediated through Christ's death.

CHAPTER III

CHRIST AND MAN IN THE ATONEMENT

What has now been said about the relations subsisting between God and
man, about the manner in which these relations are affected by sin, and
particularly about the Scripture doctrine of the connection between sin
and death, must determine, to a great extent, our attitude to the
Atonement. The Atonement, as the New Testament presents it, assumes
the connection of sin and death. Apart from some sense and recognition