The Fact without the Word is dumb. The Word with-out the Fact is empty. (Forsyth: The Work of Christ, p. 47) The Christian Religion revolves round two focal points, Holiness and Redemption. . . . it is the religion of redemption because it is the religion of forgiveness. (A. Harnack: The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought, p. 107.) I believe in the redemption of the Soul through faith in forgiveness, Nov. 25, 1863. Pardon alone conciliates the spotless purity of perfection with the infinite pity due to weakness; that is to say, it preserves and defends the idea of holiness, while giving full scope to that of love. (Amiel: Journal, April 15, 1870.) This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the remission of sins (Matt. 26:28). The robes of the saints "are white because they have been washed in blood" (Henry M. Alden: A Study of Death, p. 5).

Amiel's Journal carries the following entry for August 15, 1871: "Reread, for the second time, Renan's Vie de Jesus, in the sixteenth popular edition. The most characteristic feature of this analysis of Christianity is that sin plays' no part at all in it. Now, if anything explains the success of the Gospel among men, it is that it brought them deliverance from sin — in a word, salvation. A man . . . is bound to explain a religion seriously, and not to shirk the very center of his subject. This white marble Christ is not the Christ who inspired the martyrs and has dried so many tears. The author lacks moral seriousness, and confounds nobility of character with holiness. He speaks as an artist conscious of a pathetic subject, but his moral sense is not interested."

It would seem that many writers in their study of Christianity have followed Renan in shirking the very center of the subject. Whether we like it or not, the death of Jesus in its relation to sin is the center of the Christian religion [Cf. The Victory of God, by James Reid: " We do not see Christ clearly till we see Him in relation to sin. In the last resort He has to do with our sin, not with our failure; with the world's evil, not with its suffering; with the redemption of humanitym, not with its reformation; with a new heart, not with a better world"(p. 76)]. Professor J. R. Seeley, [Ecce Homo, p. 76] in a notable passage in which he compares Socrates and Christ says : "Those who fix their eyes on the Sermon on the Mount . . . and disregard Christ's life, his death and resurrection commit the same mistake in studying Christianity that the student of Socratic philosophy would commit if he studied only the dramatic story of his (the philosopher's) death." What sympathetic reader can read last pages of the Phaedo without tears? Yet no one who reads ever thinks of ascribing special meaning to the death of Socrates. His teachings were the source of his influence over men—"an intellectual influence upon thought—" whereas the influence of Jesus was and is "a personal influence upon feeling," an influence which streams directly from His cross.

For fifty years now, attention has been paid on the teachings of Jesus, and we cannot be too grateful for the scholarship and the insight which have been brought to bear in this field. We know the mind of Jesus better than ever before, and we hear a great deal about his "principles" and their "applications." Earlier generations, and particularly the New Testament era, thought of Him as primarily the Redeemer, His teachings being incidental to that career. Many writers today shift the emphasis to His teachings and find His redemptive ministry in the comprehensiveness and penetration of these rather than in His death. A pendulum would not be a pendulum if it did not swing from one extreme to the other, but the pendulum is not a proper symbol of truth, however well it may represent the oscillations of the human mind in apprehending truth. Truth is rather a sphere revolving in an orbit and

After last returns the first,
Though a wide compass round be fetched.

There are many indications that the first interpretations of Christ, and particularly of His death, are returning, as they must return if the sphere of Truth is to remain a sphere and keep its orbit. Am I wrong in thinking that preachers, especially in Great Britain, while avoiding with distinct aversion theories of the atonement, are again coming to grips with the fact of the death of Jesus and its meaning? One finds books like Denney's Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation (1917) and Forsyth's Justification of God (1917), and others in this field, deeply pondered. At the recent spring meetings (1924) of the Baptists in Great Britain there was a paper on The Death of Jesus, followed by discussion. Even the avowedly liberal group of theologians, while insisting that "the older explanations of Atonement seem to sink below the level of the best secular morality of today," yet go on to say: "The Christian Gospel is the need of this generation as of St. Paul. And to us, as to him, it is a gospel of salvation and atonement"[Streeter: Foundations, p. 334f.].

At the threshold of our study Professor Glover lifts a warning finger: "A man who supposes that he can speak with any adequacy of the death of Jesus is simply not thinking it at all" [Jesus in the Experience of Men, p. 52]. Professor Glover is certainly right in insisting that we must reconceive ("rethink" is his word) the meaning of our religious vocabulary if the central realities are not to elude us entirely.

I. The death of Jesus as an Event

All our sources unite in affirming His death. A carpenter named Jesus, from Nazareth, was put to death in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. The method of His execution wascrucifixion, a slow torture to which no Roman could be subjected, and which was reserved for provincials and slaves. He must have been a considerable person, for His death had a remote reverberation in the pages of a Roman historian, Tacitus. Another historian, a Greek, who, Sir W. M. Ramsay says, measures up to the standard of Thucydides, describes (Acts 25: 19) the perplexity of a Roman governor in handling a certain prisoner whose crime when he had investigated it turned out to be some conviction of his about this same dead Jew [in Luke the Historian in the Light of Research, p. 42. 6]. Moreover, it has come to pass—how, we need not now inquire---that business transactions, the public documents of all nations, and private letters, even to the most intimate exchanges of absent lovers, bear in their dates a tribute to Him. It is simple narrative to say that He lifted empires off their hinges and changed the course of history for all mankind. There has been preserved through nineteen centuries what archeology would call contemporary evidence of His death and of a special significance attached to it; I refer to Baptism and the Lord's Supper as practiced by the Christian church. Thus we of today look back upon an event as firmly set in history as the founding of Rome, the death of Socrates or the career of Mohammed. Those who came up to it from the other side and were eyewitnesses of the tragedy saw it many points of view.

The old priest Annas, high priest of avarice, monopolist, profiteer, grafter, who had made the temple a market place, a den of robbers, whose pocket nerve Jesus had touched three years before, when He drove the traders from the courts of His Father's House—Annas had the first taste of the intoxicating cup and he drained it to the dregs as he saw the young fanatic pass out of his courtyard with His hands tied behind His back [David Smith: The Days of His Flesh, p. 464].

Caiaphas, politician, opportunist, dispenser of final wisdom, sure that one man was not to be thought of when the interests of the nation were at stake, coldly counselled to put the Galilean adventurer out of the way lest trouble arise with Rome.

Pilate, annoyed at another outbreak of these pestiferous Jews and hopeless of ever knowing what it was all about, was yet interested and perpelexed by the strange behavior of his victim. Honest impulses stirred within him when he saw the low scheming of the prosecutors. Surely a harmless lunatic need not be put to death, and he tried to secure the release of "the King of the Jews."

The men who drove the spikes and lifted the cross in place had never handled so silent a sufferer. They were accustomed to this business and would not have been surprised at the most horrible outcries and curses on His enemies. As it was, He was but one more criminal who was getting what He deserved, and they quickly turned to gamble for His clothes.

What must be said of His friends? The whitest soul they ever knew, the truest heart, the deepest mind, the faultless man, the Prince of Israel, the Son of God. Every item in this count made it impossible for them to believe such an end could be. He had tried hard to forewarn them; but toward the last, in the Garden, it became clear to them He was following a clue they could not get hold of, a point of light they could not see. And when the tragedy befell and His chin dropped upon His breast they were struck blind and dumb. Amazement seized them, and in a horror of great darkness they returned from the scene. From every point of view the death of Jesus was accompanied by every imaginable aggration of cruelty. And when one remembers who he was, what He had done, and His silence through the ordeal, it becomes the most terrible indictment of the moral government of the world. "The best of men met the worst of fates and succumbed, and God said nothing and did nothing." "The most tragic, the most portentous occurrence of all man's aching, bloody, and tragic history is the death of Christ; it is not only the most monstrous, but it is the most criminal thing that was ever done in the career of humanity; it outweighs in gravity and in wickedness all that man or nations have done or can do." [The Justification of God, p. 224 and p. 153f.] Here was "a beyond all eclipse," "a victory of God's foes, another and a tremendous case of the world crushing the good and the just, another case of the soul's defeat by fate"[The Crucialilty of the Cross. p. 68]. So G. Stanley Hall can write, the progressive humiliation of Jesus culminated "in his realization that he was absolutely forsaken of God and man, that his cause was hopelessly lost, that there was no future for it or for him, that he had been a fool"; and "when the tomb closed upon Jesus' broken body all he had said and stood for seemed folly and madness, and all who had believed on him seemed convicted of fatuous delusion." [Life and Confessions of a Psychologist, p. 426F. Dr Hall in subsequent pages gives a larger interpretation of the event]. Thus God in whom He believed is proved by His death either impotent or indifferent—that is, no God !

II. The death of Jesus as a deed

The above aspect of His death as an event is wholly changed when we contemplate it as a deed—His deed. We see that He who had the best right to complain of the world's treatment of Him did not complain [Cf. The Justification of God, p. 127]. When we see this we are driven to seek for explanation; and we find it in His own clear apprehension of His death as a deed which He had set out to accomplish, and which He did accomplish in a triumph of trust in God and love for man unapproached in all the annals of time. The event, looked at as an event is so ghastly and sordid, must now be looked at as His deed. The course of things took in Jerusalem was precisely the course He foresaw.

It is not necessary to assemble here the numerous indications in our records that He deliberately chose the way of the cross [Cf. MacKintosh: Historic Theories of Atonement, Chap III, for example]. During His last six months with the Twelve He repeatedly told them that He was to be killed, in Jerusalem. We are told that they did not understand—which is a way of saying that they simply did not believe what He said. It was incredible because, from their point of view, it was impossible, a direct contradiction of the conviction they had reached that He was the Messiah.

Nothing is plainer than that He could have avoided the last visit to Jerusalem if He had chosen to do so. If He had remained away, we may well believe that the chief priests would not have sought Him out; on the contrary it would have been a relief to them to feel that He had disappeared from the capital for good. And why did He not stay away, may we not ask, if, as some writers are saying these days, we can dispense with His Person—His life and death and resurrection--now that criticism has uncovered for us His teachings in their pristine impressiveness? Why did He not retire to a safe retreat and write out His thoughts in incomparable treatises, taking a full lifetime in which to do this, tarrying meanwhile in the bosom of a circle of devoted followers and students [Cf. Ecce Homo, p. 220 (Everyman's Library Edition]. and finally borne by them, like Robert Browning's Grammarian-philosopher, up some clear rock-rimmed mountain height for burial:

Here's the top-peak... .
Here—here's the place, where meteors shoot, clouds form.
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go!
Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.

No; writers who identify Christianity with the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Prodigal Son have not only abandoned Paul, but the Synoptists as well, and of course John (6:44-45). For our Lord's foresight of His death appears not only in specific predictions but also in allusions; like that to the taking away of the bridegroom, at which time His friends will have cause to fast; like the reference to Jerusalem as the prophet killer, when He makes the first specific to it (Matt. 16:21-16). [The attempt to make these predictions a later construction by the Evangelists appears to have broken down. Cf. Moffatt's The Approach to the New Testament. It is easier to account for them as true to the mind of Jesus than as inventions by the writers.] He already sees not death only but violent death—be killed and that by crucifixion. All this lay in His mind as necessary. Again and again the imperative words "must suffer" occur. And though the story shows that He held on His way without strain ("I have a baptism to tined with; and how am I straitened till accomplished!"—Luke 12:50), He yet interpreted the cross as within the will of God for Him. "Let this cup pass away from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt" 26:39). After this final struggle in Gethsemane there is no more sign of strain, but the steady movement of one who knew His task and went firmly forward to achieve it, as He took the cross on His shoulder and started to the Place of a Skull.

Thus from the Temptation, at the opening of His public career, when He refused the way of ambition with a throne of dominion over all the kingdoms of the world at the end of that way, to Gethsemane with its "Thy will be done," He trod the way of rejection, of shame, and of sorrow, the via dolorosa with the cross at the end. In no sense therefore can His death be considered a fate which He endured; it was a deed. His deed wherein He "vehemently laid down his life."[Hutton: The Proposal of Jesus, p. 157. Cf. John 10:18.] "At the end of the long road he saw a cross, and he went forward and took it as it had been a crown."

Well then. Do we not here run into a further complication—and a more serious one? If He drove His opponents to that which such men call the "necessity" of destroying Him [Ecce Homo, p. 220 (Everyman's Library)], if He deliberately precipitated His death, is He not particeps criminis? He had said, "No one can take my life," and in the Garden He believed that twelve legions of angels were at His command if He should ask for them. But He did not ask for them ! He had forced the hand of the authorities, and when their hour came He submitted to be bound and carried to all that malignity and cruelty could devise. And so His word was fulfilled, that He laid down His life of His own accord. How then are we to distinguish His initiative in dying from that of the suicide? In this way. The suicide kills himself because he is tired of or to escape a fate that appears to him worse than death. As Seneca said, "If the house is full of smoke, go out"; and he, the noblest Stoic of them all, chose to go out. Or in the harakiri of China and Japan the man kills himself at the gate of his enemy to humiliate him. He does this, we are told, as the most terrible revenge he can take on the man who wronged him. Is it possible that there is something deeper here? May it not be a piteous appeal to the wrongdoer "by right of death's sad impotence," to turn from his feud and be at peace.

Oh let our warfare cease! Life is so short, and hatred is not sweet; Let there be peace between us... . [Caroline Mason.]

No; Jesus did not die by His own hand to escape from life. And to make a parallel to harakiri we should have to think of Him as standing before Caiaphas and drawing a dagger and saying: "See, to release you from the sin of further cruelty and to make you ashamed for what you are doing, I end all with this dagger thrust." Jesus did neither of these things; he was not a suicide. A martyr is never a suicide. "Tertullian relates how Arrius Antoninus, the proconsul of Asia, called out to the Christians who crowded voluntarily to his tribunal in a time of persecution, 'You miserable wretches, if you want to die you have precipices and ropes.' "[Harnack: Expansion of Christianity, vol. I, p. 341f.] But the precipices and ropes were not what they wanted. What they clamored for was the opportunity to bear witness, even at the cost of their lives, to the truth which had set them free, free from every bondage, including the fear of death (2 Tim. 1:10). Thus the martyr's consent to die at the hands of his persecutors does not set him in the class of cowards who run away from life, but in the class of heroes who thrill with the joy of loyalty to the mighty cause of truth. Besides, we must not overlook the full responsibility which their persecutors assume for their death. In the case of Jesus the chief priests are aware only of their determination to silence Him forever. "His blood be on us." "We know what we are doing and are willing to take the consequences. Let the crucifixion proceed!"

But we must now observe how far short martyrdom falls of meeting our Lord's estimate of His death as His own deed. And here it is necessary to recall the narrative and gather from numerous references His conception of Himself and of His career, including of course as He did and as the main point of interest for this discussion, His death and resurrection. His conception of Himself and of His career may be summarized under two items, His consciousness of Sonship to God, and His claim to be the Messiah. There is no space for details here. Let the reader consult Luke 2:49; Matthew 3:17-4:11 (and parallels, Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22); Mark 9:7 (parallels, Matt. 17:5; Luke 9:35); Matthew 26:39 (parallels, Mark 14:36; Luke 22 :42) [Cf. The Gospel of John passim]. From these passages (and many others) it is clear that Jesus lived in the sense of a unique relation to God, calling a Him habitually "Father," "My Father," and only once in direct address calling Him "My God." It is equally clear that He claimed to be the long waited for Messiah. It is a striking fact that both these elements of His self-consciousness appear in Matthew 16:16-20. Peter says : "Thou art the Messiah, the Son of God," and Jesus answers, "My Father has revealed this to you." In making God known (Matt. 11:25-30; Luke 10:21-22), in promulgating the laws of the Kingdom (Matt. 7:29), in the judgment of the nations (Matt. 25:31-32) , the supreme authority in the Kingdom of God sits upon His brow, a "majestic sweetness," for it carries no slightest derogation of the exquisite humility of One who said, "I am meek and lowly in heart."

Under these two items in His self-consciousness, Sonship and Messiahship, may be grouped all the representations—of unusual powers, the acceptance of worship, the forgiveness of sins—which forbid His classification with the prophets and which compelled His contemporaries, and compel us, to say with Nathanael: "Thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel." Now, the point here is this: It was in this knowledge of Himself that He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem, to be betrayed to the chief priests, to be condemned to death, to be handed over to the Romans, to be mocked and spit upon, and to be crucified, and after three days to be raised. He was the Son of His own parable, whom the wicked husbandmen cast out of the vineyard and killed (Matt. 21:37-41). And it was in this knowledge of Himself, of who He was and what He came to do, that He talked with Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration of the "exodus" which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. In His own mind, therefore, His death was not a martyrdom to be suffered, but a deed to be achieved, a consummation and a beginning, a station on His road to the throne of the universe. Accordingly in His own exposition of the ancient Scriptures in what they had said about Himself, He stressed the fact of His death as from of old involved in His career: 'How foolish you are and how slow to believe all that the prophets have said! Did not the Messiah have to suffer thus before entering upon His glory?' (Luke 24:25-26.) And it is no fancy to hold that the exposition of the Scriptures which He here gave passed at once into circulation among the Christians, and that it reappears , some years later when Paul at Thessalonica argued from the Scriptures (Acts 17:3) that it was necessary for Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead. He fulfilled this necessity in His greatest deed, when on the cross He gave His life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).

III. The death of Jesus as a doctrine

We come now to the third division of our discussion. The death of Jesus is an event; it is a deed, His deed; the Word of the Cross is an interpretation, a doctrine. To this latter we must now address ourselves. "The Fact without the Word is dumb; the Word without the Fact is empty."

It is clear beforehand that our interpretation must meet certain requirements: (1) It must furnish a solution of the mind of Christ in the experience of dying. [The reader will note that here the official title (Christ) displaces the personal name.] (2) It must preserve the character of God, His holiness, and the integrity of the moral universe. (3) It must yield an explanation of the sense of the forgiveness of sin in Christian experience.

(1) Perhaps it was the first of these three that was in Professor Glover's mind when he remarked upon the difficulty of speaking adequately of the death of our Lord. Emerson has somewhere said that it is possible to nestle into Shakespeare's mind and to think from thence, but as to Plato he says we are "still on the outside." Far more poignantly must we acknowledge that we are outside the mind of Jesus. And particularly at the cross we must take our place afar off (Luke 23:49). The "Seven Words" are indeed flashes of light into the darkness, but all attempts to read His mind in dying must fall short. [Cf. e.g., Matheson: Portrait of Jesus, in loco, and Bushnell: Forgiveness and Law]. Of one thing, however, we can be sure—His deep consent. If we could fathom that great deep we should find the answer to most of our questions. It is His consent to die which prevents Him from protesting against the futility, the folly, the injustice, the criminality of their deed, and which sets this death in a class by itself. To be sure, martyrs consent to die. "Play the man, Master Ridley: we shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out." Such was the victorious shout of Hugh Latimer, October 16, 1555, to his fellow sufferer when the flames leaped round him. Put in contrast to this the orphaned cry of the Dereliction,

It went up single, echoless,
My God, I am forsaken!

and one is bound to feel that the death of Latimer is worlds away from the death of Jesus.

Note two things: Death as death had no terrors for Him. His words for it were, "sleep," "exodus," "departure." "I am going away. . . . if you loved me you would be glad that I am going to the Father" (John 14:28. Cf. Phil. 1:23; 2 Tim. 4:6.).

Exultation is the going of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses, past the headlands into deep eternity. [Emily Dickinson.]

The other thing to be noted is this—notwithstanding this conception of death, He is broken with sorrow. As they enter the Garden He is carrying a load which crushes Him. He says, 'My heart is almost breaking. You must stay here and watch with me.' Then He went a little way and fell on His face and said: "My Father, . . . let this cup pass from me." What does this mean? It is not pain that He is shrinking from, nor shame. He who had said, 'Don't be afraid; the hairs of your head are numbered; not a sparrow falls without your Father,' is not here failing in faith and trust. The first generation of Christians were content to say that the load He carried was the sin of the world (John 1:29; I Peter 2:24; Paul, I Cor. 15:3). In Him we have the redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Col. 1:14) [Cf. Deissmann: The Religion of Jesus and the Faith of Paul, p. 216]. "If the Cross was a mere martyrdom and ended all, it really upset all. It did not overcome the world. It solved nothing. Nay, it aggravated everything"[Forsyth: The Justification of God, p. 224].

(2) Look now at the second requirement which our interpretation must meet: It must be consistent with the character of God. The aspect of God's character which is involved here is His approval of goodness and His hostility to sin. The whole of the Old Testament is mankind's textbook on the thesis, God hates sin. Sin is a blight on the moral universe; yes, but we must get beyond impersonal terms like these. Sin is rebellion, will against will, the rebel will of the sinner against the holy and loving will of God. "There was never such a fateful experiment as when God trusted man with freedom" [Forsyth: op. cit., p.125] And once the issue was joined, there could be no compromise in this war. From Prometheus defying Jupiter to Nietzsche defying God the issue has been the same; and until we "see sin as God sees it we have misconceived the problem." God cannot traffic with men in matters of justice [Hermann: Communion with God, p. 136]. The governance of God, like parental discipline, is insecure unless it rests upon a last reality of right. Any slightest trace of looseness here, and the moral universe collapses at its center. "Behold then the goodness and severity of God" (Rom. 11:22). "God will save His word." By His holiness He is forever on the side of goodness and forever against sin. "It is holiness that makes God God and prescribes his action with the moral soul." [Forsyth: Justification of God, p. 124]. And for this reason no interpretation of the cross can stand which does not preserve the inflexible integrity, the inviolable majesty, of his holiness. Or, as Paul puts it in a crucial passage, God must exhibit His righteousness, i.e., vindicate His hostility to sin, if He is to save us from our sins (Rom. 3:25).

Now, what makes the cross the central tragedy of history is, that there God appeared to be against goodness. The taunt of the, priests, "Let God deliver him," was not answered by a miracle of intervention to take their victim forever beyond their reach. If, as in Romans 8:25-26, the passing over of sins done aforetime brought the divine administration under suspicion of leniency to sin, the cross of Christ brings God under the equally compromising suspicion of indifference to goodness and to the cruelties a world like this inflicts upon it. God cannot remain God under such suspicions as these. He must Himself be justified, and we shall find this justification in the cross, or we shall find it nowhere. That is to say, the cross is of all our problems the most baffling, or it is the solution of them all.

(3) A third requirement was named: A sound interpretation of the cross will yield an explanation of the assurance of the forgiveness of sins in Christian experience. Jesus said: "Thy sins are forgiven thee. . . . Go in peace" (Luke 7:48-50). At his father's table the prodigal knew he had been forgiven; and forgiveness is an astounding and humbling revelation of love [Cf. Hermann: Communion with God. p. 251]. Paul makes redemption and the forgiveness of sins synonyms (Col. 1:14); and in I Corinthians 15:13-19 he insists that our sense of forgiveness is an illusion and the deepest witness of his soul is discredited, if Christ did not die for our sins and rise again. The ineffable peace of a conscience cleansed lies like a benediction on the pages of our New Testament. And Bunyan is true to the whole record, both of the New Testament and of subsequent Christian experience, when he makes Goodwill, the gatekeeper, say to Pilgrim: "As to thy burden, be content to bear it until thou comest to the place of deliverance, for there it will fall from thy back of itself." And "So I saw in my dream that just as Christian came up with this cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre where it fell in, and I saw it no more."

On the other hand, hear two great souls of those who reject the reconciliation effected at the cross (Col. 1:20-22). Tolstoy at seventy-five years of age confessed that the sins of his youth returned to torture him, and within a few days of his death, when he left his home on that fatal last pilgrimage, he wrote to his favorite daughter: "0 to sin a little less!" Ibsen in one of his books puts the case with poignant brevity in a bit of conversation: "If I am to go on living, I must find some cure for my sick conscience." "It will never be well," replies the other.

Now the point here is, that this is experience. Those who go by the way of the cross lose their burdens there, as in the familiar chorus :

At the cross, at the cross
Where I first saw the light
And the burden of my heart rolled away.

Those who go some other way carry their burden to the end. And our question is; What is the explanation of this difference? The interpretation of the cross must give the answer.

What then shall be said to these things—the mind of Christ in dying, the justification of God, the peace of forgiveness? One approaches such a task with fear and trembling. "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." If we begin with the question, Why did Jesus die? we are not here returning to the second section of this discussion. We were there concerned with gathering the data which show as matter of fact that He chose the way of the cross, that His death was in some way His deed. Here we interrogate these data for an interpretation of His death.

It is easy to say and to see that Jesus died because He was good. "The world hates me because I testify of it, that its deeds are evil" (John 7:7). Of this He was keenly aware : "They hated me without a cause" (John 15: 25). [These quotations from the Fourth Gospel represent the seasoned estimate of the last years of the apostolic age.] Our world being what it is and sin being what it is, perfect goodness is marked for crucifixion, and it is only a question of time when it will be put to death with jeers. Thus sin reveals itself for what it is. Jesus died because He loved. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). "The good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep" (John 10:11, 15). "The Son of man came to seek and to save the lost" (Luke 19: 10).

Lord, whence are these blood drops all the way
That mark out the mountain track?
They were shed for one who had gone astray
Ere the shepherd could bring him back.

Here we pass into the penumbra of the darker meanings. The shepherd has to get to the place where the lost sheep is, away on the mountains wild and bare, and ready to perish. But we cannot press the figure; for the shepherd who falls over a precipice and loses his life cannot bring the sheep back to the fold.

The characteristic New Testament representation is that Christ was more than a shepherd. The death He incurred in seeking the lost did not end His career. "God was in Christ" (2 Cor. 5:19), and He was there engaged in recovering His lost creation. Our Christian faith is that God knew what He was about when He gave man freedom. "He did not do that as a mere adventure, not without knowing that he had the power to remedy any abuse of it that might occur and to do this by a new creation more mighty, marvellous, and mysterious than the first. He had means to emancipate even freedom, to convert moral freedom, even in its ruin, into spiritual freedom. . . . There was moral resource in the Creator equal to anything that might happen to the creature or by him. And that resource is put forth in Christ—in his overcoming of the world on the cross, and His new creation of it in the Spirit" [Forsyth: The Justification of God, p. 125f. Cf. also Bushnell: Forgiveness and Law, p. 62]. Here is another statement of the same truth by our great American mystic, H. M. Alden: "Whatever may be man's sense of responsibility, the divine responsibility encompasses the universe, not only at every point unfailing, but all-inclusive, embracing all wanderings and all the wanderers"[A study of Death, p. 77] And it is Alden who has taught us to see in Genesis 8 and in Luke 15, "cosmic parables" [Ibid., pp. 66-132].

In the first of these "cosmic parables" sin entails at once three estrangements: The man is estranged from God and tries to hide; Nature becomes his enemy, bearing briars and thorns, and compelling him by the sweat of his brow to eat bread; and (Gen. 4) brother rises up against brother and slays him. We must now try to point out how these three enmities, that between God and man, that between man and man, and that between man and nature, are all healed at the cross.

It is the distinction of our Bible that it preserves throughout the personal relationship between ourselves and God; from the story of Eden to Revelation 22 it does not fall into abstractions. Accordingly sin is regarded as a violation of personal relations, and the instant effect of it is estrangement. Sin breaks the vital bond, fellowship is cancelled, peace dies; and the descensus Averni begins in a haughty adventure upon a completely isolated existence. Now, since God is love, He cannot rest in this result. But what can be done to change it? Nothing, say the hardened secularists. Too bad, say the sentimentalists, who hope that, when the prodigal's folly has reduced him to self-loathing, God, the supreme sentimentalist, may say, " 'Very well, we will wipe off the score, and nothing more will be said about it.' " "But now, once for all at the consummation of the ages, hath he appeared to put away sin by means of the sacrifice which he offered" [Thayer, in loco] —thus the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (9:26) answers our question. And Paul assures us (2 Cor. 5:19) that God will henceforth deal with men, not with reference to their sins ("refusing to count men's offences against them."—Goodspeed), but with reference to what the Sinless One, made sin for them, has accomplished in their behalf. Or as Denney puts it: "The work of reconciliation is one in which the initiative is taken by God and the cost borne by Him. . . . a work in which God so deals in Christ with the sin of the world that it shall no longer be a barrier between Himself and men"[The Death of Christ, p. 144f.].

Many minds are content to leave the matter there. Others insist that we press it further, focus on the question, Just what did Christ do which removed sin as a barrier to fellowship? Let Professor Glover help us here: "The wonder and the mystery of God is this, that He wants man infinitely more than man wants Him, that He makes the offering to man, not man to Him, that it is man, not He, who must be reconciled"[Jesus in the Experience of Men, p. 64]. And again: "Jesus distinguishes; he brought out the hatefulness of sin to God . . . but he put in the center of his teaching his conviction that sin does not alienate God from the child whom He loves. ... Jesus always takes the line that the Father wants His son above all things... . Jesus never suggests that he is effecting any change in moral law, any dislocation, legal fiction, or dodge of any kind. . . . For him the matter of first significance is the love of God"[Ibid., p. 85f].

Now the New Testament account of Jesus is consistent with itself. Consult the Synoptists, Peter, Paul, John, as you will, and the account holds together. He who was with God in the beginning appeared among men in the Person of Jesus, to seek and save sinners (1 Tim. 1:15), to put away sin (Heb. 9:26), to bear our sins in His body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness (1 Pet. 2:24); who, when He had effected man's purification from sin, took His place at the right hand of the Majesty on High (Heb. 1:3-4), showing Himself as much greater than (men and) angels as His title is superior to theirs (Cf. Phil. 2 :6-11). All these statements were made by missionaries who had to deal with simple people.

Professor Deissmann insists [in The Religion of Jesus and the Faith of Paul, p. 221] that "to illustrate the great subject of salvation in Christ Paul used pictures, which were understandable to every one of the simplest people of his own day, and some of which are even today without further explanation understandable." They are expressions to plain people of living religion and become obscure and difficult only when "we petrify them into dogmatic statements." "Paul did not coin them for the Universities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If he had written his letters for future generations he would not have coined these wonderful expressions" for the theologians but for the musicians; for they are best comprehended as sounding together in harmony like the notes of a single full choral or like the immortal sounds of a fugue of Bach [op. cit., pp. 202, 219]. That is to say, we are in the proper frame to interpret the varied figures in which the work of Christ is set forth in the New Testament when, like the rapt seer of Patmos, we are listening to the oratorio of the Redemption. He had been thrilled by the oratorio of the Creation (Rev. 4:11) , but when the full chorus of the Redemption broke upon him the whole creation the things in heaven, on earth, under the earth, in the sea and all that was in them—had joined in one vast burst of praise: "Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain to receive the power, and riches, and wisdom, and might, and honor, and glory, and blessing. . . . Unto him that sitteth on the throne, and unto the Lamb, be the blessing, and the honor, and the glory, and the dominion for ever and ever. And the four living creatures said, Amen. And the elders fell down and worshipped" (Rev. 5:11-14).

If now we descend from this exaltation, this unutterable joy, to ask what new thing Jesus brought, we can find no better answer than the answer Irenaeus gave to the Marcionites in the second century: Omnem novitatem attulit semet ipsum afferens—"He brought all that was new in bringing Himself" [Op. cit., p. 150].

(1) Let us now try to set down what He did in His death to reconcile us to God. What plummet can sound the depth of David's cry: "O Absalom, my son, my son! Would God I had died for thee!"? F. W. H. Meyers, in his poem "St. Paul," conceives Paul in a moment of passionate inspiration seeing people "bound who should conquer, slaves who should be free:"

Then with a rush the intolerable craving
Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call —
Oh to save these—to perish for their saving,
Die for their life, be offered for them all!

Now, Paul could feel this way because the love of Christ had gripped him (2 Cor. 5:13-15) and had kindled a like love in his heart; or, as he would prefer to say it, "Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). The first thing to say, then, is that Jesus is God's love—matchless, fathomless, unchangeable—and He is God's love in absolute demonstration. That is God's way of saying to us that He is reconciled to us and that there will be joy in the presence of the angels when one sinner returns in reconciliation to the Father's heart.

But it is not our nature as children of His that alone calls out this demonstration of love. Our condition as sinners makes the love an agony. Here is the deepest complication: Love finding its extreme manifestation in a piercing aversion to sin. Love "with shuddering horror pale" goes down to hell—the hell of our guilt and need, to save us from the horrible profanation and prostitution and blight and damnation of our sin. In a moral universe righteousness is life, sin is death.

Into the woods my Master went,
Clean forspent, forspent.
[Lanier.]

God in Christ comes into our death in sin. "The death that he died he died unto sin," in order to show that a moral universe must put away sin, else it succumbs to it. By the sacrifice of a perfect will in full assent to the righteous will (Heb 10:10) which ordained a moral world, Christ accepted the doom of sin in His death and established before all worlds and forever God's hostility to sin. Something had to be done to combine this twofold revelation of love and sin. And the death of Jesus is this so great something that made it possible for God to receive sinners without compromising His character. Sin is a black cloud hiding God's face and darkening man's path. Christ entered into this cloud, gathered all its fury into one lightning stroke upon Himself, and so blotted it out forever. With this vindication of His holiness, there remains no hindrance to the free flow of God's forgiving grace to repenting sinners. Thus it is seen that in the cross as nowhere else God was on the side of goodness. He proved it there. God must justify Himself, and He did so in the cross of His Son [The Justification of God, p. 125]. Or in the words of Paul, He is proved to be righteous, even when He justifies the sinner who has faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:25-26). A strong confirmation of this interpretation, amounting to a demonstration, is in the fact that it does two things: It comports with the mind of Jesus in dying, and it heals the enmity and makes peace between God and man. At His baptism our Lord acknowledged the obligations of righteousness ("Thus it be meth us to fulfill all righteousness"—Matt. 3:15). On the cross He assented with full confession from man's side to the just judgment of God upon sin. "And I heard the altar saying, Yea, 0 Lord God, the Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments" (Rev. 16:7 ).

And so both grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (John 1:17), the infinite pity evoked by wilfulness and the established integrity of an ordered universe. This twofold revelation, once it is seen, cancels estrangement, and fellowship is restored. Besides, this result has been secured through a complete vindication of the moral requirements imposed by the holiness of God and in harmony with the psychological laws imposed by the conscience of man. "The consequence is a great change of mind in the man. He moves over to God's point of view. . . . The cross has lit up the nature of God; the love that chose it becomes the Supreme thing; the record (of sin) is not ignored, but its paralyzing effect is gone; the conscience is set free to enjoy God and all his dealings" [Jesus in the Experience of Men, p. 86f].

O Love of God, 0 Sin of Man,
In this dread act your strength is tried:
But victory remains with love, Jesus our Lord is crucified.

We here pass to the experience of forgiveness in the heart of the believer. For those who are unmoved, if there be such, by the demonstration of the cross, the redemption remains a fact, for what God in Christ did there He did for the whole race. It is a finished work. But it is only when one by believing in Jesus passes over to God's point of view, responds to the love certified in blood, and makes his own Christ's confession of the holy judgment of God upon sin, his own sin, that forgiveness is sealed and one's peace becomes a river. The older hymns come true again, like John Newton's "I saw One hanging on a tree," or like Charlotte Eliot's "Just as I am," or Charles Wesley's "Heart of stone relent, relent" (translating John Kreuger, 1640), or Faber's "O come and mourn with me awhile," or Isaac Watts' "When I survey the wondrous cross," or Bernard's "0 sacred Head now wounded" (1153) , and many others. Truly "the way of the cross leads home;" and the robes of the saints "are white because they have been washed in blood." Let those who will call this overwhelming deliverance illusory. They can do so only by indicting a volume of testimony through centuries of Christian history which is for unprejudiced minds irresistible.

(2) The second reconciliation was between man and man. Forgiven sinners standing together at the cross cannot be at enmity with each other. There was no deeper enmity between peoples in the ancient world than that between Jew and Gentile, as there was no keener aversion between classes than that between priests and outcasts in Jerusalem in the time of our Lord. In the fellowship of believers all these lines between class and class, between Jew and Gentile, were blotted out. "For in Christ Jesus there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor freeman, but Christ is all and in all" (Col. 3:11) . Men talk eloquently of solidarity, cooperation, international goodwill, but they often rise no higher than enlightened self-interest as the motive of these adjustments.

At the Indianapolis Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement (1924) Professor Yohan Masih of India quoted the following appeal from one of India's prophets: "Christian Europe, India will have no other atonement with thee except in Christ. Any secular reconciliation or political treaty she would altogether repudiate. We Asiatics invite the nations of the West to a spiritual alliance and an international federation upon no other ground than that of Christ's atonement; in His name let us forgive and forget the hostilities of centuries, and in His name shake hands with each other with true brotherly love" [Christian Students and World Problems, p. 196]. It was an echo of Paul's great passage (Eph. 2:11-22) in which he sees national feuds melt and a new humanity created by means of the cross.

(3) The third reconciliation effected at the cross was the reconciliation between man and nature. This is the least important of the three, and perhaps it is on this account that it is the least familiar. Yet it is the point of emphasis in Paul's tremendous word to Timothy: "Jesus Christ has abolished death" (2 Tim. 1:10) [This word "abolish" often used by Paul may be translated, "to render negligible".] Professor J. R. Seeley has a great page in which he sees this, and he promised a subsequent treatise in which he would deal with it. He did not live to fulfill the promise—an irreparable loss. Here he says [in Ecce Homo, p. 258]: "Man has other enemies besides himself, and he has need of protections and supports which morality cannot give. He is at enmity with Nature as well as with his brother man. He is beset by two great enemies with whom he knows not how to cope. The first is Physical Evil; the second is Death. . . . When the forces of nature become hostile to us, we know neither why it is so nor what to do. . . . One of them is more dreaded than any because more mysterious. And though we know little of Death, we cannot help thinking it a comfortless torpor, that deprives the hero of his heroism, the face of its smile, the eye of its expression, that first strikes the human form with a dull, unsocial stiffness, and then peels the beauty from it like a rind and exposes the skeleton... . Death remains the fatal bar to all complete satisfaction, the disturber of all great plans, the Nemesis of all great happiness, the standing dire discouragement of human nature. What comfort Christ gave men under these evils, how he reconciled them to nature as well as to each other by offering to them new views of the Power by which the world is governed, by his own triumph over death, and by his revelation of eternity"—these were to be the subjects of the other volume which he never published. So far as I know the lack has never been adequately supplied and perhaps never can be [Cf. B.H. Streeter: Concerning Prayer (1921), pp. 1-40; and God and the Struggle for Existence (1919), pp. 157-207].

Slow torture like famine, sudden disasters like the loss of the Titanic, the earthquake in Japan, the unmoral gratuitousness of accident where Nature appears capricious and indifferent to the pain she inflicts in these things and many others like them we hear all creation groaning in agony until now (Rom. 8:22). I may be permitted to quote here what I have written in another place ("The Religion of the Lord's Prayer," Hodder and Stoughton) we do not need to be reconciled to the beauty the natural creation; but we are in right relations to nature as a temptation only when Christ's grace we are able to hold things in their proper subordination to character; when, that is, they minister to and do not hinder the chief end of our existence, communion with God. We are reconciled to nature in her aspect of physical evil—sickness, pain, death—that is, as a terror, only when we perceive how Christ by his resurrection has proved that the whole order and procession of the physical world not only do not defeat life, as winter does not frustrate spring, but are making toward some unimaginable transfiguration of life. At the Cross we see the extreme hostility of sin to goodness; 'we see also the extreme hostility of nature (with her enginery of pain and death) to personality. And in the triumph of Christ over these, we see their helplessness to defeat life. Nay, rather, life resurgent, triumphant, shouts beside the empty tomb 'O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?' . . . Nature becomes thus a means of fellowship with God, and we who were all our lifetime subject to bondage are delivered from the far of death into the glorious liberty of the children of God."

Fear not ye of little faith
For he hath abolished Death;
And no longer now we die,
we but follow Christ on high.

There is another aspect of the cross. It is seen in the phrase, "slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8). Pascal, who has been called the most Christian of minds, has somewhere said that "Christ is crucified to the world's end." "Slain from the foundation of the world," "crucified to the world's end"—what do such expressions mean? The writer to the Hebrews uses the word eternal in reference to the work of Christ—through the Eternal Spirit He accomplished an eternal redemption (Heb. 9:12, 14). Someone said years ago that it was worth while to read Ewald if only to learn how to use the word eternal. For one thing, and chiefly, it means timeless, that is, out of time relations, and therefore not measurable on a calendar. Universal, absolute, are near synonyms. Taken in this sense, the phrases quoted above mean that the cross of Christ is the explanation of the universe, that the principles embodied in the cross are in the constitution of things, the make of the world. Forsyth is the only writer known to me who has grappled this aspect of the matter. Thus he says, "In his Cross, Resurrection and Pentecost, Christ is the Son of God's love with power. God's love is the principle and power of all being. It is established in Christ everywhere and forever. Love so universal is also absolute and final. The world is His, whether in maelstrom or volcano, whether it sink to Beelzebub's grossness or rise to Lucifer's pride and culture. The thing is done, it is not to do. Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world' "[ The Justification of God, p. 171. Cf. Bushnell: Forgiveness and Law, p. 61: "All God's forgiving dispositions are dateless... The Lambhood nature is in Him, and the cross set up, before the incarnate Son arrives."].

One wonders that Dr. Forsyth gets through his discussion of this "grand reconciliation" without so much as an allusion to the crucial New Testament passage on this aspect of the matter; I mean Revelation 4 and 5. I make no attempt to interpret the magnificent symbolism of these great chapters. But one is within safe limits in saying that the center of the scene is the Lamb that had been slain, now alive forever more, opening the seals of the book. In verses 1-5 of chapter 5, the seer weeps because no one is found to open the book, no one in Heaven or on earth or under the earth; the universe stands baffled before the riddle of existence. But the angel reassures him: "Weep not; behold the Lion that is of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book." And as the seer looks to see a Lion (symbol of power) appear, lo! a Lamb (symbol of suffering meekness) advances to take the book and to open the seals. The riddle of existence is solved by the Redeemer; revelation comes to full flower through redemption.

Now it is a striking fact that the mystery of the universe was never more baffling than to our own times, and it is most baffling to the most powerful thinkers, like Ibsen, Tolstoy, Nietzsche. Such men, rejecting the Christian solution, struggle in "gulfs of metaphysical agony," writhe in "cosmic solicitudes." "Nietzsche saw life as a vast depth, a throbbing reality, a tragic tangle . . . and it unhinged his mind. To grasp the real deep tragedy of life is enough to unhinge any mind which does not find God's solution of it in the central tragedy of the Cross and its redemption" [Forsyth: op. cit., p. 219].

"Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me,
And horror hath overwhelmed me.
And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove!

I would haste me to a shelter
From the stormy wind and tempest"
(Psa. 55:5-8).

Men with fevered eagerness seek for shelter in science, in philosophy, in an interpretation of history as a story of inevitable progress; and the years 1914-18 proved that all these refuges are lies. As James Bryce wrote: "The barque that carries man and his fortunes traverses a sea where the winds are variable and the currents unknown. And the mists which shroud the horizon hang as dense and low as when the voyage began."

Thus if we look outward to nature with the eyes science has trained, or backward over the course of history, or within with the insight philosophy boasts, we are equally puzzled. Only when we see the Lamb slain "to put away sin," and through resurrection exalted to the throne of all worlds, do we get the key of the universe, the explanation of all things. The cross is the point in time in which God saves His Name as Holy and as Love. The solution of the universal mystery is in the moral victory which recovered the universe from a career of sin [Cf. Forsyth, op. cit., p. 123].

If the cross is the explanation of all things, a breaking forth into manifestation at a point in time of the principle on which God has built and is governing His world, then we need not be surprised to find our Lord saying that we His disciples must bear our own cross.

Die to live again.
Till this truth thou knowest,
Stranger like thou goest
Through a world of pain.
[Goethe. ]

Paul knew it was only through fellowship in His sufferings that he could come to know his Lord (Phil. 3:10). Suffering love, since it is in the constitution of things, can alone understand God, His way and work in the world. The secret of the Lord is with them that bear the cross; and with the cross as their symbol and living on the principle it expressed and expresses, they conquer the world and all Satanic powers. "They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death" (Rev. 12:11).

Conclusion

The central affirmation of Hinduism is in the formula: "Thou art That;" the personal becomes the impersonal, and the denial of personality in God and man issues in a pantheism in which moral distinctions completely disappear. The central affirmation of Buddhism is, that the renunciation of desire, even the desire to live, is the way of escape from the misery of existence.

The central affirmation of Mohammedanism is that God is God and Mohammed is His prophet—"a prophet without miracle, a religion without mystery, a morality without love, which has always encouraged a thirst for blood and which began and ended in the most unbounded sensuality" (Schlegel).

The central affirmation of the Christian religion is, that God was in Christ taking the world back into His favor, that in Christ we have redemption, the only redemption there is, viz., the forgiveness of sins, that He was made unto us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, and that according as it is written, "He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord" (1 Cor. 1:30-31).

Paul, from whom these statements are taken, anticipates our intellectual scruples. It is as though he said, "I know it is too good to be true; it is indeed "incredible until accepted'" [Hutton, Proposal, p. 20]. Resist sophistication, forego your demand for explanations, become as little children, embrace as they do the unfathomable Love which forgives, and like a tear-stained but happy child pressed close to his father's breast, you, too, may know a peace that passeth knowledge and—that is to be saved.

I venture no opinion of their value for others when I say that books which begin with "historic theories of the Atonement" [e.g., MacIntosh, 1920] do not help me. I have a curious feeling that they are starting me on the wrong track; that in some way, they are erecting barriers between me and the facts. Is it not significant that the New Testament nowhere concerns itself to give a rationale of the reconciliation? "We were reconciled to God through the death of his Son" (Rom. 5:10). Our inquisitiveness persists in asking, "But how?" Theories must be propounded, elaborated, defended, and then we take the road which runs straight to the jungle of speculation, and once in the tangle we may never again be in naive contact with the reality we are trying to explain.

THE DEATH OF JESUS CONTINUED

I. Facts and Fancies

Let no one accuse me of obscurantism here. I am not saying that we may not ask questions like, "How does the death of Jesus save us?"[H.C. Mabie, R.F. Horton, et al.] Nor am I implying that we must not reason about the Cross for the reason that it is unreasonable. That would involve one in the proposition that truth and fact do not match. The world of fact and the world of truth are not two worlds, but one. It remains true, however, as George Eliot said, "We may have very sublime feelings and very erroneous theories." Now, in religion, we are mainly concerned with adjustment to facts; here, the facts of God, of sin, of forgiveness. And my plea is that we must always hold firmly to the distinction between fact and truth—the one addressing our will and calling for adjustment, the other addressing our reason and calling for assent. Theories of religion are not religion. It is even possible to hold a correct theory of the reconciliation without being reconciled to God. The New Testament never shifts the emphasis—as we are so prone to do —from religion to theories of religion and steadily holds me to the view that the important thing is to have my heart healed of all estrangement toward God.

I recall two little girls. The parents of one were devout Christians, and wise withal, and when they reached the conclusion that she was old enough to stand the emotional train of hearing the story of the crucifixion, they read it to her in the simple words of one of the Gospel narratives. That night, when she said her prayers, she broke away from her accustomed words, and said, "Dear Lord, I'm sorry for you; I wish you hadn't saved us"[Bushnell: Forgiveness and Law, in loco]. The other, who, at seven, had never heard of Jesus, was waiting in a hotel parlor and picked up a book from the table, a Bible, and began to read. She had opened to the story of the crucifixion. Her attention was seized. "Why," said she, "they are killing somebody here." As she sped rapidly through the story she saw how Jesus was, how silent, and she grew eager to see that some one would appear to take His part. And when no one appeared she cried out, "If I had been there I wouldn't have let them do it." I heard her tell this story, and at the time she was a flaming evangelist of the grace of God.

"Except ye be converted and become as little children ye can in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven."

The words sound like a direct rebuke of all our attempts at a "philosophy of the plan of salvation," and they fit in with the fact that the New Testament does not give us such a philosophy, probably because it rests upon a philosophy profounder than any we have yet conceived. Paul and John traverse vast ranges of thought, to be sure, but they never give us the impression that they are trying to convince us of the truth of their scheme of things; they never speculate. They report what they see and let it go at that. Some writers, indeed, picture Paul as engaged in an intense struggle to save his soul alive by working out a modus vivendi between his Christian experience and his rabbinic education. This seems to me to be a gross exaggeration of a temporary feature of his ministry, that to the Jews; while his experience of Christ is the permanent and towering reality. And however widely these writers range, on what seems an ever lengthening radius, their center remains the same. They never become dreamers; they feel always the pull of the central reality, and so remain religious men, "Christians," and never become philosophers, or even "theologans" in the modern sense of that word. I am convinced that it would surely be wisdom in us if we could follow their example.

I have thus far said that the best approach to the study of the death of Jesus is to leap over the centuries with their theories, and come directly to the experience of the first believers.

II. Reconciliation in Experience

In what follows I propose to bring together a series of incidents. They are illustrations from our own times—some of them widely known—of reconciliation in experience. So far as I know they have never been brought together. Now, if theories of reconciliation may be misleading, illustrations may be more so. And yet, while realizing the risk of having my illustrations carry implications untrue to our reconciliation with God in Christ, I hope that since they are leaves from the book of experience they may throw some light on the center of the Christian religion, the death of Christ for our sins. It is, of course, in the field of personal relations, and there alone, that instances of atonement occur. Let me give one out of my own experience. For some disobedience which I cannot now recall my mother once promised me a punishment. This set us in a distinct relation which I, a child, clearly understood. A week passed, and she had not administered the punishment. A month passed, and she had not kept her word. I suppose I thought of it every day and became convinced at last that she had forgotten all about it. Not so. A day came, perhaps six months after my disobedience, when we were alone in the house. We met where two wide halls came together; she took firm hold of the forefinger of my left hand, and without a word started toward the room, behind her own bedroom, where the switches were kept behind the big clock on the mantel. When we came out of that room I was convinced that my mother was a truthful woman, that she loved me, and at the cost of pain to both of us she was determined to hold me in right. relations with herself. Her "passing over" of my offense brought her under suspicion of leniency toward disobedience. I know of no other way by which she could have plucked that compromising suspicion out of My heart than by the deliberate exhibition of an integrity which could not leave disobedience unpunished (Rom. 3:23-26). The course she took established us in a reconciliation on the highest possible level, for it brought us together in a satisfaction of my conscience as well as hers, and made us happy in a mutual respect for the law under which the life of the family was maintained.

My next incident was related to me by the father in the case; and not long ago in China, at the request of the mother of some of his grandchildren, I told the story in their presence. S. D. Gordon has, I believe, included it in one of his books of the Quiet Talks series.

One day the principal of the school the children attended called at the house to know if Charles was sick. "No," said the father, "but why do you ask?" "Well, he has been absent from school for several days." That morning Charles had left the house with his books and bad come back at the usual hour, put his books down and gone out for play with no slightest betrayal in face or manner of the truancy he had been keeping up. When he came in again, his father called him into his den for a very private interview. With a countenance in which suffering and tenderness were blended, the father said: "My son, my son! What have you done?" The boy had played his part in concealing his sin, so far as his own behavior was concerned, quite successfully. He came and went at the proper hours. He had been shrewd, but not shrewd enough. Is it not curious how we believe we can hide our sin? Charles had left out of mind the impression his absence would make on the principal of the school, being wholly absorbed in the fun of playing truant. And he did not see the wide and complex relations in which he stood. One recalls De Quincey's comment on "the Knocking at the South Entry" in Macbeth the night of the murder of Duncan. He says the crime had so completely isolated Macbeth and his wife, so broken their connections with the whole social complex in which they stood, that Shakespeare had somehow to bring them back, make them aware of the external world, of other people in it, and he used the "knocking" to do this.

When he walked into his father's den Charles knew that l had been found out; yes, but also that he had not been alone in his wrongdoing; and before the interview was over he knew how deep a hurt he had inflicted on his father's heart. "Why, my boy, you have been living a lie in the presence of your father and mother; you have broken the happiness of our family life; you have given us a bad name at school." Now at last, he saw all this and felt it deeply. And when together they faced the question, what was to be done, he agreed with all his heart to what his father said: "You have been lying to the whole family. I think we shall have to fix it so you cannot communicate at all." And so the dear fellow was solemnly condemned to spend a week in an unfurnished room on the top floor of their home. That night the father, rolling restlessly in his bed, said, at length, "Mother, I can't sleep here with that boy on the hard floor upstairs alone." "Well, what are you going to do?" "I'm going up and sleep with him." And a few minutes later father and son were fast asleep, locked in each other's arms. The father spent the week sharing the lot to which his conscience and his love condemned his son; and when they came out of their prison together, they were reconciled for life.

In her life of Austin Phelps, her father, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps tells a somewhat similar story of her first lie, and how her benign father became terrible, as he pierced her soul with blazing eyes and said, "My child, liars go to hell," and then burst into uncontrollable weeping. That was her last lie.

Take another instance. A beautiful family —father, mother, three children, brother nine, sister seven, and a baby sister two. The children enjoyed immensely a swing in the nursery. One day the father noticed that one of the ropes of the swing was frayed to the point of breaking, and he told the children not to swing that day. For some reason the rope was not mended, and the next morning the swing was very tempting. Yes, father had said not to swing, but one more try. So brother took a turn, then sister must have hers, and then, of course, baby sister must have her turn. But the first two had stretched the rope to the breaking point, and the baby was shouting with delight to go so high, when the rope broke and she was thrown in "heap against some furniture and lay helples' on the floor. Frightened, the children rant to tell mother. The doctor said "Paralysis." And as their sister lay for months silent in her bed, the older children found no ease for the pain in their hearts for what they had done. Here was disobedience with tragic results. What must the father do? He decided not to punish the children. The reason he gave himself was that all that punishment might do for the brother and sister had been done by the affliction of the baby. And when he saw their distress he forgave them.

The next case is from a symposium on The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought [P.T. Forsyth, p. 87], published in 1901. "Schamyl was the great religious and military leader of the Caucasus who for thirty years baffled the advance of the Russians in that region and, after the most adventurous of lives, died in 1871. At one time bribery and corruption were so prevalent about him, that he was driven to severe measures. He announced that in every case discovered the punishment would be one hundred lashes. Before long a culprit was discovered. It was his own mother. He shut himself up his tent for two days without food or water, sunk in prayer. On the third day he gathered the people, and pale as a corpse commanded the executioner to inflict the punishment, which was done. But at the fifth stroke he called 'Halt!' had his mother removed, bared his own back, and ordered the official to lay on him the other ninety-five with the severest threats if he did not give him the full weight of each blow."

I once told this incident to a woman, and with instant revulsion she protested, "If I had seen a man treat his mother that way I should have hated him the rest of my life." This immediate emotional reaction, natural to some temperaments, may indeed raise the question whether the General did not make a blunder in judgment in allowing the first five blows to fall on his mother; whether he was not mixing two methods of dealing with sin. If so, it was clearly an intellectual fault, not a moral. His moral appraisal of the situation was right; his heart was right; for he loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and he loved the sinner. And whatever his intellectual error, if there be one, he took the course which honored the law of righteousness for his camp, which put away sin, and which restored the sinner to rectitude and peace.

My last illustration is from the life of Joseph Hardy Neesima. His escape from Japan in search of education, his meeting with Mr. Hardy in Boston, his education as Hardy's ward, his return to Japan, his rise to position and power in school work in his native land—these make up a thrilling romance of Christian missions in Japan. Neesima was once absent a day or so from school, and on his return found that a rebellion had broken out and the students were defying the administration. The master called an assembly in the chapel. When he came in he saw before him a silent, sullen crowd, ready to take the consequences of their rebellion, ready to explode in resentment at any proposition he might make toward a settlement. They were boys, boys in their teens, and their little black eyes flashed with determination to yield nothing. He began by explaining his conception of a Christian school, that principal, teachers, and pupils were tied together in one bundle of life, held together by mutual respect and love. He told them how he loved them, and how he was giving himself to them in the longing and in the belief that they would become good and useful men. "And now," said he, "you have broken our fellowship; you have sinned against the life of the school; one of us must suffer." When he said that, the pupils in their eyes shrank to a point in anger. If he had been a Westerner he might have said, "One of you must suffer;" but being a true Oriental, with the East's fuller sense of corporate life, he said, "One of us must suffer." Selecting one of the older boys, a leader, he called to him to step from the first form into the area in front of the platform. The boy hesitated a moment, then rose and stepped for-ward.

Neesirna had in his hand the fertile with which minor offenses were punished, and the boy supposed he had been called out to take the punishment for the school, and he was ready to fight rather than submit. Did he not have the whole school to back him up? But what was his confusion when, instead of striking him, the Principal, his face suffused with pity and his eyes brimming with tears, handed him the ferule and, stretching forth his left hand, required the boy to strike his open palm. Surprised by so strange and sudden a shift in their relations, the boy, covered with shame, refused; whereupon the master, taking the ferule, proceeded to strike his own left hand, blow after blow, till the palm was spurting blood. With every blow, he broke hearts in the crowd before him. And when at last he stopped, their defiance had melted and in a tumult of confession and tears they begged to be forgiven, and they were.

III. The Common Essence

Readers may note and pursue the implications of these accounts as they choose. What I prefer to do is to try to distill the essence common to them all, and to inquire what help these reconciliations afford us in understanding our reconciliation to God in the death of His Son.

1. Philosophers tell us that Relation is the mother of categories. "All thought has its origin in the relating activity of the mind" [Fletcher: Introduction to Philosophy, Macmillan, p. 245]. And we shall have to widen our view to the whole reach of philosophy before we rightly conceive the relatedness which underlies reconciliation. We must think on the scale of the universe. Paul does this in Colossians, where he makes the Cross the center of the cosmos (Col. 1: 20). It is at this point and for this reason that our stories of individual experience fall short. They do indeed touch the fringes of the universal reality; they, so to speak, sample its quality and partake of its nature. But they are too atomic, too subjectivist, to furnish the norm for an eternal redemption (Heb. 9: 12). Such a phrase—"eternal redemption"—drives us "back to before the foundation of the world, to a Redeemer who was there . . . whose redemption of the world is only possible because of His part in its creation, who took the responsibility of creating because He knew He possessed the power to redeem and retrieve whatever creation might come to"[Forsyth: Justification of God, p. 26; cf. p. 126].

Now, in making the miracle of the redemption coordinate with the miracle of creation, Paul does not lose himself in a mist of speculative philosophy. See the first chapter of Galatians, with its tingling sense of an intensely personal dealing of God in. Christ with his lone soul. It is in his reflections on this individual experience that he sees the lines of it expanding till they take in the universe. The little universe of individual experience suggests, though it cannot completely epitomize, the big universe of the cosmical reconciliation.

Here, then, is the first element of the distilled essence. It is the element of relation, relatedness. In each case of at-one-ment the offense was in a relation, and it poisoned the whole of the little universe in which the parties to it stood. We may for purposes of analysis conceive these universes as separate, but it is for analysis only; they do not break up the universe into a "pluriverse." And the point I am trying to make is, that if you look hard at the microcosm (the little world) you see the macrocosm (the big world) [Sir Henry Jones, in Old Memories, p. 131, tells us that Lord Kelvin was so full of his subject as to find infinite suggestion in practically any object that caught his eye. "I remember for instance that he lectured for a whole hour on broken glass—he had seen a broken window on his way to the classroom; and, as a matter of course, his exposition of his subject led him to bring in the whole solar system."]; if you focus on the relationsh which were poisoned by the individual offense you see them expand to embrace infinity. Thus we see that sin spreads a blight over the whole moral order ; and nothing is right or can be again until the infection is removed. In the case of my mother's postponed punishment, for example, my mind passed from approval and expectation of the punishment to a guess that she was careless, that she meant nothing in particular when she reproved us; then to a suspicion that she was really indifferent to disobedience, and this, in a maturer mind, might have grown to a doubt of a moral order in the world, that is, to a form of outright atheism. Thus a single act of disobedience of a child may, if it is not properly dealt with, empty the universe for that child of moral content and leave the throne of God empty. Now, of course, God cannot consent to be dethroned by sin and sinners. Denial, disloyalty must be changed to faith and love, and this on the scale of the total moral universe, if God is to keep His throne, that is, be God. We are now prepared for the statement that only One who is in the total moral order and who is committed to it as a whole, in whom it is constituted—only He can adequately feel the blight of sin's infection, only He can take its consequences, only He can restore the broken relation, the lost harmony, so making peace.

2. This brings us to the second of the common elements to be pointed out in our stories. The initiative in the reconciliation is always taken by the offended, never by the offender. The reason for this is plain; the offender will never take it. The element of wilfulness in sin, if it is not invariably present in the initial stages, quickly appears, and settles into stiffness; and by something like gravitation the wrongdoer goes steadily away from him whom be has wronged. If we try to analyze his state of mind, we find he passes through the following stages: (a) Satisfaction—a pleasure-sense of escape, a feeling of emancipation from the restraints of the relationship, as no more bound by the obligations of friendship. Our truant schoolboy illustrates this phase, a tinge of mischief running through his satisfaction, as having outwitted both principal and parents. (b) But in cases of malicious wrong-doing, this phase passes quickly into settled dislike for the injured, into hatred indeed, and contempt individual offense you see them expand to embrace infinity. Thus we see that sin spreads a blight over the whole moral order ; and nothing is right or can be again until the infection is removed. In the case of my mother's postponed punishment, for example, my mind passed from approval and expectation of the punishment to a guess that she was careless, that she meant nothing in particular when she reproved us; then to a suspicion that she was really indifferent to disobedience, and this, in a maturer mind, might have grown to a doubt of a moral order in the world, that is, to a form of outright atheism. Thus a single act of disobedience of a child may, if it is not properly dealt with, empty the universe for that child of moral content and leave the throne of God empty. Now, of course, God cannot consent to be dethroned by sin and sinners. Denial, disloyalty must be changed to faith and love, and this on the scale of the total moral universe, if God is to keep His throne, that is, be God. We are now prepared for the statement that only One who is in the total moral order and who is committed to it as a whole, in whom it is constituted—only He can adequately feel the blight of sin's infection, only He can take its consequences, only He can restore the broken relation, the lost harmony, so making peace.

2. This brings us to the second of the common elements to be pointed out in our stories. The initiative in the reconciliation is always taken by the offended, never by the offender. The reason for this is plain; the offender will never take it. The element of wilfulness in sin, if it is not invariably present in the initial stages, quickly appears, and settles into stiffness; and by something like gravitation the wrongdoer goes steadily away from him whom he has wronged. If we try to analyze his state of mind, we find he passes through the following stages: (a) Satisfaction—a pleasure-sense of escape, a feeling of emancipation from the restraints of the relationship, as no more bound by the obligations of friendship. Our truant schoolboy illustrates this phase, a tinge of mischief running through his satisfaction, as having outwitted both principal and parents. (b) But in cases of malicious wrong-doing, this phase passes quickly into settled dislike for the injured, into hatred indeed, and contempt for the former relationship. (c) Then come hardness —

But Oh, it hardens all within
And petrifies the feeling (Burns)

hostility, implacability. Meantime other relations (friendships) have been established, and the wrongdoer conceives a strong suspicion of any approaches the injured man may make. "He is seeking revenge." He knows very well that he himself could not forgive so deep an injury as he has committed, and he cannot bring himself to believe that any man could genuinely desire a reconciliation under such circumstances. Thus the whole drift of his feelings gravitates heavily away from his old-time friend; and if he is left to take the initiative the old relation will never be restored.

Let us now look at the effects of the injury upon the injured man : (a) There is first distress at the breaking of the relation. (b) Then resentment which is a mixture of the sense of justice, respect for order (law), indignation at violation of relations (crime), and a dash of personal choler (anger). (c) In cases where the offense was unprovoked and the injured is entirely innocent of any share in the wrong done, and the injurer is thus guilty of premeditated and malicious injury, the injured man's resentment will be softened to pity, he will ascribe the offense to inadvertence or misunderstanding of some sort, and he will wish to recover the injurer from his degradation. (d) And here the love which made the former relationship so sweet and beautiful awakes and begins with eagerness to devise ways to bring the injurer back into the old dear peace [Cf. J.R. Seeley: Ecce Homo, chs. XXII and XXIII ("Law of Forgiveness")].

This brief analysis makes it clear that reconciliation is forever barred unless the enmity can be blotted out, and that by him who has felt the injury as a personal affront and wrong.

Grace is the New Testament word for the love of God which takes the initiative in the reconciliation—the love that goes forth to repair the damage, all the damage, wrought by sin. "Behold, the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1: 29). "God commendeth his own love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5: 8). 'By grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God" (Eph. 2: 8).

3. The third element in our stories is Forgiveness, and forgiveness wipes off the old score. Here we meet a chorus of objectors. There is no forgiveness; none with nature, say the scientists; none with law, say the jurists; none with society, say the Pharisees; none with anybody, say the cynics. But we live by fellowship, and if broken fellowship may not be restored, if the handicap of a guilty past, of a stained conscience, may not be lifted, we are in an evil case indeed, and we must despair of getting forward at all. "If I am to go on living, I must find some cure for my sick conscience" (Ibsen). Now there is forgiveness with God ; it is not written that He may be trifled with, but that He may be feared.

Our stories show a broken relationship, and the offended taking the initiative in restoring fellowship; they also show forgiveness, and suggest the terms on which forgiveness can be bestowed. The completed forgiveness is never possible until the wrongdoer has reached the state of forgivableness. However much the injured may long and strive for restored fellowship, an experienced forgiveness waits upon a change in the mood and attitude of the injurer. The quality of the change can best be indicated by saying that the injurer must come to feel about the injury in the way the injured feels. Fellowship means togetherness, oneness of feeling, not necessarily of judgment or opinion, but particularly of feeling, about life, about each other; and here a thousand subtleties of mutual understanding play happily. Now, in restored fellowship all these come back, and they come back into the realm of feeling. It means that the two parties are together again in their estimate of, and in their emotional response to, the wrong done.

Take Charles and his father, or Neesima and his school boys; they fell apart in their differing estimate and feeling about truancy, rebellion. They must get together at the point where they fell apart; they must come to feel the same way about truancy and rebellion. Attention must be focused exactly there. It will not do to look elsewhere. No loose and general acknowledgment of wrongdoing will suffice. Evasion of the specific wrong is in-tolerable, for it looks toward salving the hurt, not its cure ["I know not a more presumptuous, a more unholy view of God, than this general trust in his placability, this loose reliance that we may draw to any extent upon his forgiving mercies— not up to the measure in which we seek to be one with Him, but up to whatever measure we may need to be forgiven." (John Hamilton Thom: Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ)].  Rebellion in the school seemed a fine assertion of independence; it was a haughty adventure with exhilaration in it—so the boys felt, and there was doubtless a dash of curiosity to see how the "Old Man" would handle the situation. In its first phase the wrong had nothing distinctly ugly or mean or fierce. But by the time they were summoned to the assembly hall all these features had appeared, and they were as far as they well could be from seeing the affair as Neesima saw it; and feeling about it as he felt about it was even further away. What they saw as a declaration of independence, a proud adventure, he saw as a thrust at all authority. What they felt as a piece of smart bravado, he felt as a deep hurt. What made them feel defiant made him feel sorrowful; exhilaration in them, abysmal grief in him.

Now, our question is, How can this chasm of difference be—not bridged—but filled up so that no trace of it will remain? Obviously Neesima must do it; and he must begin by showing them how he feels. He may show them how he feels by what he says [Matt. 23:34: "I send to you prophets."], but more by what he does [Matt. 21:37: "Last of all he sent hes son."].   The first item to be exhibited (Rom. 3: 25) is one in which he and they agree, namely, that wrongdoing deserves to be punished. This age-long deliverance of the moral consciousness is not expunged by the present day aversion to the retributive aspects of punishment. "In every punishment as such there must be justice, and this constitutes what is essential to the notion" [Kant, quoted by Mozley: The Doctrine of the Atonement, Scribners, 1916, p. 208, ch. vii, "Towards a Doctrine", and excellent discussion. Mozley's bibliography contains more than 150 names.]. If the ferule was used and accepted for the correction of minor offenses against the school regulations, it was because both Principal and pupils carried deep in their nature a sense of "some primary and necessary connexion between sin and punishment," a sense that the infliction of the due penalties of wrongdoing must first be justified by itself as punishment, i. e., as pure evil [Ibid., p. 208]. Their assent to this connection is, I repeat, due to the identity of their moral constitution; it bears no particular relation to the specific difference that has arisen between them; and therefore it is not a step towards reconciliation, though it does furnish a platform on which such a step may be taken.

The next thing the Principal must show is that he suffers—he is indeed the chief sufferer —in the situation their wrongdoing has produced [Cf. Douglass White: Forgiveness and Suffering]. This began to appear when he told them how he loved them, how deep a hurt their behavior had given him, how deeply grieved he was. And we may believe that already some temperaments in the group began to soften, to feel sorry for him. And when in further proof of his love he proceeded so completely to identify himself with them in the wrong they had done as to accept in him-self the punishment due them and stood there, to speak in figures, openly crucified before them, dying their death—when they saw this, rebellion died in them. From being sorry for him, they turned with self-loathing upon themselves, and cried out: "What have we done? We have shed innocent blood; we have 'crucified' our friend." And with a rush of apprehension they saw that it was their deed that had inflicted this hurt [Cf. E.D. Burton on Rom 3:23-26, "The suffering of Christ on the Cross is the momentary laying bare of the agelong hurt sin inflicts on the heart of God."], brought this blight upon the school and upon their own natures, and they hated it. If now they could have done so—so completely had they passed over to his point of view and way of feeling about the whole matter—they would have healed his wounds, and taken upon themselves in tenfold volume the suffering he bore [cf. old hymn, "I hate the sins that made thee mourn," and the little girl's "Dear Lord, I'm sorry for you."].

We here see the third item in the terms of forgiveness. Once this state of feeling has been reached, there remains no barrier to the full outflow of love toward the culprits—culprits no longer, now that they have come to see and feel what wrongdoing is and what it does and to hate it as every sound moral nature does. And love's last demonstration is the word of forgiveness; for it means we are together again, with nothing, nothing, between [Isa. 44:22, "I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgression;" Isa. 43:25, "I will not remember thy sins."].

The story of the three children, though it appears to do so, does not pass over items 1 and 2 of the terms of forgiveness as here set forth. For both children and father recognized the relation of authority with its righteous law, "Thou shalt not swing," the obligation of obedience, with desert of punishment for disobedience; and they also saw the suffering which was the entail of the disobedience. It was because they were deeply together in the experience of suffering, due to their love for the little sister the suffering of the children shot through and through with twinges of self-reproach. "How wicked we were to disobey Father, to make him suffer so, to bring this terrible affliction upon little sister"—it was because of this togetherness in the experience of suffering that no further infliction, no further exhibition of the wickedness of disobedience and of its inevitable consequence of suffering, was needed. The children were forgiveable, for they felt as the father did about their sin, and he forgave them. He could not blot out all the consequences, for the paralysis lingered on for months, but he could and did blot out the remembrance of their sin. This need not mean that memory lost the broken swing as an occurrence which it could no longer recall, but it does mean that, when recalled, it was no longer a barrier to, nor even a shadow on, their fellowship. On the contrary, it deepened fellowship, for it had proved how deeply at one in their essential nature father and children were.

IV. God and Sin

The reader will have observed that I have used the words offense, affront, injury, wrong, in describing the breaking of fellowship and that I have not been able to keep the word sin out. I have not been unmindful of the fact that the first group of words applies to persons and that sin is properly used only as between ourselves and God. I undertake in this last section to set down the points involved in the statement of Paul, "We are reconciled to God through the death of His Son" (Rom. 5:10). We must sweep our minds clean of all such ideas as that God needed to be changed in His disposition toward sinners; or that He punished His Son on the Cross. God is Love from eternity, and God was in Christ taking the world back into His favor, as in John 3:16 and 2 Corinthians 5:19.

1. Says Amiel [Journal, Dec. 13, 1858], "The best measure of the profundity of any religious doctrine is given by its conception of sin and the cure of sin." It is clear from what has been said above that we are here concerned with God's estimate of sin. Matthew Arnold [Literature and Dogma, a book not to be forgotten], said the revelation of the Old Testament is, "Jehovah loveth Righteousness; the revelation of the New Testament is, Righteousness by Jesus Christ." "Righteousness and justice are the foundation of thy throne" (Psa. 89: 14; 97: 2). "Yea, O Lord God, the Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments" (Rev. 16: 7). Such statements mean that the universe is moral to its centre in the heart of God. They mean also that sin is antithetic to the universe as a whole, as disintegration is antithetic to integration, as disruption and taint are antithetic to perfection. If now we leave these abstract terms and come to personal, and remember that the God of our religion is not an impersonal absolute, but the infinitely compassionate Father of our spirits, we may begin dimly to feel how sin throbs along every fiber of His being as pain, and how every resource of infinite love and wisdom must come forth to put sin away. How does God feel about sin? We have no answer to that question but—Jesus! Before Jesus appeared all that our Father could say was, "The soul that sinneth it shall die" (Ezk. 18: 4, 20 ; Gen. 2 :17 ; etc.) [It is surely time we had dropped the notion that physical death is the penalty of sin. Adam and Eve did not "die" the day they ate the fruit, and Christ's saints "die" along with all others. Cf. White: Forgiveness and Suffering, p. 25).]. That was warning, and it affirms "a necessary connexion between sin and punishment" (Mozley, ut supra). Now, we were made in the image of God—the children are like the father—and the likeness appears in nothing more distinctly than in our instant and instinctive feeling that sin merits punishment. Our blessed Lord, who is the Father's compassion in supreme manifestation, and who must have corrected it if it were wrong, reaffirmed again and again this ancient judgment—sin deserves punishment and must be punished (Matt. 25: 46; Luke 16: 19 ff.).

One may be permitted to ask, How else could the sanctity of law be maintained if there were no "penalty" for disobedience? Would not wholesale remission of penalty break down, at once and forever, the reign of law in a moral world? Professor Mozley, in the volume referred to [The Doctrine of the Atonement, Scribners, p. 206ff], effectively answers those who find difficulty in punishment as vindication of law, and so as retributive. He says, "Rightly considered, punishment begins as the due reward of sin, that is, as retribution; penitence changes its character from retributive to restorative; but penitence involves the acknowledgment of the righteousness of the retribution" (p. 208), for penitence is assent to the righteous judgment of God upon sin. Thus far we have God's estimate of sin in the form of law "in its absolute eternal character of holiness," and in the instinctive assent of our moral nature to the iniquity of the violation of law. "Nothing can make amends for the violation except some act of a quality equal to the law's own essential quality." Thus the military leader, Schamyl, in our story, when the culprit was discovered, had the alternatives of ignoring the offense in order to shield his mother, or of affirming on a scale as public as the first promulgation of the law the certainty of punishment, and he chose the latter. It was love that made him do it, and here we see another phase of the revelation of God's estimate of Sin. The Old Testament is not without foregleams (Psa. 103:13; Jer. 31: 3; etc.), but the full revelation of Love is given in the New; and not till the final disclosure in the Cross do we at last see what Origen meant when he said, "God is Love, and Love is Agony."

One fears that many people in our day have lost, or are in danger of losing, the austerity of love. A sentimental age cannot endure the infliction of pain, and easily mistakes leniency, which is weakness, for love, which in its mighty reach may do terrible things to snatch its object from the jaws of death. "Behold the goodness and severity of God" (Rom. 11: 22) . "His mercy indeed is infinite; but then it is the mercy of a holy God that embraces us, and not the unmoral compassions of a Being made in our own image"[Thom: Op. cit., Series I, p. 75]. Perhaps Moses, in Exodus, is the nearest Old Testament parallel, when in a horror of indignation and in an agony of love, he cried : "Oh, this people have sinned a great sin. . . . Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book" (Exod. 32:31-32). Only parents who love their children more than life have ever sounded this otherwise unplumbed mighty deep ; who, writhing in anguish and drowned in tears, cry: "O my child, better were it for me if you had never been born than that you should grow up all stained and sodden and rotten with sin. Better, if I had never seen the light of the sun than that a child of mine should go away into the awful night of the outer darkness." Love like that, but a dim reflection of the love of God, is antipodal to pliancy, concession, flexibility, and can never relax an atom of the "holiness without which no man shall see the Lord" (Heb. 12: 14) . Only love like that, nay, only God who is Love—and this is the special point for emphasis here—can feel the sting, the hate-fulness, the immitigable horror, the grief, the shame, the heartbreak, of sin, as the gloom of mountain abysses can be measured only by the whiteness of the snow on their inaccessible heights.

To revert to our general again, Schamyl alone in all that camp, and he only because of the depth of his nature and of his religion and because of his keen sense of the complex solidarity in which the camp was bound—only Schamyl could feel the blight of the bribery and corruption which had infected his army. And he must, as far as could be, bring the whole army to share his feeling of the sacredness of law, of the inexcusable iniquity of violations, of the preciousness of sound morals, of the importance of securing the future against repetition of crime—all these and much else he must make them feel, and, in particular, he must make them see that nothing is safe in his and their world if the poison of sin remains. It is easy to see what would have been the effect if he had said, "Since it is my mother who is the culprit, the law cannot take its course." On the contrary, he said, "Since it is my mother who is the culprit, my mother whom I love better than life and whom I must therefore save, the law must take its course." With what result we saw. And when he took her place and before the awestruck people took her punishment upon himself, he gave the supreme demonstration of his hatred of sin and of his love for his mother and for his people. Her worst punishment was to see the penalty her crime brought on her son, and she saw it with a penitence which made her whole. This incident, I think, helps us to see how Jesus is God's estimate of sin written in characters of His own life's crimson.

2. And what is our response to this revelation? All our stories show that the normal response is to wake up to the realization that God is not indifferent to sin or lenient to sinners, and that therefore the pleasures of sin are a snare, and, indeed, an illusion, and lead on to terrible consequences, to ourselves, to the moral universe, to God. "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil" (Eccl. 8:11). The psalmist tells us he nearly lost his footing when he saw that men could be wicked and prosperous and die without pangs (Ps. 73). Where was the judgment of God upon sin, its condemnation, the vindication of the law against it? After all, is not sin a trivial thing about which men ("modern men") need not "bother themselves"?

The withering rebuke to all such thoughts is the central tragedy of history, the Cross of Christ, where God incarnate took upon Him-self the doom of sin, and so condemned sin in the flesh, thus affirming before all worlds and forever the holiness of law and the inflexible integrity, the majesty, of the moral order centered in Himself. Plato had said that "one perfectly just could not appear amongst the wicked without provoking a murderous hatred." So it comes about that the revelation of the holy love of God in Jesus became the occasion of the development of sin to its extreme manifestation. From the side of the revelation of sin, He is the victim of murderous hatred; but from the side of the revelation of the sacredness of moral law, His voluntary submission to the just judgment of sin in death carries the exhibition of love to its utmost demonstration.

The sight of suffering is not of itself redemptive; it may indeed be hardening; but the sight of suffering willingly borne in place of those whose sin deserved it is redemptive, for it carries two elements, the acceptance of doom and love for the doomed trying to save them. The first looks toward God and says, "True and righteous are thy judgments" (Rev. 16: 7); the second looks in infinite pity toward sinners and says, "Be ye reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5: 20). The normal response is repentance and confession, whereupon the word of forgiveness is spoken and reconciliation is accomplished. Inflexibility and tenderness have both been conserved, while the end, restored fellowship, has been secured. Forgiveness, and forgiveness alone, meets both requirements. As Amiel put it, "Pardon alone conciliates the spotless purity of perfection with the infinite pity due to weakness—that is to say, it alone preserves and defends the idea of holiness while giving full scope to that of love"[Journal, April 15, 1870].

In His Son God enters into union with the sinner on the plane of his sin, and so opens the way to a union of the sinner, by repentance and confession, with Himself on the plane of His holiness. In this union the past is blotted out and the future is assured. If a man refuses this last appeal there remains for him nothing but a settled isolation, the loneliness and bitterness of a heart that can never forget its refusal of the infinite Love.

THE SCANDAL OF THE CROSS

"It is no slack knot that the Saviour has to undo. All the energy of a perverse world in its created freedom, pulled on the tangle to tighten it."
"To grasp the real, deep tragedy of life is enough to unhinge any mind which does not find God's solution of it in the central tragedy of the Cross and its redemption."
"The Cross is of all our problems the most baffling, or it is the solution of them all."
"The true theology of the Cross and its atonement is the solution of the world. There is no other. It is that or nothing."
"Nay, the Cross alone is not solution without the solution for the Cross itself, the Resurrection and all its train beyond Christ's death. The solution of life is death shown practically as a victory over death of every kind."

— P. T. Forsyth.

In previous chapters I have attempted under the title, The Death of Jesus, to set forth the fact and the explanation of the Cross. Only those who have made a similar attempt can know how deeply one feels the inadequacy of all explanations here. 'When one has done his best to capture in words a truth so vast in its reach, so varied in its expression, and so vital to our need, he is thrown into exasperation when he sees streaming in from every side a rising tide of meanings which quickly blots out the lines of his analysis, dissolves his definitions, and insists that he do his work all over again. Even so, there is a bit of comfort in such a feeling, for is it not a demonstration that one is at least on the right line? I have recently seen quoted a French saying, that, "when a man is right, he is much more right than he thinks."

In the present chapter I do not mean to go in pursuit of this "much more" of which I have caught glimpses while engaged on the preceding studies. That could only end in another flush of exaggeration. Instead I propose, as the title indicates, to focus attention upon the Cross as a stumbling-block. The Christian mind sees the Cross as the centre of the Christian religion and as the centre of the moral universe, and glories in it as such—

In the Cross of Christ I glory.

But the non-Christian mind sees in it an obstacle which makes faith impossible. Paul's blazing certainties about the glories of the Cross made him feel the more keenly the tragedy of the misunderstanding in which men see their one hope as an offense and scandal, from which they turn away in mockery, in weariness, or in disgust. There have been people of this sort from the beg inning, and I would fain confer with them in sympathy with their difficulties and not without hope that some of these may be removed.

I. The First To Be Offended

Peter was the first to feel it as an offense (Matt. 16: 21-23), though John the Baptist was the first to announce the Cross (John 1: 29. Cf. Isa. 53). There is no clearer example of the power of inspiration to lift a
man clean out of his habitual thinking than this announcement of John, "Behold, the Lamb of God." The Messiah whom he believed in must be a revolutionist who would sift the nation, cut down and burn the fruitless trees, and set up a new nation with Himself as King. But when Jesus returned from His long fast in the wilderness, lo, the King has become a victim, the conquering Messiah has become the lamb for sacrifice. And when we hear from his prison at Machaerus John's question : "Art thou he that should come'?" we are bound to conclude that the fiery prophet (Matt. 3: 11-12) fell back into his more commonplace conceptions of the Messiah, and, indeed, below them. But for once he stood on the highest peak of inspiration, and saw things hidden from the foundation of the world.

The first disciples of Jesus had been disciples of John, and so the conceptions of the Messiah current in John's circle passed with Peter and Andrew and the rest into the group which formed about Jesus. And they constituted in their minds a body of ideas which their new Master had to dislodge. One can discern the patience with which He worked at this task—training narrow men with nationalist dreams and ambitions to become the missionaries of the true Kingdom of God, supernational and universal. And when at last they had been convinced that He, whose career thus far had been so unlike that depicted by the Baptist, was yet the Messiah, he began (then and not till then—Matt. 16: 20) to lead them into the mystery which had been hidden in John's announcement of the "Lamb of God." From that time Jesus Christ [Here for the first time Matthew uses the official title as a proper name. Cf. Matt. 11:2] began to show to His disciples that it was necessary ( dei ) for Him to go to Jerusalem, to suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, to be killed, and on the third day to be raised.

Thereupon Peter, loyal to his own, the Baptist's, and his fellow disciples' conception of the Messiah, broke out in violent protest against the Cross (v. 24, stauron ). He was outraged, for the prediction of his Master not only flatly contradicted His Messiahship, but threw suspicion on his own loyalty and that of his friends, who would certainly fight to prevent such a catastrophe (John 18: 10 and parallels). And when they had followed to Gethsemane through thickening gloom, which there became too deep for them, we read, "They all left him and fled" (Mark 14: 50).

What had become of His matchless teachings, His powers, His titles—Messiah, Son of man, Son of God? Where had gone the exultation of the song which thrilled the slopes of Olivet last Sunday—"Hosanna to the Son of David," "Hosanna in the highest"? The pathetic figure with His hands tied behind His back, hustled away through the night to the house of Annas—no son of mighty David He, no restoring of the Kingdom to Israel could be hoped for from Him. Later, when the worst had come [The Jewish scholar, Joseph Klausner, says, "Nothing could have been more horrible and appalling." (Jesus of Nazareth, 1925, p. 353.)] the simple, heartbreaking record says, "When all the crowds who had collected for the sight saw what had happened they turned away beating their breasts" (Luke 23:48). Men whose feet He had washed the night before and who had deserted Him at the Garden were in that crowd, men who had clung to a last hope, the hope that He would hurl the challenge of the rulers (Luke 23:35) back into their teeth, deliver Himself by a miracle, and prove Himself to be all they had believed Him to be, overwhelming all—executioners, officers, rulers, priests, multitude—with a demonstration that the Son of God had come. This last hope was quenched, and in the void place of their hearts where He had been, filling it with rapture and radiance, nothing was left, nothing but a knell.

II. The Crucified Messiah

The Cross had killed their faith. And from these, who had a thousand reasons for faith that others did not have, we may pass to consider the scandal of the Cross to the conscientious Jew who had withheld himself from the ranks of the disciples of the Prophet of Nazareth.

This man had given many and satisfactory reasons for not joining the new Teacher's circle ; and now that the death of Jesus had proved the futility of His claims and the stupid folly of His disciples for believing in Him, he, conscientious Pharisee that he was, who had held himself aloof from the craze John the Baptist had set going, was doubly vindicated in his refusal to be swept off his feet and stampeded into running after "Messiah." "When Messiah comes he will be known by unmistakable signs." Saul of Tarsus is, of course, the typical example of this attitude.

Paul is recalling his own experience when he says (1 Cor. 1: 23) a crucified Messiah was a stumbling-block to Jews. Had he not been brought up in the straitest sect of his ancestral religion? It had been written in the law, "If a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death, and thou hang him upon a tree; his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt surely bury him the same day; for he that is hanged is accursed of God ; that thou defile not thy land which Jehovah thy God giveth thee for an inheritance" (Deut. 21: 22-23). Accordingly, when Saul, after considerable absence, returned to Jerusalem—probably from some synagogue appointment in the provinces—and found the ,city from end to end and from top to bottom astir over the announcement that a man who had been crucified was the Messiah, his whole nature burst into flame ; amazement mounting to horror, to frenzy, threw him into a career; he would save the faith of the fathers from a horrible profanation. Nothing is more infuriating to a clear-minded man than to see numbers of people whom he has loved and esteemed succumbing to some crazy infatuation; and when Saul found a great company of the priests, the appointed guardians of the true religion, falling to the confession of Jesus, he knew he was commissioned from God to stamp out the heresy and stay the putrefying infection. This is the man who will one day write, "You have heard of my former conduct in Judaism, how furiously I persecuted the church of God and made havoc of it" (Gal. 1: 13), and who before King Agrippa will acknowledge how exceedingly mad against the Christians he was, how eagerly he cast his vote for their death, and how he pursued them even to distant cities in hope of bringing them in chains to Jerusalem (Act. 26:9 f.).

Yes, but the Damascus road, the light from Heaven,

When day seemed added unto day
As though Omnipotence had lit up the sky with another sun —Dante.

the men prostrate on the ground (Acts 26: 14) , the Voice—all these lay between Saul and Paul, and they make all the difference be tween the two men. If the Voice had said, "I am Messiah," Saul would have rushed back to Jerusalem as the herald of the new age. "Messiah is come. I have seen Him in a glory above the brightness of the sun, and He will shortly redeem Israel. Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." But the Voice said, "I am Jesus." Here was a shattering collision; and the man Saul, with his whole house of life—all his religion, all his hopes—was scattered in a thousand fragments. It took him three heavy years to get these fragments together again to build a house in which his soul could live.

Now my point here is that only some such revelation as this—a miracle—could have over-come in him the deep repugnance of his nature to ascribing Messiahship to a dead man (cf. Acts 25:19) , an idea utterly revolting to Jews then (1 Cor. 1: 23) , and equally so to this day. In proof of this last, let me conclude this section with a quotation from the Jewish nationalist historian, Dr. Joseph Klausner:

What is Jesus to the Jewish nation of the present day? To the Jewish nation, he can be neither God nor the Son of God, in the sense conveyed by belief in the Trinity. Either conception is to the Jew not only impious and blasphemous, but in comprehensible. Neither can he to the Jewish nation be the Messiah: the kingdom of heaven ("the days of Messiah") is not yet come. Neither can they regard him as a prophet: he lacks the prophet's political perception and the prophet's spirit of consolation, in the political-nationalist sense. Neither can they regard him as a law-giver or the founder of a new religion. He did not even desire to be such. . . . But Jesus is for the Jewish nation a great teacher of morality and an artist in parable... . If ever the day should come and this ethical code be stripped of its wrappings of miracle and mysticism, the Book of the Ethics of Jesus will be one of the choicest treasures in the literature of Israel for all time. (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 413 f.) [This is the book which recetly created something of a sensation in Jewish circles in New York. Under the title, Jesus of Nazareth, it was traslated from Hebrew in 1925 by Herbert Danby, D.D.]

 

III. The Intellectuals

I have already quoted from a paragraph in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians. Hear him again, "Jews insist upon miracles and Greeks demand philosophy" (1 Cor. 1: 22) [Goodspeed]. He is remembering an experience in Athens, his discussion with the novelty mongers in the public square, the derisive laughter which greeted his allusion, in the Mars Hill address, to the resurrection. This experience confirmed him in his determination, (1 Cor. 2: 1-2), on approaching Corinth, to mix no philosophy or poetry with his proclamation of Jesus the crucified as Saviour. If he had been less firmly convinced of his message he would undoubtedly have sought a more elaborate adaptation of it here than he had attempted in Athens. But no, there is no use in trying to make a message which involves crucifixion palatable to a Greek audience, and he will therefore set it forth in its bare repulsivenes with no apology for doing so. Now our question is, What is the explanation of this repulsiveness of the Cross to the philosophic mind?

Professor Glover says—and he ought to know—that the Stoics invented the word conscience [Progress in Religion, p. 40]; but long before their day Aeschylus had "exhausted the resources of his genius in the attempt to depict the horror of avenging powers, who, under the name of Furies, torment the criminal" ; yet even so, his theme is "not the conscience of the sinner, but the ob j ective consequence of his crime. . . . The tragedy is the punishment of the guilty, not the inward sense of sin"[Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of Life, p. 23]. The Stoics, at their best in the first century of our era and later, did not allow for the sense of sin [Glover, The Conflict of Religions, p. 67] and so had no need of redemption from sin. "God," says Epictetus, "ordains if you wish good, get it from yourself. You must exercise the will, and the thing is done, it is set right... . From within comes ruin, and from within comes help." "What do you want with prayers," asks Seneca," make yourself happy"[Ibid., p. 68].

It was out of this superiority complex, in which men thought themselves already one with the Deity (order of nature), that the philosophers whom Paul encountered in Athens mocked at his call to repentance, and to faith in One whom God had commended to all men in that He had raised Him from the dead (Acts 17:31) .

Here we have a sufficient picture of the temper and attitude of the philosopher, a temper and attitude as distinct in Oriental sages of the same period as among the Greeks. "What the superior man seeks is in himself" (Confucius); "The inherent goodness of human nature is divinely implanted" (Mencius) [See Hume: The World's Living Religions, p. 119] to quote only two among many. And thus man has all the resources for salvation in himself. Whether we see him as Prometheus hurling titanic defiance at Jupiter in the right of man's unconquered and unconquerable soul, as a devotee climbing the long, long stairs to the South Gate of Heaven on China's Sacred Mountain, or toiling through ages to escape, as Gautama Buddha did, the endless chain of rebirths into a miserable world, or by some metaphysical tour de force vanishing into the impersonal allness of Hindu speculation, in every case and everywhere man refuses to surrender his boast, "I am the captain of my soul."

If the center of sin is selfishness, the center of selfishness is pride, and when Aristotle's Megalopsuchos (Mr. Greatsoul) hears that God has come to save him, taking upon Him-self, in the Person of His Son, the responsibility of his sin, Greatsoul meets the proposition with a towering independence: "This is my affair; I will attend to it." And he attends to it, either by denying the sin, or by ignoring it as altogether negligible, or by devising a self-discipline to be quit of it. In no case will he give the slightest heed to any remotest suggestion of help from the outside in dealing with it. There is no help outside.

IV. The Modern Mind

This brings us to the present day Sadducee who calls himself the Modern Mind. "After Rousseau and the French Revolution, humanity was enthroned." And Goethe, whom Heine likened to the Olympian Jove—"Goethe the grand Immoralist of his epoch, wise and wicked Goethe from whom flows all that is modern"[Egoists, A Book of Supermen, by Huneket, p. 362f.] —is the typical example of the wholly emancipated modern mind. His successors and imitators are a great multitude [I make no reference throughout this section to the so-called "Modernist" of recent controversy]. Their deepest aversion is Christianity, and more particularly the Cross. From Nietzsche, who was fond of saying, "The only Christian died on the Cross," and who never tired of pouring contempt on Christian morals, "the collective egoism of the feeble," and vitriolic vituperation on the Cross, to Bernard Shaw, who claimed for himself and others "the right to refuse Atonement . . . to say [when salvation is offered] 'No, thank you, I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing ' " [Androcles and the Lion, p. cxvii] and on through a thousand variations to a magazine (1926), lately projected in Shanghai by some young literary men, which publishes an article, for which the editors disclaim responsibility, in which the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and Redemption are called myths which Chinese Christianity need not accept—through all these varieties, I say, the one aversion of the modern mind is everywhere in evidence. The Countess Schimmelmann, evangelist to the Danish fishermen, encountered it in perhaps its extreme form among devil worshipers in Paris who, when she mentioned the blood of Christ, frothed and foamed at the mouth like madmen, or perhaps I had better say, like wild animals.

Goethe under the restraints of a genuine and wide culture was of course not violent, but he is none the less sure that redemption comes through rich human experience, as in the second part of Faust. "The key to Faust's rescue may be found—in Faust himself, an ever purer and higher form of activity to the end"[Strong: The Great Poets and Their Theology, p. 319]. "First self-culture, then labor for the good of others."

Freedom like life must be deserved by toil.

The redemption of man is the theme, and this, according to this poet-philosopher, is the method of it. The reader will have noticed that the sentences quoted at the head of this article are all taken from P. T. Forsyth, all but one of them from his book, The Justification of God. Professor James Denney [Letters to W.R. Nicoll, p. 118] said in 1908 of Dr. Forsyth, that he had "more true and important things to say, in my opinion, than anyone writing on theology." In the same letter he complains of Forsyth's difficult style—people would be glad to take hold of his thought if they could "find the handle." I have repeatedly commended Forsyth as the ablest English-speaking theologian and have been met with some impatient comment on his mannerisms of style. He himself expressed impatience with people who could not understand him (Cf. Browning). Be that as it may, like the Danish theologian Kierkegaard, whom Forsyth alone among the English writers seems to have studied, he solemnly dedicated his unsurpassed insight and his unequalled knowledge of the whole course of Christian history and of the whole realm of philosophy and theology to the one task of making clear what the Christian demand really is [A Memoir of Kierkegaard has just been published in Munich. One wishes an English translation of the two volumes of his diaries might be made available]. In all his books he finds this central demand in the Cross; and no writer of my acquaintance sees so clearly how repulsive the message of the Cross is to the modern mind.

The modern mind is interested in redemption, as we saw in Goethe, but it is not redemption from sin to holiness, but redemption from immaturity, ignorance, defect, to maturity, knowledge, perfection (in the Greek sense of the perfectibility of the natural man)—in a word, from Philistinism to culture. "The fundamental heresy is humanist." Humanism is the religion, Rousseau the high priest, and humanitarianism is the career. God, if there be a God, is there to approve and crown this development of the beautiful creature, man [Cf. The Justification of God, p. 18f].

The method is return to nature. Take the chains off [See Shelly: Prometheus Unbound] let man have his way, obey his impulses, and so fulfill his life. One recalls Voltaire's comment on Rousseau, "Rousseau makes us feel like running about in the forests on all fours." And it is well to remember in this connection what was said about this arch-romanticist's own life: "Never was a more squalid fifth act enacted on the stage of life" —cultured but corrupt.

If now we try to trace the line of this estheticism which today poses so impressively as the rival to Christianity with its redemption through the Cross, we shall find ourselves back among the Greeks, with their worship of the Good, the Beautiful, the True. Years ago I read Charles Bigg's "The Christian Platonists of Alexandria," and felt myself fascinated by the expansiveness of their interpretation of Christianity, in which the Incarnation took precedence of the Atonement. I felt then and feel now that the most fateful conjuncture in history was the point in which the stream which rises in Sinai and flows by Calvary met the stream that rises in Olympus and flows by the Acropolis. Dean Inge ["The Platonic Tradition"] is being reviewed in current magazines, and the reviewers do not always see that the two streams I have alluded to represent two estimates of human nature and two conceptions of its redemption—the one finding ground for a general and somewhat vague optimism in a process of progress conceived to be inevitable under the urge of Bergson's Elan vital; the other seeing the one hope of our race in God's judgment of its sin in the Cross of His Son, and in the forgiveness of sin made at last and once for all safe and possible through the Cross.

Now the burden of all I am saying is, that the modern mind "narcotized by civilization, by science, by culture, and engrossed with practical activities," schemes of philanthropy, and what not, and so without leisure or inclination to inquire whether its moral interior may not be crumbling [Forsyth: Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, p. 330]—this modern mind, equipped with all the resources of science and art and committed to self-salvation, will have none of the Cross. And the final reason is that the acceptance of the Cross begins in a surrender, a surrender of self in a confession of sin and of the weakness it entails, a surrender of all our determination to conquer the world, to master our destiny, to save our souls. This modern mind can easily confess its ignorance—is it not seeking always to abolish ignorance? It can confess its error—is it not forever committed to the search for truth? It can even confess its disease—did not Christianity come into the world to create doctors and nurses and comforters? It can confess its stupidity—are we not always glad to find out when we have made fools of ourselves? It can confess its feebleness—have we not dedicated ourselves to the worship of Power? But its guilt? Never! "Christ came to redeem us from our last strait; and this deep distress was neither blindness nor sickness of spirit . . . it was guilt" [Forsyth: The Church and the Sacraments, p. 287, a great book which seems strangely neglected] and Bernard Shaw is speaking for, if not in the name of, this modern mind, when he speaks of Paul as "a pathological symptom of that particular sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings it under the tyranny of two delirious terrors, the terror of sin, and the terror of death" [Op. cit., p. xcvi]. And the one word of Paul which balks the age, but which Christians with so deep a gratitude repeat is, "By the grace of God, I am what I am" [Cf. a series of articles in a London daily, by various writers, under the title, "My Religion"].

V. The Christian Mind

Here we turn to the question, How is it that for Christians who also live in the modern world, and many of whom know well the aversions described in the foregoing section, and all the reasons for them—how is it that for them, as Amiel says, "the crown of thorns has become the crown of glory and a gibbet has become a symbol of salvation"? [Journal, April 15, 1870].

Before going on to consider the transfiguration of the Cross in Christian faith, it is fair to inquire whether the modern mind as above described has not some justification for the misunderstanding (to use the most sympathetic word available) under which we Christians believe multitudes of fine people labor. Many of these people are highly intellectual.

Some of them are scholars in this field. But if they are right, Christians are wrong. Christianity is the religion of redemption in Christ, in whom we have the forgiveness of our sins (Col. 1: 14). If Christians are right, Goethe and Nietzsche and Ibsen and Shaw are wrong.

These men all insist upon openness of mind in facing facts. By all means; but as one has put it, "Openmindedness costs too much when the man wakes up some morning to find that he has no major premise and religion sinks to a rather uninspired branch of social statistics." I once handed a volume of Shaw to a distinguished professor of theology. He did not lay the book down until he had finished the long Preface of 127 pages. The next morning he said, "Shaw is a good counter-irritant, a good danger signal." I suppose he meant by this that it is well for Christians to be challenged, to be obliged to tell what they mean by their "Gospel," to be crowded back upon reality, their own central realities. Says Romaine Rolland, "Ideas that are not constantly confronted with reality, which are not frequently dipped in the stream of experience, grow dry, take on a toxic character, and produce fever"[Cherambault, p. 75]. Theology must sometimes confess to the mild impeachment.

It is a fact, however, that those whose names I have cited as representative of our Sadducean age had their first contacts with Christianity in state churches or in Roman Catholicism; and their revolt was a revolt against institutions, and institutionalized religion, rather than against the more abundant life our Lord came to give. Heine said, "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out; if thy reason offend thee, join the Roman Catholic Church." That alternative being impossible to the men I have named, they joined the ranks of the illuminati, and with a gesture of impatience threw churchianity and Christianity together into the discard.

But let us not overlook the fact that evangelicalism as well as sacerdotalism comes in for protest. Men as robust as Ibsen, and as intent on genuineness as he, will have none of the easy solutions of the human problem so often heard in Christian preaching. The cure of a sick conscience cannot be effected by a vest pocket nostrum. And if you mean to say that Christ died for our sins in order that we might escape dying, then our robust Titan of the North will tell you roundly, "Your God is an old man whom you can cheat," and that for himself he prefers to play the man and die for his own sins.

Bernard Shaw thinks of himself as crying out in the name of Jesus against much current antinomianism when he says, " 'I come as an infallible patent medicine for bad consciences' is not one of the sayings of Jesus in the gospels." [Androcles and the Lion, p. ci, a book which begins with the question, "Why not give Christianity a trial?"]. And again: "There is no record of Christ's having said, 'Go and sin as much as you like, you can put it all on me'. He said, 'Sin no more' and insisted that He was putting up the standard of conduct, not debasing it, and that the righteousness of the Christian must exceed that of the scribe and Pharisee." I hope the reader will pardon me for going on to quote the next sentence, "The notion that He was shedding His blood in order that every petty cheat and adulterer and libertine might wallow in it and come out whiter than snow cannot be imputed to Him on His own authority." The whole paragraph blazes with anger against debasing the moral currency, and it also gives the counter proposal which he conceives our Lord to lay down and which represents the kind of redemption Shaw finds in the Gospel: "He was to take away the sins of the world by good government, by justice and mercy, by setting the welfare of little children above the pride of princes, by casting all the quackeries and idolatries which now usurp and malversate the power of God into the dust destructor, and by riding on the clouds of glory in heaven, instead of in a thousand guinea motor car. That was delirious if you like; but it was the delirium of a free soul" [Op. cit., p. ci].

Thus it is clear that a brilliant man, whose up-to-dateness no one can question, combines a rejection of what he calls salvationism through the Atonement with a full assent to "the soundness of the secular doctrines of Jesus, for it is about these that we may come to blows in our time." In an earlier day an other brilliant man, Renan, commenting on Amiel, said: "He speaks of sin, of salvation, of redemption, of conversion as if these things were realities. He asks me 'What does M. Renan make of sin?' Eh bien! I think I leave it out." [Quoted by Mrs. Humphry Ward in her Introduction to Amiel's Journal, p. xi.] On the contrary Shaw says, "We are not now afraid to look facts in the face, even such terrifying facts as sin and death. The result is greater sternness in modern thought." [Op. cit., p. cxv.] Greater sternness, yes ; but still no concession to the Christian way of salvation, the only way Christians know whereby sin is put away and sinners reconciled to God. We were reconciled to God through the death of His Son (Rom. 5:10) . Now, it were a tragedy indeed if we two must permanently part company, the one going away with a supercilious or contemptuous, "If you would push your thinking a stage further you would see the absurdity of your Gospel" ; the other going away with a petulant, "Our Gospel was never expected to be popular with the natural man," or with a pitiful, " 'Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone.'"

VI. The Cross in Cosmic Relations

If we are not willing to be left in this case, we must use every means to make clear to all men the transfiguration of the Cross in Christian faith. There is a sense, of course, in which Christians must always bear the reproach of Christ, and it were sheer disloyalty to Him to attempt to tone down that reproach in order to conciliate the mind of the age, a thing of which some writers have accused Ritschl of doing. But loyalty also requires that we do everything in our power to remove the misunderstanding under which our brother men turn away from what James Moffatt calls "the supernatural Act of God once done for man's salvation upon earth" [Every Man's Life of Christ, Prologue, p. 19].

1. There is a great, strange word in the Revelation (1: 17-18) . He who shows himself to the seer, with a countenance like the sun, says : "I am the first and the last, and the Living one; I became dead, and here I am alive forever and ever, and I have the keys of death and the Place of the Dead." Clearly the scale here is immense, and we shall not make even a beginning in comprehending the Cross as seen in the New Testament unless we widen the range and sweep of our view to embrace the universe and eternity. Our New Testament will not allow us to think of the Cross as an incident in the life of a man—individual, local, once over and done with. If it were that, we should find no more significance in it than in the death of any other good man; and we should find ourselves falling sheer down from the vast plateau where shines the everlasting light. Within the framework of these great words, "First . . . last . . . dead . . . Living one . . . keys," we see all worlds and their issues ; and we look onward to the day when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

It is from some such point of view as this that Forsyth says, "The curse of orthodoxy, and of the current religion it has colored, has been to sever the Cross from the whole fabric and movement of the Universe and make it a theologian's affair" [Justification of God, p. 192]. The Cross is "the moral crisis of souls, of nations, of the Universe and of Eternity." Such is the New Testament conception, and when a man, dazzled by his own brilliance, turns his back upon the central sun he goes his own way indeed, but he is walking in his own shadow; and he is going toward what Jesus called the outer darkness, by which I understand Him to mean the darkness that lies beyond the confines of the moral universe. Here is a picture of it from one of the most highly esteemed of all the apostles of culture, Professor George Santayana, of Harvard. He says : "The time will come, astronomers tell us, when life will be extinct on this weary planet. All the delights of sense and imagination will be over. But the masses of matter which the worldlings have transferred with their machinery and carried from one place to another, will remain to bear witness of them. The collocation of atoms will never be what it would have been if their feet had less continuously beaten the earth. They may have the proud happiness [sic] of knowing [will they be there (where?) and will they know?] that when nothing that the spirit values endure, the earth may still sometimes, because of them, cast a slightly different shadow across the craters of the moon"[Little Essays drawn from the Writings of G.S., by L.P. Smith].

2. Those who like that prospect, like it; but the Christian mind lives in a wholly different cosmos. And it is perhaps here that we come upon the explanation of the situation described above—people live in different worlds. To paraphrase Paul, there is a natural world, and there is a spiritual world. Not that which is spiritual is first, but that which is natural; afterwards that which is spiritual. The cosmos of necessity, with its law of the survival of the fittest in a struggle for existence, is first; afterwards, the cosmos of moral law—also a fact—which forever eludes the categories of a necessitarian universe. Lord Birkenhead, in a celebrated rectorial address at Glasgow University in 1923 said: "The motive of self-interest not only is, but must be, and ought to be the main-spring of human conduct." It was a reassuring sign that this speech met with so hostile a press, for the famous lawyer was speaking out of the midst of the natural order, and was not within astronomic distance of the spiritual order with its center in the Cross. In Lord Birkenhead's cosmos science (education) is the saviour; or as another secularist, Mr. John Galsworthy put it, "Education is the only hope of mankind" [In "Atlantic Monthly"]. In his book, International Thought, Galsworthy takes from Thomas Hardy the text for the volume: "The exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation of the world"[Cf. H.G. Wells, "It is a race between Education and Disaster."]; and he argues that three great powers, science, finance, and the press, "are secretly determining the march of the nations. . . . The world's hope lies with them . . . a new triple alliance in service to a new idealism." In the same book he says, "We have made by our science a monster that will yet devour us unless . . ." He does not ask himself where the old idealism came from, or where the new is to come from, and, like the secularist that he is, he entirely ignores religion, and specifically the Christian religion. The Christian religion is two thousand years ahead of his propaganda with its ever expanding internationalism, a world brotherhood based on world redemption in the Cross.

We are indebted to Professor William James [Some Problems of Philosophy, etc.] for his stout refusal to bow down to the gods some of his fellows had set up. "The law of causality is an altar to an unknown god. ... It is not a presupposition that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be." I may insert here Professor James' definition of materialism, "Explaining higher phenomena by lower, and leaving the destiny of the world to the mercy of its blinder parts and forces."

It would draw us too far from the line of this discussion to go into any detail to show how determinism has been transcended and its language become obsolete. [See Patrick's Intoduction to Philosophy, 1924, p. 334f.] Enough has been said to indicate why minds imbued with its presuppositions see no place or possibility for a break in the mechanistic chain, such as is involved, according to their understanding, in redemption and forgiveness. The law of the Cross can have no place in their world, for them vicarious atonement is the most scorned of all Christian doctrines, and where it is not scouted with repugnance it is viewed with cold incredulity. Let it pass! [Cf. Scudder: Socialism and Character, p. 356-361]

What now shall be said of that other world where Christians live?

I have quoted Ibsen as living in the natural world; yet I have come upon a passage in which he clearly sees and speaks of "another world" [Ibid., p. 364]. It is from his "Emperor and Galilean," in which Julian the Apostate is fighting a lifelong, losing battle in the name of the fair glories of the pagan world. On the night before his last conflict he recounts a dream:

Where is He now? Has He been at work elsewhere since that happened at Golgotha?

I dreamed of Him lately. I dreamed that I ordained that the memory of the Galilean should be rooted out on earth. Then I soared aloft into infinite space till my feet rested on an-other world.

But behold—there came a procession by me, on the strange earth where I stood. And in the midst of the slow moving array was the Galilean, alive and bearing a cross upon His back. Then I called to Him, "Whither away, Galilean?" But He turned His head toward me, smiled, nodded slowly, and said, "To the Place of the Skull."

Where is He now? What if that at Golgotha, near Jerusalem, was but a wayside matter, a thing done as it were in passing?

... What if He goes on and on, and suffers, and dies, and conquers, again and again, from world to world?

Yes, above that dark world, where according to Ibsen a "sick conscience" can "never be well," there is a world where love is law—love that finds its perfect manifestation in suffering for and with others. Here we are persons and in personal relations. "When we pass from life as merely organic to life as personal, we have to do with something more than movement . . . we are in another category than natural process. We have not only a difference from 'nature,' we have a reversal of `nature'; for our choice can go back on nature's process. It is nature taken in hand by an inner. power with a freedom above nature" [Forsyth, op. cit., p. 46f]. And from this point of view sin" is not the tragedy of an external fate falling on the inner will. It is the tragedy of the inner will itself, falling. It is man's own fall, not the fall of his fortunes. It is his moral tragedy, the fall not from happiness but from holiness—the tragedy not simply of gloom but of guilt" [Ibid., p. 364f]. It is this world of persons and personal relations that has the Cross as its center, and where the Cross is necessary to the full conception of God who is love. Says Miss Scudder: "A deity who did not stoop to the last agony would be a God surpassed by man in the one way of love—man so eager to die for his beloved—and so no God at all. That such sacrifice is eternally necessary to progress has always been clear to the Christian vision. . . . That it will ever die from the hearts of the faithful is not to be conceived; for it did not arise from the natural order but came down from above" [Scudder, op. cit., p. 364f].

The tendency of all those thinkers who take their start from the account which science (a new Almighty for them) gives of the natural world is toward "a vast, vague Monism, which has more mass than quality," and which, if it do not entirely extinguish personality, yet allows personality to be only one point through which this massive push, without qualitative distinctions, may express itself. Perhaps this is thought to be a distinction for persons, but in reality it is to make persons the tools or the victims of a non-moral world process; we are but "borne on a stream" [Forsyth, op. cit., p. 134f. Cf. W.G. Summer: "The Absurd Effort to Make the World Better", in Forum]. And, of course, in a world which has no concern for morality [Cf. Huxley's famous lecture "Evolution and Ethics"]; no moral progress is possible, but only the slow unfolding of mighty nature. Here also, and also of course, we come to the vanishing point of religion as communion of persons or worship.

On the other hand, the tendency of all those minds which take their start from religion, and particularly from the account it has left of itself in the pages of the New Testament, is toward the subordination of the whole nature process to personality. Our own personality reaches its transfiguration in the light of the holy majesty of the personal God, and its glory in voluntary submission to His control. "We can go on and up only if the sense of personal power and faculty in the race includes the witness in conscience and history to a Personal Lord and God who will not spare even His Son that righteousness may reign, and holiness cover the earth" [Forsyth, op. cit., p. 135].

I have quoted Shaw and Forsyth—I fear too freely for some readers. They represent the two worlds of which I have spoken, and I am venturing to set these two brilliant men over against each other at the point where their difference is most direct and profound—the death of Jesus.

Shaw: "The more our reason and study lead us to believe that Jesus was talking (in his teachings) the most penetrating good sense ... the more impossible it becomes for us to believe that he was talking equally good sense when he so suddenly announced that he was himself a visible concrete God; that his flesh and blood were miraculous food for us; that he must be tortured and slain in the traditional manner and would rise from the dead at the end of three days" [Shaw, op. cit., p. cxii]. It was a case of an overwrought preacher going mad, "as Swift and Ruskin and Nietzsche went mad." His history ends in a "psychopathic delusion, and is credible, intelligible or interesting only to people upon whom the delusion imposes."

Forsyth: "To destroy sin cost God His life in His Son. . . . Of course there is a sense in which the phrase is nonsense. In the literal sense the death of God would leave the victory with the enemy of God. If God could be abolished there could have been no real God. But there is a sense in which the phrase is not nonsense . . . it expresses that in sin which ... taxes the whole resource of the divine omnipotence in grace. . . . And that is the nature of the issue as it is set in the Cross of Christ. . . . God in Christ so died that sin lost its chief servant, death, which became now the minister of life. (Cf. Paul in 1 Cor. 15:54-55, and 2 Tim. 1:10.) The Cross is not a theological theme nor a forensic device, but the crisis of the moral universe. . . . It is the Theodicy of the whole God dealing with the whole soul of the whole world in holy love, righteous judgment, and redeeming grace. There is no universal ethic but what is based in that power and deed" [Forsyth, op. cit., pp. 136, 151-153].

VII. DELIVERANCE

It is time that we turned back to the first group whom the Cross offended, and observed their emergence from the gloom into which it plunged them. In them and in their experience we see the first stage of that reinterpretation of the Cross which bursts into song in the familiar hymn,

All the light of sacred story
Gathers round its head sublime.

Their secular ambition was tremendously reinforced when they were finally convinced of the Resurrection. For He who had died without restoring Israel's throne must now have returned to make good the omission. Insomuch as His resurrection had proved His power to be unlimited, by so much was their confidence enhanced that no conspiracy or combination of powers could defeat the restoration of the glories of David's reign (Acts 1:6). So persistent are our fixed ideas! So their Risen Lord patiently begins all over again—through the Forty Days speaking the things concerning the Kingdom of God (Acts 1:3) . That is to say, it was necessary for Him to reinterpret the Kingdom in the light of the death of the King. No other King these expectant souls ever heard of had set up a kingdom by getting himself killed in the middle of his program. Accordingly the ministry of the Forty Days was given to clearing their minds on the nature of the Kingdom He was setting up.

And, first, by appearing and disappearing He accustomed them to think of Him as a spiritual presence, substituting omnipresence for a limited and local bodily presence [Cf. Latham: Pastor Pastorum, in loco]. Thus He was with them when they could not "see" Him. Secondly, the Kingdom too must be spiritual—a Kingdom with no earthy capital like Jerusalem, a Kingdom of truth (John 18:33-38), a Kingdom of which all truth-seekers and lovers of truth are ipso facto members. No blare of trumpets or neighing of horses or tramp of legions will attend the setting up of this Kingdom; but silently—how silently ! as flowers open—humble souls will receive the truth and know themselves made free.

With all His explanations, it was not until the Fiftieth Day (1 Cor. 12:3) that they came at last to the full comprehension of His enthronement as Lord (Acts 2:36) , and saw that the Cross belonged in His career as King. It was not the contradiction, as they first supposed, of His royal claims, but the confirmation of them; and they saw that it was because of the suffering of death that He was now crowned with glory and honor (Heb. 2: 9-10, dia to pathema tou thanatou). In Isaiah 53 the sufferer has no beauty that we should desire Him. In John 12:32, He who is lifted up from the earth is the centre of a new gravitation, and all men are turning their faces toward Him. In Philippians 2:9 Paul connects the words "cross" and "therefore," and the humiliation is the ground of the glory.

James Denney says, "There are writers in plenty who do not seem to have the faintest perception of what the New Testament religion is" [Letters to W. R. Nicoll, Nov. 7, 1907]. Well, they will never find out till they get hold of the clue. The emphasis is on Jesus. It is Jesus, the person who was crucified, who is Lord. This might almost be called the Apostles' Creed, already reduced to a formula while as yet the New Testament was forming. (See Acts 2:36, I Cor. 12.3; Rom. 10:9; 14:9; Phil. 2:11; John 20:31; 21:7; Rev. 1:5, 9-18; etc.) And this insight—by which men see through the dread disguise of the crucifixion the Lord of all worlds and of all the life of all worlds—this insight, bestowed by the Holy Spirit enlightening the eyes of the heart ( Eph. 1:17-18) , has never been lost; it remains to this day the Christian confession (Rom. 10:9). Hear Denney once more: "You may call Jesus Lord and be a Christian, or refuse to do so and not be a Christian; but it is absurd to think yourself a Christian when your attitude to Jesus is that of vigilant jealousy that He shall not invade your freedom, nor come between you and God —tempered with admiration not free from .patronage. This is what the philosophy of religion brings some men to" [Ibid., June 27, 1911].

Once more and finally: "The Christian religion is what it is, and what it has been all through its history, in virtue of the place which Jesus holds in it; and the one question which really exercises men's minds at the present time is whether the place which the Church has given Him is one which He Himself claimed, in other words, whether there is a historical basis adequate to support the spiritual phenomenon of Christianity" [Ibid., Oct. 8 1907. It was to show this historical basis that Denney wrote his definitive book, Jesus and the Gospel].

Thus I have tried to suggest—space does not allow elaboration—how the Cross has been transfigured in the faith of Christians ; how, to quote Amiel again, "the crown of thorns has become the crown of glory and a gibbet has become a symbol of salvation."

4. With this discovery of the Lordship of Jesus, Christians boldly challenge the view that the world is a huge machine grinding blindly; and they refuse to construe the universe in terms of force, process, "natural law." In other words, they do not interpret Jesus in terms of the natural order; they interpret the natural order in the light of Jesus and His Cross. The Cross becomes the touchstone of the philosophy of the universe. "For Christ went to the Cross as the King of the World, and not simply as the kingliest figure in it. He went to the Cross as King, He did not simply come out of it as King. He died as a King; He did not so die that He rose as a King. That is the Christian, the apostolic sense of His historic value" [Forsyth: op. cit., p. 154].

Without the perspective of this point of view, everything that men see is out of focus, and therefore their interpretations of forces on the physical level, of events and history on the human level, and, comprehensively, of the universe, are unreliable. Once we reach this point of view, we see that force is will in action, that history is a drama fulfilling purpose, and, in the ethical realm, we see that self-interest (recall Lord Birkenhead) is utterly discredited. Even enlightened self-interest, taking the form of conscientious altruism, is self-interest still; .and, however it may disguise itself, it will not balk at wrecking the world to achieve its end—a perpetual menace to the life of mankind. Of this the "superb arrogance" of Nietzsche, "with his clamor for fulness of life regardless of the fate of the weak," is an example and proof. And the nemesis of the mood is well illustrated in the earlier phase of Papini, "I am a little Prometheus harboring the vulture of remorse in my vitals, because with the fire I have stolen I can burn only myself" [The Failure, p. 256f].

Now, it is at the Cross, as nowhere else, that we see that our freedom from others is, as Hegel said, our "doom, the most insufferable form of bondage"; and it is here, as nowhere else, that we see that dying to self is the way of survival. Our Lord is stating a biological principle, when He says, "Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains just one grain; but if it die, it yields a great harvest" (John 12:24). He Himself exhibits the same law on the human level, and in dying was on His way to the highest place and the fullest life. This principle runs through the universe, is indeed the principle on which God made the world; the surrender of life in death for love's sake opens the gateway to the more abundant life. It follows that those who live on this principle attain complete self-realization without mutilation of the self and without the taint of selfishness; they are living and working with the make, the grain of the world, and have the total weight of the universe to support them. Those who live on the opposite principle have all things against them, as must at last appear in the issues of their life.

But another thing. Focus on the Cross, and you see not only the constitutive principle which is expressed in God's world, but also its goal. There is a tradition—it is nothing more —that the century plant blooms once in a hundred years. Through a hundred years the life force in the plant is struggling toward a con-summate flower. The Apostle Paul, in Romans 8:18-25, seems to feel the strain of the whole creation striving with groanings toward .a grand consummation; and he knows what the consummation will be. For the Son of God has appeared, the First-born of a great brotherhood, in all things made like His brothers (Heb. 2 :17) . The Son, in bringing many sons to glory, tasted death for every man, and was made perfect through suffering, the Leader of a mighty host for their salvation. Now, it is this revelation of the host of the saved—all sons like the Perfect Son—toward which the whole creation strives, unsatisfied until this consummation is reached in the glorious freedom of the sons of God. Then even the natural creation will be restored to Edenic peace, when the leopard and the kid shall lie down together, and a little child (Matt. 2:10-11) shall lead them (Isa. 11:6).

One thing more. Here is the explanation of the uniqueness of Jesus among the moral teachers of our race, and of the prodigious originality of His way of curing men of their vices and training them in goodness [Seeley: ecce Homo, p. 33]. If the essence of the nature of things, the Reason (Logos) that is at the heart of the universe and expresses itself in the harmony and beauty of the world, ever spoke with a human voice, that voice would surely say, "I am the Truth"; and we should expect that no advance in knowledge could ever contradict what He said. The most stupendous intellectual phenomenon in history is the fact that nineteen centuries of progress have not yielded one contradiction of Jesus in what He intended to say; and that He remains to this day "The Lord of Thought" [cf. Lily Dougall's volume with this title]. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away" (Matt. 24:35). He is the Eternal Word, become personal and appearing among men, to reveal God, and to interpret God's world; and therefore what He says about the good life and how to live it will be confirmed by all that scientists may discover of the laws of life of the physical world in which the good life is to be lived. And if any complain that He did not do the work of the scientists before them, the reply is, that He concerned Himself with only those matters, knowledge of which is essential to the good life, and so are equally the need of all men. The surgeon and the farmer need to know different things, but both of them need to know what Jesus taught. He did not teach the surgeon surgery, nor the farmer farming. He taught them both of the Father, and of how to live as His children in His world (Matt. 11:25-30).

VIII. Conclusion

"What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?" (Rom. 8:31 f.) "Nay, in all things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us."

This is Paul speaking for all believers. So the curtain rises.

On November 11, 1910, a weary Titan at the age of eighty-two fled his home in search of peace. A few days later, just before his death, he wrote his daughter: "I cannot help feeling a great heaviness. The main thing is not to commit a sin; here is the difficulty. Of course I have sinned and shall sin yet; but if only a little less of it!" So the curtain falls.

This is Tolstoy, of whom it has been said that he was "the only spiritual leader of our day who can be said to have attained international importance." He spoke of the deliverance through Christ as "a gross superstition. ... Men have no need of rescue. They require no Saviour's blood" [Resurrection, p. 303]. The life of struggle for salvation by working on one's self ends in defeat. The life of faith in the grace of God in His Son ends in victory. "Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."


TOLSTOY: RELIGION WITHOUT REDEMPTION

I. Excommunicated

Tolstoy was born in 1828. He died in 1910. On the 22d of February, 1901, in the seventy-third year of his life, the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Greek Church issued a decree of excommunication, in which it is said :

In our days God has permitted a new false teacher to appear —Count Leo Tolstoy. A writer well known to the world, Russian by birth, Orthodox by baptism and education, Count Tolstoy under the seduction of his intellectual pride has insolently risen against the Lord and His Christ and against His Holy heritage, and has publicly, in the sight of all men, repudiated the Orthodox Mother Church, which reared and educated him, and has devoted his literary activity and the talent given him by God, to disseminating among the people teachings repugnant to Christ and the Church and to destroying in the minds and hearts of men their national faith, the Orthodox faith. . . . Therefore the Church does not reckon him as its member, and cannot so reckon him until he repents and resumes his communion with her. . . . Many of those near to him, retaining their faith, reflect with sorrow that he, at the end of his days, remains without faith in God and in our Lord and Saviour, having rejected the blessings and prayers of the Church, and all communion with her.

In his reply Tolstoy said:

That I have renounced the Church which calls itself Orthodox is perfectly correct. But I renounced it not because I had risen against the Lord, but on the contrary, only because with all the strength of my soul I wished to serve Him. Before renouncing the Church and fellowship with the people, which was inexpressibly dear to me, I—having seen some reasons to doubt the Church's integrity—devoted several years to the investigation of its theoretic and practical teachings. For the theory I read all I could about church doctrine, and studied and critically analyzed dogmatic theology; while as to practical—for more than a year I followed strictly all the injunctions of the Church, observing all the fasts and all the services. And I became convinced that church doctrine is theoretically a crafty and harmful lie, and practically a collection of the grossest superstitions and sorcery, which completely conceals the whole of Christ's teaching.... "He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and in the end loving himself better than all," said Coleridge. I traveled the contrary way. I began by loving my Orthodox faith more than my peace; then I loved Christianity more than my Church; and now I love Truth more than any-thing in the world. And up to now Truth for me corresponds with Christianity; and to the degree in which I hold to it, I live peacefully and happily, and peacefully and happily approach death.

Twelve years before his death Mr. G. H. Perris [Leo Tolsty: A Study in Personal Evolution, p. 20] wrote of him, "In naked worth, perhaps the greatest soul now alive on this earth." And when death came a leading magazine spoke of him as "the foremost man in the world of letters, a man who combined an extraordinary genius akin to madness with an extraordinary lack of common sense." A European paper speaks of him as "thought-poor"; and W. Dean Howells called him "the greatest imaginative writer who ever lived."

The quotations here brought together set before us a strangely complex personality whose predominant characteristic was a passion for simplicity; and it will be seen at once that a study of his religion will lead us into the heart of religion itself, and will raise ultimate questions in the philosophy of the religious experience.

One takes considerable risk in attempting a generalization on Russia and Russians, but Mr. Perris, in the gripping volume already referred to, says (p. 11) : "Every Russian is a pilgrim. . . . he is a foredoomed truth-seeker." And again (p. 20) : "This is the unknown quantity men call Russia; an immeasurable devotion, an immeasurable patience, an immeasurable industry, an immeasurable hunger for holiness. And the heart of Russia is Leo Tolstoy--a pilgrim of pilgrims, and sick with the sickness of his people."

 
II. Childhood and Youth

Already in his early childhood, which he re-members as marked by "an innocent light-heartedness and an infinite need of love," he had shown an extraordinary sensitiveness to religious impressions. Of an itinerant fanatic praying in the moonlight, he exclaims [Maude: Life of Tolstoy, vol. I, p. 24]: "Oh, Greesha! thou good Christian—how greatly didst thou glorify His greatness, when, unable to find any words, thou didst fall on the ground with tears." His mother had died when he was in his third year, and his father when he was nine. His first guardian, the Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken, had been "the graceful and poetic Aline with beautiful eyes, who used to love reading and copying French verses, who played on the harp and always had great success at the grandest balls." But after terrible experiences (her husband became insane and tried to kill her) she became "a truly religious woman. Her favorite occupation was reading the Lives of the Saints; communing with pilgrims, half crazy devotees, monks and nuns, of whom some always lived in our house. ... She was not merely outwardly religious, keeping the fasts, praying much, and associating with people of saintly life, but she herself lived a truly Christian life, trying not only to avoid all luxury and acceptance of service, but herself serving others as much as possible. She never had any money, for she gave away all to those who asked." His governess through all the period of his childhood, Amity Tatiana, "took the first place in our upbringing by right of love to us, and we felt her right. I had fits of passionately tender love for her. . . . Aunty Tatiana had the greatest influence on my life." He early fell into solitary musings and felt himself "alone in the search for the good." 'Writing of the period of 1840—when he was twelve or thirteen—he says : "At one time it occurred to me that happiness did not depend on outward causes, but upon the way we considered them; that a man who had grown used to suffering could never more be truly miserable, and in order to get myself inured to labor I used to hold Tatischeff's dictionary in my outstretched hand for five minutes, or would go into a closet and scourge my bare back with a rope so severely that the tears would flow down my cheeks."

A little later, like Shelley, he came power-fully under the illusion of the perfectibility of human nature. "At that time it seemed to us a feasible thing to improve humanity and to extirpate all human vices and sufferings; it seemed such a simple, easy thing to amend our own faults, to acquire every virtue and to be happy." We have here a trace of what will become his gospel of salvation by loving work. There was now no God; for a boy had brought from his grammar school a year before the announcement of the latest discovery. "The discovery was that there is no God, and that all we were taught about Him is a mere invention. I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this news; they called me to their council and we all, I remember, became animated and accepted the news as something very interesting and fully possible."

When he passed from these home influences at the age of fifteen to the University at Kazan, he entered upon a stretch of unhappy years. He had read the Sermon on the Mount; Old Testament stories; Rousseau's Confession, and David Copperfield, beside all the popular Russian writers. Of Rousseau he says [Maude: vol. I, p. 46]: "I was more than enthusiastic about him, I worshiped him. At the age of fifteen I wore a medallion portrait of him next my body instead of the Orthodox cross." "The religious beliefs of my childhood disappeared . . . and as from the time I was fifteen I began to read philosophic works, my rejection of those beliefs very soon became a conscious one. From the age of sixteen I ceased going to church and fasting on my own accord. Looking back on that time now, I clearly see that my faith—my only real faith—was a belief in perfecting oneself." Again [My Confession]: "I remember also at the University that when my elder brother suddenly, in the passionate way natural to him, devoted himself to religion and began to attend all the church services, and to fast and to lead a pure and moral life, we all, and even our elders, unceasingly held him to ridicule, and called him 'Noah.'"

He left the University without a degree, and while there and afterward he followed the open road into all the vices of the fashionable society in which he moved. Let him tell the story of the next ten years in his own swift way. "I killed men in war; I lost at cards; wasted my substance wrung from my peasants; punished the latter cruelly; rioted with loose women, and deceived men; lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds; drunkenness, violence, and murder, I committed them all; and yet I was none the less considered by my equals as a comparatively moral man.

III. The Man of Letters

"During that time I began to write, out of vanity, love of gain, and pride."

But he had his qualms of conscience, flushes of repentance, and at times he fell into deep self-loathing on account of his lapses. A companion describes him [Maude: vol. I, p. 127]: "He would vanish for one, two or three days. . . . At last he would return—the very picture of a prodigal son, sombre, worn out and dissatisfied with himself .. . Then he would take me aside, quite apart, and would begin his confessions. He would tell me all, how he had caroused, gambled, and where he had spent his days and nights, and all the time, if you will believe me, he would condemn himself and suffer as though he were a real criminal. He was so distressed that it was pitiful to see him."

After one of these fits of depression, in his twenty-seventh year, he writes [Ibid., p. 130]: "A conversation about Divinity and Faith has suggested to me a great, a stupendous idea, to the realization of which I feel myself capable of devoting my life. This idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present state of mankind; the religion of Christianity, but purged of dogmas and mysticism; a practical religion, not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth. I understand that to accomplish this the conscious labor of generations will be needed. One generation will bequeath the idea to another, and some day fanaticism or reason will accomplish it. Deliberately to promote the union of mankind by religion—that is the basic thought, which I hope will dominate me."

Already he had won distinction as a writer, and that same year (1855) he will publish Sevastapol. The next year he leaves the army and begins the career of a man of letters, and what with writing, travel, work for peasant schools at Yasnaya, association with literary men, Tourgenef and others, the years until his marriage in 1862 are very full. It was in 1860 that he visited the Wartburg, where Luther was imprisoned after the Diet of Worms, and when shown the room where Luther commenced his translation of the Bible he exclaimed, "Luther was great!"

September 20, 1860, his favorite brother, Nicolas Tolstoy, died, "literally in my arms." And on October 13th he notes in his Diary: "At the very time of the funeral the thought occurred to me to write a Materialistic Gospel, a Life of Christ as a Materialist." [It may not be generally known that such a life of Christ was written by Thomas Cooper, president of S.C. College, 1820-34.] "To whom can one pray? . . . A God whom one can beseech and whom one can serve—is the expression of mental weakness. . . . Indeed, He is not a Being but a law and a force" [Ibid., p. 83].

Yet his earlier religious impressions were never completely effaced, and out of the midst of his most reckless days he writes to his aunt [Maude: vol. I, p. 73]: "Religion and the experience I have of life (however small it may be) have taught me that life is a trial. In my case it is more than a trial; it is an expiation of my faults... . It is the hand of God that has guided me—I do not cease to thank Him for it." Or this from his Diary [Ibid., I, p. 91]: "He whose aim is his own happiness is bad; he whose aim is the good opinion of others is weak; he whose aim is the happiness of others is virtuous; he whose aim is God is great." And once more [Ibid., I, p. 117]: "All the prayers I have invented I replace by one prayer—'Our Father.' All the requests I can make to God are far more loftily expressed and more worthily of Him in the words, 'Thy Kingdom Come, as in Heaven, so on earth'!" And still again: "Lord I thank Thee for Thy continual protection. How surely Thou leadest me to what is good. What an insignificant creature should I be, if Thou abandoned me. Lord, give me what is necessary, not for the satisfaction of my poor aspirations, but that I may attain to the eternal, vast, unknown aim of existence, which lies beyond my ken" [Ibid., I vol. I, p. 136]. As showing how nearly he approached evangelical ideas, the following words, in which he is ex-pressing his horror of war and the insufficiency of bandages to mitigate it, may be quoted [Ibid., vol. I, p. 315]: "It is not the suffering and mutilation and death of man's body that most needs to be diminished—but it is the mutilation and death of his soul. Not the Red Cross is needed, but the simple Cross of Christ to destroy falsehood and deception." Indeed, from his earliest years he showed affinity for the Christian ideal of humility, meekness and self-sacrifice, and this affinity was more pronounced after he had read Greek Literature (1870), which presents an outlook on life so different from his own.

IV. Conversion

But the great crisis, his "Spiritual rebirth" as he calls it, is not reached till 1878—his fiftieth year. Meantime he is reading widely—Bacon, Luther, Froebel, Proudhon, Schopenhauer, the Lives of the Saints, Pascal, Kant, etc., etc. Of Schopenhauer, he says [Maude: vol. I, p. 342]: "Do you know what this summer has been for me? An unceasing ecstasy over Schopenhauer, and a series of mental enjoyments such as I never experienced before. I have bought all of his works and I have read and am reading them (as well as Kant's). I do not know whether I shall ever change my opinion, but at present I am confident that Schopenhauer is the greatest genius among men."

Thus interest in literature and philosophy, his writing, the cares of a family and a large estate, absorbed him for fifteen years, and by these means he succeeded in stifling in his soul "all questions as to the meaning of my [his] own life, or of life in general."

Up to this point his life might be summarized in the words of the preacher (Eccl. 2) : "I said in my heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth; therefore enjoy pleasure; and, behold, this also was vanity. . . . I made me great works ; I builded me houses! I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and parks and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruit. . . . I bought men-servants and maidens . . . also I had great possessions of herds and flocks. . . . I gathered me also silver and Id ... and whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them; I withheld not from my heart any joy. . . . Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought and on all the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was no profit under the sun."

That he is approaching Koheleth's conclusion—all is vanity—see a letter bearing date January 30,1872 [Maude: vol. I, p. 370]: "In Nirvana there is nothing to laugh at; still less is there cause for anger. We all (I at least) feel that it is much more interesting than life; but I agree that however much I may think about it I can think of nothing less than that Nirvana is Nothingness. I only stand up for one thing : religious reverence—awe of that Nirvana."

And after expressing approval of the burial of his brother's child in spite of his repugnance toward ceremonial rites, he goes on: "For me at least those Slavonic words evoke quite the same metaphysical ecstasy as one experiences when one thinks of Nirvana. Religion is wonderful in that she has for so many ages rendered to so many millions of people the same service, the greatest anything human can render in this matter. With such a task how can she be logical? Yes, there is something in her."

In 1875 a priest, Vasili Ivanovitch, who had come to the house to teach the children, was detained overnight by a snowstorm, and "the Count began a conversation with him, and they did not go to bed till daylight. . . . From that day Leo Nikolaievitch became very thoughtful, and always talked with Vasili Ivanovitch. When Lent came round the Count got up one morning and said: 'I am going to do my devotions and prepare to receive communion.' ... From that day, for a couple of years, he always went to church, seldom missing a Sun-day. The whole village was surprised and asked, 'What has the Priest told the Count, that has suddenly made him so fond of church-going?'"

He was in the thick of the five years' inner struggle which culminated in his writing "My Confession" (1878). It is impossible here to give even the briefest summary of this remarkable human document. The pen that wrote it was dipped in blood, and the leaves are wet with tears. It is plain, grave, ruthless; with sad lucidity it uncovers the refuge of lies in which worldly people hide, and calls them out to endure the convicting gaze of Truth. It recounts the bewildered groping of a lost soul; the feeding on ashes; the pining hunger; the despair—"Lord, have mercy, save me! Lord teach me!" "But no one had mercy on me, and I felt that my life was coming to a standstill."

He sought help of the philosophers : "Where philosophy does not lose sight of the essential question, its answer is always the same; an answer given by Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon, Buddha." "To go on living knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us .. . was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that position." "My position was terrible—I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge, except a denial of life; and in faith I could find nothing but a denial of reason, still more impossible to me than a denial of life.

"Finally I saw that my mistake lay in ever expecting an examination of finite things to supply a meaning to life. The finite has no ultimate meaning apart from the infinite. The two must be linked together before an answer to life's problems can be reached."

Then he sought help of the religious people —Buddhists, Mohammedans, Christians of all types, including evangelicals who profess salvation by belief in the Redemption. He returned to the Church. "Never shall I forget the painful feeling I experienced the day I received the Eucharist for the first time after many years. The service, confession, and prayers were quite intelligible and produced in me a glad consciousness that the meaning of life was being revealed to me. The Communion itself I explained as an act performed in remembrance of Christ and indicating a purification from sin and the full acceptance of Christ's teaching. If that explanation was artificial, I did not notice the artificiality; so happy was I at humbling myself before the priest—a simple, timid, country clergyman—turning all the dirt out of my soul and confessing my vices; so glad was I to merge in thought with the humility of the Fathers who wrote the prayers of the office, so glad was I of union with all who have believed and now believe, that I did not notice the artificiality of my explanation. But when I approached the altar gates and the priest made me say that I believed that what I was about to swallow was truly flesh and blood, I felt a pain in my heart; it was not merely a false note ; it was a cruel demand made by some one or other who had evidently never known what faith is. . . . It was indescribably painful to me. . . . I humbled myself and swallowed that flesh and blood without any blasphemous feelings, and with a wish to believe. But the blow had been struck, and knowing what awaited me, I could not go a second time."

Then like Bunyan he listened to the conversation of some illiterate peasants—"about God, faith, life and salvation, and a knowledge of faith revealed itself to me"—and on turning to the Gospels he found in the five precepts of Matthew 5 a sure foundation for faith and life [Perris, p. 159].

1. "To offend no one, and by no act to excite evil in others, for out of evil comes evil.
2. "To be in all things chaste, and not to quit the wife whom we have taken.
3. "Never to take an oath, because we can promise nothing, for man is altogether in the hands of the Father, and oaths are imposed for wicked ends.
4. "Not to resist evil, to bear with offenses, and to do yet more than is demanded of us; neither to judge nor to go to law, for every man is himself full of faults and cannot teach. By seeking revenge men only teach others to do the same.
5. "To make no distinction between our own countrymen and foreigners, for all men are children of one Father."

In other words: "Do not be angry"; "Do not lust"; "Do not give away the control of your future actions"; "Do not use violence against men who act in a way you disapprove of"; and "Love your enemies."

Here is Mr. Aylmer Maude's comment [Maude: vol. II, p. 38]: "By arriving at the conclusion that we are parts of a moral universe, and only in so far as we discern that order and adjust ourselves to it, has life any meaning and purpose that is not defeated by death, Tolstoy reached the ultimate root of religion. Through strife and suffering to have found it by his own effort, and to have proclaimed it in the teeth of those who denounced him as a heretic and atheist, as well as of those who sneered at him as a superstitious dotard, is an achievement that entitles him to rank among the prophets."

V. The Last Phase

For the remaining thirty-two years of his life he devoted himself to the heroic attempt to warm the winter's cold from his own fire; he tried to practice the meaning of life, which had now become plain to him. His own account of his life was that it fell into three periods—in the first he served himself; in the second he served his fellows; in the third he served God. The following titles of books he wrote in the third period will indicate the centre of his interest: Criticism of Dogmatic Theology; My Religion; What Then Must We Do?; The Kingdom of God Is Within You; Reason and Religion; Religions and Morality; How to Read the Gospels; Christianity and Patriotism; What is Religion? And on the side of practice his renunciations included all his estates, property in his books, luxury in food and dress (at one time he was a dandy), hunting (of which he was very fond), meat, tobacco, and for a time even horseback-riding; while he still reproached himself that he found it so difficult to match a Christian peasant, Soutaef, in altering his life to suit his perception of what was right. As to his inner life of communion with God he writes to a friend (1901) [Maude: vol. II, p. 61]: "I have long since formed the habit of praying every morning in solitude," and then he gives as his prayer a remarkable paraphrase of the Lord's prayer, and adds: "Besides that prayer . . . I read the thoughts of Saints and Sages, not Christians only, and I meditate, seeking out what in God's sight there is of evil in my heart, and trying to rid myself of it. I also try to pray in active life, when I am among people and passions assail me. Then I try to remember what went on in my soul when I prayed in solitude, and the more sincere my prayer was, the more easily do I refrain from evil."

Earlier (1889) he had written to another friend: "I often say to myself `Live rejoicing unceasingly in (what no one can anywhere prevent) the joy of doing God's will in purity, humility and love.' " And again : "It is for the most part well with my soul. Indeed, it would be a sin were it not so. Seldom a day passes without joyful proofs that the fire which Christ brought to earth is kindling more and more."

That he classified himself as a Christian is shown in other letters. For example [Maude: vol. II, p. 356]: "The sayings of Christ that—'If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me'—was true in His time, and is true in ours; a follower of Christ must be ready to be poor and to suffer; if not he cannot be His disciple." This letter is signed—"Your Brother in Christ, Leo Tolstoy." In 1885 his friend Frey had urged him to renounce the name of Christianity for his system. Tolstoy replied [Ibid., p. 221]: "I cannot do so, for all I know comes from Christ, and I am still continually learning from Him, I think I shall learn yet more in the future." And once more [Maude: vol. II, p. 483]: "Please don't be frightened at the word 'Christianity'—I mean nothing mystical, but simply the love of man by man." In 1894 his friend Gay had finished his picture of the Crucifixion [Ibid., p. 492]; he brought it to show to Tolstoy, who asked to be left alone with it. Gay on returning to the room found him in tears. Embracing him, Tolstoy said: "I feel, dear friend, that that was how it really happened!"

Of Nietzsche he said [Maude: vol. II, p. 499]: "He was a real mad-man, but what talent! . . . Great God, what savagery! It is terrible so to drag down Christianity!"

At the last his tone was gentle, submissive, trustful: "I am eighty years old, and I am still searching for truth." "Physical and mental strength decreases, but something else (moral strength) greatly increases. I would on no account exchange what I am now for what I was sixty years ago."

VI. World-View Versus Redemption

This study might end here, for it contains a description, for the most part in Tolstoy's own words, of his religion. But inadequate as the description is, it yet raises questions which carry us beyond Tolstoy and the classification 'to which he is entitled as a religious man. As to the latter, we are not prepared to fix his classification till we have taken account of his attitude toward various conceptions of the subject matter of religion. He defines religion as "a certain relation established by man between his separate personality and the infinite universe or its source ; and morality is the ever-present guide to life resulting from that relation." "Every sane man must of necessity have a religion (whether of selfishness, or patriotism, or obedience to some Lord or Law): that is to say, must have some outlook on life enabling him to know why he approves of some things and disapproves of others."

We have seen that he was a man of prayer, but he did not believe in the personality of God [Maude: vol. II, p. 60]. He often speaks of the guidance of God, but after such a reference he remarked [Ibid., p. 645]: "I speak of a personal God, whom I do not acknowledge, for the sake of convenience of expression." "I believe in God whom I understand as Spirit, as Love, as the source of all. I believe that the will of God is most clearly and intelligently expressed in the teaching of the Man Jesus, whom to consider and pray to as God, I esteem the greatest blasphemy [Ibid., II, p. 580]. His frank eclecticism in religion is shown in the following quotation from What is Religion (1902) : "For us the true religion is Christianity in those of its principles in which it agrees, not with the external forms, but with the basic principles of Brahmanism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hebraism, Buddhism, and even Mohammedanism. And these principles are very simple, intelligible and clear."

They are: That there is a God, the origin of all things; that in man dwells a spark from that Divine Origin, that man by his way of living, can increase or decrease that spark in himself; that to increase this divine spark man must suppress his passions and increase love in himself; and that the practical means to attain this result is to do to others as you would that they should do to you." From this it will be clear that Tolstoy will hear of Redemption with impatience, and even with resentment. To a young evangelist, William Fettler [With Christ in Russia—by Latimer], who had spoken of Christ as the Saviour of sinners by means of his death and resurrection, he cried out: "I cannot listen to you. Much better is it for us to walk in silence than to speak so unprofitably." In the same conversation Mr. Fettler had spoken of Jesus as a living Saviour, and of the Christian hope of His appearing. To this Tolstoy replied: "I have no such expectation. If some one were to come here to us now and tell us that the risen Christ had arrived in Yasnaya Polyana and was walking in the garden over there, I would not care to have a look at Him. It is a mere superstition. He has been dead for nearly two millenniums." The only resurrection he believed in appears in a comment he wrote on the Dourkobors [Maude: vol. II, p. 508] ( Spirit Wrestlers who interested him profoundly) —"the germinating of the seed sown by Christ eighteen hundred years ago, the resurrection of Christ himself."

Of course he rejects the whole Pauline interpretation of Christianity, feeling no need of Paul's "doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery" [W. James: Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 211]. "Do not quote Paul to me. I do not believe in Paul."

"I hold the doctrine of Salvation by the blood of Christ to be one of the most irrational, senseless, unsubstantiated of opinions; a gross superstition . . . men have no need of rescue. They require no Saviour's blood, they must only do God's will. Love God and thy neighbor. In this consisted the whole law" [Resurrection, p. 303].

In the novel entitled Resurrection (1899), just after an evangelical preacher had said "Let us praise the Lord, who has given His only begotten Son for the redemption of man-kind. His holy blood" . . . we read: "Nekludoff felt so deeply disgusted that he rose silently and frowning and keeping back a groan of shame, he left on tiptoe, and went to his room" [My Religion, p. 245]. Yet he writes in My Religion: "I believe that nothing but the fulfillment of the doctrine of Jesus can give true happiness to men.... I cannot refuse to obey it, if I would save my life from the certainty of eternal loss. . . . The doctrine of Jesus Christ is a doctrine of grace and truth. Once I knew not grace and knew not truth. I understand and believe now that the good toward which I was attracted is the will of the Father, the essence of life" [Letter, Oct., 1910].

From these quotations it will be seen that Tolstoy knew Jesus only as a Sage, the greatest of the sages; and thus in Tolstoy's experience we have presented in the concrete "the modern issue as to the person of Jesus Christ" [Rev. and Expos., Jan., 1911].

A student once asked Phillips Brooks the question—"Is conscious personal fellowship with Jesus Christ part of Christianity?" The great preacher hesitated, reflected and replied decisively : "Conscious personal fellowship with Jesus Christ is Christianity. That is what differentiates the religion of the Bible from all others." Tolstoy's religion was not of this type; and yet it has to be admitted that he attained a high character under the discipline of religion, and that he exhibited an almost unique loyalty to what he felt to be his duty—"Acting contrary to the Law of Christ is worse than death" [Letter to Rev. Aldin Ballou]. He protests, "the great sin is to lower the ideal of Christ in order to make it attainable."

Miss Jane Addams visited him (1896) and wrote [Maude: vol. II, p. 525]:"The glimpse of Tolstoy has made a profound impression on me; not so much by what he said, as the life, the gentleness, the Christianity in the soul of him."

VII. Concluding Observations

To sum up, though one hesitates to attempt a summary of elements apparently so contradictory; for we are dealing with one who has much in common with the medieaval saint and the Oriental fatalist, and who never, wholly escaped from the clash of contrary ideals and tendencies in his own soul.

1. The background of all his thinking about religion is the Greek Catholic Church. Remember that, and consider that he lived through the last half of the nineteenth century. He never felt to the full the stress of the Darwinian revolution, but he knew and responded to the deeper reaction of philosophy and criticism against traditional views of religion. He characterized Renan's Life of Jesus as a "merely childish, trivial and mean prank" ; but Voltaire, Schopenhauer and other philosophers, together with the study of Comparative Religion, led him into deep revolt against the Orthodox Greek Church. He says ["What is Religion?"]: "No religion has ever preached things so evidently incompatible with reason and with contemporary knowledge or so immoral as the doctrine preached by Church-Christianity." So violent was this revolt that, though he met and conversed with, and was deeply impressed by, many simple believers, yet evangelical Christianity was never fairly faced, and accordingly never gained access to his mind. His experience at the Communion, recited earlier in this chapter, was "indescribably painful," and yet he probably never again came so near to the Kingdom in the evangelical sense of the phrase as on that day. "Knowing what awaited me, I could not go a second time," and his complete rejection of Evangelicalism was from that day inevitable. In the presence of such a tragedy one feels that a petrified ecclesiasticism calling What is Religion? itself Christianity is a crime against mankind, a monstrous hindrance to honest religion.

It is idle to guess what might have been the result if Tolstoy's approach to Christianity had been through the ministry of, say, Stundists, for example; but we may be permitted to wish that so sincere an inquirer might have been spared the painful and, as it proved, vain struggle to find the truth in the veneered paganism of his native "Orthodox Church."

2. He is a thoroughgoing rationalist. Says Maude [Vol. I, p. 400]: "Some men take to religion at the prompting of the heart; others at the prompting of the brain; and Tolstoy belongs to the latter category, not from lack of heart, but because, strong as are his emotions, his intellectual powers are stronger still." He recovered the God, whom he lost in his youth, at the end of a syllogism [Ibid., vol. I, p. 416]: "I know that I shall be blamed; but still I must repeat! 'Reason, Reason, Reason.' There is no other way to reach the truth." And he repeatedly resents the charge of being a mystic, of claiming an inner light denied to other men. Indeed, his rejection of the personality of God carried with it a denial of Revelation, and laid on the reason the whole burden of finding truth. The truth Jesus found, he found in this way (But see Matt. 11:25 ff.) . So Buddha also. And Tolstoy's religion is a blend of Buddhist and Christian elements—the Buddhist elements predominating. That is to say, he takes his place among the Enlightened, not among the Redeemed; and the enlightenment he attained he attained like Buddha, in a long and stressful meditation accompanied by painful ascetic discipline. We have seen that in his youth he used to beat his bare back with a rope till the tears would flow down his cheeks. In his eightieth year he wrote [Maude: vol. II, p. 636]: "Nothing really would so fully satisfy me, or give me such pleasure, as to be put in prison, in a real, good, stinking, cold, hungry, prison." In his Confession he recites his adoption of asceticism: "The aim of man in life is to save his soul; and to save his soul he must live godly; and to live godly he must renounce all the pleasures of life, must labor, humble himself, suffer and be merciful." These words might have been taken from a manual of Buddhist piety. And, indeed, the three periods of Tolstoy's life correspond in a striking, and by no means superficial, way with the three periods in the life of Gautama—the periods, namely, of absorption in the pleasures of life, of search for the meaning of life, of enlightenment and effort to make others see the light. More especially do Tolstoy's Buddhist affinities appear in his idea of the future [Maude: vol. II, p. 579]. "If one is to understand by life beyond the grave, the Second Advent, a hell with eternal torments, devils, and a Paradise of perpetual happiness—it is perfectly true that I do not acknowledge such a life beyond the grave; but eternal life and retribution here and everywhere, now and forever, I acknowledge to such an extent that, standing now at the verge of the grave, I often have to make an effort to restrain myself from desiring the death of this body, that is birth to a new life; and I believe that every good action increases the true welfare of my eternal life, and every evil action decreases it." Here, surely, is a close approach to the Buddhist doctrine of retribution (Karma)."

The characteristic word of Christianity is — 'Grace' as the characteristic word of Buddhism is Karma. Grace is the bending love and the stooping pity which looses us from our past, which delivers us from our burdens and weakness. Karma is the quality of our actions, which determines our future condition by the blind and unconscious concatenation of cause and effect, by dark and capricious regulations and consequences"[W. Robertson Nicoll].

It is true that Tolstoy reproaches Buddhism because it gives up this world as a bad job and because it accepts what is wrong in it as inevitable [Maude: vol. II, p. 607] —whereas true Christianity undertakes to establish a Kingdom of Righteousness here and now. And it is also true that, though he was fascinated by the Buddhist conception of Nirvana, there is no evidence that he adopted the vast cycles of existences (transmigration of souls) through white the individual, according to the Buddhist system, is to attain Nirvana; his own conception of personal immortality was too vague for that. Yet it remains true that his religious system, following a clue given him by Schopenhauer, is an amalgamation of the principles of Buddhism and Christianity [Perris: Leo Tolstoy, p. 65].

3. I have said that the Buddhist elements predominate. To put this proposition beyond dispute, it is only necessary to consider one other point—the forgiveness of sins. Here he falls far short of the Christian view and of the Christian experience.

We have seen that Tolstoy suffered terribly in his periodic repentances [Maude: vol. I, p. 219], and there is deep pathos in that passage of the Confession in which he describes his hunger for God. But his repentance—better call it remorse—and his dealings with God never yielded a sense of sins forgiven. The Epistle to the Hebrews was a sealed book to him; the cleansed conscience was a piece of self-deception. Goethe and Ibsen and Tolstoy; Augustine, Luther and Bunyan—these two groups make conspicuous the distinction here pointed out. The first three felt the soul-sickness as poignantly as any men who ever lived; but it is to the other three we must look to find the cure in an experience of free forgiveness through Christ the Redeemer.

Now, the forgiveness of sins is a transaction between persons, and no one who evaporates his God into "a spiritual element" [Maude: vol. II, p. 677] is ever likely to know the meaning of it; as no sunny-minded, sky-blue Pantheist will ever know the meaning of it. Bunyan came on the line of conscience to despair—it was a sense of sin and guilt—and the relief he found was a cleansing of his conscience; and his peace was as a river. Tolstoy came on the line of reason to despair—it was a discovery of the vanity of life—and such relief as he found was in a view of the world and of life (Weltanschauung). I do not mean to depreciate the relief Tolstoy found; it was immense, and it may even be admitted that some who find the other type of relief miss this; reconciled to God, they never attain a satisfying world-view. But the relief of forgiveness is, after all, deeper than the relief of enlightenment, and Tolstoy's Diary may be cited in proof. As late as 1903 [Maude: vol. II, p. 402] he writes: "I am now experiencing the torments of hell. I remember all the abominations of my former life." One finds no indication that he ever heard the words, "Thy sins are forgiven thee; go in peace." On the contrary, he is constantly encouraging people never to cease to strive to attain goodness; they will succeed if they persevere. But their success will be their own achievement—an achievement made by main force, so to speak; there is no atoning Saviour, no Living Lord to help, and no blotting out of past sins as a thick cloud. And to the last, his own struggle, while not without hope, retained the somber hue, as of one resolved to fight the last fight with courage, even though the issue might remain hidden from his eyes. It was a struggle to live up to the ideal required by the Kingdom of God [Maude: vol. II, p. 415] "to realize which we must be as perfect as the Father, i.e., the ideal of external as well as internal perfection." He tried to live up to this ideal of love without the help of Him Who set it before us, the Living Lord of Love. Christ alone can give the life He demands ; and Tolstoy came to attach less and less importance to Christ's personality, saying in a letter (1900) [Maude: vol. II, p. 598ff] of a book he read: "In this book it is very well argued (the probability is as strong against as for) that Christ never existed." To such a mind the Sermon on the Mount is not a Gospel, but a condemnation; not a salvation, but a doom. Surely Paul and Augustine are sounder teachers here : Paul who gives his autobiography in four words—"Christ liveth in me"; and Augustine, who prays, "0 Lord, give what Thou commandest, and then command what Thou wilt." Tolstoy never got out of the seventh chapter of Romans—never beyond the "0 wretched man that I am!" of that chapter, and one listens in vain through all his experience for the apostolic assurance and gratitude: "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord"; or for the apostolic paean of praise, "Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins in His blood . . . to Him be the glory and the do-minion for ever and ever, Amen."

4. One point more. We have seen in the discussion of the last point that Tolstoy's "Christianity" errs by defect, by a fatal defect: he misses the essential Christian fact, the forgiveness of sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, and is thus thrown into the company of all those—Buddhists and others—who are struggling unaided up some "eightfold path" toward perfection. And true to his rationalist bent, religion with him [Maude: vol. II, p. 125] is "the sense of a relation which man himself establishes between himself and the infinite life surrounding him; and faith is man's consciousness of this relationship, his consciousness that his position in the world is such as obliges him to do certain things." "Faith is a relation man is conscious of toward the infinite universe, and from this relation the direction of his activity results." Thus religion is a perception of certain truths about one's world and his place in it; in a word, a view of the world. And he exhorts people to change their views, their outlook on life. He regrets his inability to help the poor upon whom he had bestowed alms, because nothing short of a change of their views of life would really meet their case [Ibid., vol. II, p. 653]. All he could do was to tell them his own views, the truths he had found; and he held on to the conviction 51 that "a message exists which can destroy all evil in men and give them universal welfare." In this Tolstoy has not gone beyond Socrates, and he knows of no provision for cleansing the tainted will and creating in a perverted will a purpose to do the right which the intellect perceives.

Tolstoy does not know Religion as a personal fellowship with a personal God, who, according to Christianity, is in and through Jesus Christ a Redeeming God. And Tolstoy did not perceive that "the thing we are redeemed from is not chiefly ignorance or pain, but guilt." Mr. Harold Begbie's "Twice-Born Men" are in no doubt that they have been redeemed from guilt, set right with the Holy God; and their song is not of a new view, or set of views, but of a new life in Christ Jesus.

In conclusion: It does not lie in our province to fix the point Tolstoy reached in his up-ward striving. But no one acquainted with his life, his opinions, the range and depth of his interest and his teachings will deny him a place among the sages, and some will even give him a place among the saints. His discovery of the vanity of the worldly life, of the line of usefulness in loving service, and his loyalty to the light as far as he saw it, go far toward overbalancing his marked limitations. When looked at from the point of view of a Christian interpretation of life, the central difficulty presented by his career is this : Granting his willingness to do the will of God. (John 7:17), how account for his failure to see the full meaning of the religion of the In-carnation? Truth in the form of Law came by Moses, Confucius, Lao Tse, Buddha. Truth in the form of Grace came by Jesus Christ. And a man who is willing to do the truth he knows is surely in the way of knowing all truth [Tolstoy: The Inner Drama, by Hugh L'Anson Fausset, has just been published. I regret that I have not been able to consult it in the preparation of the above].

The merely inquisitive mind is sure to ask: Was Tolstoy "saved"? To which the proper and only reply is:

"Will not the Judge of till the Earth do right ?"

RELIGION AND REDEMPTION

Tolstoy, as we have seen, is an example of Religion and Morals without Redemption. A profoundly religious nature, he set out to rid himself of sin. "0, to sin a little less!" (Last letter.) He undertook to be his own redeemer.

It is well to point out here an important distinction the distinction between Religion without Morals and Morals without Religion, and to note that the Christian Religion is unique, among other things, in this also, that here Religion and Redemption and Morals are indissolubly united. The Religion and the Redemption are set firmly in the context of a well-known period, and the morals are illustrated in the lineaments of a human life.

And so the Word had breath, and wrought With human hands the creed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds More grand than all poetic thought. [Tennyson.] The Bodhisattvas of Buddhism are a noble speculation. They are human beings on the way to Nirvana "who have denied themselves the privilege of entering into the final stage in order to devote themselves to the saving of humanity. Their love for human beings is such that they are willing to forego for countless ages the perfect state, in order to save from woe the suffering world, and they are ever ready to respond to the cries of the distressed." The Goddess of Mercy is the most popular of these. [See Soothill: The Three Religions of China, p. 105f.] "Only call on one of the Bodhisattvas and thou shalt be saved." But these saviours inhabit some intermediate state and remain speculative inventions to meet a need—the need of deliverance, not from sin, but from suffering.

On the contrary, our Redeemer is not even "the Holy One of Israel, thy Redeemer" as in the Old Testament, but one who was born of a woman, in a well-known village, in the full blaze of history, that he might redeem us who were struggling along the highways of this human life—highways he trod and knew so well—that we might receive the adoption and a name like his own, sons of God (Gal. 4:4 f) . This admitted historical basis is of immeasurable advantage, and those who would discredit or deny the Christian Religion must first get rid of the Historic Jesus [cf. books like The Fact of Christ, The Historicity of Jesus, and many others].

But the point I am here insisting on is the union of all three—religion, redemption, and morals in our holy Religion. And this point becomes conspicuous when we set Christianity as the religion of the New Testament in the context of the world's religions and philosophies. The pre-Christian philosophers from Socrates down attempt to give us a view of the world and of the moral life agreeable to Reason, but they leave us struggling under the fatal handicap of a stained past and a perverted will toward an ideal which forever eludes us. Paul, of whom Coleridge said that he was "the subtlest intellect of all time," has put the case once and finally in chapters one to seven in his letter to the Romans: I see and approve the good, but I do the wrong which I detest.

In the year 670 B.C. a state in China perished. A duke asked a sage why the state perished. "Because our ruler loved the good and hated the evil," said the Duke. "He must have been a worthy prince. How then came he to ruin?" Quoth the old man: "He loved the good but was unable to secure it; he hated the evil but was unable to get rid of it. Thus the state perished." Descriptions of the good life, as that by Aristotle, for example, have in them no dynamic to produce the kind of life described, and therefore they fail to meet the human case. Similarly, a satisfying philosophy (world-view) may reconcile us in a general way with the order of the world (Cf. Tao, The Way, in Chinese philosophy), but it has no way of insuring that those who embrace it will live in accordance with that order. To put the matter in a single sentence. Religions and philosophies and systems of morals with no historic redemption in them fall short in this, that they bind burdens on men's shoulders which they do not touch with their little finger! It was in the sense of the futility of merely knowing the True and the Good that John Drinkwater prayed:

Knowledge Thou hast lent,
But, Lord, the will—there lies the bitter need;
Give us to build about the deep intent
The deed, the deed!
Grant us the will to fashion as we feel,
Grant us the strength to labor as we know,
Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel,
To strike the blow.

It is not necessary here to enlarge upon the other point referred to in the opening paragraph of this chapter : religion without morals. Present-day Buddhism in Japan is committed to the view that religion has nothing to do with morals and religious worship no connection with the struggle for the good life. And we have already seen that antinomianism has followed the intensest evangelicalism as a dark shadow throughout Christian history. One welcomes Ibsen and Shaw when they cry out against an interpretation of the Redemption in Christ as a discharge from ordinary moral obligation. But with Isaiah crying out against murderers trampling the courts of the Lord's house with their vain oblations (Isa. 1) in the line which ends in Christ, the Christian Religion cannot be held responsible for these perversions of a redemption which proves its reality in an immediate transformation of character and behavior after the likeness of him who said, "I have given you an example that you should do as I have done" (John 13:15), and "Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" (Luke 6:46.)

To sum up: Redemption without morals runs in certain so-called Christian sects to antinomianism, the repudiation of all moral obligation; and in non-Christian peoples to a high and dry intellectualism, as in Hinduism, where by a sort of intellectual tour de force the soul passes by reabsorption into Infinite Passion-less Peace; or again, to the negative, repressive, quietistic, individualistic, anti-social attitudes of Buddhist ethics. On the other hand, Morals without Redemption leads to Stoicism (to mention the highest ethical level reached in the Greaco-Roman World) or to the cold dissertations and exhortations of the Ethical Culture Societies of today. In more familiar language, we have in these, Salvation without works and salvation by works, whereas in the Christian Religion we have faith working by love—i.e., faith in a Redeemer who by dying for us puts us under immeasurable obligation of love to Him, and who kindles in us a love for all whom He loved, and who thrusts us out in a passion to serve to the limits of the race.

Thus the Cross which all along has been the centre of redemption becomes, by the death to self and self-interest of the believer there achieved, the centre and the inspiration of the Christian Moral system, and supplies the only and alone sufficient dynamic for the moral life.

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