THE ATONEMENT
+III. The Doctrine in Christian History and Experience+
+Antiquity of the essential truth.+--From what has now been said it
will, I hope, be clear that the roots of the Christian doctrine of
Atonement lie far back in history, especially Semitic history mediated
through the Old Testament, and that its fundamental truth is one with
which the world can never dispense; it is both simple and sublime.
Nothing worth doing in human history has ever been done apart from it
or ever will be. It is no paradox to say that even a morally earnest
agnostic believes in the Atonement; at any rate he believes in the
all-essential truth without which there would never have been such a
thing as a doctrine of Atonement.
+No consistent theory in the New Testament.+--But now we come to the
consideration of this truth as it has passed over into Christianity. I
do not propose to give an accurate and exhaustive analysis of the
principal things that have been said about it, from the writings of St.
Paul downwards; that would only be wearisome to my readers and lead to
no particular result. But if I have succeeded in making clear the
psychological necessity for the existence of the idea of Atonement, it
will serve us as a guiding principle when we come to consider it in
relation to the sacrifice of Jesus. Many exegetes have undertaken to
show that the various New Testament writers held one and the same
theory of the relation of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of
sins; never was a task more hopeless. The Pauline, Petrine, and
Johannine theories, and that of the writer of the epistle to the
Hebrews, are not mutually consistent, and Paul is not always consistent
with himself. The principal thing they have in common is their belief
that the death of Jesus was of vital efficacy in the doing away of sin.
The symbolism in which they set forth this truth is borrowed mainly
from the Old Testament, and we have already seen what underlay that
symbolism even in its earliest use. Old Testament language about
sacrifice supplies the mental dialect of the New, and now that we have
the key to it we need neither be puzzled nor misled by it. Beneath all
that the New Testament writers have to say about the death of Jesus
there is the same grand old spiritual truth of Atonement which makes
religion possible. Before we resume our examination of the connection
between the death of Jesus and the doing away of sin, let us look for a
moment at what post-apostolic thought has had to say about it.
+The Fathers.+--From the beginning of the second century onwards the
Fathers of the church and their theological successors attempted a
variety of explanations of the way in which the death of Jesus achieved
potentially the redemption of mankind. It is not easy to say just when
one period of Christian thought closes and another begins; but, broadly
speaking, we can for convenience classify them into the period of the
Fathers, the mediaeval period, the Reformation and afterwards up to the
eighteenth century, and the period of modern thought. The Fathers may
be divided into two groups, the ante-Nicene and the post-Nicene
writers, and also into the Greek and Latin Fathers. But as I am not
writing for theological students, I will not attempt any further
analysis of the various patristic schools. Those who wrote previous to
325 A.D. belong to the ante-Nicene group; those who wrote after that
date, to the post-Nicene group. The ante-Nicene writers, generally
speaking, avoid giving any theory of the atonement at all; but two of
their greatest thinkers, Origen and Irenaeus, held that mankind had
fallen under the dominion of Satan, and that Jesus by His sufferings
paid a ransom to Satan in order that we might be freed from his power.
Post-Nicene Fathers for the most part adopted this view without
attempting to justify it. Amongst their statements we find the ideas
that the Atonement was a ransom to Satan and also a sacrifice to God,
but they offer no explanation of the necessity of either. Later on
Augustine anticipated subsequent Christian thought by maintaining that
the atoning work of Jesus was part of an eternal purpose.
+Anselm and after.+--The scholasticism of the Middle Ages finds its
first important expression in the illustrious Anselm, an acute thinker
and a beautiful soul. Anselm rejected the idea of a ransom to Satan,
declaring that Satan had no rights over humanity; in place of this
notion he put forward the theory that Jesus made to God an infinite
satisfaction for an infinite debt. According to this theory the
majesty of God had suffered indignity because of human sin, and yet man
was unable by himself to offer an adequate satisfaction for the
offence. Hence the eternal Son of God became man in order that He
might offer the only satisfaction that could be considered adequate.
This theory did not go unchallenged. Abelard, for example, asked the
very reasonable question how the guilt of mankind could be atoned for
by the greater guilt of those who put Jesus to death. Abelard's famous
opponent, Bernard of Clairvaux, also repudiated Anselm's main
contention and fell back upon the theory of a satisfaction to Satan.
+Reformation theories.+--At the time of the Reformation the question of
the Atonement formed the subject of considerable controversy, and, on
the whole, the Reformers were less reasonable than the Catholics, as is
the case to some extent even to-day. The Roman Catholic doctrine of
Atonement is much nearer to the truth than conventional Protestant
statements about the "finished work" and so on. One considerable
section of sixteenth-century Protestantism held and taught the doctrine
of the total depravity of human nature, and insisted on the idea that
Jesus bore the actual penal sufferings of sinners. Calvinists held
that these sufferings had value for the elect only. Against these
views Socinianism arose as a protest, but tended to reduce the Passion
of Jesus to a sort of drama enacted by God in the presence of humanity
in order to excite men's contrition and win their love.
+The modern lack of a theory.+--Modern evangelical thought has done
very little with all these theories except to make them impossible; it
has no consistent and reasonable explanation to put in their place.
The popular kind of evangelical phraseology is that which continues to
represent Jesus as having borne the punishment due to human sin;
salvation is spoken of as though it meant deliverance from the
post-mortem consequences of misdoing.
+More about sin.+--In all these theories it is evident that the death
of Jesus is closely connected with the forgiveness of sin and that the
forgiveness of sin is the vital element in the Atonement. In order to
understand the truth about this let us return to what has already been
said on the subject of sin and pursue it a little farther. I have
already pointed out that sin is selfishness pure and simple, and that
that definition will cover all its manifestations. There is no sin
that is not selfishness, there is no selfishness that is not sin. All
possible activities of the soul are between selfishness on the one hand
and love on the other. If people would only accept this simple
explanation of a great subject, it would get rid of most of the
confusion of thought that exists in regard to it. The life of love is
the life lived for impersonal ends; the sinful life is the life lived
for self alone. The life of love is the life which does the best with
the self for the sake of the whole; the sinful life is the life which
is lived for the self at the expense of the whole. The desire for
gratification at some one else's cost, or at the cost of the common
life, is the root principle of sin. Sin against God is simply an
offence against the common life; it is attempting to draw away from
instead of ministering to the common good. The sinful man thinks it
will pay him to be selfish; his impulse is to suppose that he can gain
more happiness, can drink more deeply of the cup of life, by doing it
at the expense of other people. We all do it more or less, and yet the
world might have learned by this time that selfishness does _not_ pay;
the thoroughly selfish man is an unhappy man, for he has not drawn upon
the source of abiding joy. Like love, selfishness is a guest for life,
but whereas love obtains more abundant life by freely giving itself,
sin loses hold on life by trying to grab and keep it. Every man is
seeking life and seeking it in one or other of these opposite ways; he
is either fulfilling the self by serving the whole, or he is trying to
feed the self by robbing the whole. But life is God, and there is no
life which is not God. God is the life all-abundant, the life infinite
and eternal, the life that never grows old, the life that is joy.
Every man, consciously or subconsciously, wants that life; he is
wanting it all the time. Why does the man of business spend so many
hours in his office in the effort to make money? It is because money
represents power, power that can purchase "more life and fuller."
Probably he does not want it all for himself; he works for love of his
family or love of the community, and his desire to serve them makes his
work gladder, so that already he has more abundant life than he would
otherwise possess. Analyse human action, no matter what, and it will
be seen to point in one or other of these two directions, self-ward or
all-ward. If the former, it will shrivel the soul, it makes for death;
if the latter, it will expand the soul, it makes for life. This is a
spiritual law which knows no exception; in the long run the loving deed
brings larger life and joy, the selfish deed brings pain and darkness.
"Be not deceived, God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth that shall
he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap
corruption, but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap
eternal life."
It is evident from the foregoing that even the sinful life is a quest
for God, although it does not know itself to be such, for in seeking
life saint and sinner alike are seeking God, the all-embracing life.
And the sinner _must_ learn that to seek life selfishly is to lose it;
to seek it unselfishly is both to gain and to give it. The good man
and the bad man are seeking the same thing in opposite ways.
During the recent New Theology controversy the editor of the _British
Weekly_, in the course of an attack upon my teaching, printed a number
of extracts from my sermons in order to convince his readers that that
teaching was objectionable and false. In every case the extract was
carefully removed from its context and therefore conveyed quite a
misleading impression to the mind of the reader. One of these extracts
was from a sermon on "More Abundant Life," preached in the City Temple
on Sunday morning, March 18, 1906. As this extract has been widely
circulated, perhaps I may be pardoned for giving it here along with the
context. All that the editor chose to print was a part of the
paragraph in which sin was described as a quest for God, and yet he
must have known perfectly well that to take that paragraph out of its
setting was to do an injustice both to the preacher and to the subject.
Observe the sharp antithesis between the "thief or the robber" on the
one hand, and the "Good Shepherd" on the other. These two stand for
two opposing tendencies that have run through all nature and all human
life. All nature through, all history through, two conflicting
tendencies have been discernible. These are ever at war, and they ever
will be until the whole world has been subdued to Christ, and is filled
with the fulness of the life of God. These two tendencies we may
describe as the deathward and the lifeward respectively. The words are
not very satisfactory because the deathward tendency masquerades as the
lifeward tendency, and the lifeward tendency, before fruition, looks
like the deathward one. In nature, as Romans viii. tells us, "We know
that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until
now." Nature is cruel, "red in tooth and claw." The deathward
tendency is what I may call the self-ward tendency in the upward
struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism only exists at the
expense of other organisms. Yet at a certain stage in evolution this
principle of the survival of the fittest at the expense of the rest
gives way to a counter principle, that of the fitting of as many as
possible to survive. The thief tendency gives way to the shepherd
tendency, self-love to mother-love, the struggle to survive to the
struggle for the life of others. I do not pause at the moment to
account for these two antithetic tendencies, there they are; all
through the history of this sad old world of ours these two tendencies
have been in sharp conflict. Both are cosmic, both probably resolvable
in that higher unity which is too mysterious for us to penetrate, but
to our minds they are in flagrant opposition to each other. The thief
cometh to steal and to kill and to destroy; mother-love, Christ-love,
that it may give life, and that more abundantly.
In human history the antithesis is even more plainly marked. From one
point of view, history is little else than the story of the crimes and
follies of mankind. If it were entirely that, the study would be too
saddening to enter upon; but it is not all of that character, and yet
it is sufficiently so to cast a shadow over the optimism of any man who
investigates human evolution as told in song and story. The principle
that "they should take who have the power, and they should keep who
can" has ruled in human concerns from the dawn of history until to-day.
It is strong enough in our midst even now. Out industrial system is
founded upon it, and is essentially unchristian. Commercialism is
saturated with it; all men suffer from it, but often they know not how
to get free from it. Ruskin has a grimly amusing paragraph on the
parallel between an earlier civilisation and that of to-day, and the
identity in principle of the self-ward tendency in both. In mediaeval
times, as he would say, the robber baron was wont to possess himself of
a mountain fortress, whence he swooped down upon hapless passers-by to
rob them of their possessions and their lives. To-day the successful
financial magnate does the same by effecting corners in corn and such
like. The great writer adds, with characteristic irony, "I prefer the
crag baron to the bag baron." Yet with all this we see at work in
history another tendency which we can recognise as plainly as the
former, but which fills us with great hope for the future of
humanity,--it is that which is summed up in the one word "Christ."
That word stands all the world over for the things that make for more
abundant life. Just as in the text the word "thief" stands for
everything that makes for separateness, selfhood, cruelty, so the word
"Christ" stands for everything that makes for union, mutual
helpfulness, brotherly kindness. The thief stands for the tendency to
grasp and draw inward, and the Christ stands for the tendency to give,
and live outward. The former tendency is what I call the
deathward--deathward for all else but itself; and the Christ is the
lifeward, life for all else but itself. Yet--curious inversion of
earlier experience--the deathward tendency results in death to itself
in the spiritual region, and the lifeward tendency results in life to
him who gives life. "I have power to lay it down, and I have power to
take it again." I want you to realise here, then, that the Christ in
humanity is the life-giver of the soul. They who are possessed of the
Christ spirit are they who have and can give the more abundant life.
We have briefly examined the two tendencies of which I have spoken;
have you realised that in the things of the spirit the deathward
tendency is what we call sin? Sin is selfishness; it is the attempt to
misuse the energies of God; it is the expansion of individuality at the
expense of the race. I do not know that you can arrive at a much more
thorough explanation of the nature of sin than that. Men blunderingly
attempt to classify virtues, and think of sin as simply the failure to
attain them. It is not that, it is something deeper; sin is the
attempt to minister to self at the expense of that which is outside
self. It lives by death to others, or seeks to do so.
When I was away a few weeks ago I paid a visit to Monte Carlo to see
what it was like, and went into the famous gambling saloon, and stood
for a while looking at the faces of the players. I could not see
anything very different from what I see now; the people who were
engaged in that all-engrossing pursuit might have been in church, they
were so quiet, so orderly, and so apparently passionless. Yet I
felt--it may have been a preacher's prejudice--that the moral
atmosphere of that place was one in which I did not want to remain;
there was something bad there, and I think I could discern what it was.
The gambler is essentially a man who is trying to get something for
nothing; he is drawing to himself that which he supposes will give him
more satisfying and abundant life. Let who will suffer; it is not his
concern. What is lifeward for him may be deathward for them; he is
willing that it should be so--that is the sin. Sin is always a
mistake,--a soul's mistake; it is the carrying up into the spiritual
region of that stern and terrible law of the physical world, the
survival of an organism at the expense of its fellow. That law is
reversed in the spiritual world; it is replaced by something else. If
a soul is to gain more abundant life, it must rise above the desire to
grasp and hold. The gambler is selling that beautiful thing which came
fresh from the hand of God, and is at once God's life and his; he is
destroying the present possibility of attaining to that higher life
which is the destiny of the soul. The Christ in him can find no
expression. And yet, my friends, realise this, however startling it
may seem, sin itself is a quest for God--a blundering quest, but a
quest for all that. The man who got dead drunk last night did so
because of the impulse within him to break through the barriers of his
limitations, to express himself, and to realise more abundant life.
His self-indulgence just came to that; he wanted if only for a brief
hour to live the larger life, to expand the soul, to enter untrodden
regions, and gather to himself new experience. That drunken debauch
was a quest for life, a quest for God. Men in their sinful follies
to-day, and their blank atheism, and their foul blasphemies, their
trampling upon things that are beautiful and good, are engaged in this
dim, blundering quest for God, whom to know is life eternal. The
_roué_ you saw in Piccadilly last night, who went out to corrupt
innocence and to wallow in filthiness of the flesh, was engaged in his
blundering quest for God. He is looking for Him along the line of the
wrong tendency; he has been gathering to himself what he took to be
more abundant life, "but sin, when it hath conceived bringeth forth
death"--death to the sinner as well as to his victim, death of what is
deepest and truest in the soul. Yet--I repeat it--all men are seeking
life, life more abundant, even in their selfishness and wrong-doing,
seeking life by the deathward road.
"Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
O life, not death, for which we pant,
More life and fuller than I want."
On the following Sunday I preached a sermon entitled the "Nature of
Sin," in which the same point was reëmphasised with even greater
distinctness, as the following extract will show:--
I think I startled some of you last Sunday morning when I happened to
remark that sin was, after all, a quest for God--a mistaken quest, but
none the less a quest for God, for all that. I want to explain to you
to-night somewhat more in detail what I mean by this, because the more
clearly we can see the truth the more clearly we can perceive sin to be
a soul's blunder. There are two tendencies discernible throughout
nature and in human history. These two tendencies are essentially
opposed, are ever in conflict, and ever will be until the whole world
is subdued to Christ, and God is all in all. I called them last Sunday
morning from the pulpit the deathward and the lifeward respectively.
The terms are not very satisfactory, because the deathward tendency
usually masquerades as the lifeward, and the lifeward often looks like
the deathward. That is why sin is ever possible. A man thinks to get
something by it, and though he finds out his mistake afterward, yet he
supposes it to be for him the lifeward road. On the other hand, the
utterly unselfish deed often looks as though it were a deed that would
bring destruction upon the doer. Not so. Jesus Christ saw right to
the heart of things when He said, "He that loveth his life shall lose
it, and he that loseth his life for My sake the same shall find it."
If you substitute for the words "for My sake," "for truth's sake," or
"for life's sake," you will get just the same meaning,--"he that keeps
back his life shall lose it, and he that gives forth his life shall
find it."
Here, then, are two tendencies sharply contrasted. Now observe their
operation in nature and in human experience. You are all aware of, and
frequently have been saddened, no doubt, by what you regard as the
cruelty of nature. There is a tragedy under every rose leaf, there is
unceasing conflict to the death going on in every hedgerow. Nature is
indeed cruel. I have often watched, during this winter which is now
drawing to a close, the little birds feeding outside the window of my
breakfast room in the morning. Like many of you, we put out a few
crumbs for these feathered friends who share the same garden with
ourselves, and I have always noticed that there is a battle royal
fought round those crumbs. There is enough for everyone, and yet the
instinct of these little creatures is to try and grab and keep all,
each one for itself. The instinct of the lower creation appears to be
that a form can only preserve itself, and only expand and express
itself, at the expense of other forms. It is a stern and terrible law,
as you well know. Forms, by a slow, upward progress in the unfolding
of the purpose to which nature exists, have become what they are at the
expense of earlier and weaker forms. There is a tendency to grasp and
hold, a tendency to kill and to destroy, and this, to some minds,
appears to be the strongest tendency in nature or in man. I question
it,--in fact, I deny it,--and I want that you and I should arrive at
the same conclusion respecting it. For there is another tendency
observable working from the very earliest throughout the processes of
nature, too. It is that which Henry Drummond describes as the struggle
for the life of others. If you like, we will call it mother-love. I
saw it illustrated only yesterday. A mother sheep, standing in her
place amongst the flock, was surprised with the rest at the incursion
of a mongrel dog. The flock fled instantly, but the ordinarily timid
mother stood her ground. The reason was not far to seek. There was a
little lamb cowering behind her, and she, overcoming her natural
instinct of self-preservation, turned her face to the dog to draw his
attention, if possible, to herself and deflect it from her young one.
Now, that instinct represents the tendency of which I speak, the
antithetic tendency to the other already described. It is the stronger
of the two. It indicates the goal toward which nature herself is
moving. "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together
until now," but mother-love is a prophecy of a higher yet to be. It is
the forth-going instinct, the all-ward, lifeward tendency.
Now turn to humanity. I think you will agree with me that right
through human history the same two tendencies are observable. The
farther back we go, the stronger seems the self-ward tendency. The
natural state of uncivilised man is a state of war. Man in primitive
communities only exists and flourishes by destroying other communities.
A most curious thing it is, too, that apparently our domestic and civic
virtues have grown out of this state of war. A man used to carry his
wife off by main force. She become his property. He exerted his brute
force, he magnified his own personality, as it were, in crushing other
personalities. His children were in his hands for life and death. If
he afterwards learned to love them, it was in contradistinction to the
children that were not his. That which was his, so to speak, gratified
his egotism; and, although a more beautiful relationship grew out of
it, such was the unpromising beginning. To-day when you hear a man
speaking loudly about "_my_ country," or "_my_ family," or "_my_
society," as the case may be, you may be perfectly sure that he is
projecting himself into his patriotism, or into his loyalty to family
or society; and indeed this was the lowly beginning of what has come to
be an excellent virtue. We have had to learn benevolence by
concentrating unselfish attention upon the few rather than the many.
The farther back you go in history, the sterner does the operation of
that law appear, and the less promising the future of mankind. If
people tell me the world is not getting better, I suggest that it might
be worth their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive
history. In the "Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches for us the
career of a strong and remarkable man. His hero, supposed to be a
paragon of virtue, is capable of things you would call scoundrelism
to-day. He and his band of storm-tossed companions land upon an island
of the Grecian Archipelago and find a city there. They promptly sack
it and kill all the inhabitants--men, women, and children. It seemed
to be the proper thing to do, and found its way into verse, and they
boasted about such heroic exploits. It was brutal murder, and the men
who were capable of it were nothing more or less than pirates. Yet
that stern, terrible tendency thus illustrated is just one with that
inscrutable law under which nature herself has come to be what she is.
It is what I call the self-ward tendency, the desire to grasp and keep
at the expense of other individualities other societies than our own.
But in history, and from those very earliest times down to our own,
another tendency has shown itself at work, a counter tendency. The two
have been so intertwined frequently--as I have indicated in showing
where patriotism comes from--that it has been difficult to dissociate
them; but they are quite distinct. Take, for instance, the magnificent
devotion of Arnold von Winkelried on the field of Sempach. Switzerland
has not existed as a political unit for many centuries, but during that
time her roll of heroes has been large. In the formative hour of Swiss
independence, when that tiny folk were struggling for their liberty
against the overweening power of Austria, it must have seemed a
hopeless undertaking--this group of mountaineers against the chivalry
of an empire. The great battle of Sempach was fought. The Swiss,
armed with nothing but their battle-axes, hurled themselves in vain all
day long against the serried ranks of Austrian mail-clad warriors,
armed with spears, through which the shepherd men could make no way.
They fell before them, but could not pass through them, till Winkelried
called to his countrymen, "Provide for my wife and children and I will
make a way," and, rushing unarmed upon the spearmen of Austria, clasped
in his embrace as many of them as he could and bore them to the earth.
A dozen spears passed through his body, but through the gap his
devotion had made, his countrymen leaped to victory. That one act made
possible, humanly speaking, the Swiss independence, which is an
object-lesson for us to-day. Such acts as these form part of the
cherished lore of nations. We feel they are the light-centres of the
world. Something tells us that an act like that, the giving of a life
for the sake of an ideal, a cause, a country, was a great thing. It
represented the counter tendency to what was going on at that moment.
In that very battle Austria was trying to grasp and hold, Switzerland
was trying to get free and live her own life, and here was a man who,
for the sake of his country's ideal, gave all that he had--his life.
Will you tell me where to look for the focus and centre of that ideal?
I know what your answer would be. It was at Calvary. The one thing
which, consciously or subconsciously, men have recognised in Jesus that
has given Him His supreme attraction for the world, is this--He was
absolutely disinterested. It is the disinterestedness of Jesus, His
utter nobleness, His power of projecting Himself into the experience of
others, and trying to lift humanity as a whole to His experience of
God, that gave Him His power with mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed,
but lived, the counter tendency to the law of sin and death.
Now, when we have brought the two together, you see the essential
distinction between working for self and its deathward look, and
working for all with its lifeward gaze. These two are antithetic, and
must be in opposition until the latter absorbs the former, and God is
all in all, and love reigneth world without end.
We are now able to see what sin is more plainly than before. Sin is
the tendency to grasp and draw inward, and everything that feeds that
tendency makes for death. Sin is the expansion of the individuality at
the expense of the race; sin is acting on the belief that the soul can
increase at another's cost, can increase by destroying what is
another's good. Apply that explanation or definition of sin to what
you know about life, and you will soon see when a man is facing the
deathward road, and how differently he acts when he is choosing the
lifeward road. There are men in this congregation who do not realise,
as they should, that lifewardness is God-wardness; but so it is. The
soul and the source of all things is God, and, consciously or
unconsciously, all men are seeking God in that they are seeking
self-expression, seeking life. The man, for instance, who is trying to
become rich is a man who is seeking to express himself, seeking power,
seeking life, seeking to thrust through the barriers that surround the
soul. They are all doing it; the veriest materialist among you is
seeking by his daily activities more abundant life. The young man here
who feels a burning ambition within his heart, a desire to exploit the
world and make a name for himself, to occupy a high station, is not
conscious of anything essentially unworthy. It all depends on what he
does with the impulse. What you are seeking, young man, is more
abundant life, and that is equivalent to seeking God. Life is God.
"Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from
the Father of lights." And when the tendency goes round and works
havoc and ruin in the world, it still remains a quest for God, although
a blundering one. It is a misuse of divine energy. The man who got
drunk last night and gratified his lower nature in that delirious hour
would be surprised if you were to tell him when you see the result that
he was really seeking God, but so it is. He wants life, and thinks he
can get it this way. This is the reason why morbid excitement and the
craving for amusement have such power in human lives to-day. Your
_roué_ in Piccadilly who went out to destroy innocence was seeking life
while spreading death. It seems almost blasphemy to say it, but he was
seeking God and thinking--O woful blunder!--that he would find Him by
destroying something that God has made beautiful and fair. So with all
acts of selfish gratification of which men are capable--they are the
turning of the current of divine energy the wrong way, and seeking
self-gratification at the expense of something else that God has made.
It is a failure to see that we only obtain life by giving life. When
an engine goes off the line there is a smash, as a rule, and the
greater the power that was driving the engine, the worse is the wreck
when it leaves the line. The lightning directed rightly becomes the
luminant by which we look on each other's faces to-night. That same
power might have brought havoc and destruction if it had not been
harnessed in the service of man. And so with the power that God has
given you; all desire for self-expression, all seeking of which you are
conscious for larger and better and richer life, is God-given; but it
may mean ruin and destruction unless you see that it is yours, not that
you may draw inward, but that you may give outward, yours not to keep
and hold, but yours wherewith to bless mankind. Sin is the tendency to
keep for self that which was meant for the world. "The wages of sin is
death," the death of soul. He who is guilty of sin is guilty of soul
murder. "All they that hate Me love death," and he that spreads pain
and ruin over other lives in the gratification of his own lower
instincts is using something which is God-given--yea, which is
essentially God's own life--in the wrong way. The only hope for him is
to realise that no act of sin was ever yet worth while, that it does
punish itself, must punish itself, for it shrivels and fetters the
soul. No eleventh-hour repentance will ever save you, and no cowardly
cry for relief will ever bring God's forgiveness into your soul, until
you have realised that sin and selfishness are one, and that what you
have failed to give forth of love and service represents the measure of
your soul poverty.
Even at the risk of prolixity and repetition I have thought it right to
insert these lengthy extracts from sermons which have been animadverted
upon. My readers will be able to judge of the fairness of the
criticism which, by abstracting a few lines, strove to make it appear
that my teaching denied the reality of sin. Here are the actual words
seen in their proper setting. If one were on the lookout for a good
illustration of the sinfulness of sin, perhaps the controversial
methods of the editor of the _British Weekly_ might furnish it. This
kind of criticism is on a par with that of the gentleman who once
startled an audience by declaring, "The Bible says there is no God."
He was right, of course, if it be legitimate to suppress the former
part of the passage, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God."
It is time we had done with unreal talk about sin. Sin is the murder
spirit in human experience. "Whosoever hateth his brother is a
murderer. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a
liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he
love God whom he hath not seen?" Strong language, but I suppose the
man who first used it must have known what he was talking about.
Pomposity is sin, because it is egoism; self-complacency and
contemptuousness are sin for the same reason. Cupidity is sin whether
in a burglar or a Doctor of Divinity. A bitter, grasping, cruel,
unsympathetic spirit is sin, no matter who shows it. The scribe and
the Pharisee are too much with us, and the religious ideal needs to be
rescued from their blighting grasp to-day as much as ever it did. Of
all forms of sin an arrogant, malignant, self-satisfied assumption of
righteousness is the worst and the hardest to eradicate, as Jesus found
to His cost. The terrible damning lie which is stifling religion
to-day is the lie which crucified Jesus, the lie that spiritual pride
can ever interpret God to a needy world. There is something grimly
amusing in the suggestion that prosperous people should pay for sending
gospel missions to the poor. If sin is selfishness, the poor had
better missionise the rich. Imagine how it would be if things were
reversed in this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers took
their stand in Belgravia and began a house-to-house visitation, with
all the theological terms carefully eliminated from the mission
leaflets they thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered footmen.
Instead of, "Flee from the wrath to come," etc., they might have:
"Don't be selfish! it is hurting you and your neighbours and making you
unhappy. Don't pretend! It is poor business in the end. Try to do as
much as you can for other people and you will know what God is." The
attempt would be startling and unwelcome, but it would be far less
impudent than the religious exhortations of the prosperous to the poor
commonly are. For the truth is that if sin is selfishness,--and it is
nothing else,--the degraded habits of people at the lower end of the
social scale are no more sinful than the ordinary behaviour of most of
their preceptors at the other end. Most of the talk about sin is
unreal; that is the trouble; so verily the publicans and harlots go
into the kingdom of heaven before us. In church a man will profess
himself to be a miserable sinner, but if we were to address him in the
same way out of church he would sue us for libel--if he thought we
meant it. For heaven's sake let us have done with the sham of it all
and face the truth. What mankind is suffering from is selfishness.
Get rid of that and there would be little left to trouble about.
+Atonement and sin.+--It should now be plain why the doctrine of
Atonement has been so closely associated with the doing away of sin; it
is because, as we have seen, the root idea of Atonement is the
assertion of the fundamental oneness of man with man and all with God.
Sin is the divisive separating thing in our relations with one another,
and with God the source of all, so the assertion of our oneness
involves getting rid of sin. If we ask how this is to be done, the
answer is simple enough: the only way to get rid of selfishness is by
the ministry of love. What is it that is slowly winning the world from
its selfishness to-day and lifting it gradually into the higher, purer
atmosphere of universal love? There is but one thing that is doing it,
and that is the spirit of self-sacrifice. Wherever you see that, you
see the true Atonement at work. There can be no doubt about the final
issue, for behind the spirit of love is infinity, whereas the spirit of
selfishness is essentially finite. On the field of human history the
death of Jesus is the focus and concentrated essence of this age-long
atoning process, whereby selfishness is being overcome and the whole
race lifted up to its home in God. Until Jesus came no self-offering
had been so consistent and so complete. No selfish desire could find
lodgment in His pure soul. He showed men the ideal life by living it
Himself, the life which was perfectly at one with God and man. In a
selfish world that life was sure to end on a Calvary of some kind, but
the very fact that it did so demonstrated the completeness of its
victory over all considerations of self-interest. Selfishness lost the
battle by seeming to gain it. God was behind the life of Jesus just
because it was the life of perfect love, the life which was a perfect
gift to the whole, therefore that life immediately arose in power in
other lives and has gone increasing its benevolent sway over human
hearts ever since. This is the Atonement and it is rightly associated
with the cross of Jesus in the minds of men, for the cross is the sum
and centre of it all.
+The increasing Atonement.+--But the Atonement to be effective has to
be repeated on the altar of human hearts, and so it is, to a far
greater extent than most people stop to think. The same spirit that
was in Jesus and governed His whole career was the spirit of the true
humanity, "The light that lighteth every man that cometh into the
world." The spirit of Jesus was the spirit of Christ, the ideal or
divine manhood as it exists eternally in God. But that ideal or divine
manhood, that Christ nature, is also potentially present in every human
being. What needs to be done is to get it manifested or brought forth
into conscious activity. The immediate effect of the life and death of
Jesus upon His followers was to make them more or less like Him, and to
fill them with a similar desire to get men to live the life of love
which is the life of God. They felt themselves inspired by the same
spirit, the Holy Spirit of truth and love, and exalted above all fear
for their own safety and all desire to live for themselves alone. They
loved their Lord so much that their lives became one with His in the
work of saving the world. They could see no difference between serving
their Master and serving mankind. This love force of theirs, this
intense loyalty to Jesus, was, and still is, the redeeming thing in the
life of mankind. There is not and never has been any other Atonement.
The divine power that is breaking down selfishness, and transforming
human desires in accordance with the eternal truth of things, is the
spirit of self-sacrificing love. It is but a step from sinner to
saviour. To cease to be a sinner is perforce to be a saviour. To
escape from the dominion of selfishness is forthwith to become a power
in the hand of God for the uplifting and ingathering of mankind to
Himself; this is the Atonement.
Ask yourself whether this is not so. What other force for good is
there in the world to-day than the spirit which governed the whole life
of Jesus and rendered Him willing to brave the worst that evil could do
in His desire to get men to realise the true life? There is no other.
If you want to see the Atonement at work, go wherever love is
ministering to human necessity and you see the very same spirit which
was in Jesus, the spirit which heals and saves. Dogma is doing nothing
to save the world; the gospel of self-sacrifice is doing everything.
Show me a Christlike life and I will show you a part of the Atonement
of Christ. Show me a noble deed and I will show you something worthy
of Jesus. His self-offering, and the love and devotion it awoke in
human hearts, are a perpetual sacrifice, a cumulative assertion that in
the presence of need love can never do anything other than give itself
until the need is supplied and love is all in all. There is even a
possibility of substitution here. Vicarious suffering willingly
accepted becomes irresistible in the long run as a means of lifting a
transgressor out of the mire of selfishness. Many a noble wife has
saved her husband by remaining at his side and patiently accepting the
disabilities caused by his wrong-doing. It is even possible in such a
case for the saviour to bear more than the sinner, and for the sinner
to be relieved of some of the consequences of his sin; he would have to
suffer more if there were no loving helper to stand by him. But to
speak of one as bearing another's punishment is untrue; such a thing
cannot be. All that love can do is to share to the uttermost in the
painful consequences of sin and by so doing break their power What
other Atonement is needed than this? It requires no defence, and a
child could understand it. Everyone already believes in it, whether he
stops to think about it or not. While I am writing these words a
fierce storm is raging outside. This is the second day we have had of
it, and there seems likely to be some loss of life on the dangerous
rocks outside the bar which forms the entrance to the bay below. A
visitor has just been telling me of a wilder storm in this same bay
some years ago, and of which he says to-day's gale reminds him. On
that previous occasion three ships were wrecked together within a few
yards of this house. It must have been a dreadful, awe-inspiring
scene. No boat could live on the surf, so every survivor had to be
dragged ashore with ropes fastened to the cliffs and hauled by willing
hands. Hundreds of townspeople and fisher folk came pouring over from
St. Ives and all the hamlets round about in order to take part in the
work of rescue. According to my informant the scene was enough to stir
any heart, and even grown men were crying with excitement and
compassion as some of the poor fellows in the rigging of the doomed
vessels were washed away before they could be got ashore. The few who
were actually snatched from the jaws of death found no lack of willing
helpers as one by one they were passed insensible into the kind keeping
of the many who stood waiting for an opportunity to be of service. No
one grudged anything; every home and every bed would have been
cheerfully placed at the disposal of the shipwrecked mariners if they
had been wanted. Brave women, the wives and daughters of men who were
risking their lives on the sea every day, willingly encouraged their
husbands and sons in battling against the tempest in the endeavour to
save other husbands and sons whom they had never seen or heard of until
that hour of distress and need. And what a fight it was to be sure!
Never was a braver. Again and again these humble Cornish heroes dashed
into the raging billows to grasp and guide the ropes that bore a
flickering human life, and every time they returned with their helpless
burden a cheer went up from the watchers that drowned for a moment the
violence of the blast. No one thought of enquiring into the theology
of saviours or survivors. No doubt there were some among the former
who were oftener to be found at the public-house bar than at church,
but no one could have distinguished them from the orthodox Christians
who fought the waves shoulder to shoulder beside them; they were there
to save life, and in doing so their deeper manhood shone out with
divine splendour. But the most of the rescuers were good sound,
earnest Methodists who perhaps believed, or thought they believed, in
the eternal damnation of the unregenerate. But what became of their
doctrine in the face of an urgent human need and the call for
self-sacrifice to supply that need? It was utterly forgotten. There
is both humour and pathos in the fact that these convinced believers
tugged and tore at the ropes, and freely jeopardised their own lives in
a magnificent endeavour to save perishing bodies from temporal water.
There is the truth for you, the real Atonement. The heart creed is
usually better than the head creed, and in great moments buries the
latter out of sight. Here was the spirit of Christ, the true and
eternal manhood, the spirit that seeks to save at its own cost. Here
was the instinctive perception of the fundamental oneness of all life
and the recognition that the godlike thing is to seek to deliver life
from the clutch of death.
+All men instinctively believe in the Atonement.+--This is the deepest
and truest impulse of the human heart, as all men already know if they
would only trust their better nature to tell them what God wants from
his children. Here is an explosion in a coal-mine, and forthwith every
mother's son above ground volunteers to go down into the choke-damp to
snatch his buried comrades from the sleep of death. A few months ago
one such disaster took place in a Durham colliery. Most of my readers
will remember that in the newspaper reports of the incidents that took
place at the pit mouth were the following: A father who was brought to
the surface was asked whether he lost hope during the long hours of his
imprisonment below without food or light. "No," was the reply, "for I
knew my boy would be in the rescue party, and that nothing would turn
him back until he found his father, dead or alive." The suffragan
bishop of the diocese, along with a number of other clergymen and
nonconformist ministers, remained all night amid the scene of sorrow at
the pit mouth, doing his best to comfort the mourners as their loved
ones were brought up dead. As morning broke he mounted a heap of
cinders and, without making any attempt to conceal his emotion, spoke a
few manly words of brotherly exhortation and Christian love to his
deeply moved congregation of toilers and sufferers. One poor woman,
with unconscious irony, exclaimed to the bystanders: "He doesn't seem
like a bishop! He is just like one of ourselves." That servant of God
has never preached the Atonement more effectually in all his life--by
getting together of man and man, and man and God, through the spirit of
self-sacrifice. He stands in the true apostolic succession, the
succession of men like Saul of Tarsus, the erstwhile persecutor, who,
under the inspiration of the love of Jesus, lived to say, "Who is weak
and I am not weak? Who is offended and I burn not?"
Go into any home where the spirit of self-sacrificing love is trying to
do anything to supply a need or save a transgressor, and you see the
Atonement. Follow that Salvation lassie to the slums, and listen to
her as she tries to persuade a drunken husband and father to give up
the soul-destroying habit which is such a curse to wife and child, and
you see the Atonement. Go with J. Keir Hardie to the House of Commons
and listen to his pleading for justice to his order and you see the
Atonement. Hear the prayer of mother-love for the erring, wandering
son, and you have the Atonement. See that grey-haired father patiently
pleading with selfish, hot-headed youth, or yielding up his own
hard-won possessions to pay the gambler's debts and save the family
name, and you have the Atonement. Nothing can stir the human heart so
much. All the great deeds of history derived their inspiration from
it; all the little heroisms of our common everyday life are the
declaration of it. There is not a single one of all our thoughts and
activities but has some relation to it; we are either living for
ourselves individually and separately or we are living for the whole.
If the former, we are the servants of sin; if the latter, our lives are
already part of the Atonement.
+Jesus and the Atonement.+--It is easy to see how much the world owes
to Jesus in this regard. I cannot tell what the world might have been
if there had never been a Jesus, but certain it is that the sacrificial
life and death of Jesus have meant the inpouring of a spirit into human
affairs such as had never been known in the same degree before. Here
for the first time men saw a perfect manifestation of the life that is
life indeed, the life that pleased not itself, the life that entered
into and shared human disabilities as though they were its very own,
the life that in the presence of selfishness must inevitably become
sacrifice, the life of Atonement. In a sinful world that life had to
come to a Calvary, but in so doing in refusing to shield and save
itself it became the greatest moral power and the greatest revelation
of God that the world has ever known. What we succeed in doing some of
the time, Jesus did all the time; when all men are able to do it all
the time the Atonement will have become complete and love divine shall
be all in all. "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!" cried Julian the
apostate; and Christian faith can reverently add--
"Jesus is worthy to receive
Honour and power divine;
And blessings more than we can give
Be, Lord, forever thine."
Faith in Jesus is faith in the Atonement and faith in our own
Christhood. It means the upraising of the true life, the eternal life,
within our own souls. Until His spirit becomes our spirit, His
Atonement has done nothing for us, and when it does we, like Him,
become saviours of the race. It must be so, for the spirit of love is
the same both in God and man; in the presence of need, no matter what
the need may be, that spirit must continue to give itself without stint
until the need is supplied and all that would tend to separate between
the individual soul and the eternal perfect whole is done away.
But then, someone will say, what has the death of Jesus effected in the
unseen so as to make it possible for God to forgive us? Nothing
whatever, and nothing was ever needed. God is not a fiend but a
Father, the source and sustenance of our being and the goal of all our
aspirations. Why should we require to be saved from Him?
+Divine satisfaction in Atonement.+--But in what sense is the death of
Jesus a satisfaction to the Father? In no sense at all, except that
the sacrifice of Jesus is the highest expression of the innermost of
God that has ever been made. If it affords an artist satisfaction to
express himself in a beautiful picture, or a great thinker to express
his noble thought in a book, surely the highest satisfaction that God
can know must be his self-expression in the self-sacrifice of his
children. At its best, the intensest joy that can be known is the joy
of giving one's self for the good of the whole. In everything grand
and good in human thought and achievement God is doing just this. It
is the satisfaction he receives from the Atonement and the only one.