But even if the need is admitted, it does not follow that the traditional Christian doctrine will commend itself to-day to the sincere inquirer as being either morally edifying or psychologically sound. The difficulties which men feel in making Atonement a real part of their religion are, at bottom, largely intellectual: they are difficulties of understanding. Moral ideas have not stood still; and the older explanations of Atonement seem to sink below the level of the best secular morality of to-day. So far as this is so, the "modern mind" rightly rejects them. It will not listen to any theory of the dealings of God with man, which represents Him as actuated by anything but the highest goodness that we can conceive. But the fault is not all on one side. The modern thinker is right in making moral experience a touchstone of the truth of religious doctrine and in insisting that, if such doctrine does not altogether correspond to the conclusions of experience, it shall differ from them only by way of development and further illumination. But, in fact, his own ethics and psychology are often crude; and it is because of this that any belief in Atonement seems to him impossible. In particular, an over-individualistic conception of the nature of personality stands in the way. And the chief object of this essay is to make clear and to criticize the psychological presuppositions with which the modern inquirer is apt to approach these questions. For it is in this region that the case is really determined. On the other hand, the Conservative thinker is wrong in so far as he relegates to a secondary place the whole method of appeal to moral experience. And he is apt to make the ways of God to man seem unacceptable to conscience and to experience by failing sufficiently to exhibit the process of judgment and salvation as a whole. So far as there is truth in the conception of God's judicial condemnation and punishment of sin, this has always a saving character. It is not as though God began as Justice by condemning sin and instituting a penal hell; and then, as it were by a happy afterthought, intervened as Mercy to arrest in part its operation. The condemnation cannot be separated from the salvation: only as intended to lead to it, has it place or justification. Our method throughout has been to exhibit the Liberal and Conservative views side by side, with the suggestion that they are mutually dependent halftruths. To preach that the way to truth is by reconciliation and combination of opposing views may seem an empty platitude. But the aim has been to show in some points how and why the two views involve one another. The Liberal thinks in terms of modern ethics and psychology. But these leave us with a problem, for the solution of which we need the dynamic power of the atoning work of Christ, as the Conservative conceives it. The Christian Gospel, then, is the great need of this generation as of St. Paul. And to us, as to him, it is a gospel of salvation and atonement. SYNOPSIS I. THE CHURCH IN ESSENCE AND FACT PAGE 339-347 The Church is the Church of the Resurrection; it lives the Risen and Ascended Life of its Lord; its unity is the unity of that Life, and can therefore never be broken; the Church on earth is a sacrament of that Church Expression of the foregoing in the Eucharist; its significance 339 343 II. THE CHURCH MILITANT HERE IN EARTH 347-359 The Church on earth a sacrament; the organ of the Will of Christ, and thus the completion of His Being 347 Its unity realised through diversity; affinities of St. Paul's doctrine with modern sociology 348 Practical results; Christian unity; the consequent strengthening of faith; the need for loyal Church-membership 350 The Church entangled in the World 355 The Fellowship of the Holy Ghost. 357 The perfecting of the Church dependent on the conversion of the world. 358 "The completion of Him who all in all is being fulfilled". 359 |