Gloria Crucis / addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907

Transcribed from the 1908 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
addresses delivered in lichfield cathedral holy week and good friday, 1907
by THE REV. J. H. BEIBITZ, M.A. vice-principal of the theological college, lichfield
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1908
All rights reserved
MATRI
The writer desires to express his obligations to various works from which he has derived much assistance, such as, above all, Du Bose’s Gospel in the Gospels , Askwith’s Conception of Christian Holiness , Tennant’s Origin of Sin , and Jevons’ Introduction to the History of Religion .
To the first and the last of these he is especially indebted in regard to the view here taken of the Atonement.
It seems to him that no view of that great and central truth can possibly be true, which (i) represents it as the result of a transaction between the Father and the Son, which is ditheism pure and simple; or which (ii) regards it as intended to relieve us of the penalty of our sins, instead of having as its one motive, meaning, and purpose the “cure of sinning.”
So far as we can see, the results of sin, seen and
unseen, in this world and beyond it, must follow naturally and necessarily from that constitution of the universe (including human nature) which is the expression of the Divine Mind. If this is true, and if that Mind is the Mind of Him Who is Love, then all punishment must be remedial, must have, for its object and intention at least, the conversion of the sinner. And, therefore, the desire to escape from punishment, if natural and instinctive, is also non-moral, for it is the desire to shirk God’s remedy for sin, and doomed never to realise its hope, for it is the desire to reverse the laws of that Infinite Holiness and Love which governs the world.