The Chief End of Man

by George Spring Merriam

The belief that the perfect life had actually been lived by Christ was a help to men whose aspiration felt itself unsuccessful,—the very height of the aspiration deepening the sense of failure. The mind fastened on an actual and perfect goodness outside of itself. The Stoic ideal kept a man self-watchful, giving him no higher personality to look up to. There was in Christianity the feeling that the perfect life has been lived, and this somehow may help to save me. This was the core of the Atonement. All theories of it—ransom, substitution, and the like—were intellectual explanations of the fact of experience.

Forgiveness is the soul's delighted sense that its sin is not mortal. It comes only after sin has been felt as a burden. Conscious of wrong-doing, man feels helpless and even accursed,—imagines or credits stories of a fall, of measureless guilt, and an endless hell. What gives poignancy to these ideas is the real sense of wrong-doing, which projects a monstrous and exaggerated shadow.

The sense of duty, constantly worked, breeds in sensitive souls the despair of an unattainable perfection. The outward ceremonial does not help or enrich,—the moral and spiritual ideal tantalizes by its impossibility. This happens even to the strenuously righteous. In the gross wrong-doer, especially if he falls under the ban of society, there is wrought a despair which probably expresses itself in a hardened recklessness.

Among these "lost sheep" came Jesus as a friend. His love divined the deeper soul within them,—its yearning for the good it had perhaps ceased even to struggle for,—its untouched possibilities. He said, "Be of good cheer! Thy sins be forgiven thee! Go in peace!" At his word and touch, a new life sprang up in them,—a new force lifted humanity in its lowest depths.

To this new sense of life out of death Jesus gave the name of Your Father's love. He typified it in the parable of the Prodigal Son. And as the appropriate attitude for this recovered sinner, he set, not merely a glad and thankful acceptance of the gift, but the passing of it on to others. He bound inseparably the receiving and the giving. "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

Just the experience of the pardoned miser or harlot came to Paul when he saw that in his pride and willfulness he had been persecuting the holy and innocent, yet felt himself reached and loved and restored by that same innocent and holy soul.

The experience was constantly repeated in the early church. It was the most striking of all those genuine "miracles"—the wonders of spiritual creation and growth—which were the wealth of the Christian society.

At the most dark and depressing hour of that society; when in gaining dominion it had lowered its purity, and before the barbarian invasion the whole social fabric shook,—that same miracle of a divine love, realized as a saving and transforming force, was wrought in the great personality of Augustine, and inspired through him anew the life of the church.

The intellectual vestment of this experience—the form under which the crude thought of these men gave it body and substance—was the Incarnation and the Atonement. Those doctrines have lasted through all changes, even until this day, because of the pearl of truth cased in their rough shells.

When now we try to express that truth in its simplicity—finding always a great difficulty in putting in articulate words the deep things of the spirit—we say that the man who sees and sorrows for and seeks to escape from his wrong deed or habit may come into the consciousness that he will escape,—may feel with a profound assurance that he is upborne by some power of good which will save him and bless him. He is recoverable; he is lovable; he is loved, and shall be saved. And the way in which that consciousness is awakened is oftenest by the contact of some soul which the sinner reverences as better than himself, which knows his guilt and loves him in spite of it, and declares to him that he shall live and recover. The minister of forgiveness may be a mother or a wife; it may be the sincere priest speaking to the sincere penitent; it may be Christ or Madonna; it may be the unnamed Power whose token is the sunset, or the rainbow, or the voice within the heart.