There is then no additional propitiation demanded from us. The Atonement, in this aspect, requires nothing from us, for the forgiveness is there, bestowed upon us by God in consequence of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But like the gifts of grace which come after forgiveness, the forgiveness itself has to be personally accepted by us; it must be brought into contact with each man's will. So regarded, the Atonement, though the great gift of reconciliation is absolutely free, the product of the spontaneous love of God, does lay upon us an obligation. On our part faith is demanded that we may realize, and appropriate, and associate ourselves with the pardon which is ours in Christ. This is not the place for a full discussion of justifying faith: it is enough to indicate what seems to be its relation to the Atonement, as being man's share in the propitiatory work of Christ. It is often said that the faith which justifies is simply trust[239], but it must surely be a more complex moral act than this. If faith is the acceptance of Christ's propitiation, it must contain, in the first place, that longing for reconciliation which springs from the personal consciousness of sin as alienation from God, and from horror of its guilt and power. There must then ensue the recognition of man's complete powerlessness to free himself from sin, and a deeply humble sense of dependence on God's mercy; but this mere trust in His mercy is not enough, for it would not satisfy the sense of sin. The sinner has to own that God is not merely benevolent, and that sin must be punished. Therefore faith must contain the recognition of the justice of the Divine law against sin, manifested in the death of Christ. Faith, in short, starts from the longing for a representative to atone for us, and it ends with the recognition of Christ as our representative, of His Atonement as sufficient, and of His death as displaying the due reward of sin. For the Atonement cannot be a mere external act. If Christ is our representative, He must be acknowledged by those whom He represents: otherwise His endurance of suffering would avail nothing for them, for God will not be satisfied with the mere infliction of punishment. But if the result of His death is that men are brought, one by one, age after age, to acknowledge the righteousness of the law for which He suffered, to recognise the result of sin to which sin has blinded them, then there has been made on their part the first step towards the great reconciliation. Faith identifies the individual with the sacrifice which has been offered for him, and therefore with Christ's attitude towards God and towards sin, and though it is but the first step, yet it is emphatically that by reason of which we are justified. For since we are thus identified with the sacrifice, God accepts the first step for the whole course, of which it is the pledge and anticipation. We are justified because we believe in God, but also because God believes in us[240]. Faith, being what it is, a complex moral act whereby Christ's propitiation is accepted by man, implies an attitude of mind towards sin so right that, though it is but the first movement of the soul in Christ, God takes it for the whole, sees us as wholly in Him, reckons it to us as righteousness. But only because it is as a matter of fact the first, the hardest, perhaps, and the most necessary, but still only the first step towards complete sanctification. And, if we now ask what is the further course of sanctification, the answer will shew the full relation of the sacrifice of Christ to man's will and conscience. For the life of sanctification is nothing else but the 'imitation of Christ' in that task of 'learning obedience' to which His life was devoted, and which His death completed. In us, too, as in Him, that task has to be accomplished by suffering. 'He learnt obedience by the things which He suffered.' 'It became Him ... in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.' That same path towards perfection lies before all who are justified by faith in His atoning sacrifice. For justification is a spiritual act answering to the spiritual act of faith. The spiritual germ of vitality thus implanted in us has to be developed in the sphere in which the consequences of sin naturally and inevitably work themselves out, in the bodily nature of man. 'Even we,' says S. Paul, 'which have the first fruits of the Spirit,' even we are waiting for the further process, for 'the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.' And the process consists in so following 'the Captain of our salvation' that, like Him, we accept every one of those sufferings which are the consequences of sin, but accept them not as punishment imposed from without upon unwilling offenders, but as the material of our freewill sacrifice. From no one pang or trial of our nature has He delivered us, indeed, He has rather laid them upon us more unsparingly, more inevitably. But the sufferings from which He would not deliver us He has transformed for us. They are no longer penal, but remedial and penitential. Pain has become the chastisement of a Father who loves us, and death the passage into His very presence. And this He has done for us by the bestowal upon us of spiritual vitality. The germ is implanted by the act of forgiveness which removes the wrath and the impending death, and this germ of life, cherished and developed by the gifts which flow from His mediation and intercession, by the Holy Spirit Whom He sends to dwell in us, works on all the penalties of sin, and makes them the sacrifice which we offer in Him. This is the 'law of the Spirit of life.' 'If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you.'
Our personal share then in the Atonement is not mere passivity. It consists, first, in the acceptance of God's forgiveness in Christ, our self-identification with Christ's atoning attitude, and then in working out, by the power of the life bestowed upon us, all the consequences of forgiveness, the transformation of punishment into sacrifice, the imitation of Christ in His perfect obedience to the law of righteousness, the gradual sanctification of body, soul and spirit by the grace which enables us to 'suffer with Him.'
III. The doctrine of Atonement, more than any of the great truths of Christianity, has been misconceived and misrepresented, and has therefore not only been rejected itself, but has sometimes been the cause of the rejection of the whole Christian system. The truth of the vicarious sacrifice has been isolated till it has almost become untrue, and, mysterious as it undoubtedly is, it has been so stated as to be not only mysterious, but contrary to reason and even to conscience. One most terrible misconception it is hardly necessary to do more than mention. The truth of the wrath of God against sin and of the love of Christ by which that wrath was removed, has been perverted into a belief in a divergence of will between God the Father and God the Son, as if it was the Father's will that sinners should perish, the Son's will that they should be saved; as if the Atonement consisted in the propitiation of the wrathful God by the substituted punishment of the innocent for the guilty. It will be seen that while this statement seems to represent the Catholic doctrine, in reality it introduces a most vital difference. There can be no divergence of will between the Persons of the Blessed Trinity; and, in regard to this special dealing with man, we have the clearest testimony of Revelation that the whole Godhead shared in the work. Here, as always, God the Father is revealed as the source and origin of all good. 'God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.' The beginning and the end of the Atonement is the love of God: the death of Christ was not the cause, but the revelation of that love[241]. That it was the second Person of the Trinity who was actually the means of our redemption may be ascribed to that original relation of the Logos to the human race, by which He was both its Creator and its perfect exemplar[242]. But nothing can be further from the truth than to imagine that His was all the love which saved us, the Father's all the wrath which condemned us. If the death of Christ was necessary to propitiate the wrath of the Father, it was necessary to propitiate His own wrath also; if it manifested His love, it manifested the Father's love also. The absolute, unbroken, unity of will between the Father and the Son is the secret of the atoning sacrifice.
Again, the isolation of the truth of the Atonement from other parts of Christian doctrine has led to a mode of stating it which deprives us of all motive to action, of all responsibility for our own salvation. Just as the misconception noticed above arose from a failure to grasp the whole truth of our Lord's Divinity, so this error springs from ignoring His perfect Humanity. Christ is regarded as having no vital or real relation to us, and His work is therefore wholly external, a mere gift from above. But what has already been said will shew that from the first the Atonement has been taught as the offering of our spiritual Head, in Whom we are redeemed, and whose example we are able to follow as having Him in us. Salvation is thus given to us indeed, but it is given to us because we are in Christ, and we have to work out our share in it because of the responsibility, the call to sacrifice which that union with Him lays upon us. 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do.' It is all from God and of God; but God has come into our life, and taken us up into Him, and called upon us to follow Him in the way of the cross.
And this leads us to consider another error, or rather another form of the same error. Nothing is more common than to hear the doctrine of Atonement stated as if the work of Christ consisted in His endurance of our punishment in order that we might not endure it. This view of the doctrine leads to the objections—perhaps the commonest of all the difficulties found in what men take for Christianity—that the punishment of the innocent instead of the guilty is unjust, and that punishment cannot be borne by anyone but the sinner. We have seen that the real vicariousness of our Lord's work lay in the offering of the perfect sacrifice: the theory we are now considering holds, on the contrary, that it lay in the substitution of His punishment for ours. A partial truth is contained in this theory; for our Lord did endure sufferings, and, as has been already said, they were the very sufferings which are, in sinners, the penalties of sin. But as a simple matter of fact and experience, the sufferings and the pains of death which He endured have not been remitted to us; and that which is remitted, the eternal penalty of alienation from God, was not, could not be endured by Him. For alienation from God is, essentially, a state of sin; it is sin, regarded both in its origin and in its necessary result. It could not, therefore, be borne by Christ, 'in Whom was no sin,' between Whom and the Father was no alienation. Attempts have been made to establish a quantitative relation between our Lord's sufferings and the punishment which is thereby remitted to us, to prove that the eternal nature of the Sufferer made His death equivalent to eternal punishment. But even if such attempts, in so mysterious a region, could succeed, it would be vain to establish a quantitative equivalence where there is no qualitative relation. Eternal punishment is 'eternal sin[243],' and as such could never be endured by the sinless Son of God.
But we have to face the question which naturally follows. What, then, did His sufferings and death mean? Why did He endure what are to us the temporal penalties, the diverse consequences of sin? And if He endured them, why are they not remitted to us? It is true, as has been shewn, that He bore just those sufferings which are the results and penalties of sin, even to that tremendous final experience in which man loses sight of God as he enters the valley of the shadow of death; but He bore them, not that we might be freed from them, for we have deserved them, but that we might be enabled to bear them, as He did, victoriously and in unbroken union with God. He, the Innocent, suffered, but the guilty do not 'go free;' for the very end and object of all the obedience that He learnt was, that He might lead man along the same path of suffering, not 'free,' but gladly submissive to the pains, which, but for Him, would be the overwhelming penalties of our sins. It may be true that 'punishment cannot be borne by anyone but the sinner[244],' and therefore it may be right not to call Christ's sufferings punishment, especially as the expression is significantly avoided in the New Testament. But it is certainly not true that the sufferings which result from sin cannot be borne by anyone but the sinner: every day demonstrates the falsity of such an assertion. Sufferings borne in the wrong spirit, unsubmissively or without recognition of their justice, are penal; but the spirit of humility and obedience makes them remedial and purgatorial. Christ, by so bearing the pains which sin brought upon human nature, and which the special sin of His enemies heaped upon Him, has not only offered the one perfect sacrifice, but has also given us strength to make the same submission, to learn the same obedience and to share the same sacrifice.
IV. There are many topics connected with the Atonement which it is impossible here to discuss, but which seem to fall into their right place and proportion if those aspects of Christ's redeeming work which have been dwelt upon are kept firmly in mind. The central mystery of the cross, the forgiveness, the removal of wrath, thereby freely bestowed upon us, remains a mystery, and must always be an insuperable difficulty to those who depend wholly on reason, or who trust wholly in man's power to extricate himself from the destruction wrought by his sin, as it was an offence to the Jew, and foolishness to the Greek. But mystery though it is to the intellect, there is a moral fitness[245] in the bestowal of forgiveness because of the obedience of Christ shewn in His sacrificial death, which appeals irresistibly to the moral consciousness of mankind. The witness of this is the trustful gratitude with which the doctrine of Christ crucified has been accepted by Christians, learned and unlearned, from the age of its first preaching. The human heart accepts it, and by the cross is assured of forgiveness: 'to them which are called' it is 'Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.'
But if we may appeal to experience in support of this mysterious truth, much more may we claim the same support for the plainer, more human aspect of the Atonement. As S. Athanasius in his day[246], so we in ours may appeal for the practical and visible proof of the Atonement, to the complete change in man's relation to sorrow and suffering, and in the Christian view of death[247]. This is no small matter. When we realize what suffering is in human life, the vast place which it has in our experience, its power of absorbing the mind, its culmination in the final pangs of death, and when we see the transformation, however gradual and imperfect it may be, of all this into the means and material of the sacrifice which the follower of Christ is gladly willing to offer to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we realize the full force of the great words telling of the destruction 'through death of him that had the power of death, that is the devil,' and of the deliverance of 'them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.' And the transformation, the destruction, the deliverance, consist in this that from these sufferings His sacrifice has removed the element of rebellion, the hopelessness of alienation, the sting of sin. They are ours, because they were His; but they are ours as they were His, purified and perfected by obedience, by the offering of a holy Will; 'by the which Will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.'
[217] Mill, Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 103. 'I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.'
[218] Cf. Holland, Logic and Life, pp. 107, 108.