There is a very marvellous knowledge of the hidden heart shown in these prophetic teachings. As we converse with the Supreme Person of the Gospels we feel him searching out our bones and marrow. To him there lies open the secret of disunion among us personal beings and the secret of the utmost furtherance, and the means towards furtherance, of the conversion of our will from self-seeking to love-finding. This utmost furtherance necessarily falls short of the compulsion love can never even contemplate or man endure. A man compelled to love is unthinkable. Words, mere empty words these are that so speak of him. He cannot be. If he could be compelled he could not be man; if the semblance of love were forced upon him it would not be love. But the atonement in which the Christian believes shows the love of God working to further love in man to an utmost God alone can reach. Punishment and forgiveness work together as that love, and the life of Jesus and the Cross on which he died are at once their final showing-forth, their clearest call to man, and the tremendous acceptance by man of all that they entail and are.
Here, indeed, is the fountain of love in its fulness. We need not wonder that the disciple, having in mind his living and triumphant Lord, hears him say to us who desire to drink of the waters of love—'Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.'
Christian atonement means restoration to the only real and full union and communion of persons, that of divine love.
CHAPTER VII
Nature, in a fashion whose details are still only
faintly hinted to us men, constitutes a vast society.
Royce.
The Christian shows in his root principles, we are bound to confess, a profound sense of personality and of the relations of persons. That this comes of his relation to the Supreme Person from whom he has derived them can hardly be denied. It is in a person, Jesus Christ, that he has seen God and learnt about him; and the judgements and love of God that he discerns he discerns in Christ. As the spirit of Christ becomes one with his spirit so do his own judgements and his own love become those of God in him, and his principles are embodied in his life. All wisdom is divine, and all love, the Christian says. And, undoubtedly, men who are earnestly and disinterestedly seeking these, and discovering how in that search they penetrate into the truth and reality of moral and practical affairs of life, must find that the Christian is worth listening to, perhaps even worth watching. That is, when he has 'the mind of Christ.' Otherwise he confuses judgement and blurs, if he does not efface, his principles. In 'the mind of Christ' he is for us 'a well-spring of water'; without that, if he only calls himself by the name and is either the Scribe, the Pharisee, or the false prophet, he is far more helpless, far more misleading and misled, than they are who honestly seek truth and know they have not found it.
In the last chapter we heard what the man with the mind of Christ had to say about punishment and forgiveness as between persons. And one difficulty that disturbs others, many others, besides those who approach the Christian religion from the direction of science, has surely been lessened by him. But besides this, in that chapter we referred, in passing, to the calamities of what we narrowly call 'nature,' the burnt child, the man of ruined health; and we said that these were not strictly affairs of punishment. But, undoubtedly, they are often regarded as punishment by religious men, by Christian men. We may turn to our Christian, whose best has been so good, and ask him what the mind of Christ is on this matter. Does the Lover and Father of Jesus inflict plague and pestilence, earthquake and fire, on evil-doers, as a human judge inflicts prison or the hangman's cord, and once inflicted mutilation and torture? The God of the Old Testament, so his prophets said, was not unlike our judges. What is the God of the New, as Jesus showed him? The answer is not far to seek.