recognition of the atonement as a development of the incarnation, but on the contrary, in regarding the atonement as in the light of the incarnation alike uncalled for and inconceivable.

So soon as the incarnation, no longer regarded only as a mystery of condescending love-love which took this form because of the need-be for an atonement, is accepted as itself the light to which the subject of the atonement must be taken, we are prepared to find that all conceptions of the atonement which accord not with the love of the Father of Spirits to men His offspring manifested in the incarnation, will be rejected. But we expect true conceptions on this great subject to take the place of the errors rejected. For, if the atonement be the development of the incarnation, how can we stop short with the fact of the incarnation itself as if it were the whole of the Gospel? One reason for stopping short with the incarnation may be the overwhelming sense of the deep root of man's relation to God, of man's inconceivable preciousness in the sight of God, which fills the mind in realising the incarnation-fills the mind apart from and antecedent to all tracing of the course of the incarnate Saviour, in His working out of our salvation. As divine love fitted to subdue man's enmity, as divine power entering into humanity and equal to the task of regenerating all humanity, the incarnation may seem a Gospel sufficient to meet all the need of man.

Yet our 66 need" is to be measured, not by our own sense of need, but by what God has done to meet our need. How little may meet our sense of need, the inadequate and superficial views of the gospel which so often give peace, even to minds considerably awakened on the subject of religion, may warn us. The faith of what the Scriptures teach of the development of the incarnation is not less essential to an enlightened peace of mind than the faith of the incarnation itself. And if the greatness of the grace of God to man in the incarnation is enough to assure us of the hope that is for man in God, is not the unanticipated and marvellous character

of that divine mystery what should constrain us to the attitude of reverently learning from the course of its development in the work of our redemption all that concerns the manner of the love which the Father hath bestowed on us? It seems to me a contradiction to believe in the incarnation, and to expect to understand its relation to us otherwise than through the faith of the divine facts which are the form which divine wisdom has taken in accomplishing the results which, in the incarnation, divine love has contemplated. The incarnation may itself be traced back to the love which has taken that form, and we may propose to ourselves to set out from the axiom that God is love, and think that we can deduce from it creation, incarnation, and the ultimate participation of individual men in the divine nature. But we cannot, in contradiction to the history of human thought, assert that we could have anticipated the course of the divine self-manifestation; while we may and must thankfully rejoice that God gives us the capacity of recognising His glory in all these manifestations of Himself. But to be thus in the light of revelation children of the light and of the day is very different from stopping short at any divine fact, however high and ultimate, and substituting our own deductions from it for the facts of the gospel. It is natural and right. to ascend from the facts of historical Christianity to the principles and laws of the kingdom of God which these facts make known to us. But, if this has been a sound process of thought, to descend again in order to rest in these facts with a confirmed faith must also be natural, and what we shall rejoice to do. And so it is with the Apostles. St. Paul says, "God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us ;" and the language of St. John is, "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." Both Apostles see the love of God not in the incarnation simply, but in the incarnation as developed in the atonement.

Those who in former times gave the first place to the

incarnation, subordinating the atonement to it, while still believing in the atonement, sometimes speculated on the probable history of man if he had not sinned, as what would still have implied the incarnation in order to the fulfilment of the divine purpose in man. Such specu

lations are recalled to us when we now see faith in the incarnation combined with the rejection of the atonement. What is left out of Christianity is just that part of revealed truth in which the love of God is connected with the need of man as a sinner; all, in a word, which gives the Gospel a remedial character, representing the Son of God as having come "to seek and to save that which was lost," representing man as having destroyed himself, while revealing the hope that remained for him in God. Redemption only reveals the deep love of the Father of our spirits; and hence an Apostle, in the full light of redeeming love, speaks of committing ourselves unto God as unto a faithful Creator." But to trace redemption to its ultimate root in the divine Fatherliness, and to regard that Fatherliness as leaving no room for the need of redemption, are altogether opposite apprehensions of the grace of God.

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Two tendencies of philosophic thought which strongly characterise our time, favour this resting in the faith of the incarnation, while rejecting that of the atonement.

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I. We can hear as an echo of Christianity such words

"Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs " in reference to the race, and

"Men may rise on stepping stones

Of their dead selves to higher things"

in reference to the individual man. For, in the light of revelation we see the "increasing purpose" that runs through the ages, and through Christ we rise from our "dead selves to higher things." But speculation on man as the subject of progress has sometimes assumed what we feel to be an anti-Christian character; as when sin is regarded as only one form of ignorance, deliverance from

which is a gain, like every other advance in knowledge, but not as what can be rationally regarded with self-blame, penitence, remorse. It is not too much to say that the real ignorance which is present in sin is what that man has not yet been delivered from who is not looking back on sin with genuine self-blame. To judge otherwise is to treat the light of conscience, surely, at lowest, co-ordinate with that of pure reason, as on a level with what have been called delusions of sense, from which philosophy delivers us.

But far short of this denying, as we may say, that sin is sin, there is room for thoughts excusing and palliating sin whose operation is to hinder the sense of a need-be for an atonement. We believe that through the redemption man is raised to a level higher than that on which he stood at the first, while we see the God of creation in the God of redemption, and accept the unsearchable riches which we have in Christ, as the divine purpose from the beginning; but to philosophic thought not accepting the utterances of conscience as axiomatic, redemption and the atonement which it implies do not harmonise with development and progress, while incarnation may.

II. Another tendency of thought strongly characteristic of our time, to which I refer as hindering faith in the atonement, is that which has its extreme evil development when a personal God is lost to the human spirit in the uniformity of the course of nature or the reign of law.

The reign of law, making experience possible, and all those results of experience which we call Science, has necessarily the deepest practical interest to us; while apart from practice it is full of intellectual interest, and an ever inviting theme of speculative thought; but its highest and purest interest is that which belongs to it as the form which the will of God has taken in ordering this fair universe, and in respect of which it is to faith a revelation of God.

There are indeed minds, and some even of a high order intellectually, to which the scientific interest of the reign of law is its highest, and seems its only rational interest.

They are satisfied to take the facts of existence as they present themselves as facts; regarding the contemplation of them as manifestations and revelations of a divine mind as an exercise of speculative thought in which we have no sure footing, into which we are tempted by our own human consciousness, which, they say, suggests to us the conception but does not justify the faith of a God.

But it is not too much to say that what is thus rejected as an unwarranted exercise of thought, leading to no sure results, is what the laws of thought necessitate. We are so constituted that the appearance of design suggests to us a designing mind; and, in proportion as this appearance is varied, wide spread, and abiding, our sense of the necessity of the recognition of design deepens. So truly is this the case, that the realisation of the reign of law, which the ordered universe of which we find ourselves a part presents to us, renders the possibility of accepting that reign simply as a fact, and without being constrained to rise from the fact to the faith of mind and thought as manifested in the fact, inexplicable. Thus to stop short of God is, we feel, to do violence to a deep instinct of our being.

Further, as the manifestation of design in the ordering of the universe as we know it raises our faith to a divine purpose and plan, as what we see being realised, so does the same necessity of thought which we are thus obeying constrain the further step of tracing all the laws and powers, which we see acting together in obedience to One Will, to that Will as the source of their existence. Here we are come to the point at which our own experience no longer accompanies us as light, and we pass from that in God of which there is an image in man, to that which is distinctive of God as God-what the Apostle names as His "eternal power and Godhead." For here we pass from the relation of a reign of law to thought and design using law, to the relation of that reign to thought and design manifested in giving laws their existence. There is a certain likeness in human action to divine action as employing means to accomplish ends; but there is no