It must be evident that reconciliation can have, in this scheme, no meaning save that man's being reconciled to God. Jesus reveals a God who has no need to be reconciled to us. The alienation is not on the side of God. That, being alienated from God, man may imagine that God is hostile to him, is only the working of a familiar law of the human mind. The fiction of an angry God is the most awful survival among us of primitive paganism. That which Jesus by his revelation of God brought to pass was a true 'at-one-ment,' a causing of God and man to be at one again. To the word atonement, as currently pronounced, and as, until a half century ago, almost universally apprehended, the notion of that which is sacrificial attached. To the life and death of Jesus, as revelation of God and Saviour of men, we can no longer attach any sacrificial meaning whatsoever. There is indeed the perfectly general sense in which so beautiful a life and so heroic a death were, of course, a grand exemplification of self-sacrifice. Yet this is a sense so different from the other and in itself so obvious, that one hesitates to use the same word in the immediate context with that other, lest it should appear that the intention was to obscure rather than to make clear the meaning. For atonement in a sense different from that of reconciliation, we have no significance whatever. Reconciliation and atonement describe one and the same fact. In the dogma the words were as far as possible from being synonyms. They referred to two facts, the one of which was the means and essential prerequisite of the other. The vicarious sacrifice was the antecedent condition of the reconciling of God. In our thought it is not a reconciliation of God which is aimed at. No sacrifice is necessary. No sacrifice such as that postulated is possible. Of the reconciliation of man to God the only condition is the revelation of the love of God in the life and death of Jesus and the obedient acceptance of that revelation on the part of men. CHAPTER IV THE CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL MOVEMENT