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.'