The Atonement has weakened that stern condemnation of sin which is the safeguard of purity; it has softened down moral differences, and placed the penitent above the saint; it has dulled the feeling of responsibility in the soul; it has taken away the help, such as it is, of fear of punishment for sin; it has confused man's sense of justice, outraged his feeling of right, blunted his conscience, and misdirected his repentance. It has chilled his love to God by representing the universal father as a cruel tyrant and a remorseless and unjust judge. It has been the fruitful parent of all asceticism, for, since God was pacified by suffering once, he would, of course, be pleased with suffering at all times, and so men have logically ruined their bodies to save their souls, and crushed their feelings and lacerated their hearts to propitiate the awful form frowning behind the cross of Christ. To the Atonement we owe it that God is served by fear instead of by love, that monasticism holds its head above the sweet sanctities of love and home, that religion is crowned with thorns and not with roses, that the _miserere_ and not the _gloria_ is the strain from earth to heaven. The Atonement teaches men to crouch at the feet of God, instead of raising loving, joyful faces to meet his radiant smile; it shuts out his sunshine from us, and veils us in the night of an impenetrable dread. What is the sentiment with which Canon Liddon closes a sermon on the death of Christ? I quote it to show the slavish feeling engendered by this doctrine in a very noble human soul: "In ourselves, indeed, there is nothing that should stay His (God's) arm or invite his mercy. But may he have respect to the acts and the sufferings of his sinless son? Only while contemplating the inestimable merits of the Redeemer can we dare to hope that our heavenly Father will overlook the countless provocations which he receives at the hands of the redeemed." Is this a wholesome sentiment, either as regards our feelings towards God or our efforts towards holiness? Is it well to look to the purity of another as a makewight for our personal shortcomings? All these injuries to morality done by the atonement are completed by the crowning one, that it offers to the sinner a veil of "imputed righteousness." Not only does it take from him his saving punishment, but it nullifies his strivings after holiness by offering him a righteousness which is not his own. It introduces into the solemn region of duty to God the legal fiction of a gift of holiness, which is imputed, not won. We are taught to believe that we can blind the eyes of God and satisfy him with a pretended purity. But that every one whose purity we seek to claim as ours, that fair blossom of humanity, Jesus of Nazareth, whose mission we so misconstrue, launched his anathema at whited sepulchres, pure without and foul within. What would he have said of the whitewash of unimputed righteousness? Stern and sharp would have