Ethical Monism, since it is ethical, leaves room for human wills and for their freedom. While man could never break the natural bond which united him to God, he could break the spiritual bond and introduce into creation a principle of discord and evil. Tie a cord tightly about your finger; you partially isolate the finger, diminish its nutrition, bring about atrophy and disease. So there has been given to each intelligent and moral agent the power, spiritually to isolate himself from God while yet he is naturally joined to God. As humanity is created in Christ and lives only in Christ, man’s self-isolation is his moral separation from Christ. Simon, Redemption of Man, 339—“Rejecting Christ is not so much refusal to _become_ one with Christ as it is refusal to _remain_ one with him, refusal to let him be our life.” All men are naturally one with Christ by physical birth, before they become morally one with him by spiritual birth. They may set themselves against him and may oppose him forever. This our Lord intimates, when he tells us that there are natural branches of Christ, which do not “abide in the vine” or “bear fruit,” and so are “cast forth,” “withered,” and “burned”_ (John 15:4-6)_. Ethical Monism, however, since it is Monism, enables us to understand the principle of the Atonement. Though God’s holiness binds him to punish sin, the Christ who has joined himself to the sinner must share the sinner’s punishment. He who is the life of humanity must take upon his own heart the burden of shame and penalty that belongs to his members. Tie the cord about your finger; not only the finger suffers pain, but also the heart; the life of the whole system rouses itself to put away the evil, to untie the cord, to free the diseased and suffering member. Humanity is bound to Christ, as the finger to the body. Since human nature is one of the “all things” that “consist” or hold together in Christ (_Col 1:17_), and man’s sin is a self-perversion of a part of Christ’s own body, the whole must be injured by the self-inflicted injury of the part, and “it must needs be that Christ should suffer”_ (Acts 17:3)_. Simon, Redemption of Man, 321—“If the Logos is the Mediator of the divine immanence in creation, especially in man; if men are differentiations of the effluent divine energy; and if the Logos is the immanent controlling principle of all differentiation—_i. e._, the principle of all _form_—must not the self-perversion of these human differentiations react on him who is their constitutive principle?” A more full explanation of the relations of Ethical Monism to other doctrines must be reserved to our separate treatment of the Trinity, Creation, Sin, Atonement, Regeneration. Portions of the subject are treated by Upton,