Produced by Al Haines THE ATONEMENT AND THE MODERN MIND BY JAMES DENNEY, D.D. PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THEOLOGY UNITED FREE CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW _WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ THE DEATH OF CHRIST STUDIES IN THEOLOGY THE EPISTLES TO THE THESSALONIANS THE SECOND EPISTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS GOSPEL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS LONDON HODDER AND STOUGHTON 27 PATERNOSTER ROW MCMIII PREFACE The three chapters which follow have already appeared in _The Expositor_, and may be regarded as a supplement to the writer's work on _The Death of Christ: its place and interpretation in the New Testament_. It was no part of his intention in that study to ask or to answer all the questions raised by New Testament teaching on the subject; but, partly from reviews of _The Death of Christ_, and still more from a considerable private correspondence to which the book gave rise, he became convinced that something further should be attempted to commend the truth to the mind and conscience of the time. The difficulties and misunderstandings connected with it spring, as far as they can be considered intellectual, mainly from two sources. Either the mind is preoccupied with a conception of the world which, whether men are conscious of it or not, forecloses all the questions which are raised by any doctrine of atonement, and makes them unmeaning; or it labours under some misconception as to what the New Testament actually teaches. Broadly speaking, the first of these conditions is considered in the first two chapters, and the second in the last. The title--_The Atonement and the Modern Mind_--might seem to promise a treatise, or even an elaborate system of theology; but though it would cover a work of vastly larger scope than the present, it is not inappropriate to any attempt, however humble, to help the mind in which we all live and move to reach a sympathetic comprehension of the central truth in the Christian religion. The purpose of the writer is evangelic, whatever may be said of his method; it is to commend the Atonement to the human mind, as that mind has been determined by the influences and experiences of modern times, and to win the mind for the truth of the Atonement. With the exception of a few paragraphs, these pages were delivered as lectures to a summer school of Theology which met in Aberdeen, in June of this year. The school was organised by a committee of the Association of Former Students of the United Free Church College, Glasgow; and the writer, as a member and former President of the Association, desires to take the liberty of inscribing his work to his fellow-students. GLASGOW, _September_ 1903. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT CHAPTER II SIN AND THE DIVINE REACTION AGAINST IT CHAPTER III CHRIST AND MAN IN THE ATONEMENT CHAPTER I PRELIMINARY DEFINITION OF THE SUBJECT