very work of His calling, into all that sin meant for God and brought
on man. Something that I experience in a particular relation, in which
another has borne my sin and loved me through it, may help to open my
eyes to the meaning of Christ's love; but when they are opened, what I
see is the propitiation for the whole world. There is no guilt of the
human race, there is no consequence in which sin has involved it, to
which the holiness and love made manifest in Christ are unequal. He
reveals to all sinful men the whole relation of God to them and to
their sins--a sanctity which is inexorable to sin, and cannot take it
as other than it is in all its consequences, and a love which through
all these consequences and under the weight of them all, will not let
the sinful go. It is in this revelation of the character of God and of
His relation to the sin of the world that the forgiveness of sins is
revealed. It is not intimated in the air; it is preached, as St. Paul
says, 'in this man'; it is mediated to the world through Him and
specifically through His death, because it is through Him, and
specifically through His death, that we get the knowledge of God's
character which evokes penitence and faith, and brings the assurance of
His pardon to the heart.
From this point of view we may see how to answer the question that is
sometimes asked about the relation of Christ's life to His death, or
about the relation of both to the Atonement. If we say that what we
have in the Atonement is an assurance of God's character, does it not
follow at once that Christ's teaching and His life contribute to it as
directly as His death? Is it not a signal illustration of the false
abstractions which we have so often had cause to censure, when the
death of Christ is taken as if it had an existence or a significance
apart from His life, or could be identified with the Atonement in a way
in which His life could not? I do not think this is so clear. Of
course it is Christ Himself who is the Atonement or propitiation--He
Himself, as St. John puts it, and not anything, not even His death,
into which He does not enter. But it is He Himself, as making to us
the revelation of God in relation to sin and to sinners; and apart from
death, as that in which the conscience of the race sees the final
reaction of God against evil, this revelation is not fully made. If
Christ had done less than die for us, therefore--if He had separated
Himself from us, or declined to be one with us, in the solemn
experience in which the darkness of sin is sounded and all its
bitterness tasted,--there would have been no Atonement. It is
impossible to say this of any particular incident in His life, and in
so far the unique emphasis laid on His death in the New Testament is
justified. But I should go further than this, and say that even
Christ's life, taking it as it stands in the Gospels, only enters into
the Atonement, and has reconciling power, because it is pervaded from
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