What does the little fellow do? He instinctively feels the need of some sacrifice. He must soften his father by giving him something. He breaks open his bank and brings his father his pennies, or he brings in his hand the most precious plaything he owns, and acts out his troubled inward condition. He wants the gap closed and he feels that it will cost something to get it closed.[7] That is human nature. That feeling is deep-rooted in man wherever he is found. He is conscious that sin separates and he feels that something costly and precious is required to close the chasm. Sacrifice is one of the deepest and most permanent facts of the budding spiritual life. Its origin is far back in history. The tattered papyrus, the fragment of baked clay, the pictorial inscription of the most primitive sort, all bear witness to this immemorial custom. It is as old as smiling or weeping, as hard to trace to a beginning as loving or hating. It is bound up with man’s sense of guilt, and was born when conscience was born. Dark and fantastic are many of the chapters of the long story of man’s efforts to square the account. Priests have seized upon this instinctive tendency and have twisted it into abnormal shapes, but they did not create it--it is elemental. The idea of an angry God who must be appeased and satisfied was born with this consciousness of guilt, it is a natural product of the shadow of human sin.[8] The historic theories of the atonement, inherited from the Roman church, were all formulated under the sway of this idea. The two fundamental aspects of sin, then, are (1) its inward moral effect upon the soul, its enslaving power over the sinner, and (2) its tendency to open a chasm between God and man, to make God appear full of wrath. How does Christ meet this human situation? What is the heart of the Gospel? First of all, Christ reverses the entire pagan attitude. He reveals God as a Father whose very inherent nature is love and tenderness and forgiveness. In place of a sovereign demanding justice, He shows an infinite Lover. We must either give up the parable of the Prodigal Son, or accept this view of God. But this parable fits the entire Gospel. John was only uttering what Jesus Christ taught by every act of His life and what He exhibited supremely on His cross, when He said “God is Love.” To surrender this truth, and to start with the assumption of a God who must be appeased, or reconciled or changed in attitude is to surrender the heart of the Gospel, and to weave the shining threads of our message of salvation in with the black threads of a pagan warp. He who came to show us the Father, has unmistakably showed Him full of love, not only for the saint, for the actual son; but also for the sinner, the potential son. Either God _is_ Love, or we must conclude that Christ has not revealed Him as He is.