This is the key to Paul’s great message which won the Roman Empire. It was not a new philosophy. It was the irresistible appeal to love, exhibited in Christ crucified. “He loved me and gave Himself for me;” “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the _love of God_, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Sacrificing love, the Divine Heart suffering over sin, God Himself taking up the infinite burden and cost of raising men like us into sons of God like Himself; this is the revelation in the face of Jesus Christ. The heart that can stand _that_ untouched can stand anything. The power unto salvation, the dynamic of the Gospel is in the cross, which exhibits in temporal setting the eternal fact, that God suffers over sin, that He takes upon Himself the cost of winning sons to glory and that His love reaches out to the most sin-scarred wanderer, who clutches the swine husks in his lean hands. But the appeal of love and sacrifice is not the whole of the truth which this word atonement covers. We have been seeing, in some feeble way, how God in Christ enters into human life, identifies Himself with us, and reveals the _energy of Grace_. But we cannot stop with “what has been done for us without us.” Sin, as has been already said, is an affair of personal choice--it is a condition of inward life. It is not an abstract entity, in a metaphysical realm. It is the attitude of heart and will in a living, throbbing person who cannot get free from the lower nature in himself. So too with Salvation. It cannot be a _transaction_ in some realm foreign to the individual himself. It is not a plan, or scheme. It is an actual deliverance, a new creation. It is nothing short of a redeemed inward nature. Such a change cannot be wrought without the man himself. It cannot come by _a tergo_ compulsion. It must be by a positive winning of the will. A dynamic faith in the man must cooperate with that energy from God. Something comes down from above, but something must also go up from below. Paul, who has given the most vital interpretation of both sides of the truth of redemption--the objective and the subjective--that has ever been expressed, uses the word “faith” to name the human part of the process. Faith, in Paul’s sense of it, means an identification of ourselves with Christ, by which we re-live His life. As He identified Himself with sinning humanity, so, by the attraction of his love, we identify ourselves with His victorious Life. We go down into death with Him--a death to sin and the old self--and we rise with Him into newness of life, to live henceforth unto Him who loved us.