It does, then, seem at first as though we had here an irreconcilable opposition. Yet before we discard either of these ideas, it is worth while to enquire whether they need really entail conflict, or can be regarded as two sides of a greater whole. It is true that there are certain extreme views of the Atonement which do appear to be hopelessly irreconcilable with the mystical view of religion: especially those which lay peculiar stress, not on the latent powers, but on the essential impotence of man; centring the soul’s salvation on “imputed righteousness,” and finding the whole meaning and reason of the Incarnation in the one historical “propitiatory act” of Calvary. There is real conflict between such a creed, centred on the idea of something done once for all _to_ the soul—to the world—from outside, and that which is centred on the idea of a life perpetually welling up _in_ the soul, on growth, movement, organic change. Yet, on the other hand, is there not a curious similarity between these two apparently opposite views of salvation? Is not the drama of the divine life incarnate, humbling and limiting itself to the human life to save it, essentially a dramatic representation of that other experience, of the divine life limiting itself and mysteriously emerging within each soul, to transmute, regenerate, infinitize it, which the mystics describe to us? Is not what theologians call “grace”—that essential factor of the mystic life-process—a making good by the addition of a new dower of transcendent vitality, of the shortcomings of the merely human creature regarded as an “inheritor of Eternal Life”; just as the historical surrender of Calvary is conceived by orthodox Christianity to make good the shortcomings of the whole race, regarded as heirs of the Kingdom? And if this be so, then can the opposition between these two ideas of salvation—the vital and the theological—be as real as it sometimes appears? Are they not both plans in which atonement plays a part?