All creation looks for it “with outstretched neck.” But all have fallen short. Christ, the perfect man, does it, does what man was always meant to do; and because of the corporate character of humanity, in His utter transcendence of self-hood and of all finite categories He inevitably lifts up, to share His union with God, all who are in union with Him. The essence of the Atonement, then, would not lie so much in the sacrificial act as in the lift-up of the human spirit which that act guarantees; the new levels of life which it opens for the race. “Much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved _in his life_,” says Paul. “In his life” a new summit has been conquered by humanity. But are we to stop there? Is not the attainment of that same summit, the achievement of that life-giving surrender to the Universal Spirit—“a life-giving life,” Ruysbroeck calls it—just what the great mystics, following as well as they can the curve of the life of Christ, try to do according to their measure? Theirs, after all, is the vision which sees that “there is no other way to _life_ but the way of the Cross,” and that the human life of Christ is “the door by which all must come in.” Thus the spiritual victory of the Cross is for them not so much a unique, as a pioneer act. It is the first heroic cutting of a road on which they are to travel as far as they can; not merely the vicarious setting-right of the balance between God and man, upset by man’s wilful sin. In their ascent towards union with God, are not they road-makers, or at any rate road-menders, too? Are they not forging new links between two orders of reality, which are separate for the once-born consciousness? If so, then we may regard each one of them as a bit of the slowly achieved atonement of the race; that gradual pressing-on of humanity into the heart of the Transcendent Order. For Christians, this movement was initiated by Christ. But surely it is continued and helped by every soul in union with Him, even those who knew not His Name; and Julian of Norwich was right when she said that she knew she was “in the Cross with Him.”