Faith in Jesus is faith in the Atonement and faith in our own Christhood. It means the upraising of the true life, the eternal life, within our own souls. Until His spirit becomes our spirit, His Atonement has done nothing for us, and when it does we, like Him, become saviours of the race. It must be so, for the spirit of love is the same both in God and man; in the presence of need, no matter what the need may be, that spirit must continue to give itself without stint until the need is supplied and all that would tend to separate between the individual soul and the eternal perfect whole is done away. But then, someone will say, what has the death of Jesus effected in the unseen so as to make it possible for God to forgive us? Nothing whatever, and nothing was ever needed. God is not a fiend but a Father, the source and sustenance of our being and the goal of all our aspirations. Why should we require to be saved from Him? +Divine satisfaction in Atonement.+--But in what sense is the death of Jesus a satisfaction to the Father? In no sense at all, except that the sacrifice of Jesus is the highest expression of the innermost of God that has ever been made. If it affords an artist satisfaction to express himself in a beautiful picture, or a great thinker to express his noble thought in a book, surely the highest satisfaction that God can know must be his self-expression in the self-sacrifice of his children. At its best, the intensest joy that can be known is the joy of giving one's self for the good of the whole. In everything grand and good in human thought and achievement God is doing just this. It is the satisfaction he receives from the Atonement and the only one. CHAPTER XI THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE