+The fundamental principle of its Atonement always the same.+--It would simplify our acquaintance with Paul's modes of reasoning if we could recognise that the truth of Atonement which he has to declare, and which he associates so closely with the life and death of Jesus, is in principle precisely the same as that which the writers of the Old Testament had in mind. What that was we have already seen. It was the assertion of the fundamental oneness of God and man, and the means to it was the principle of self-sacrifice. This is just what St. Paul set himself to proclaim to the world, and to him the whole process centred in Jesus, just as it does for Christian experience. But to his presentation of the subject Paul almost of necessity had to bring the whole apparatus of his rabbinical training. This it was which supplied him with the most of his figures, symbols, and illustrations; but his gospel was no more dependent upon these than--as I trust I have shown in a previous chapter--the ancient spiritual truth of Atonement depended upon Semitic ritual sacrifices. Paul's thought-forms were supplied by the Old Testament and his Pharisaic education, just as the forms in which we ordinarily express our thoughts to-day belong to the mental atmosphere of our time. Most of the allusions in a _Times_ leading article, for example, would be lost upon an English reader five hundred years hence unless they were carefully explained. To me one of the most remarkable things about Jesus is the fact that He was able to escape so completely the mental environment of the time in which, and the people among whom, He lived His earthly life. How He managed to deliver His peerless teaching while making so little allusion to current Jewish modes of thought and worship is a mystery, and marks His greatness as perhaps nothing else does. It was utterly different with Paul; he spoke the language of his time, and never tried to do anything else. When, therefore, we want to get at what he meant about the death of Jesus, we have first of all to get behind the symbolism by which he illustrates it, and even when we have done this we have to make allowance for some limiting Pharisaic conceptions about justice and the punishment of sin. Every now and then he breaks through these and rises into a rarer, purer region without troubling about consistency. Paul never dreamed that he was writing theological treatises which would be numbered off into chapters and verses and lectured upon in class rooms, or perhaps he would have been more careful about being exact. How many of us could afford to have our letters, written at different times and to different readers, analysed and dissected and taken as a full and permanent statement of our thought upon any particular subject or group of subjects?