1. _The Application to the Problem of Redemption._--It is hardly possible to ignore this one great known law of character-making, which the social consciousness so presses upon us, in any thinking that is for a moment worth while concerning our redemption by Christ. And whatever our point of view, this consideration ought to have weight with us. Nay, must we not make it necessarily the very center of all our thought here? For all the realities in this problem of redeeming a man from sin to righteousness are intensely personal, ethical, spiritual. Now, are we to reach a deeper view of redemption, by turning away from the deepest ethical fact to the unethical? Do we so ground our view the more securely? Is there something holier than the holy ethical will seen realized in Christ's life and death? For, if it is the will in his death by which we are sanctified,[83] there can be no sharp separation of the life and death. Must we not rather expect that the clearest light, on the holiest in God and our personal relation to him, will be thrown by the holiest we know in life, in our human personal relations? Is not the precise method of redemption, then, to no small degree, cleared for us right here, in this conviction of the social consciousness of the contagion of the good in a self-surrendering association--the only solidarity of which we can be certain? Christ saves us, in the only certain way we know that any man is ever saved to better living, through direct contagion of character, through his immediate influence upon us. The power of the influence of a redeeming person must depend upon two facts: the richness of the self that is given, and the depth of the giving. The supremely redeeming power must be the giving of the richest self, unto the uttermost. God has not yet done his best for men, until he gives himself in the fullest manifestation which can be made through man to men, and gives to the uttermost, with no drawing back from any cost. Is it not because, after all, back of all theories and even in spite of theories, men have seen in the life and death of Christ just this eternal giving of God himself, that they have been caught up into some sharing of the same spirit, and so felt working directly and immediately upon them the supremest redeeming power the world knows? The cross of Christ has been God's not only _saying_, "I will help that child to conquer himself, whatever it costs me," but God doing it, and perpetually doing it. Not less than that must be the cost of a man's redemption. Character is directly transmissible in an association in which there is mutual self-giving. It is most easily so transmissible, only at its highest, in its most perfect manifestation, in its completest self-giving at any cost.