The New Theology Part 4

When, therefore, a man offered the blood of a victim upon the altar, he was symbolically declaring his recognition of the truth that the individual life belongs to the whole and must give or pour itself out to the common life and to G.o.d the source of all. Only in this way could individuality realise itself; apart from the whole it was meaningless and valueless.

+The truth beneath all sacrifice, however barbarous.+--This helps us to see how, even underneath the most horrible and repellent modes of ancient religious sacrifice, there was something essentially great and n.o.ble. When a heathen mother pa.s.sed her child through the fire to Moloch, did the sacrifice cost her nothing? To be sure it did. It must have been much harder to give her baby than to give herself. She did it because she had been taught to believe that to give one's best and dearest possession for the life of the whole was an action acceptable to G.o.d and worthy of our relations.h.i.+p to Him. We have deepened and purified that ideal, but we have not lost it; we never can. As time went on men came to see that there was a higher way of giving the self to the whole than that of immolating a physical life, and a better way of symbolising that offering than by shedding the blood of bulls and goats; but the essential truth beneath all the intricate sacrificial systems of ancient Israel and her neighbours is one that can never perish.

To sum up. Atonement is the a.s.sertion of the fundamental unity of all existence, the unity of the individual with the race and the race with G.o.d. The individual can only realise that unity by sacrificing himself to it. To fulfil the self we must give the self to the All. This is the truth presumed in all ancient ideas of Atonement. The idea of placating a manlike G.o.d for offences committed against his dignity has been a concomitant of this perception, even a hindrance to it, but it has never wholly obscured the truth itself. That truth is constant and essential to all religion and morality, and is the coordinating principle to all between them.

CHAPTER X

THE ATONEMENT

+III. The Doctrine in Christian History and Experience+

+Antiquity of the essential truth.+--From what has now been said it will, I hope, be clear that the roots of the Christian doctrine of Atonement lie far back in history, especially Semitic history mediated through the Old Testament, and that its fundamental truth is one with which the world can never dispense; it is both simple and sublime.

Nothing worth doing in human history has ever been done apart from it or ever will be. It is no paradox to say that even a morally earnest agnostic believes in the Atonement; at any rate he believes in the all-essential truth without which there would never have been such a thing as a doctrine of Atonement.

+No consistent theory in the New Testament.+--But now we come to the consideration of this truth as it has pa.s.sed over into Christianity. I do not propose to give an accurate and exhaustive a.n.a.lysis of the princ.i.p.al things that have been said about it, from the writings of St.

Paul downwards; that would only be wearisome to my readers and lead to no particular result. But if I have succeeded in making clear the psychological necessity for the existence of the idea of Atonement, it will serve us as a guiding principle when we come to consider it in relation to the sacrifice of Jesus. Many exegetes have undertaken to show that the various New Testament writers held one and the same theory of the relation of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of sins; never was a task more hopeless. The Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine theories, and that of the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, are not mutually consistent, and Paul is not always consistent with himself. The princ.i.p.al thing they have in common is their belief that the death of Jesus was of vital efficacy in the doing away of sin.

The symbolism in which they set forth this truth is borrowed mainly from the Old Testament, and we have already seen what underlay that symbolism even in its earliest use. Old Testament language about sacrifice supplies the mental dialect of the New, and now that we have the key to it we need neither be puzzled nor misled by it. Beneath all that the New Testament writers have to say about the death of Jesus there is the same grand old spiritual truth of Atonement which makes religion possible. Before we resume our examination of the connection between the death of Jesus and the doing away of sin, let us look for a moment at what post-apostolic thought has had to say about it.

+The Fathers.+--From the beginning of the second century onwards the Fathers of the church and their theological successors attempted a variety of explanations of the way in which the death of Jesus achieved potentially the redemption of mankind. It is not easy to say just when one period of Christian thought closes and another begins; but, broadly speaking, we can for convenience cla.s.sify them into the period of the Fathers, the mediaeval period, the Reformation and afterwards up to the eighteenth century, and the period of modern thought. The Fathers may be divided into two groups, the ante-Nicene and the post-Nicene writers, and also into the Greek and Latin Fathers. But as I am not writing for theological students, I will not attempt any further a.n.a.lysis of the various patristic schools. Those who wrote previous to 325 A.D. belong to the ante-Nicene group; those who wrote after that date, to the post-Nicene group. The ante-Nicene writers, generally speaking, avoid giving any theory of the atonement at all; but two of their greatest thinkers, Origen and Irenaeus, held that mankind had fallen under the dominion of Satan, and that Jesus by His sufferings paid a ransom to Satan in order that we might be freed from his power.

Post-Nicene Fathers for the most part adopted this view without attempting to justify it. Amongst their statements we find the ideas that the Atonement was a ransom to Satan and also a sacrifice to G.o.d, but they offer no explanation of the necessity of either. Later on Augustine antic.i.p.ated subsequent Christian thought by maintaining that the atoning work of Jesus was part of an eternal purpose.

+Anselm and after.+--The scholasticism of the Middle Ages finds its first important expression in the ill.u.s.trious Anselm, an acute thinker and a beautiful soul. Anselm rejected the idea of a ransom to Satan, declaring that Satan had no rights over humanity; in place of this notion he put forward the theory that Jesus made to G.o.d an infinite satisfaction for an infinite debt. According to this theory the majesty of G.o.d had suffered indignity because of human sin, and yet man was unable by himself to offer an adequate satisfaction for the offence. Hence the eternal Son of G.o.d became man in order that He might offer the only satisfaction that could be considered adequate.

This theory did not go unchallenged. Abelard, for example, asked the very reasonable question how the guilt of mankind could be atoned for by the greater guilt of those who put Jesus to death. Abelard's famous opponent, Bernard of Clairvaux, also repudiated Anselm's main contention and fell back upon the theory of a satisfaction to Satan.

+Reformation theories.+--At the time of the Reformation the question of the Atonement formed the subject of considerable controversy, and, on the whole, the Reformers were less reasonable than the Catholics, as is the case to some extent even to-day. The Roman Catholic doctrine of Atonement is much nearer to the truth than conventional Protestant statements about the "finished work" and so on. One considerable section of sixteenth-century Protestantism held and taught the doctrine of the total depravity of human nature, and insisted on the idea that Jesus bore the actual penal sufferings of sinners. Calvinists held that these sufferings had value for the elect only. Against these views Socinianism arose as a protest, but tended to reduce the Pa.s.sion of Jesus to a sort of drama enacted by G.o.d in the presence of humanity in order to excite men's contrition and win their love.

+The modern lack of a theory.+--Modern evangelical thought has done very little with all these theories except to make them impossible; it has no consistent and reasonable explanation to put in their place.

The popular kind of evangelical phraseology is that which continues to represent Jesus as having borne the punishment due to human sin; salvation is spoken of as though it meant deliverance from the post-mortem consequences of misdoing.

+More about sin.+--In all these theories it is evident that the death of Jesus is closely connected with the forgiveness of sin and that the forgiveness of sin is the vital element in the Atonement. In order to understand the truth about this let us return to what has already been said on the subject of sin and pursue it a little farther. I have already pointed out that sin is selfishness pure and simple, and that that definition will cover all its manifestations. There is no sin that is not selfishness, there is no selfishness that is not sin. All possible activities of the soul are between selfishness on the one hand and love on the other. If people would only accept this simple explanation of a great subject, it would get rid of most of the confusion of thought that exists in regard to it. The life of love is the life lived for impersonal ends; the sinful life is the life lived for self alone. The life of love is the life which does the best with the self for the sake of the whole; the sinful life is the life which is lived for the self at the expense of the whole. The desire for gratification at some one else's cost, or at the cost of the common life, is the root principle of sin. Sin against G.o.d is simply an offence against the common life; it is attempting to draw away from instead of ministering to the common good. The sinful man thinks it will pay him to be selfish; his impulse is to suppose that he can gain more happiness, can drink more deeply of the cup of life, by doing it at the expense of other people. We all do it more or less, and yet the world might have learned by this time that selfishness does _not_ pay; the thoroughly selfish man is an unhappy man, for he has not drawn upon the source of abiding joy. Like love, selfishness is a guest for life, but whereas love obtains more abundant life by freely giving itself, sin loses hold on life by trying to grab and keep it. Every man is seeking life and seeking it in one or other of these opposite ways; he is either fulfilling the self by serving the whole, or he is trying to feed the self by robbing the whole. But life is G.o.d, and there is no life which is not G.o.d. G.o.d is the life all-abundant, the life infinite and eternal, the life that never grows old, the life that is joy.

Every man, consciously or subconsciously, wants that life; he is wanting it all the time. Why does the man of business spend so many hours in his office in the effort to make money? It is because money represents power, power that can purchase "more life and fuller."

Probably he does not want it all for himself; he works for love of his family or love of the community, and his desire to serve them makes his work gladder, so that already he has more abundant life than he would otherwise possess. a.n.a.lyse human action, no matter what, and it will be seen to point in one or other of these two directions, self-ward or all-ward. If the former, it will shrivel the soul, it makes for death; if the latter, it will expand the soul, it makes for life. This is a spiritual law which knows no exception; in the long run the loving deed brings larger life and joy, the selfish deed brings pain and darkness.

"Be not deceived, G.o.d is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap eternal life."

It is evident from the foregoing that even the sinful life is a quest for G.o.d, although it does not know itself to be such, for in seeking life saint and sinner alike are seeking G.o.d, the all-embracing life.

And the sinner _must_ learn that to seek life selfishly is to lose it; to seek it unselfishly is both to gain and to give it. The good man and the bad man are seeking the same thing in opposite ways.

During the recent New Theology controversy the editor of the _British Weekly_, in the course of an attack upon my teaching, printed a number of extracts from my sermons in order to convince his readers that that teaching was objectionable and false. In every case the extract was carefully removed from its context and therefore conveyed quite a misleading impression to the mind of the reader. One of these extracts was from a sermon on "More Abundant Life," preached in the City Temple on Sunday morning, March 18, 1906. As this extract has been widely circulated, perhaps I may be pardoned for giving it here along with the context. All that the editor chose to print was a part of the paragraph in which sin was described as a quest for G.o.d, and yet he must have known perfectly well that to take that paragraph out of its setting was to do an injustice both to the preacher and to the subject.

Observe the sharp ant.i.thesis between the "thief or the robber" on the one hand, and the "Good Shepherd" on the other. These two stand for two opposing tendencies that have run through all nature and all human life. All nature through, all history through, two conflicting tendencies have been discernible. These are ever at war, and they ever will be until the whole world has been subdued to Christ, and is filled with the fulness of the life of G.o.d. These two tendencies we may describe as the deathward and the lifeward respectively. The words are not very satisfactory because the deathward tendency masquerades as the lifeward tendency, and the lifeward tendency, before fruition, looks like the deathward one. In nature, as Romans viii. tells us, "We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Nature is cruel, "red in tooth and claw." The deathward tendency is what I may call the self-ward tendency in the upward struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism only exists at the expense of other organisms. Yet at a certain stage in evolution this principle of the survival of the fittest at the expense of the rest gives way to a counter principle, that of the fitting of as many as possible to survive. The thief tendency gives way to the shepherd tendency, self-love to mother-love, the struggle to survive to the struggle for the life of others. I do not pause at the moment to account for these two ant.i.thetic tendencies, there they are; all through the history of this sad old world of ours these two tendencies have been in sharp conflict. Both are cosmic, both probably resolvable in that higher unity which is too mysterious for us to penetrate, but to our minds they are in flagrant opposition to each other. The thief cometh to steal and to kill and to destroy; mother-love, Christ-love, that it may give life, and that more abundantly.

In human history the ant.i.thesis is even more plainly marked. From one point of view, history is little else than the story of the crimes and follies of mankind. If it were entirely that, the study would be too saddening to enter upon; but it is not all of that character, and yet it is sufficiently so to cast a shadow over the optimism of any man who investigates human evolution as told in song and story. The principle that "they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can" has ruled in human concerns from the dawn of history until to-day.

It is strong enough in our midst even now. Out industrial system is founded upon it, and is essentially unchristian. Commercialism is saturated with it; all men suffer from it, but often they know not how to get free from it. Ruskin has a grimly amusing paragraph on the parallel between an earlier civilisation and that of to-day, and the ident.i.ty in principle of the self-ward tendency in both. In mediaeval times, as he would say, the robber baron was wont to possess himself of a mountain fortress, whence he swooped down upon hapless pa.s.sers-by to rob them of their possessions and their lives. To-day the successful financial magnate does the same by effecting corners in corn and such like. The great writer adds, with characteristic irony, "I prefer the crag baron to the bag baron." Yet with all this we see at work in history another tendency which we can recognise as plainly as the former, but which fills us with great hope for the future of humanity,--it is that which is summed up in the one word "Christ."

That word stands all the world over for the things that make for more abundant life. Just as in the text the word "thief" stands for everything that makes for separateness, selfhood, cruelty, so the word "Christ" stands for everything that makes for union, mutual helpfulness, brotherly kindness. The thief stands for the tendency to grasp and draw inward, and the Christ stands for the tendency to give, and live outward. The former tendency is what I call the deathward--deathward for all else but itself; and the Christ is the lifeward, life for all else but itself. Yet--curious inversion of earlier experience--the deathward tendency results in death to itself in the spiritual region, and the lifeward tendency results in life to him who gives life. "I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." I want you to realise here, then, that the Christ in humanity is the life-giver of the soul. They who are possessed of the Christ spirit are they who have and can give the more abundant life.

We have briefly examined the two tendencies of which I have spoken; have you realised that in the things of the spirit the deathward tendency is what we call sin? Sin is selfishness; it is the attempt to misuse the energies of G.o.d; it is the expansion of individuality at the expense of the race. I do not know that you can arrive at a much more thorough explanation of the nature of sin than that. Men blunderingly attempt to cla.s.sify virtues, and think of sin as simply the failure to attain them. It is not that, it is something deeper; sin is the attempt to minister to self at the expense of that which is outside self. It lives by death to others, or seeks to do so.

When I was away a few weeks ago I paid a visit to Monte Carlo to see what it was like, and went into the famous gambling saloon, and stood for a while looking at the faces of the players. I could not see anything very different from what I see now; the people who were engaged in that all-engrossing pursuit might have been in church, they were so quiet, so orderly, and so apparently pa.s.sionless. Yet I felt--it may have been a preacher's prejudice--that the moral atmosphere of that place was one in which I did not want to remain; there was something bad there, and I think I could discern what it was.

The gambler is essentially a man who is trying to get something for nothing; he is drawing to himself that which he supposes will give him more satisfying and abundant life. Let who will suffer; it is not his concern. What is lifeward for him may be deathward for them; he is willing that it should be so--that is the sin. Sin is always a mistake,--a soul's mistake; it is the carrying up into the spiritual region of that stern and terrible law of the physical world, the survival of an organism at the expense of its fellow. That law is reversed in the spiritual world; it is replaced by something else. If a soul is to gain more abundant life, it must rise above the desire to grasp and hold. The gambler is selling that beautiful thing which came fresh from the hand of G.o.d, and is at once G.o.d's life and his; he is destroying the present possibility of attaining to that higher life which is the destiny of the soul. The Christ in him can find no expression. And yet, my friends, realise this, however startling it may seem, sin itself is a quest for G.o.d--a blundering quest, but a quest for all that. The man who got dead drunk last night did so because of the impulse within him to break through the barriers of his limitations, to express himself, and to realise more abundant life.

His self-indulgence just came to that; he wanted if only for a brief hour to live the larger life, to expand the soul, to enter untrodden regions, and gather to himself new experience. That drunken debauch was a quest for life, a quest for G.o.d. Men in their sinful follies to-day, and their blank atheism, and their foul blasphemies, their trampling upon things that are beautiful and good, are engaged in this dim, blundering quest for G.o.d, whom to know is life eternal. The _roue_ you saw in Piccadilly last night, who went out to corrupt innocence and to wallow in filthiness of the flesh, was engaged in his blundering quest for G.o.d. He is looking for Him along the line of the wrong tendency; he has been gathering to himself what he took to be more abundant life, "but sin, when it hath conceived bringeth forth death"--death to the sinner as well as to his victim, death of what is deepest and truest in the soul. Yet--I repeat it--all men are seeking life, life more abundant, even in their selfishness and wrong-doing, seeking life by the deathward road.

"Whatever crazy sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death.

'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, O life, not death, for which we pant, More life and fuller than I want."

On the following Sunday I preached a sermon ent.i.tled the "Nature of Sin," in which the same point was reemphasised with even greater distinctness, as the following extract will show:--

I think I startled some of you last Sunday morning when I happened to remark that sin was, after all, a quest for G.o.d--a mistaken quest, but none the less a quest for G.o.d, for all that. I want to explain to you to-night somewhat more in detail what I mean by this, because the more clearly we can see the truth the more clearly we can perceive sin to be a soul's blunder. There are two tendencies discernible throughout nature and in human history. These two tendencies are essentially opposed, are ever in conflict, and ever will be until the whole world is subdued to Christ, and G.o.d is all in all. I called them last Sunday morning from the pulpit the deathward and the lifeward respectively.

The terms are not very satisfactory, because the deathward tendency usually masquerades as the lifeward, and the lifeward often looks like the deathward. That is why sin is ever possible. A man thinks to get something by it, and though he finds out his mistake afterward, yet he supposes it to be for him the lifeward road. On the other hand, the utterly unselfish deed often looks as though it were a deed that would bring destruction upon the doer. Not so. Jesus Christ saw right to the heart of things when He said, "He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My sake the same shall find it."

If you subst.i.tute for the words "for My sake," "for truth's sake," or "for life's sake," you will get just the same meaning,--"he that keeps back his life shall lose it, and he that gives forth his life shall find it."

Here, then, are two tendencies sharply contrasted. Now observe their operation in nature and in human experience. You are all aware of, and frequently have been saddened, no doubt, by what you regard as the cruelty of nature. There is a tragedy under every rose leaf, there is unceasing conflict to the death going on in every hedgerow. Nature is indeed cruel. I have often watched, during this winter which is now drawing to a close, the little birds feeding outside the window of my breakfast room in the morning. Like many of you, we put out a few crumbs for these feathered friends who share the same garden with ourselves, and I have always noticed that there is a battle royal fought round those crumbs. There is enough for everyone, and yet the instinct of these little creatures is to try and grab and keep all, each one for itself. The instinct of the lower creation appears to be that a form can only preserve itself, and only expand and express itself, at the expense of other forms. It is a stern and terrible law, as you well know. Forms, by a slow, upward progress in the unfolding of the purpose to which nature exists, have become what they are at the expense of earlier and weaker forms. There is a tendency to grasp and hold, a tendency to kill and to destroy, and this, to some minds, appears to be the strongest tendency in nature or in man. I question it,--in fact, I deny it,--and I want that you and I should arrive at the same conclusion respecting it. For there is another tendency observable working from the very earliest throughout the processes of nature, too. It is that which Henry Drummond describes as the struggle for the life of others. If you like, we will call it mother-love. I saw it ill.u.s.trated only yesterday. A mother sheep, standing in her place amongst the flock, was surprised with the rest at the incursion of a mongrel dog. The flock fled instantly, but the ordinarily timid mother stood her ground. The reason was not far to seek. There was a little lamb cowering behind her, and she, overcoming her natural instinct of self-preservation, turned her face to the dog to draw his attention, if possible, to herself and deflect it from her young one.

Now, that instinct represents the tendency of which I speak, the ant.i.thetic tendency to the other already described. It is the stronger of the two. It indicates the goal toward which nature herself is moving. "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now," but mother-love is a prophecy of a higher yet to be. It is the forth-going instinct, the all-ward, lifeward tendency.

Now turn to humanity. I think you will agree with me that right through human history the same two tendencies are observable. The farther back we go, the stronger seems the self-ward tendency. The natural state of uncivilised man is a state of war. Man in primitive communities only exists and flourishes by destroying other communities.

A most curious thing it is, too, that apparently our domestic and civic virtues have grown out of this state of war. A man used to carry his wife off by main force. She become his property. He exerted his brute force, he magnified his own personality, as it were, in crus.h.i.+ng other personalities. His children were in his hands for life and death. If he afterwards learned to love them, it was in contradistinction to the children that were not his. That which was his, so to speak, gratified his egotism; and, although a more beautiful relations.h.i.+p grew out of it, such was the unpromising beginning. To-day when you hear a man speaking loudly about "_my_ country," or "_my_ family," or "_my_ society," as the case may be, you may be perfectly sure that he is projecting himself into his patriotism, or into his loyalty to family or society; and indeed this was the lowly beginning of what has come to be an excellent virtue. We have had to learn benevolence by concentrating unselfish attention upon the few rather than the many.

The farther back you go in history, the sterner does the operation of that law appear, and the less promising the future of mankind. If people tell me the world is not getting better, I suggest that it might be worth their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive history. In the "Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches for us the career of a strong and remarkable man. His hero, supposed to be a paragon of virtue, is capable of things you would call scoundrelism to-day. He and his band of storm-tossed companions land upon an island of the Grecian Archipelago and find a city there. They promptly sack it and kill all the inhabitants--men, women, and children. It seemed to be the proper thing to do, and found its way into verse, and they boasted about such heroic exploits. It was brutal murder, and the men who were capable of it were nothing more or less than pirates. Yet that stern, terrible tendency thus ill.u.s.trated is just one with that inscrutable law under which nature herself has come to be what she is.

It is what I call the self-ward tendency, the desire to grasp and keep at the expense of other individualities other societies than our own.

But in history, and from those very earliest times down to our own, another tendency has shown itself at work, a counter tendency. The two have been so intertwined frequently--as I have indicated in showing where patriotism comes from--that it has been difficult to dissociate them; but they are quite distinct. Take, for instance, the magnificent devotion of Arnold von Winkelried on the field of Sempach. Switzerland has not existed as a political unit for many centuries, but during that time her roll of heroes has been large. In the formative hour of Swiss independence, when that tiny folk were struggling for their liberty against the overweening power of Austria, it must have seemed a hopeless undertaking--this group of mountaineers against the chivalry of an empire. The great battle of Sempach was fought. The Swiss, armed with nothing but their battle-axes, hurled themselves in vain all day long against the serried ranks of Austrian mail-clad warriors, armed with spears, through which the shepherd men could make no way.

They fell before them, but could not pa.s.s through them, till Winkelried called to his countrymen, "Provide for my wife and children and I will make a way," and, rus.h.i.+ng unarmed upon the spearmen of Austria, clasped in his embrace as many of them as he could and bore them to the earth.

A dozen spears pa.s.sed through his body, but through the gap his devotion had made, his countrymen leaped to victory. That one act made possible, humanly speaking, the Swiss independence, which is an object-lesson for us to-day. Such acts as these form part of the cherished lore of nations. We feel they are the light-centres of the world. Something tells us that an act like that, the giving of a life for the sake of an ideal, a cause, a country, was a great thing. It represented the counter tendency to what was going on at that moment.

In that very battle Austria was trying to grasp and hold, Switzerland was trying to get free and live her own life, and here was a man who, for the sake of his country's ideal, gave all that he had--his life.

Will you tell me where to look for the focus and centre of that ideal?

I know what your answer would be. It was at Calvary. The one thing which, consciously or subconsciously, men have recognised in Jesus that has given Him His supreme attraction for the world, is this--He was absolutely disinterested. It is the disinterestedness of Jesus, His utter n.o.bleness, His power of projecting Himself into the experience of others, and trying to lift humanity as a whole to His experience of G.o.d, that gave Him His power with mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed, but lived, the counter tendency to the law of sin and death.

Now, when we have brought the two together, you see the essential distinction between working for self and its deathward look, and working for all with its lifeward gaze. These two are ant.i.thetic, and must be in opposition until the latter absorbs the former, and G.o.d is all in all, and love reigneth world without end.

We are now able to see what sin is more plainly than before. Sin is the tendency to grasp and draw inward, and everything that feeds that tendency makes for death. Sin is the expansion of the individuality at the expense of the race; sin is acting on the belief that the soul can increase at another's cost, can increase by destroying what is another's good. Apply that explanation or definition of sin to what you know about life, and you will soon see when a man is facing the deathward road, and how differently he acts when he is choosing the lifeward road. There are men in this congregation who do not realise, as they should, that lifewardness is G.o.d-wardness; but so it is. The soul and the source of all things is G.o.d, and, consciously or unconsciously, all men are seeking G.o.d in that they are seeking self-expression, seeking life. The man, for instance, who is trying to become rich is a man who is seeking to express himself, seeking power, seeking life, seeking to thrust through the barriers that surround the soul. They are all doing it; the veriest materialist among you is seeking by his daily activities more abundant life. The young man here who feels a burning ambition within his heart, a desire to exploit the world and make a name for himself, to occupy a high station, is not conscious of anything essentially unworthy. It all depends on what he does with the impulse. What you are seeking, young man, is more abundant life, and that is equivalent to seeking G.o.d. Life is G.o.d.

"Every good and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." And when the tendency goes round and works havoc and ruin in the world, it still remains a quest for G.o.d, although a blundering one. It is a misuse of divine energy. The man who got drunk last night and gratified his lower nature in that delirious hour would be surprised if you were to tell him when you see the result that he was really seeking G.o.d, but so it is. He wants life, and thinks he can get it this way. This is the reason why morbid excitement and the craving for amus.e.m.e.nt have such power in human lives to-day. Your _roue_ in Piccadilly who went out to destroy innocence was seeking life while spreading death. It seems almost blasphemy to say it, but he was seeking G.o.d and thinking--O woful blunder!--that he would find Him by destroying something that G.o.d has made beautiful and fair. So with all acts of selfish gratification of which men are capable--they are the turning of the current of divine energy the wrong way, and seeking self-gratification at the expense of something else that G.o.d has made.

It is a failure to see that we only obtain life by giving life. When an engine goes off the line there is a smash, as a rule, and the greater the power that was driving the engine, the worse is the wreck when it leaves the line. The lightning directed rightly becomes the luminant by which we look on each other's faces to-night. That same power might have brought havoc and destruction if it had not been harnessed in the service of man. And so with the power that G.o.d has given you; all desire for self-expression, all seeking of which you are conscious for larger and better and richer life, is G.o.d-given; but it may mean ruin and destruction unless you see that it is yours, not that you may draw inward, but that you may give outward, yours not to keep and hold, but yours wherewith to bless mankind. Sin is the tendency to keep for self that which was meant for the world. "The wages of sin is death," the death of soul. He who is guilty of sin is guilty of soul murder. "All they that hate Me love death," and he that spreads pain and ruin over other lives in the gratification of his own lower instincts is using something which is G.o.d-given--yea, which is essentially G.o.d's own life--in the wrong way. The only hope for him is to realise that no act of sin was ever yet worth while, that it does punish itself, must punish itself, for it shrivels and fetters the soul. No eleventh-hour repentance will ever save you, and no cowardly cry for relief will ever bring G.o.d's forgiveness into your soul, until you have realised that sin and selfishness are one, and that what you have failed to give forth of love and service represents the measure of your soul poverty.

Even at the risk of prolixity and repet.i.tion I have thought it right to insert these lengthy extracts from sermons which have been animadverted upon. My readers will be able to judge of the fairness of the criticism which, by abstracting a few lines, strove to make it appear that my teaching denied the reality of sin. Here are the actual words seen in their proper setting. If one were on the lookout for a good ill.u.s.tration of the sinfulness of sin, perhaps the controversial methods of the editor of the _British Weekly_ might furnish it. This kind of criticism is on a par with that of the gentleman who once startled an audience by declaring, "The Bible says there is no G.o.d."

He was right, of course, if it be legitimate to suppress the former part of the pa.s.sage, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no G.o.d."

It is time we had done with unreal talk about sin. Sin is the murder spirit in human experience. "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. If a man say, I love G.o.d, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love G.o.d whom he hath not seen?" Strong language, but I suppose the man who first used it must have known what he was talking about.

Pomposity is sin, because it is egoism; self-complacency and contemptuousness are sin for the same reason. Cupidity is sin whether in a burglar or a Doctor of Divinity. A bitter, grasping, cruel, unsympathetic spirit is sin, no matter who shows it. The scribe and the Pharisee are too much with us, and the religious ideal needs to be rescued from their blighting grasp to-day as much as ever it did. Of all forms of sin an arrogant, malignant, self-satisfied a.s.sumption of righteousness is the worst and the hardest to eradicate, as Jesus found to His cost. The terrible d.a.m.ning lie which is stifling religion to-day is the lie which crucified Jesus, the lie that spiritual pride can ever interpret G.o.d to a needy world. There is something grimly amusing in the suggestion that prosperous people should pay for sending gospel missions to the poor. If sin is selfishness, the poor had better missionise the rich. Imagine how it would be if things were reversed in this way, and a mission band of earnest slum dwellers took their stand in Belgravia and began a house-to-house visitation, with all the theological terms carefully eliminated from the mission leaflets they thrust under the doors or handed to the powdered footmen.

Instead of, "Flee from the wrath to come," etc., they might have: "Don't be selfis.h.!.+ it is hurting you and your neighbours and making you unhappy. Don't pretend! It is poor business in the end. Try to do as much as you can for other people and you will know what G.o.d is." The attempt would be startling and unwelcome, but it would be far less impudent than the religious exhortations of the prosperous to the poor commonly are. For the truth is that if sin is selfishness,--and it is nothing else,--the degraded habits of people at the lower end of the social scale are no more sinful than the ordinary behaviour of most of their preceptors at the other end. Most of the talk about sin is unreal; that is the trouble; so verily the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before us. In church a man will profess himself to be a miserable sinner, but if we were to address him in the same way out of church he would sue us for libel--if he thought we meant it. For heaven's sake let us have done with the sham of it all and face the truth. What mankind is suffering from is selfishness.

Get rid of that and there would be little left to trouble about.

+Atonement and sin.+--It should now be plain why the doctrine of Atonement has been so closely a.s.sociated with the doing away of sin; it is because, as we have seen, the root idea of Atonement is the a.s.sertion of the fundamental oneness of man with man and all with G.o.d.

Sin is the divisive separating thing in our relations with one another, and with G.o.d the source of all, so the a.s.sertion of our oneness involves getting rid of sin. If we ask how this is to be done, the answer is simple enough: the only way to get rid of selfishness is by the ministry of love. What is it that is slowly winning the world from its selfishness to-day and lifting it gradually into the higher, purer atmosphere of universal love? There is but one thing that is doing it, and that is the spirit of self-sacrifice. Wherever you see that, you see the true Atonement at work. There can be no doubt about the final issue, for behind the spirit of love is infinity, whereas the spirit of selfishness is essentially finite. On the field of human history the death of Jesus is the focus and concentrated essence of this age-long atoning process, whereby selfishness is being overcome and the whole race lifted up to its home in G.o.d. Until Jesus came no self-offering had been so consistent and so complete. No selfish desire could find lodgment in His pure soul. He showed men the ideal life by living it Himself, the life which was perfectly at one with G.o.d and man. In a selfish world that life was sure to end on a Calvary of some kind, but the very fact that it did so demonstrated the completeness of its victory over all considerations of self-interest. Selfishness lost the battle by seeming to gain it. G.o.d was behind the life of Jesus just because it was the life of perfect love, the life which was a perfect gift to the whole, therefore that life immediately arose in power in other lives and has gone increasing its benevolent sway over human hearts ever since. This is the Atonement and it is rightly a.s.sociated with the cross of Jesus in the minds of men, for the cross is the sum and centre of it all.