the third we have the only view of God which is worth preserving. Either God is ignorant of the future as we are, though to a less degree, or he sees the first together with the last. In the former case, the course of events is independent of him; that is, he is no God at all. In the latter, his existence must be not only everlasting, but timeless.

This consideration, though simple, is far-reaching. It follows that nothing can "happen" for God, as things happen in the world or in history for us, altering our views, our environment, or our purposes and actions. To speak of an event in the life of God would be as absurd as to call the excellence of truthfulness or the equality of the three angles of a triangle to two right angles an event in our own lives. Least of all can the Atonement, whether we regard it as the central act of history or not, be an "event" to God. We concluded previously, on other grounds, that we cannot speak of God's attitude, either to man or to Christ, as changing on account of what either may do. Now we must assert further that the Atonement, Christ's own great act, could produce no change in God; He must have known it from the beginning. He must have seen man in the light of the Atonement, not merely for the last two thousand years, but ever since there was any man to see; ever since He first thought of man; which can only mean, from all eternity. Christ was the "Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world." In that region which transcends and yet surely permeates all time and all existence, the abode of God, Christ was, is, and will be, continually obeying his Father's will, sacrificing himself, reconciling men to God. What we see projected on the screen of history, God sees in that point of light, that eternal present, which embraces His

Godhead. What Christ did on earth in the first century was only the outworking, made visible to men, of the attitude that is eternal and timeless; as eternal and timeless as is his love to God. Only in our human limitation do we think of that act as producing a change in God's thought of us; the act was known, and, for God, it was also done, from the beginning. There could be no difference in the position of men before God in the year 100 B.C. and the year 100 A.D. The Atonement holds good for the whole of humanity, and not simply for that part of it which came into existence at a time when the world was already growing old.

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But we shall be reminded that if the Atonement existed for God from all time, it did not so exist for man; that man could not know what Christ was, or what God really was, until Christ had appeared; and that with this knowledge, man could not be the same, or be judged by the same standards, as he had been while without it. This is undeniable. The Atonement, whatever else it was, was a revelation; and a revelation takes place in time, and alters the world for those to whom it is vouchsafed. But what did it reveal? did not reveal new virtues, but it laid fresh emphasis on old ones; it did not reveal a new God, but it revealed attributes of God which men had guessed at and talked of, but not clearly understood; it did not reveal a new law, but reaffirmed the essentials of the old one, known to Jew and Gentile alike though constantly disobeyed or forgotten. What it did reveal was a new way of salvation, nothing less than a personality which was the motive power and fulfilment of righteousness in the individual,-God fulfilling his own law in the heart of man. And yet, the more we look at this revelation, the more we see that God, who revealed himself by a

son in the last times, had yet revealed himself at sundry times and in divers manners to the fathers. Conviction, repentance, mercy, long-suffering, forgiveness, acceptance, were all known before Christ. No passage in the Bible is more saturated with the longing for salvation. and its joyous experience than the fifty-first psalm; and of sin, righteousness, judgment, and salvation, the mind of man is half convicted and dimly conscious, in the psalms of Babylonia, the hymns of ancient India, the choruses of Greek tragedy, and the confused records of the struggles, failures, and glories of ancient history Goodness, where it is not an interested and selfish obedience to an external precept, and therefore no goodness at all, is one and the same wherever it is met. Confidence in right, hatred of wrong-doing, loyalty to principle in the face of danger, sacrifice of self to the commands of the highest authority,-the laws, the state, duty, the gods of the country or the Lord of heaven and earth-these are the marks of goodness inside as outside the pages of the Bible. If God does not approve of these, he can approve of nothing. The difference which has been made by the Atonement, considered as a divine revelation, has been that what before was dim and fluctuating is now clear and unmistakable; the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.

VIII. But is the Atonement primarily a revelation? Have we not been discussing it all along as if it were something very different? Was Christ's death the repetition, though on a stupendous scale, of the messages of the prophets to previous generations? Surely to regard it merely as a symbolical expression, however remarkable, of God's love of men and hatred of sin, would be to empty it of its essential characteristics. The Atonement is a revelation, and something more.

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In the first place, the real work of Christ was not done on Calvary; nor was it done simply in the three crowded years of his ministry; it has lasted from the first moment when sin entered into the world. His death outside Jerusalem was that work contracted to a span, brought under conditions which made it visible to us, just as a star, after passing through space, might enter the field of vision of our human eyes. The Atonement itself the Reconciliation-is thus more than a revelation; it is Christ's essential activity. The Atonement, as we saw it on the cross, is the revelation of the Atonement as Christ performs it, and as God knows it, for all eternity.

But, secondly, such a revelation must itself be a work. To unveil a truth hitherto unknown is to set free a force hitherto unemployed. Every new message of God, when really learnt, becomes a new activity of God within the heart; how much more the message of God's ultimate law and love for man? It is the risen sun which brings to us the consciousness of the sun's beneficent action. Through the hours of darkness, the sun still controls every movement of the earth, and is responsible for all its varied life. But when it appears above the horizon, it calls forth every slumbering faculty for which hitherto all its light and warmth had been non-existent. Precisely in the same way, Christ's work of reconciliation, through the ages of ignorance, had been unsuspected, and so without direct influence on any conscious human endeavour; when it had become known under conditions of time and space, that very revelation became a unique factor in the formation of Christ-like character, in the uplifting of the heart and the purifying of the life.

It was as bearers of good news, heralds of a mystery

long hid, but now made ready for universal proclamation, prophets of the revelation of an accomplished work which was to end the long centuries of baffled groping and futile conflict, that the early apostles "turned the world upside down." In Judea, righteousness had been sought, and sought in vain, by the dead works of the law; the result of enthusiasm for the law, as the law had come to be understood, was made manifest in the horrors of the siege of Jerusalem; but what the law could not do was made triumphantly possible by the knowledge of a personal word of God, who had reconciled sinners once for all upon the cross. In the pagan world, the old ideals of patriotism, reverence, and order, the "pietas" and the "prisca fides," the ideals which were enshrined in the pages of Virgil and inspired the author of the "De Monarchia," had been transformed into the monotonous and hopeless wickedness which needed, for its due description, the pen of a Tacitus, a Juvenal, or a Petronius. The knowledge that sin could be fought, not merely by philosophies or codes of morals, but by a divine force before which it had already yielded at discretion; that the God who had never left himself without witness was now waiting to become the covenant God of man, -this knowledge it was which transformed the world by the renewing of its mind.

It has been pointed out that every great revival of religion in Christendom has sprung from a rediscovery of S. Paul. This means that whenever the fires of religion, almost quenched by worldliness, indifference, or "legalism," have burst forth again, they have been re-kindled by the knowledge of a present salvation ;by the knowledge that the work has been already done, and that through "faith in Christ," every man may be