(including even that miserable caricature which we have just considered) that is altogether without some elements of truth.  There is no view which embodies the whole of the truth.  Each generation is meant to read that secret of God, which was uttered to mankind from the Cross of the Christ, a little more clearly than its predecessors.  No theology of the Atonement which is not both new and old, can be a true theology.  It must be old, because the disclosure was made under the form of historic facts which belong to the past.  It must be new, because each age, in the light of the progressive revelation of God, interprets the disclosure under the forms of its own experience, scientific, moral, spiritual, which belongs to the present.  “Therefore is every scribe that is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, like unto a householder which bringeth forth out of his treasures things both new and old.”

But the present point is, that we should realise the far-reaching significance of the disclosure of God made on and from the Cross.  Human history is like a long-drawn-out drama, in which we are actors.  How long is that drama, stretching back beyond the long years of recorded history to our dim forefathers,

who have left their rude stone implements on the floors of caves or bedded in the river drift, the silent witnesses of a vanished race.  And how short is that little scene in which we ourselves appear, while, insignificant as it is, it is yet our all.  And we ask, we are impelled to ask, what is the meaning of the whole vast drama?  What is the meaning of our own little scene in it?  No questions can be compared in interest and importance to these two.  And the answer to them both, so we shall try to see, was given once in time from the Cross.  That is one of the chief aspects under which we shall regard the Cross of Christ, as the key which unlocks the mystery of human existence, and of my existence.  There is no more majestic or pathetic conception than that of the veiled Isis.  But the Cross is the removal of the veil, the discovery of the Divine Secret.

* * * * *

Before, however, we proceed to our main subject, it will be well to set first before our minds a few elementary considerations.

The existence of God appears to be necessitated in order to account for two things: (i) the appearance of control in the universe; (ii) the facts of moral consciousness.

(i)  It seems impossible to get rid of the ideas of direction and control.  If we regard the world as it exists at the present moment, as one stage in an age-long process, then at least δυναμει the facts which

now appear were contained in the earliest stage of all.  Man appears with his moral and spiritual nature.  Then already the moral and the spiritual were somehow present when the first living cell began its wonderful course.  το πωτον ου μεν σπέρμα αλλα το πέλειον.  All movements have converged towards this end, and the co-ordination of movements implies control.

This then is our first reason for our belief in God.  We live in a universe which seems throughout to manifest evidence of direction and control.

(ii)  But I have much surer and more cogent evidence within myself.  Whence comes that ineradicable conviction of the supremacy of righteousness, of the utter loveliness of the good, and utter hatefulness of the evil?  I am not concerned with the steps of the process by which the moral sense may have developed.  The majesty of goodness, before which I bow, really, sincerely, even when by my acts I give the lie to my own innermost convictions, that is no creation of my consciousness.  Nor do I see good reason to believe that it has been an invention of, or growth in, human consciousness during the slow development of past ages.  There is something deeper in my moral convictions than an outward sanction wondrously transmuted into an internal one.  Moreover, in the best men, those who have really developed that moral faculty which I detect, in beginning and germ, as it were, in myself, I see no abatement in reverence for

the ideal.  Rather, the better and saintlier that they are, the keener do they feel their fallings off from it.  A moral lapse, which would give me hardly a moment’s uneasy thought, is capable of causing in them acute and prolonged sorrow.  The nearer they draw to the moral ideal, strange paradox, the farther off from them does it ever appear, and they from it.  It is an apostle who writes, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief.”  Nor can I discover any tolerable explanation of all this, except that the guiding and directive power in the world, reveals itself in the moral consciousness of men, and with growing clearness in proportion as that consciousness has been trained and educated, as the moral ideal.

I find myself then, when my eyes are opened to the realities of the world in which I live, confronted with the facts of directive control and of the moral ideal.  If I seek for some interpretation and coordination of the facts, I am compelled, judging of them on the analogy of my own experience (which, being the ultimate reality I know, is my only clue to the interpretation of the ultimate reality of the universe) to regard them as the activities of a Person, Whom we call God.  Certainly to call the Ultimate Reality a Person, must be an inadequate expression of the truth, for it is the expression of the highest form of being in the terms of the lower.  But it is an infinitely more adequate presentation, than to

represent that Reality as impersonal.  For personality being the highest category of my thought, I am bound to think of God as being Personal, if I would think of Him at all.  I can be confident that though my view must fall far short of the truth, it is at least nearer to the truth and heart of things than any other view I can form.  It is in fact the truth so far as I can apprehend it: the truth by which I was meant to live, and on which I was made to act.

But the question of questions remains—What is the relation of the Person Whom I call God to my own personal being, to my spirit?  And, in answering this question, popular theology makes a grave and disastrous mistake.  It regards that Person as being isolated from all other persons, in the same way as each of us is isolated from all other persons.  God, that is, is viewed as but One Person among many.  Now, without inquiring as to the truth of this conception of personality, as being essentially an exclusive thing, we may at least say this, following the teaching of our best modern thinkers, as they have followed that of St. John and the Greek Fathers, that God is as truly conceived of as being within us, as external to us.  His Throne is in the heart of man, as truly as it is at the centre of the universe.  No view of God is tenable at the present day which regards Him as outside His own creation.  His Personality is not exclusive, but inclusive of all

things and all persons, while yet it transcends them.  And as He includes us within Himself, as in God “we live and move and have our being,” so also He interpenetrates us with His indwelling Presence as the life of our life.

To this point we shall presently return, for it is the keynote of all modern advance in theological knowledge, so far as that is not concerned with questions of literature, history, archæology, and textual criticism.  But we are concerned to notice now, that this recovered truth of the immanence of God in our humanity, affords the full and sufficient