The Grecian sage declared that his only wisdom was a consciousness of ignorance; and he constantly confessed to his hearers that he was merely a fellow-seeker with them after truth and goodness. The Nazarene maintained, on the contrary, that He was the light of the world, the shepherd of the souls of men, the way to eternal life, the vine or the life-tree of humanity. The prophet of Islam never allowed an expression to escape him which could be construed into a request for human worship. The whole tenor of Christ's teaching, on the contrary, was in harmony with His own explicit demand, that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. Either, then, Christ was more than a good man, or He was a very bad man. He must be placed either far above the world's noblest teachers, or far below the meanest. Either He was inordinately conceited-so conceited as to be continually guilty of the grossest blasphemy-or He was the brightness of the Father's glory, the express image of His person. Either He had a selfish paltry thirst for popularity, which led Him to demand from men, at the risk of their soul's perdition, a worship to which He had not the

slightest claim, or else He was God manifest in the flesh, the only begotten of the Father. We must choose between these alternative

Which do you suppose is the

suppositions.
more reasonable of the two?

0

210

Christianity and Pre-Christian
Religion.

III.

THE ATONEMENT.

"God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself." -2 COR. v. 19.

THE

HE word atonement is synonymous with reconciliation. It means etymologically, as you see, at-one-ment-the bringing to an understanding those who have misunderstood one another, the reconciling those who had previously been at enmity. Hence it is manifest that all revelation is, in a greater or less degree, atoning. It will attract men towards God, in so far as they can learn from it what He really is. But the pre-Christian revelations were vague and difficult to interpret. Nature, for example,

is sometimes beautiful and beneficent and lovely; but sometimes also, with her earthquakes and whirlwinds, her pains and diseases, she seems to suggest to us a Power which does not care whether we live or die, whether we have all that heart can wish, or suffer lifelong, unmitigated anguish. Conscience, again, has told every man ever born into the world that there is a distinction between right and wrong, that he should do the one and avoid the other, that right-doing is praiseworthy and wrong-doing abominable. This much conscience tells him; but what he must do in order to act rightly, he has to discover for himself. And the discovery is not always easy. On every page of history you will find illustrations of mistaken ideas of right. The Feejee Islander kills his parents when they begin to grow old, and he thinks he is thereby doing them a service; for he is afraid that otherwise they would be too feeble to make their way into another life. Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, invited the vanquished warrior Sisera into her tent, offering him, as it seemed with feminine kindliness, refreshment and repose. He trusted her; he fell asleep; and she killed him on the spot. She

thought she had acted nobly.

Deborah and

honour, and

In

Barak chanted a pæan in her declared that, in doing what she did, she came to the help of the Lord. As if the God of righteousness required to be supported by treachery and meanness worthy only of a fiend! History, moreover, "which, to him who reads it rightly, is but the God of truth working out truth," is by no means easy to decipher. the long-run, right has always prevailed, and evil has always proved itself to be foolish and injurious in the long-run, but not necessarily in the life of the individual. The tower of Siloam may fall upon the righteous. The wicked may be in great power, and may " spread himself like a green bay-tree," even till he dies. And so we may be often misled into mistaking good for evil, and evil for good. These primeval revelations, then, of nature and conscience and history, are very difficult to interpret.

Hence men have often formed the most erroneous and unworthy conceptions of the Deity. Some have regarded Him as indifferent to human welfare, others as positively vindictive. Epicurus, for example, taught that it was a waste of time to worship the gods; for they were too agreeably employed to do men harm or good.