to each other, if the object of them was a son who was false, treacherous and impure, and yet with the possibility of becoming a good man. In God they are all simultaneous, and the full conception can only be got by looking at them all. Love is the passionate desire to reclaim the work of His own hands. Pity the recognition of its weakness and misery. Sorrow is what is caused by treachery against love, the manifestation of wounded love. Wrath we have already described. If God does not experience these things, somehow, in His eternal heights, He is no god for us. But the study of Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah and Jonah (especially) shows us conclusively that this is in fact His attitude to me and to sinful man. And in Jesus Christ the fact is finally revealed.

Apply then these thoughts, lastly, to the Atonement. We have already seen that the Incarnation is only the particular case of God's general condescension to relation and communion with, and indwelling in His world and especially man. Then the Atonement is only the particular manifestation, in that Incarnate Word, of the general attitude of God to sinful man. The Atonement is the Divine Sorrow, Pity, Wrath, and Love embodied in the Incarnate One. The Atonement is the expression of the eternal Patience of God—which is sin-bearing—in relation to space and time, just as the Incarnation is the expression of the Eternal Essence in relation to space and time. The Passion of Christ is the temporal and spatial manifestation

of the Passion of God. The wrath, love, pity, sorrow, patience of Christ are the manifestation in terms of space and time of the same things in the Heavenly God. The Incarnation says, 'God was in Christ'; the Atonement adds, 'reconciling man unto Himself.'

The doings of Christ, therefore, in the flesh are, as it were, the doings of God when manifested on the stage of space and time, being brought there into immediate contact with men. This conception show us how far from the truth is anyone who construes the Christian idea as that of a severe, angry Father and a mild, loving Son. The Bible lends no such support to a division in the Godhead, however much it may appropriate functions to the persons of the Trinity. In the one work of Love and Redemption through Suffering—that is Patience—the Godhead is One Father, Son and Spirit. 'God so loved the world.' 'God was in Christ.' 'God commendeth His love towards us.'

The Atonement is thus seen to be a work springing from the very nature of God, not an external action which had to take place before God could forgive. We rather say: None but a God who is so loving as to bear man's sin in eternity, and bear it, incarnate, in time, could forgive and save the sinner. This is absolutely true. The Atonement, in Christ, of the Incarnate Son, is indeed the means whereby we attain salvation. But it is not an external means, an external plan, to enable God to