to its significance every moment, he is alive to its principle, he is in prayer daily that his life may be used to bring man to it and he conceives that his life task is none other than to lead humanity to its consciousness. Who denies the atonement but the man who bickers and fights about definitions of God's side of it and fails to give his time, talents and his very soul to develop in humanity about him the actual process which in the providence of the Father will surely bring it about? The real denier of the atonement is the one who neglects to give his life for others to secure the essential harmonizing of man with God and right. The real heretic, we fear, is the man who so limits the holy love of the Father, that another is obliged to interpose between his children and him to secure his interest in them, and attempts to force a theory of the atonement upon man which implies a doubt of the Father's eternal disposition of solicitude for his child notwithstanding that child's sin and weakness and a further doubt of his ability to overcome the moral catastrophe which sin has brought about in the world, within his own heart and nature. Surely that man cannot truthfully be styled a heretic who thinks of God as the one who is able and willing to move toward man in love notwithstanding all that sin is and does, who divinely expresses that native movement of his soul in Jesus Christ's life and death and who passionately assumes the great task of bringing sinful man to that actual state of righteousness, love and brotherhood which is the ideal of his mind, the desire of his heart and the cry of his own nature for his children. We believe there is a Heavenly sanction of that faith which conceives of God thus, which recognizes the reconcilia tion which he must have for his children and which expresses itself in untiring devotion to those ministries which are calculated definitely and actually to secure in men the moral and spiritual at-one-ment which is so evidently essential in the Kingdom plan of Jesus our Lord. IN CHAPTER SIX THE GOSPEL MESSAGE N Mr. Chesterton's delightful play "Magic," the young girl who wanders about the garden dreaming of fairies is warned by the stern old agnostic doctor not to forget the difference between the things that are beautiful and the things that are there; "my red lamp is not beautiful but it is there." The girl looks through the French windows and sees the red glow of the doctor's light shining steadily in the dark—a reminder that pain, disease and death are there as well as dreams and fairies of the mind and heart. It is of the utmost importance that we view the world of humanity as it actually is. There is much in it that is beautiful and we love to think of it and gaze upon it, but there is also much that is ugly and bad and we do not like to think of it, in fact we shudder in horror when we are, at times, forced to look upon it. But whether we enjoy it or not, the fact is that this dark side of human life is there. It is useless to deny it. The fairminded one who looks at life squarely and with clear vision, knows it is there. It is only the blind optimist, or one sided philosopher, who refuses to see what really exists, and who is able to make himself think that it is not actual. There has been in vogue among some a belief of absolute idealism which does not recognize that there is anything offensive in life. This view is, that within the absolute, there is no room for real differences and if things can only be viewed from the eternal standpoint, disagreement vanishes. That is, that there is nothing particularly wrong with the world, everything is in beautiful harmony because everything has its place in the All. But there is an awakening resentment to this sort of sophistry and this resentment is because the facts do not substantiate the idealism which it champions. The belief in the unity of the universe and the eternity of the good, does not necessitate the view of life which recognizes no evil present today. Some people who feel there must be a oneness to life are so obsessed with an ultimate ideal that they refuse to see the actual condition of human life which, though moving toward the ideal, is far from it. Faith in God and the supremacy of truth and righteousness, does not demand that we shut our eyes to the facts of life, heart rending and shameful as they may be. All about us, right before us in individual life and active collective humanity, there are clear and unmistakable evidences of the presence of the unideal. Take the European Crisis which is on just now. We may believe that God is somehow connected with it, that it was inevitable, that all nations are more or less involved in its ethics, that there are times when war is justifiable, and that it must be fought to the bitter end until righteousness triumphs. Yet is there any one in this country who truly believes that it is compatible with a true Christianity, that it really exhibits the spirit and ideals of the Nazarene, that it reveals humanity at its best, that it was begun in justice and brotherhood and that it is the result of love to God and love to man? We know that it is evil, that it is the fruit of treachery, fear, race hatred and human greed, backed by a false idealism of life and that it would never have occurred, had Christian nations taken Jesus' ideal of life seriously and received his spirit actually. It means progress because man will no doubt have sense enough to learn something as a result of it, but no deep reasoning is able to gloss over the fact that it is discord and distrust among the nations of the world. This accentuates the truth that right by the side of the lovely and good in this world, are unrighteousness and unloveliness. The story that the daily newspapers tell is not one of moral grandeur. Think of the record of anger, divorce, murder, cruelty, impurity, avarice, and a hundred other forms of the unideal which is being served us hourly. When can we enjoy a happy meal together without being conscious of the poverty, sorrow, drunkenness, debauchery, wretchedness and misery about us? Think of the persistent strife among the classes which represent labor and capital, the stampede of human greed for gold that crushes out human lives in its mad rush, and the craze for the superficial and temporary which engulfs millions like a flood. Before such facts, is it unreasonable to declare that the world is out of order and that there is much that is far from the ideal? And when this is traced to its source it comes back to the individual. There is that in his life which is fitly described only by that homely word "sin." The unideal is a soft word for the same fact. But speaking it softly as we may, does not lessen the awfulness of the truth that it is sin in man that causes it all. We do not need to discuss original sin; |