The most comprehensive soteriological statement is that "the Father hath sent the Son to be the Saviour³ of the world" (4¹⁴).  Salvation, which culminates in the one supreme good, Eternal Life, includes, as a present possession, the forgiveness of sins (1⁹), cleansing from all sin and unrighteousness (1^7,9), being "begotten of God" (5¹ etc.), fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ (1⁸) our abiding in Him and His in us (4¹⁵ etc.), the anointing of the Spirit (2²⁰), fellowship one with another (1⁷), overcoming the world (5^4,5), righteousness of life (3⁶ etc.), love (3¹⁴ etc.), assurance towards God (3¹⁹, 4¹⁸), confidence in prayer (3^20,21, 5¹⁴).  As a possession perfected in the future, it includes boldness in the Parousia (2²⁸) and in the Day of Judgment (4¹¹), complete assimilation to Christ as He will then be manifested (3²) and abiding for ever⁴ (2⁷).  Here the origin of Salvation in the love of God is exhibited in the twofold fact of the Father's having sent His Son, and of the Son's being sent as the "Saviour of the world" (emphasising, as this does, the human need that drew forth the manifestation of the Divine Love).

    When we pass to the more specific question of the method by which Christ accomplishes His mission of saving the world, the answer, still general, is, "Ye know that He was manifested that He might take away sins" (3⁵).⁵  Here the thought is only of the purpose for which Christ appeared on earth - the removal of sins; there is no reference to the definite means by which this is accomplished.  The world can be saved only by the abolition of sin; and to this end all that Christ was and taught and did, by life, death, and resurrection the whole human manifestation in Him of the unseen Divine Life (1²) was directed.  This neither requires demonstration nor permits of argument. "Ye know,"⁶ says the Apostle.  In the Christian consciousness of Christ and His work this is the first principle.

    Thus, from another point of view, the work of salvation may be regarded as one of destruction.  "To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy⁷ the works of the devil" (3^8b).  The "works of the devil" signify human sin in its entirety regarded as the product of original Satanic agency; and Christ saves the world by breaking up and destroying from its foundations the whole system and establishment of Evil that dominates human life.  This he does by "taking away sins."  The Epistle contemplates no other means by which the destruction of the "works of the devil" is to be accomplished than the taking away of sin through the spiritual forces of the Kingdom of God.  How, failing this, they are to be destroyed, is a question regarding which the Epistle has no message.

    We come closer to the core of our subject when we ask by what specific mode of action Christ takes away sin - a result after which morality has toiled and religion agonised in vain, which has been at once the quenchless aspiration of conscience and its burden of despair.  The first, though not the full, answer is, that the mode of action was that of self-sacrificing Love.  The mission of Christ, while we must think of it as having its inception in the love of the Father, Who sent the Son as the Saviour of the world (4¹⁷), is achieved only by the same self-sacrificing Love on the part of the Son. "Herein know⁸ we Love, because He laid down His Life for us" (3¹⁶).  This is the absolute revelation of Love - the ideal to which all that claims that title must conform.⁹  And it is only as exhibiting the fact and the magnitude of Christ's self-sacrifice on our behalf that the "laying down"¹⁰ of His Life is here contemplated.  Reference to the Death of Calvary as a substitutionary¹¹ ransom is excluded by the context, in which it is held up specifically as our pattern, binding on us the obligation to lay down our lives in like manner for the brethren.  No necessity, save that of Love itself, is indicated for that infinite self-sacrifice.  Nothing is said as to the conditions of human need or Divine law under which it was indispensable to our salvation and avails for it.  All this, however, is done, with notable emphasis and unmistakable significance, in the group of passages that next come under consideration.

    4¹⁰  "God loved us, and sent His own Son a propitiation for our sins."

    2²  "And He Himself (Jesus Christ the righteous) is the propitiation for our sins."

    1^7b  "The blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin."

    1⁹  "God is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

    In these passages we have a concatenation of ideas - propitiation, blood, cleansing, forgiveness - which are directly derived from the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, which are expressed, indeed, in technical Levitical terms.  To elucidate their meaning, therefore, it is necessary to examine them in the light of their Old Testament associations.

    Here the primary term is i`lasmo,j,¹² which with its congeners is used by the LXX. to translate the corresponding group, Kipper and its derivatives.¹³  The root-idea of Kipper is that of covering over;¹⁴ but its use in the Old Testament is restricted to the "covering" of sin; and, like so many other ideas, it undergoes a remarkable process of moral elevation and religious development.  The primitive conception is that found in the patriarchal narrative (Gen. 32²⁸), where Jacob proposes to "cover" Esau's face with a gift, that is, to render him blind to the injury done, by means of the gift thrust upon his attention.  Crude as the instance is, it clearly exhibits the idea that runs through the whole complicated usage of the metaphor - that of rendering offence invisible, null, inoperative as a cause of just displeasure and punishment.¹⁵

     The class of passages that shed the light of clearest analogy upon our present study are those that deal with legal or ritual propitiation.  In this the agent is the priest; the means, usually, a sacrifice; the object, the person or thing on whose behalf the sacrifice is offered.  Propitiatory efficacy is assigned to a large variety of sacrifices, but especially to the sin-offering and to blood as containing the "life."  And it is peculiarly relevant to the exegesis of the Epistle to note the effects of propitiation, which are expressly the forgiveness¹⁶ of sin (1⁹) and cleansing¹⁷ (1^7b,9).  Upon the whole subject, though one might quote from more recondite sources, a better statement could not be furnished of the action which, with its agents, instruments, and consequences, is denoted by propitiation than is given by Driver (DB IV. 131^b).  "It is to cover (metaphorically) by a gift, offering, or rite, or (if God be the subject) to treat as covered; the ideas associated with the word being to make (or treat as) harmless, non-existent, or inoperative, to annul (so far as God's notice or regard is concerned), to withdraw from God's sight, with the attached idea of restoring to His favour, freeing from sin and restoring to holiness - especially (but not exclusively) by the species of sacrifice called the sin-offering."  Such is the word and such is the conception employed in the Epistle to express the mode of action by which Christ has accomplished and still accomplishes His mission as the Saviour of the world.  "He is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but for the whole world" (2²). Two great truths emerge.  First, propitiation has its ultimate source in God.  Paganism conceives of propitiation as a means of changing the disposition of the deity, of mollifying his displeasure and rendering him literally "propitious."  In the Old Testament the conception rises to a higher plane; the expiation of sin begins to supersede the idea of the appeasing sacrifice, and language¹⁸ is chosen as if to guard against the supposition that a feeling of personal irritation, pique, or resentment, such as mingles almost invariably with human wrath, mars the purity of the Divine indignation against sin.  And this ascent from pagan anthropomorphism reaches the climax of all ethical religion in St. John's conception of the Divine atonement for human guilt: - "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us, and sent His Son as a propitiation for our sins" (4¹⁰).  The action of which, in some sense, God is Himself the object, has God Himself as its origin.  Propitiation is no device for inducing a reluctant deity to forgive; it is the way by which the Father in Heaven restores His sinning children to Himself.

    Nevertheless, it is a real work of propitiation in which this love is exhibited and becomes effective for our salvation.  "And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins" (2²).  To interpret the virtue of the i`lasmo,j as consisting merely in its supreme exhibition of God's all-embracing, all-forgiving love, as if to assure men that no barrier to fellowship exists save in their own fears, is to empty the word of all that it distinctively contains.  One may or may not accept the teaching of the New Testament; but it is, at any rate, due to intellectual honesty to recognise what that teaching is.  And, beyond dispute, i`lasmo,j can mean but one thing - that which in some way (we may not be able to say, and I do not here attempt to say, in what way or upon what principle) expiates the guilt of sin, which restores sinful offenders to God by rendering their sin null and inoperative as a barrier to fellowship with Him.  The fundamental implication is that not until the moral fact of sin is thus dealt with, can the relations of God and man be established on a permanent, that is, on a moral basis.  And because sin is thus dealt with by Christ, He is the "propitiation for our sins."  The ultima ratio of propitiation lies at once in the Love of God and the guilt of man.  It is at once the act in which alone the pure, spontaneous, all-forgiving Divine Love finds its total expression, and the act through which alone that Love, in consistency with its own highest aims and obligations, can go forth on its mission of reconciliation.  It is through this channel of suffering and death, determined and cut out by human sin, that the life-giving stream which arises in the heart of the Eternal Love must find an outlet into the barren and unclean waste.

    In saying so much, we have been guilty of a slight anticipation.  In the statement that Christ is the propitiation for our sins, nothing more is implied than that, sin being a valid and by us insuperable obstacle to God's fellowship with us and ours with Him, the power by which this obstacle is removed springs from the Person of Christ.

    This must now be considered in the light of the more definite statement, "If we walk¹⁹ in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin" (1⁷).  In the Old Testament, propitiation was normally effected by the offering of an animal victim through death.  Any other mode of making over a life to God was unknown to the Levitical ritual, and, indeed, to any pre-Christian conception of sacrifice.  And thus it is invariably assumed in the New Testament that the sacrifice of Christ was consummated and offered in the Death of the Cross.  That this is St. John's presupposition is clear from this reference to His Blood.

    Neither here, however, nor anywhere in the New Testament, is the Blood a synonym for the Death of Christ.  In the Levitical ritual the atoning virtue is assigned in a peculiar degree to the blood as containing the "life" (Lev. 17¹¹).  The warm, fluid blood was considered as the life of the animal, not a symbol of the life, but the life itself; and the essence, ritually, of the sacrificial act consisted in the offering of the life-blood to God; so much so that it might be regarded as a principle of the whole ritual system that "without outpouring of blood there is no remission" (Heb. 9²²).  The meaning of this manipulation of the blood is variously explained; but the points of real importance are these: that, according to the analogy of the Old Testament, and in consonance with every type of New Testament teaching,²⁰ the propitiatory virtue of all Christ is and has done and does is here regarded as concentrated in His Blood; and that what this term connotes is the Life offered to God in His Death, not death itself regarded as mere deprivation of life.  And now appears the immense significance of the words by which the Blood is defined.  For what manner of life is it that is offered in this Blood?  It is the life of perfect immaculate humanity - the life of Jesus; but it is at the same time Divine life ("the Eternal Life that was with the Father and was manifested to us ") - the life of Jesus, His Son.²¹  It was this Divine-human life that was yielded up in spiritual sacrifice through physical death²² in the Blood of the Cross.

    The efficacy of this Blood is that it "cleanses from all sin"²³ (kaqari,zei h`ma/j avpo. pa,shj a`marti,aj).  Here, again, the connection of ideas is strictly Levitical.  In the Old Testament ritual, purification from moral or ceremonial uncleanness was constantly effected by expiatory sacrifice, and especially by blood.²⁴  One may almost say that, "According to the law, all things are purified with blood" (Heb. 9²²).

    It is usually assumed without question, however, that, in this passage "cleansing" denotes not the removal of the guilty stain of sin, but cleansing of the character, deliverance from the power and defilement of sin itself (Lucke, Ebrard, Huther, Haupt, Rothe, Westcott; opposed, however, by Calvin, Weiss, Plummer).  It is difficult to account for this; certainly there is no foothold in the Old Testament for such an interpretation of kaqari,zein.  There, the object of sacrificial cleansing is never the character; but is moral or ceremonial offence, regarded as leaving upon the offender a stain which makes covenant relations with God impossible till it is removed.²⁴  This impossibility is conceived either as objective, consisting in the reaction of the Divine purity against the uncleannesses of men, or as subjective, consisting in man's consciousness²⁵ of such uncleanness, depriving him of confidence to draw near to God.  Elsewhere in the New Testament the usage is identical with that of the Old.²⁶  Nor is there any support in the context for a different interpretation in the present case.  True, it is the very glory of salvation by the Blood of Christ that it cleanses the character from evil affection at the same time as it removes the guilt of sin, that Divine pardon and moral renewal are organically inseparable.  And this, moreover, is the truth to the assertion of which this Epistle is as a whole devoted.  But the question here for the Apostle and his readers is still only this, how we, being such as we are, - we whose life and character, when brought into the Light of God, are only revealed in their actual deformity and guilt,  - can nevertheless enter into immediate fellowship with Him in Whose Light we stand thus revealed.  And the answer is that, when we walk in the Light, confessing our sins, "the Blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin "removes from us the stain of our guilt, and makes us clean in God's sight.²⁷

    The statement of this is varied and expanded in us "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."²⁸  Still we are in the circle of Levitical ideas,²⁹ in which forgiveness and cleansing are as closely as possible related to each other, and both to propitiation.  For, though unexpressed, the idea of propitiation is implicit here in the assertion that God is "faithful and righteous" in forgiving sin and cleansing from unrighteousness.  Here "faithful"³⁰ is the wider concept, which includes the more specific "righteous."  When upon our penitent confession (the psychological condition that makes forgiveness possible de facto) God sets us free from the sins and disabilities by which we stand debarred from His fellowship, He does what is according to His own unalterable character, because He does what is right.  He is "faithful" to His own nature; and it is His nature to "delight in mercy" and to be "ready to forgive"; yet to forgive, not with a weak and injurious mercy, but only in such a way that no wrong is done, no truth slurred over, that sin is recognised and dealt with as being what it is.  The human conscience itself, when truly awakened, has always declined to find a solution of the problem of sin in forgiveness granted either by arbitrary will or by a leniency that shrinks from inflicting pain more than from vindicating right and showing its abhorrence of wrong.  The New Testament proclaims that God is faithful and righteous in forgiving sin (cf. Rom. 3²⁶), because He first reveals in word and in action the true nature and guilt of sin; and then freely pardons all who, walking in the light of that revelation, - the light that shines with concentrated power from the Cross, - confess and forsake their sins.  And the human conscience in every age has borne witness that where men do thus walk in the Light, this result follows: the Blood of Jesus cleanses away sin in the sight of God; to which He bears witness in cleansing the conscience from its stain and giving peace with Himself.

    The last of this group of utterances speaks of Christ as our Paraclete.  Earnestly the Apostle affirms the aim of all his writing to be "that ye sin not" (2¹).  Nevertheless, the present state being what it is, he contemplates the possibility - may we not say, the certainty? - of sin occurring in the life even of those who are walking in the Light.  In such an event we are not left without a resource:  "We have a Paraclete with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous" (2¹).  The word Paraclete³¹ is exclusively Johannine (a statement which includes the LXX. as well as the N.T.); and its meaning is everywhere the same.  No single English word, indeed, covers the whole breadth of its various applications and suggestions; but these are always different shades of the same meaning, not different meanings.  It may be said to signify in general a friendly representative who defends one's cause, usually by influential intercession.  In the Gospel the Holy Spirit, as the Paraclete, maintains Christ's cause with the believer (John 14²⁰, 15²⁶, 16¹⁴), and champions the believer's cause against the world (John 16^8-11); and here Christ is the penitent sinner's Advocate, and pleads his cause with the Father.

    In this connection these words, "with the Father" (pro.j to.n pate,pa), are extremely significant.  It is God's Fatherhood that renders such advocacy possible, and at the same time demands it.  On the one hand, the words repudiate the caricature of Christ's Intercession as a process of persuasion acting upon a reluctant will.  On the other hand, the writer could not by conscious intention have chosen words more directly contradictory of the assumption that the Divine Fatherhood, rightly understood, excludes all necessity or possibility of mediation and intercession.  The all-forgiving Love of the Father is like the waves of a great reservoir, pulsing and throbbing against the barrier until the flood-gate is opened; when instantly the pent-up waters are sent bounding along the dried-up channel.  That opening is, from the human side, repentance and confession (1⁹); but, if New Testament teaching is unanimous on any point, it is regarding this, that from the Divine side also an opening of the flood-gate is needed, and that this is effected through Christ's work of propitiation and intercession.  An Advocate with the Father!  The words seem a paradox.  Is not a father's heart the best advocate of an erring child?  Will not a father's love have anticipated every plea that can be urged in his behalf?  That must be understood.  But it must be understood also that even the Father's love can urge nothing in apology for sin - nothing that is of force to absolve from its guilt . Yet there is One who can urge on our behalf what is at once the most appalling condemnation of our sin, and the only sufficient plea for its remission - Himself.

    This Paraclete the Apostle now names and describes with reference to His personal qualifications for the office.  He is Jesus Christ.  Elsewhere the writer distinguishes between those two appellations, and brings out the proper and original force of each (2²³, 4², 5^1,6); but here Jesus Christ is used simply as a proper name, the full designation by which the Saviour of the World is known in history.

    It is as Jesus Christ, the "Word made flesh," that He is our Paraclete.  In virtue of His uniquely intimate union with humanity in nature, experience, and sympathy, He remains for ever its perfect and universal representative; and as, when He was on earth, He pled for friend (John 17, Luke 22³¹) and foe (Luke 23³⁴), so still in the Heavenly places He upholds our cause.

    But if it is as Jesus Christ that He is qualified to represent man, it is especially as Jesus Christ the Righteous³² that He is fitted to be the sinner's Advocate.  The epithet may apply directly to His advocacy.  Not only without share in the sin of those for whom He pleads, He is untainted by any secret sympathy with it.  He has resisted sin unto blood; He has suffered all things on account of sin.  He sees it as it is, and confesses it as beyond apology or extenuation.  His righteousness in interceding corresponds to the Father's righteousness in forgiving (1⁹).  Or we may, perhaps, better understand "righteous" as applying universally to the Advocate's nature and character.  In Him the Father sees His own essential Righteousness (2^29a) revealed.  In Him there stands before God the Divine Ideal of humanity (2^29b).  It is as man in whom that ideal is consummated, as Jesus Christ the Righteous that He is qualified to undertake the cause of mankind before the Righteous Father (cf. Heb. 7^26,27).  This interpretation best agrees with what follows.

    "And He³³ is the propitiation for our sins.  And not for ours only, but also for the whole world" (2²). Here a necessary relation between the office of Paraclete and the fact of propitiation is clearly indicated, again on Levitical lines.  As it was through the blood of sacrifice that the High priest³⁴ enjoyed the right of entering within the veil and making intercession for the sins of the people (Heb. 9⁷), so Christ's prerogative of advocacy is grounded on the fact that He has made propitiation (Heb. 9¹²).  On the other hand, as it was only in the High priest's appearing before God with the atoning blood that the act of atonement was completed, so it is by Christ's advocacy that the propitiation becomes actually operative.  The two acts not only are united in one Person, but constitute the one reconciling work by which there is abiding fellowship between God and His sinning people.

    But the most notable point is that it is Himself - Jesus Christ the Righteous - who is the propitiation.  (So also in 4¹⁰.)  St. John does not speak of Christ as "making propitiation."  He Himself, in virtue of all that He is, He who has lived the Life of God in man, in whom that Life has triumphed over the world and reached its last fulfilment in the self-surrender of death - He is the propitiation³⁵ for sin, and He is our Paraclete through whose permanent ministry before the Father, propitiation becomes salvation unto the uttermost (Heb. 7²⁵).

    What conception can we form of the reality denoted by Christ's office of Paraclete?  It has sometimes been understood in a crassly anthropomorphic sense; and we must agree with Calvin, who repudiates the materialism of those "qui genibus Patris Christum advolvunt, ut pro nobis oret."  Our Lord Himself negatives the idea of oral intercession (John 16^26,27).

    On the other hand, His intercession is sometimes rarefied into a merely symbolical expression of the truth that His work of propitiation is of enduring validity.  But no such abstract idea adequately represents the thought and the feeling of the Apostle's words, "If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father."  The title Paraclete itself suggests, on the manward side, a ministry that is intensely personal and compassionate, intimately and sympathetically related to the moral crises of sin and temptation, distress and need, that arise in individual lives (Heb. 2¹⁷, 4¹⁵).  And if the New Testament understands by Christ's Intercession such a ministry toward men, it is also, without doubt, understood as containing a correspondent activity toward God.  In what this consists - though it is not essentially more mysterious than Christ's intercession on earth - is necessarily beyond our conception.  More we need not and cannot know than that Jesus Christ the Righteous - Propitiation and Paraclete - abideth for ever, and is the living channel through which the Eternal Love gives itself to sinful men, and all the spiritual energies of the Divine Nature stream forth to take away the sin of the world.

    From the examination thus made of the principal passages in the Epistle that bear directly on Propitiation, it must be evident that its type of doctrine, under this category, exhibits a striking affinity with that of the Epistle to the Hebrews, - an affinity which does not, perhaps, imply direct derivation, but does imply that both are so far products of the same school of thought.  For both, the fundamental religious concepts are those of the Levitical system.  Both instinctively run Christian truth into Old Testament moulds.  The entire theological scheme in Hebrews has as its nucleus the thought of "religion as a Covenant, or state of relation, between God and a worshipping people, in which necessarily the high priest occupies the place of prominence" (Davidson, Hebrews, p. 197).  St. John eschews the terms "covenant" and "High priest " - possibly because they were unfamiliar to those for whom he wrote, or, if familiar, debased by pagan associations.  With him "covenant relationship" becomes koinwni,a (1³), filial fellowship with God, the mutual indwelling of God and His people.³⁶  And unmistakably this is the standpoint from which he approaches the problem of sin and its removal.  St. John does regard sin ethically, and insists with startling emphasis upon its absolute antagonism to the nature of God and His children (3⁹); and it is open to any one to maintain that he ought to have adhered to this point of view throughout, and to have contemplated the removal of sin simply by ethical process, so that the atonement would be "the believer himself brought into harmony with the Divine mind, purpose, and will through the Mediator."³⁷  But this St. John does not do.  Like the author of Hebrews, he contemplates sin primarily, in its religious consequences, as an objective disability for fellowship with God.  As such, it can be removed only by "cleansing," which carries with it "remission"; and "cleansing" again is accomplished only by "propitiation" and specifically by "blood."  For these ends a sacrifice and a priestly mediator are indispensable.  The sacrifice is provided.  The "Blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth from all sin"³⁸ (1⁷).  And He who is the propitiation is Himself also the Priest (Heb. 9^11-14), who consummates the sacrifice by intercessory presentation of it before God; for, though in the nomenclature of St. John the Paraclete supplants the Priest, the office of the Paraclete is indubitably identical with that of the great High Priest of God's people, as it is delineated in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

    But it is maintained³⁹ that "The problem of sin, which was central in the mind of Paul, to John appeared something secondary.  In the true Johannine doctrine there is no logical place for the view of the death of Christ as an atonement.  So far as that view is accepted we have to do, not with John's characteristic teaching, but with the orthodox faith of the Church, which he strove to incorporate with his own at the cost of an inner contradiction."  Now, on any theory of its authorship, the Epistle must be regarded as essentially a Johannine document; and it is not going beyond our province to consider how far, if at all, it sustains these assertions.  It is true that we do not find in it the same fierce grappling with the problem of deliverance from sin as in the Epistle to the Romans; that the truth to which the earlier thinker fights his way, as with tears and blood, the later gets not in possession by his own sword, but finds and accepts as beyond all controversy.  And yet there is no lack of intensity in his statement either of the problem of sin (1^8,10) or of its solution (1^7,9, 2^1,2, 4^9,10).  These words represent, no doubt, "the orthodox faith of the Church"; yet what words can possess a clearer note of immediate spiritual intuition?  What more fervent and memorable expressions of the common doctrine of the New Testament are to be found?  What words are more constantly used in the devotions of the Church, for the confession of sin and the expression of confidence in its removal by the Divine sacrifice, than the words of this Epistle?  It seems strange that these should be the words of a writer who was only endeavouring to engraft the orthodox doctrine upon another truth that was vital to his own soul.

    The doctrine of Propitiation has no "logical place" in St. John's "characteristic teaching," but is accepted "at the cost of an inner contradiction," only if that can be true of a doctrine which at the same time is for him the climax of all truth - the supreme revelation of the supreme principle of all moral life, human and divine.  Organic relation cannot be closer than that which exists between St. John's doctrine of Propitiation and his doctrine of the moral nature of God.  If "God is Love" is the master-light of all spiritual vision, this is the sole and perfect medium of its outshining: "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us, and sent His Son as a propitiation for our sins" (4¹⁰).  This is no mere echo of an orthodox belief; no repetition of a stock idea.  St. Paul had already compared the love of God in the Death of Christ with the utmost men will do for one another (Rom. 5^7,8); but "St. John rises above all comparisons to an absolute point of view."⁴⁰  Christ's mission of propitiation not only has its motive in the Divine Love, it embodies and contains the complete fulness of that Love.  Other acts and gifts are tokens and expressions of it; but "Herein is Love" - the whole and sole equivalent in act of what God is in essence.  In this passage we have a conception which, as it seems to me, surpasses anything to be found elsewhere in the Apostolic Scriptures,⁴¹ of the sacrifice of God in Christ as a Divine act which, while it is free and optional, as being unsolicited and undetermined by anything external to the Divine nature itself is an absolute self-necessity of that nature.  St. John's doctrine of propitiation is related to his doctrine of God by the logic of moral necessity.  If God is Love, nothing is more necessarily true than that He suffers on account of human sin; and to deny Him the power to help and save men by bearing their burden, is to deny to Him the highest prerogative of Love.

    But it may be said that propitiation stands in no logical relation to the other and more prominent half of St. John's doctrine of Salvation - Regeneration.  God saves men by the Divine Begetting, by the direct impartation of that Eternal Life which has been made communicable to them through the Incarnation of the Word.  How and why, it may be asked, is this spiritual and ethical salvation from sin conditioned by the expiation of its guilt?  We may not be able to answer this question.  It is conceivable that St. John himself could not.  But it does not follow that there is an inner contradiction.  The difficulty does not attach itself to the Johannine theology exclusively.  It belongs in some form to every type of theology in the New Testament.  It only becomes specially obvious in St. John because with him the doctrinal centre is Life - the Life of the Word made Flesh becoming the new Life of mankind.  And if we inquire, as we naturally do, why the Divine-human Life of Christ must pass through death, and thereby become a propitiation for human sin, before it could become the principle of new Life to men, St. John gives us no explicit answer.  He tacitly presupposes the answer that in its various forms is given or assumed throughout the New Testament, that God, in bestowing the sovereign grace of pardon and sonship, must deal truthfully and adequately with sin as a violation of the moral order as a fact, if we may say so, both of the Divine conscience and of the human conscience, which is its image.  And with St. John, as with other New Testament writers, the necessity and the efficacy of sacrifce as the means by which this is accomplished are simply axiomatic.

    But when we proceed to the endeavour to extract from the data of the Epistle the principle or principles upon which we may account for this, we encounter a task to which exegesis is not adequate, and which constructive theology has not yet finally achieved, it has become a commonplace to say that the New Testament contains no theory of the Atonement.  Yet it is evident that the Apostolic writers were not only religiously conscious of reconciliation with God by the mediation of Christ, but were also intellectually interested in the mode of its accomplishment.  The Epistles to the Romans and to the Hebrews abundantly witness that the fascination which the problem of Christ's Death has for the modern mind was no less intensely felt by the Apostolic mind.  The tantalising feature of the case is that its need of explanation seems to have ended where ours begins.  When the work of Christ was described as a propitiatory sacrifice, and was seen to embody the full truth which the sacrificial system of the Old Testament faintly and imperfectly expressed, no need of further elucidation suggested itself to the writers of the New Testament.

    We are only driven back upon the further inquiries what is the root-idea of sacrifice, and what is its relation to the end in view?  How was it conceived by the earliest Christian teachers and their disciples?  Did they feel that any rationale of sacrifice and its cognate institutions was either necessary or possible?  What was to them the explanation has become itself the problem.⁴²

    One intensely illuminating ray St. John does shed upon it.  The sacrifice of Christ is the sacrifice of God.  This is the Epistle's great contribution to Christian thought the vision of the Cross in the heart of the eternal Love.  How suggestive are these two statements when placed side by side: "Herein is Love - that God loved us, and sent His Son as a propitiation for our sins" (4¹⁰), and "Herein do we know Love (recognise what it is), because He laid down His Life for us" (3¹⁶)!  God's sending His Son and Christ's laying down His Life are moral equivalents.  The Cross of Christ is but the manifestation of another Cross - that invisible Cross which the sin and folly, the trustlessness and ingratitude, of His children have made for the Father who is Love.  How hard it has been for human thought to assimilate the ethics of Christ, needs no stronger proof than the fact that the impassibility of God had for so long the place of an axiom in Christian theology.  When we speak of God as Father, when we say that God loves beings who are false, lustful, malicious, who are stubborn and impenitent, who in their blindness and perverse wilfulness rush upon self-destruction, what immeasurable sorrows do we imply in the depths of the Divine Love!  And it is out of those depths that the Cross of Christ emerges.  He who bled on Calvary was first in the Bosom of the Father; and what is the Gospel of a crucified Christ, but the proclamation of the infinitely awful, blessed truth that God Himself is the greatest sufferer from our sin; that the Righteous Father drinks the bitter cup His children's unrighteousness has filled?  As in all things, Christ is in this the Word of the invisible God.  He bore our sins in His sufferings and Death, not by any external infliction, but by the inward necessity of holy Love, - because He would live out the Life of God in this hostile world.  In this there is nothing "transactional," "official," "forensic," nothing but inevitable spiritual reality.  Holy Love cannot but bear sin, sorrow over it, suffer for it, and thereby, according to the redemptive law, become sin's propitiation.

    What is that redemptive law?  There is no other problem over which Christian thought, since "Cur Deus Homo," has brooded so intently; and there is no doctrine the history of which more clearly shows that ethical always precedes theological advance.  Its history becomes an index to the moral development of Christendom, as we find each successive theory reflecting the moral standards and ideas of the time in which it arose.  And it is idle to imagine that the theories that find favour in our day will prove more satisfying to our successors than those of preceding ages do to us.  Always as the Spirit of Christ comes to more perfect fulfilment in the individual and in society, shall we come to a more perfect understanding of the sacrifice of Christ.

    Yet the labour of past generations has not been fruitless.

    There is not one of the great historical theories of the Atonement which, when its crudities and exaggerations have been carried away by the tide, does not leave some residuum of solid gain.  There is no aspect under which the work of Christ has revealed itself to reverent minds but contains some element of essential value.  This has not been sufficiently recognised.  Criticism has been prone to seize upon incidental falsities and exaggerated expressions rather than upon abiding truths.  It has been too generally assumed that the work of Christ is explicable by some single formula; and the part seen has been taken for the whole.  We cannot doubt, indeed, that a unity there must be in which all its manifold aspects meet; one principle which is the master-key to all its complexities.  "If we could find it, we might be surprised at its simplicity; we certainly should wonder at its Divine beauty and naturalness."  Meanwhile, may we not recognise that the different aspects it reveals, when approached from different points of view, are not mutually destructive, but mutually complementary?

    Inadequate as is the "moral influence" theory, when it regards the work of Christ exclusively as the undoing of the effect of sin in the character, its essential truth is so obvious that it is the common element in all the theories.  To make sinful men know that God grieves over them, that He longs to touch and win them to penitence and newness of life, that for this end He has willed to go to that length of self-sacrifice, the only measure of which is the Cross, - who does not acknowledge that this is supremely aimed at and achieved in the work of Christ?

    And if there be taken away from the despised Anselmic theory its accidental taint of feudalism with its defective moral ideals, that theory also, when it contemplates the work of Christ in relation to the Divine personality, contains a profound truth.  If we conceive of God as a Being to whom the notions of moral satisfaction and pleasure and their opposites are in any way applicable, must we not also conceive of the obedience of Christ - obedience not only flawless in will and deed, but obedience which exhausted the possibilities of obedience, which transcended all the obedience of earth because perfect as that of heaven, and which transcended all the obedience of heaven because wrought out through the pains, humiliations, and temptations of earth, obedience as perfect and divine as the Will to which it was rendered, - must we not conceive of that obedience⁴³ as a perfect satisfaction, "an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour," as, in literal truth, an atonement, a moral compensation for the sin of the world?  If the race, which without Christ were a tragic moral failure, so that, to speak after the manner of men, it would have grieved and repented God that He had created it, becomes with Christ a moral triumph, so that looking upon that Face He can rejoice in having said, "Let us make man," - is not Christ in a very real sense a propitiation for the sin of the world?

    Is there not essential truth also in the so-called governmental theories by which the work of Christ is related specifically to the public moral interests of mankind and of the whole rational universe?  In the universal Christian consciousness, the Cross of Christ is a solemn and unique testimony to the guilt of sin.  It achieves in the realm of Divine government that vindication of moral law which it is sought to achieve in mundane communities by the infliction of adequate penalties for transgression.  The Cross of Christ has made sin a vastly more appalling thing.  Wherever its influence is felt it has inspired in the conscience a new sense of the enormity of sin.  It becomes in experience a supreme factor in the moral administration of God's Kingdom; and can it be supposed that this lies apart from its essential purpose, or that there is not in this respect also a real propitiatory efficacy in the work of Christ?

    And is there not essential truth also in the much-reprobated "penal" theory?  More than any other, this theory has been wounded in the house of its friends.  It has sometimes represented God as one with whom the quality of mercy is sadly strained, as a vindictive Shylock who must and will have a quid pro quo.  But God is Love; and Justice, even punitive Justice, is one of the indefeasible functions of Love.⁴⁴  There is a law of retribution inherent in the very constitution of a universe created and governed by God who is Holy Love, - a law, that wherever sin is, suffering follows for the sinner himself or vicariously for others.  And may we not conceive that there is an exactness in the operation of this law, whereby, whenever wrong is placed in the one scale, suffering is always accumulated in the other until the balance is adjusted; and that only by working itself out in the full harvest of suffering can wrong exhaust its power, and make way for the possibility of a new and happy rightness?  And may we not conceive that one truth - the greatest truth - revealed in the Cross, is that in Christ God Himself fulfils this law on behalf of His creatures, and drains the bitter cup men's sin has filled?  But, if such a generalisation be too vast and venturesome, there are still obvious and undeniable facts.  Relieve the penal doctrine of the forensic technicalities with which it has been loaded, and the truth remains that God in Christ has borne the penalty of human sin, as the worthy father of an unworthy child, or the faithful wife of a profligate husband bears its penalty, as by the inherent vicariousness of Love the good always suffer for the bad.  Does not every Christian, whatever his theology, instinctively recognise this, and say, when he looks to Gethsemane and Calvary, "There is the true punishment of my sin; there in the suffering flesh and spirit of my Saviour, I behold the genuine fruit of sin; a Divine woe borne for me which I shall never bear, but which, I pray, shall more and more bear fruit in my penitence and devotion?"  It is fact of history that Christ has suffered for human sin; it is fact of faith that God in Him has so suffered, fulfilling on our behalf the retributive law that balances sin with suffering, and that now no suffering is left save what is laden with good to ourselves or to others.  In this also we must recognise a direct and vital element in Christ's work of propitiation.

    If, then, we find in every theory alike that the work of Christ is the undoing of the work of sin, that in one theory sin and its undoing are regarded in relation to the moral disposition of man; in another, to the Personality of God; in another, to the public interests of the Divine government; in yet another, to the inherent constitution of the moral universe, - we may conclude that none of these different conceptions will be lacking, whatever others may be present, in the final interpretation of the Apostle's words, "Herein is Love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.