Atonement

THE human aspect of the Christian idea of atonement, is based upon such motives that, if there were no Christianity and no Christians in the world, the idea of atonement would have to be invented before the higher levels of our moral existence could be fairly understood. To the illustration of this thesis the present essay is to be largely devoted. The thesis is not new; yet it seems to me to have been insufficiently emphasized even in recent literature; although, as is well known, modern expositors of the meaning of the Christian doctrine of the Atonement have laid a constantly increasing stress upon the illustrations and analogies of that doctrine which they have found present in the common experience of mankind, in non-theological literature, and in the history of ethics.

I

The treatment of the idea of atonement in the present paper, if it in any respect aids toward an understanding of our problem, will depend for whatever it accomplishes upon two deliberate limitations.

The first limitation is the one that I have just indicated. I shall emphasize, more than is customary, aspects of the idea of atonement which one could expound just as readily in a world where the higher levels of moral experience had somehow been reached by the leaders of mankind, but where Christians and Christianity were, as yet, wholly unknown.

My second limitation will be this; I shall consider the idea of atonement in the light of the special problems which the close of the essay on ‘The Second Death’ left upon our hands. The result will be a view of the idea of atonement which will be intentionally fragmentary.

It is true that the history of the Christian doctrine of the Atonement has inseparably linked with the topics that I shall here most emphasize, various religious beliefs, and theological interpretations, with which, under my chosen limitations, and despite these limitations, I shall endeavor to keep in touch. But, in a great part of what I shall have to say I shall confine myself to what I may call ‘the problem of the traitor,’ — an ethical problem which, on the basis laid in the foregoing essay, I now choose arbitrarily as my typical instance of the human need for atonement, and of a sense in which, in purely human terms, we are able to define what an atoning act would be, if it took place, and what it could accomplish, as well as what it could not accomplish.

Our last paper familiarized us with the conception of the being whom I shall now call, throughout this discussion, ‘the traitor.’ We shall soon learn new reasons why our present study will gain, in definiteness of issue and in simplicity, by using the exemplary moral situation in which our so-called ‘traitor’ has placed himself, as our means for bringing to light what relief, what possible, although always imperfect, reconciliation of the traitor with his own moral world, and with himself, this situation permits.

Perhaps I can help the reader to anticipate my further statement of my reasons for dwelling upon the unlovely situation of the hypothetical traitor, if I describe the association of ideas which first conducted me to the choice of the exemplary type of moral tragedy which I shall use as the vehicle whereby we are here to be carried nearer to our proposed view of the idea of atonement.

In Bach’s Matthew Passion Music, whose libretto was prepared under the master’s own guidance, there is a great passage wherein, at the Last Supper, Christ has just said, ’One of you shall betray me.’ ' And they all begin to say, so the recitative tells us, although at once passing the words over into the mouths of the chorus, ‘Is it I? Is it I? Is it I?’ And then there begins the wonderful chorus of ‘the Believers’:

‘ ’T is I. My sins betray thee, who died to make me whole.’ The effect of this, as well as of other great scenes in the Passion Music, — the dramatic and musical workings in their unity, as Bach devised them, — is to transport the listener to a realm where he no longer hears an old story of the past retold, but looking down, as it were, upon the whole stream of time, sees the betrayal, the divine tragedy, and the triumph, in one—not indeed timeless, but timeembracing vision. In this vision, all flows and changes and passes from the sorrow of a whole world to the hope of reconciliation. Yet all this fluent and passionate life is one divine life, and is also the listener’s, or, as we can also say, the spectator’s own life. Judas, the spectator, knows as himself, as his own ruined personality, the sorrow of Gethsemane, the elemental and perfectly human passion of the chorus: ‘ Destroy them, destroy them, the murderous brood,’ the waiting and weeping at the tomb, — these things belong to the present life of the believer who witnesses the Passion. They are all the experiences of us men, just as we are. They are also divine revelations, coming as if from a world that is somehow inclusive of our despair, and that yet knows a joy which, as Bach depicts it in his music drama, is not so much mystical, as simply classic, in the perfection of its serene self-control.

What the art of Bach suggests I have neither the right nor the power to translate into ‘matter-moulded forms of speech.' I have here to tell you only a little about the being whom Mephistopheles calls ‘ der kleine Gott der Welt,’ about the one who, as the demon says, —

And I am forced to limit myself in this essay to choosing — as my exemplary being who feels the need of some form of atonement — man in his most unlovely and drearily discouraging aspect, — man in his appearance as a betrayer. The justification of this repellant choice can appear, if at all, then only in the outcome of our argument, and in its later relation to the whole Christian doctrine of life. But you may now see what first suggested my using this choice in this paper.

So much, however, it is fair to add as I introduce my case. The ‘traitor’ of my argument shall here be the creature of an ideal definition based upon facts set forth in the last lecture. I shall soon have to speak again of the sense in which all observers of human affairs have a right to say that there are traitors, and that we well know some of their works. But we have in general no right to say with assurance, when we speak of our individual neighbors, that we know who the traitors are. For we are no searchers of hearts. And treason as I here define it, is an affair of the heart, — that is, of the inner voluntary deed and decision.

While my ideal definition of the traitor of whom we are now to speak, thus depends, as you see, upon facts already discussed in our essay on ‘The Second Death ’ our new relation to the being defined as a traitor consists in the fact that, on the last occasion, we considered the nature of his guilt, while now we mean to approach an understanding of his relation to the idea of atonement.

II

Two conditions as you will remember from our last discussion, determine what constitutes, for the purposes of my definition, a traitor. The first condition is that a traitor is a man who has had an ideal, and who has loved it with all his heart and his soul and his mind and his strength. His ideal must have seemed to him to furnish the cause of his life. It must have meant to him what Paul meant by the grace that saves. He must have embraced it, for the time, with full loyalty. It must have been his religion, his way of salvation.

The second condition that my ideal traitor must satisfy is this. Having thus found his cause, he must, as he now knows, in at least, some one voluntary act of his life have been deliberately false to his cause. So far as in him lay, he must, at least in that one act, have betrayed his cause.

Such is our ideal traitor. At the close of the last essay we left him condemned, in his own sight, to what we called the ‘hell of the irrevocable.’

We now, for the moment, still confine ourselves to his case, and ask, Can the idea of atonement mean anything that permits its application, in any sense, however limited, to the situation of this traitor? Can there be any reconciliation, however imperfect, between this traitor and his own moral world, —any reconciliation which from his own point of view, and for his own consciousness, can make his situation in his moral world essentially different from the situation in which his own deed has so far left him?

In the hell of the irrevocable there may be, as at the last time we pointed out, no sensuous penalties to fear. And there may be, for all that we know, countless future opportunities for the traitor to do good and loyal deeds. Our problem lies in t he fact that none of these deeds will ever undo the supposed deed of treason. In that sense, then, no good deeds of the traitor’s future will ever so atone for his one act of treason, that he will become clear of just that treason, and of what he finds to be its guilt.

But it is still open to us to ask whether anything could occur in the traitor’s moral world which, without undoing his deed, could still add some new aspect to this deed, — an aspect such, that when the traitor came to view his own deed in this light, he could say, Something in the nature of a genuinely reconciling element has been added, not. only to my world and to my own life, but also to the inmost meaning even of my deed of treason itself. My moral situation has hereby been rendered genuinely better than my deed left it. And this bettering does not consist merely in the fact that some new deed of my own, or of some one else has been simply a good deed, instead of a bad one, and has thus put a good thing into my world to be henceforth considered side by side with the irrevocable evil deed. No, this bettering consists in something more than this, — in something which gives to my very treason itself a new value; so that 1 can say, not, ‘It is undone’; but, ‘I am henceforth in some measure, in some genuine fashion, morally reconciled to the fact that I did this evil. ’

Plainly, if any such reconciliation is possible, it will be at best but an imperfect and tragic reconciliation. It cannot be simple and perfectly destructive of guilt. But the great tragic poets have long since taught us that there are, indeed, tragic reconciliations even when there are great woes. These tragic reconciliations may be infinitely pathetic; but they may be also infinitely elevating, and even, in some unearthly and wondrous way, triumphant.

Our question is: Can such a tragic reconciliation occur in the case of the traitor? If it can occur, the result would furnish to us an instance of an atonement. This atonement would notmean, and could not mean, a clearing-away of the traitor’s guilt as if it never had been guilt. It would still remain true that the traitor could never rationally forgive himself for his deed. But he might, in some measure and in some genuine sense, become, not simply, but tragically, — sternly, — yet really, reconciled, not only to himself but to his deed of treason, and to its meaning in his moral world.

Let us consider, then, in what way, and to what degree, the traitor might find such an atonement.

III

The Christian idea of atonement has always involved an affirmative answer to the question, Is an atonement for even a willful deed of betrayal possible? Is a reconciliation of even the traitor to himself, and to his world, a possibility? The help that our argument gets from employing the supposed traitor’s view of his own case as the guide of our search for whatever reconciliation is still possible for him, shows itself, at the present point of our inquiry, by simplifying the issue, and by thus enabling us at once to dispose, very briefly, not indeed of the Christian idea of atonement (for that, as we shall see, will later reveal itself in a new and compelling form), but of a great number of well-known theological theories of the nature of atonement, so far as they are to help our traitor to get a view of his own case.

These theological theories stand at a peculiar disadvantage when they speak to the now fully awakened traitor, when he asks what measure of reconciliation is still, for him, possible. Our traitor has his own narrow, but, for that very reason, clearly outlined problem of atonement to consider. We here confine ourselves to his view. Calmly reasonable in his hell of the irrevocable, he is dealing, not with the ‘angry God’ of a well-known theological tradition, but with himself. He asks, not indeed for escape from the irrevocable, but for what relative and imperfect tragic reconciliation with his world and with his past, his moral order can still furnish to him, by any new event or deed or report. Shall we offer him one of the traditional theological comforts and say, Some one — namely, a divine being, Christ himself — has accomplished a full ‘penal satisfaction’ for your deed of treason. Accept that satisfying sacrifice of Christ, and you shall be reconciled. The traitor need not pause to repeat any of t he now so well-known theological and ethical objections to the ‘penal satisfaction’ theories of atonement. He needs no long dispute to clear his head. The cold wintry light of his own insight into what was formerly his moral home, and into what he has by his own deed lost, is quite enough to show him the mercilessly unchangeable outlines of his moral landscape. He sees them; and that is so far enough. Penal satisfaction? That, he will say, may somehow interest the ‘angry God’ of one or another theologian. If so, let this angry God be content, if he chooses: That does not reconcile me. So far as penalty is concerned, —

I asked for reconciliation with my own moral universe, not for the accidental pacification of some angry God. The ‘penal satisfaction ’ offered by another, is simply foreign to all the interests in the name of which I inquire.

But hereupon let a grander, — let a far more genuinely religious, and indeed truly Christian chord, be sounded for the traitor’s consolation. Let the words of Paul be heard, ‘There is now no condemnation for them that are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.’ The simply human meaning of those immortal words, if understood quite apart from Paul’s own religious beliefs, is far deeper than is any merely technical theological theory of the Atonement. And our traitor will well know what those words of Paul mean. Their deepest human meaning has long since entered into his life. Had it not so entered, he would be no traitor; for he would never have known that there is what, for his own estimate, has been a Holy Spirit, — a cause to which to devote one’s life, — a love that is indeed redeeming, and — when it first comes to us — compelling — the love that raises as if from the dead, the man who becomes the lover, — the love that also forces the lover, with its mysterious power, to die to his old natural life of barren contentions and of distractions, and to live in the spirit. That love —so the traitor well knows—redeems the lover from all the helpless natural wretchedness of the, as yet, unawakened life. It frees from ‘condemnation’ all who remain true to this love.

The traitor knows all this by experience. And he knows it not in terms of mere theological formulas. He knows it as a genuinely human experience. He knows it as what every man knows to whom a transforming love has revealed the sense of a new life.

All this is familiar to the traitor. In his own way, he has heard the voice of the Spirit. He has been converted to newness of life. And therefore he has known what his own sin against the Holy Ghost meant. And, thereafter, he has deliberately committed that very sin. Therefore Paul’s words are at once, to his mind, true in their most human as well as in their most spiritual sense. And just for that very reason they are to him now, in his guilt, as comfortless and as unreconciling as a death-knell. For they tell him of precisely that life which once was his, and which, so far as his one traitorous deed could lead to such a result, he himself has deliberately slain.

If there is to be any, even the most tragic, reconciliation for the traitor, there must be other words to be heard beside just these words of Paul.

IV

Yet there are expositors of the Christian idea of the Atonement who have developed the various so-called ‘moral theories’ of the atoning work of Christ. And these men indeed have still many things to tell our traitor. One of the most clearly written and, from a purely literary point of view, one of the most charming of recent books on the moral theory of the idea of atonement, namely, the little book with which Sabatier ended his life-work, very effectively contrasts with all the ‘penal-satisfaction’ theories of atonement, the doctrine that the work of Christ consisted in such a loving sacrifice for human sin and for human sinners that the contemplation of this work arouses in the sinful mind a depth of saving repentance, as well as of love, — a depth of glowing fervor, such as simply purifies the sinner’s soul. For love and repentance and new life, — these constitute reconciliation. These, for Sabatier, and for many other representatives of the ‘moral theories’ of atonement, •— these are in themselves salvation.

I need not dwell upon such opinions in this connection. They are nowadays well-known to all who have read any notable portion of the recent literature of the Atonement. They are present, in this recent literature, in almost endless variations. In general these views are deep, and Christian, and cheering, and unquestionably moral. And their authors can and do freely use Paul’s words; and, on occasion, supplement Paul’s words by a citation of the parables. In the parables there is no definite doctrine of atonement enunciated. But there is a doctrine of salvation through loving repentance. Cannot our traitor, in view of the loving sacrifice that constitutes Christ’s atoning work, repent and love? Does that not reconcile him? May not the love of Christ both constrain and console him?

V

Once more — speaking still from his own purely human point of view — our traitor sadly simplifies the labor of considering in detail these various moral theories of atonement. The traitor seeks the possible, the relative, the inevitably imperfect reconciliation, which, for one in his case, is still rationally definable. He discounts all that you can say as to the transforming pathos and the compelling power of love and of the sacrifices. All this he long since knows. And, as I must repeat, all this constitutes the very essence of his own tragedy. He knew love before he became a traitor. He has this repentance as the very breath of what is now his moral existence in the hell of the irrevocable. As for amendment of life, and good deeds yet to come, he well knows the meaning of all these things. He is ready to do whatever he can. But none of all this doing of good works, none of this repentance, no love, and no tears will ‘lure back’ the ‘moving linger’ to ‘cancel half a line,’ or ‘wash out a word’ of what is written.

Let us leave, then, both the ‘penalsatisfaction’ theories and the ‘moral’ theories to address themselves to other men. Our traitor knows too well the sad lesson of his own deed to be aided either by the vain technicalities of the more antiquated of these theological types of theories, or by the true, but to him no longer applicable, comforts which the theories of the other, — the moral type, — open to his view.

Plainly, then, the traitor himself can suggest nothing further as to his reconciliation with the world where, by his deed of betrayal, he once chose to permit the light that was in him to become darkness. We must turn in another direction.

VI

We have so far considered the traitor’s case as if his treason had been merely an affair of his own inner life, — a sort of secret impious wish. But, of course, while we are indeed supposing the traitor — now enlightened by the view of his own deed — to be the judge of what he himself has meant and done, we well know that his false deed was, in his own opinion, no mere thought of unholiness. He had a cause. That is, he lived in a real world. And ho was false to his cause. He betrayed. Now betrayal is something objective. It breaks ties. It rends asunder what love has joined in dear unity. What human ties the traitor broke we leave to him to discover for himself. Why they were to his mind holy, we also need not now inquire. Enough, — since he was indeed loyal;

— he had found his ties; — they were precious and human and real; and he believed them holy; — and he broke them. That is, so far as in him lay, he destroyed by his deed the community in whose brotherhood, in whose life, in whose spirit, he had found his guide and his ideal. His deed, then, concerns not himself only, but that community whereof he was a voluntary member. The community knows, or in the long run must learn, that the deed of treason has been done, even if, being itself no searcher of hearts, it cannot identify the individual traitor. We often know not who the traitors are. But if ours is the community that is wrecked, we may well know by experience that there has been treason.

The problem of reconciliation, then, — if reconciliation there is to be, — concerns not only the traitor, but the wounded or shattered community. Endlessly varied are the problems — the tragedies, the lost causes, the heartbreaks, the chaos — which the deeds of traitors produce. All this we merely hint in passing. But all this constitutes the heart of the sorrow of the higher regions of our human world. And we here refer to such countless, commonplace, but crushing, tragedies, to these ruins which are the daily harvest-home of treason, merely in order to ask the question, Can a genuinely spiritual community, whose ideals are such as Paul loved to portray when he wrote to his churches, — can such a loving and beloved community in any degree reconcile itself to the existence of traitors in its world, and to the deeds of individual traitors? Can it in any wise find in its world something else, over and above the treason, — something which atones for the spiritual disasters that the very being of treason both constitutes and entails? Must not the existence of traitors remain, for the offended community, an evil that is as intolerable and irrevocable, and as much beyond its powers of reconciliation, as is, for the traitor himself, his own past deed, seen in all the light of its treachery? Can any soul of good arise or be created out of this evil thing, or as an atonement therefor?

You see, I hope, that. I am in no wise asking whether the community which the traitor has assailed desires, or does well, either to inflict or to remit any penalties said to be due to the traitor for his deed. I am here speaking wholly of the possibility of inner and human reconciliations. The only penalty which, in the hell of the irrevocable, the traitor himself inevitably finds, is the fact, I did it. The one irrevocable fact with which the community can henceforth seek to be reconciled, if reconciliation is possible, is the fact, This evil was done. That is, These invaluable ties were broken. This unity of brotherhood was shattered. The life of the community, as it was before the blow of treason fell, can never be restored to its former purity of unscarred love. This is the fact. For this let the community now seek, not oblivion, for that is a mere losing of the truth; not annulment, for that is impossible; but some measure of reconciliation.

All the highest forms of the unity of the spirit, in our human world, constantly depend, for their very existence, upon the renewed free choices, the sustained loyalty, of the members of communities. Hence the very best that we know, namely, the loyal brotherhood of the faithful who choose to keep their faith, — this best of all human goods, I say, — is simply inseparable from countless possibilities of the worst of human tragedies,— the tragedy of broken faith. At such cost must the loftiest of our human possessions in the realm of the spirit be purchased, — at the cost, namely, of knowing that some deed of willful treason on the part of some one whom we trusted as brother or as beloved may rob us of this possession. And the fact that we are thus helplessly dependent on human fidelity for some of our highest goods, and so may be betrayed, — this fact is due not to the natural perversity of men, nor to the mere weakness of those who love and trust. This fact is due to something which, without any metaphysical theory, we ordinarily call man’s freedom of choice. We do not want our beloved community to consist of puppets, or of merely fascinated victims of a mechanically insistent love. We want the free loyalty of those who, whatever fascination first won them to their cause, remain faithful because they choose to remain faithful. Of such is the kingdom of good faith. The beloved community demands for itself such freely and deliberately steadfast members. And for that very reason, in a world where there is such free and good faith, there can be treason. Hence the realm where the spirit reaches the highest human levels, is the region where the worst calamities can, and in the long run do, assail many who depend upon the good faith of their brethren.

The community, therefore, never had any grounds, before the treason, for an absolute assurance about the future traitor’s perseverance in the faith. After his treason,—if indeed he repents and now begins once more to act loyally, — it may acquire a relative assurance that he will henceforth abide faithful. The worst evil is not, then, that a trust in the traitor, which once was rightly serene and perfectly confident, is now irrevocably lost. It is not this which constitutes the irreconcilable aspect of the traitor’s deed. All men are frail. And especially must those who are freely loyal possess a certain freedom to become faithless if they choose. This evil is a condition of the highest good that the human world contains. And so much t he community, in presence of the traitor, ought to recognize as something that was always possible. It also ought to know that a certain always fallible trust in the traitor can indeed be restored by his future good deeds, if such are done by him with every sign that he intends henceforth to be faithful.

But what is indeed irrevocably lost to the community through the traitor’s deed is precisely what I just called ‘ unscarred love.’ The traitor remains — for the community as well as for himself—the traitor, just so far as his deed is confessed, and just so far as his once unsullied fidelity has been stained. This indeed is irrevocable. It is perfectly human. But it is unutterably comfortless to the shattered community.

It is useless, then, to say, that the problem of reconciliation, so far as the community is concerned, is the problem of ‘forgiveness,’ not now as remission of penalty, but of forgiveness, in so far as forgiveness means a restoring of the love of the community, or of its members, toward the one who has now sinned, but repented. Love may be restored. If the traitor’s future attitude makes that possible, human love ought to be restored to the now both repentant and well-deserving doer of the past evil deed. But alas! this restored love will be the love for the member who has been a traitor; and the tragedy of the treason will permanently form part in and of this love. Thus, then, up to this point, there appears for the community, as well as for the traitor, no ground for even the imperfect reconciliation of which we have been in search. Is there, then, any other way, still untried, in which the community may hope, if not to find, then to create, something which, in its own strictly limited fashion, will reconcile the community to the traitor and to the irrevocable, and irrevocably evil, deed.

VII

Such a way exists. The community has lost its treasure; its once faithful member who, until his deed of treason came, had been wholly its own member. And it has lost the ties and the union which he destroyed by his deed. And, for all this loss, it lovingly mourns with a sorrow for which, thus far, we see no reconciliation. Who shall give to it its own again?

The community, then, can indeed find no reconciliation. But can it create one? At the worst, it is the traitor, and it is not the community, that has done this deed. New deeds remain to be done. The community is free to do them, or to be incarnate in some faithful servant who will do them. Could any possible new deed, done by, or on behalf of the community, and done by some one who is not stained by the traitor’s deed, introduce into this human world an element which, as far as it went, would be, in whatever measure, genuinely reconciling?

We stand at the very heart and centre of the human problem of atonement. We have just now nothing to do with theological opinion on this topic. I insist that our problem is as familiar and empirical as is death or grief. That problem of atonement daily arises, not as between God and man (for we here are simply ignoring, for the time being, the metaphysical issues that lie behind our problem). That problem is daily faced by all those faithful lovers of wounded and shattered communities who, going down into the depths of human sorrow, either as sufferers or as friends who would fain console, or who, standing by hearths whose fires burn no more, or loving their country through all the sorrows which traitors have inflicted upon her, or who, not weakly, but bravely, grieving over the woe of the whole human world, are still steadily determined that no principality and no power, that no height and no depth, shall be able to separate man from his true love, which is the triumph of the spirit. That human problem of atonement, is, I say, daily faced. And faced by the noblest of mankind. And for these our noblest, despite all our human weakness, that problem is, in principle and in ideal, daily solved. Let us turn to such leaders of the human search after greatness, as our spiritual guides.

Great calamities are, for all but the traitor himself, — so far as we have yet considered his case, —great opportunities. Lost causes have furnished, times without number, the foundations and the motives of humanity’s most triumphant loyalty.

When treason has done its last and most cruel work, and lies with what it. has destroyed, — dead in the tomb of the irrevocable past, — there is now the opportunity for a triumph of which I can only speak weakly and in imperfectly abstract formulas. But, as I can at once say, this of which I now speak is a human triumph. It forms part of the history of man’s earthly warfare with his worst foes. Moreover, whenever it occurs at all, this is a triumph not merely of stoical endurance, nor yet of kindly forgiveness, nor of the mystical merit which, seeing all things in God, feels them all to be good. It is a triumph of the creative will. And what form does it take amongst the best of men, who are here to be our guides?

I answer, this triumph over treason can only be accomplished by the community, or on behalf of the community, through some steadfastly loyal servant who acts, so to speak, as the incarnation of the very spirit of the community itself. This faithful and suffering servant of the community may answer and confound treason by a work whose type I shall vent ure next to describe, in my own way, thus: First, this creative work shall include a deed, or various deeds, for which only just this treason furnishes the opportunity. Not treason in general, but just this individual treason shall give the occasion, and supply the condition, of the creative deed which I am in ideal describing. Without just that treason, this new deed (so I am supposing) could not have been done at all. And, hereupon, the new deed, as I suppose, is so ingeniously devised, so concretely practical in the good which it accomplishes, that, when you look down upon the human world after the new creative deed has been done in it, you say, first, This deed was made possible by that treason; and, secondly, The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all. That is, the new creative deed has made the new world better than it was before the blow of treason fell.

Now such a deed of the creative love and of the devoted ingenuity of the suffering servant, on behalf of his community, breaks open, as it were, the tomb of the dead and treacherous past, and comes forth as the life and the expression of the creative and reconciling will. It is this creative will whose ingenuity and whose skill have executed the deed that makes the human world better than it was before the treason.

To devise and to carry out some new deed which makes the human world better than it would have been had just that treasonable deed not been done, is that not, in its own limited way and sense, a reconciling form both of invention and of conduct? Let us forget, for the moment, the traitor. Let us now think only of the community. We know why, and in what sense, it cannot be reconciled to the traitor or to his deed. But have we not found, without any inconsistency, a new fact which furnishes a genuinely reconciling element? It indeed furnishes no perfect reconciliation with the irrevocable; and it transforms the meaning of that very past which it cannot undo. It cannot restore the unscarred love. It does supply a new triumph of the spirit,—a triumph which is not so much a mere compensation for what has been lost, as a transfiguration of the very loss into a gain that, without this loss, could never have been won. The traitor cannot thus transform the meaning of his own past. But the suffering servant can thus transfigure this meaning; can bring out of the realm of death a new life that only this very death rendered possible.

The triumph of the spirit of the community over t he treason which was its enemy, the rewanning of the value of the traitor’s own life, when the new deed is done, involves the old tragedy, but takes up that tragedy into a life that is now more a life of triumph than it would have been if the deed of treason had never been done.

Therefore, if indeed we suppose or observe that, in our human world, such creative deeds occur, we see that they indeed do not remove, they do not annul, either treason or its tragedy. But they do show us a genuinely reconciling, a genuinely atoning fact, in the world and in the community of the traitor. Those who do such deeds solve, I have just said, not the impossible problem of undoing the past, but the genuine problem of finding, even in the worst of t ragedies, the means of an otherwise impossible triumph. They meet the deepest and bitterest of estrangements by showing a way of reconciliation, and a way that only this very est rangement has made possible.

VIII

This is t he human aspect of the idea of atonement. Do we need to solve our theological problems before we decide whether such an idea has meaning, and is ethically defensible? I must insist that this idea comes to us not from the scholastic quiet of theological speculation, but stained with the blood of the battlefields of real life. For myself, I can say that, no theological theory suggested to me this interpretation of the essent ial nature of an atoning deed. I cannot call the interpretation new, simply because I myself have learned it from observing the meaning of the lives of some suffering servants — plain human beings — who never cared for theology, but who incarnated in their own fashion enough of the spirit of their community to conceive and to accomplish such new and creative deeds as I have just attempted to characterize. To try to describe, at all adequately, the life or the work of any such persons, I have neither the right nor the power. Here is no place for such a collection and analysis of the human forms of the at oning life as only a William James could have justly accomplished. And upon personal histories I could dwell, in this place, only at the risk of intruding upon lives which I have been privileged, sometimes, to see afar off, and briefly, but which I have no right to report as mere illustrations of a philosphical argument. It is enough, I think, for me barely to indicate what I have in mind when I say that such things are done among men.

All of us well know of great public benefactors whose lives and good works have been rendered possible through the fact that some great personal sorrow, some crushing blow of private grief, first descended, and seemed to wreck their lives. Such heroic souls have then been able, in these wellknown types of cases, not only to bear their own grief, and to rise from the depths of it (as we all in our time have to at tempt to do). They have been able also to use their grief as the very source of the new arts and inventions and labors whereby they have become such valuable servants of their communities. Such people indeed often remind us of the suffering servant in Isaiah; for their life-work shows that they are willing to be wounded for the sake of their community. Indirectly, too, they often seem to be suffering because of the faults, as well as because of the griefs, of their neighbors, or of mankind. And it indeed often occurs to us to speak of these public or private benefactors as living some sort of atoning life, as bearing, in a sense, not only the sorrows, but the sins, of other men.

Yet it is not of such lives, noble as they are, that I am now thinking, nor of such vicarious suffering, of such sympathizing helpfulness in human woe, or of such rising from private grief to public service, that I am speaking, when I say that atoning deeds, in the more precise sense just described, are indeed done in our human world. Sharply contrasted with these beneficent lives and deeds, which I have just mentioned, are the other lives of which I am thinking, and to which, in speaking of atonement, I have been referring. These are the lives of which I have so little right to give more than a bare hint in this place.

Suppose a community—a modern community — to be engaged with the ideals and methods of modern reform, in its contests with some of those ills which the natural viciousness, the evil training, and the treasonable choices of very many people combine to make peculiarly atrocious in the eyes of all who love mankind. Such evils need to be met, in the good warfare, not only by indignant reformers, not only by ardent enthusiasts, but also by calmly considerate and enlightened people, who distinguish clearly between fervor and wisdom, who know what depths of woe and of wrong are to be sounded, but who also know that only well-controlled thoughtfulness and well-disciplined self-restraint can devise the best means of help. As we also well know, we look, in our day, to highly trained professional skill for aid in such work. We do not hope that those who are merely well-meaning and loving can do what most needs to be done. We desire those who know. Let us suppose, then, such a modern community as especially needing, for a very special purpose, one who does know.

Hereupon, let us suppose that one individual exists whose life has been wounded to the core by some of treason’s worst blows. Let us suppose one who, always manifesting true loyalty and steadfastly keeping strict integrity, has known, not merely what the ordinary professional experts learn, but also what it is to be despised and rejected of men, and to be brought to the very depths of lonely desolation, and to have suffered thus through a treason which also deeply affected, not one individual only, but a whole community. Let such a soul, humiliated, offended, broken, so to speak, through the very effort to serve a community forsaken; long daily fed only by grief, yet still armed with the grace of loyalty and of honor, and with the heroism of dumb suffering, — let such a soul not only arise, as so many great sufferers have done, from the depths of woe; let such a soul not only triumph, as so many have done, over the grief that treason caused; but let such a soul also use the very lore which just this treason had taught, in order to begin a new life-work. Let this life-work be full of a shrewd, practical, serviceable, ingenious wisdom which only that one individual experience of a great treason could have taught. Lot this new lifework be made possible only because of that treason. Let it bring to the community, in the contest with great public evils, methods and skill and judgment and forethought which only that so dear-bought wisdom could have invented. Let these methods have, in fact, a skill that the traitor’s own wit has taught, and that is now used for the good work. Let that life show, not only what treason can do to wreck, but what the free spirit can learn from and through the very might of treason’s worst skill.

If you will conceive of such a life merely as a possibility, you may know why I assert that genuinely atoning deeds occur, and what I believe such deeds to be. For myself, any one who should supply the facts to bear out my supposition (and such people, as I assert, there are in our human world), would appear henceforth to me to be a sort of symbolic personality, — one who had descended into hell to set. free the spirits who are in prison. When I hear those words, ‘descended into hell,’repeated in the creed, I think of such human beings, and feel that I know at least some in this world of ours to whom the creed in those words refers.

IX

Hereupon, you may very justly say that the mere effects of the atoning deeds of a human individual are in this world apparently petty and transient; and that even the most atoning of sacrificial human lives can devise nothing which, within the range of our vision, does make the world of the community better, in any of its most tragic aspects, than it would be if no treason had been committed.

If you say this, you merely give me the opportunity to express the human aspect of the idea of the Atonement in a form very near to the form which, as I believe, the Christian idea of atonement has always possessed when the interests of the religious consciousness (or, if I may use the now favorite word, the sub-consciousness) of the church, rather than the theological formulation of the theory of atonement, have been in question. Christian feeling, Christian art, Christian worship, have been full of the sense that somehow (and how has remained indeed a mystery) there was something so precious about the work of Christ, something so divinely wise (so skillful and divinely beautiful) about the plan of salvation, — that, as a result of all this, after Christ’s work was done, the world, as a whole, was a nobler and richer and worthier creation than it would have been if Adam had not sinned. This, I insist, has always been felt, to be the sense of the atoning work of Christ. A glance at a great Madonna, a chord of truly Christian music, ancient or modern, tells you that this is so. And this sense of the atoning work cannot be reduced to what the modern ‘ moral’ theories of the Christian Atonement most emphasize. For what the Christian regards as the atoning work of Christ is, from this point of view, not something about Christ’s work which merely arouses in sinful man love and repentance. No, the theory of atonement which I now suggest, and which, as I insist, is subconsciously present in the religious sentiment, ritual, and worship of all Christendom, is a perfectly ‘objective’ theory, — quite as ‘objective’ as any ‘penal-satisfaction’ theory could be.

Christian religious feeling has always expressed itself in the idea that what atones is something perfectly ‘objective,”namely, Christ’s work. And this atoning work of Christ was for Christian feeling a deed that was made possible only through man’s sin, but that somehow was so wise and so rich and so beautiful and divinely fair that, after this work was done, the world was a better world than it would have been had man never sinned. So the Christ ian consciousness, I insist, has always felt. So its poets have often, in one way or another, expressed the matter. The theologians have disguised this simple idea under countless forms. But every characteristically Christian act of worship expresses it afresh. Treason did its work (so the legend runs) when man fell. But Christ’s work was so perfect that, in a perfectly objective way, it took the opportunity which man’s fall furnished to make the world better than it could have been had man not fallen.

But this is, indeed, as an idea concerning God and the universe and the work of Christ, an idea which is as human in its spirit, and as deep in its relation to truth, as it is, in view of the complexity of the values which are in question, hard either to articulate or to defend. How should we know, unless some revelation helped us to know, whether and in what way Christ’s supposed work made the world better than it would have been had man not sinned ?

But in this discussion I am speaking of the purely human aspect of the idea of atonement. That aspect is now capable of a statement which does not pretend to deal with any but our human world, and which fully admits the pettiness of every human individual effort to produce such a really atoning deed as we have described.

The human community depending, as it. does, upon it s loyal human lovers, and wounded to the heart by its traitors, and finding, the further it advances in moral worth, the greater need of the loyal, and the greater depth of the tragedy of treason, utters its own doctrine of atonement as t his postulate, — the central postulate of its highest spirituality. This postulate I word thus: No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement. The deed of atonement shall be so wise and so rich in its efficacy, that the spiritual world, after the atoning deed, shall be better, richer, more triumphant amidst all its irrevocable tragedies, than it was before that traitor’s deed was done.

This is the postulate of the highest form of human spirituality. It cannot be proved by the study of men as they are. It can be asserted by the creative will of the loyal. Christianity expressed this postulate in the symbolic form of a report concerning the supernatural work of Christ. Humanity must express it through the devotion, the genius, the skill, the labor of the individual loyal servants in whom its spirit becomes incarnate.

As a Christian idea, the Atonement is expressed in a symbol, whose divine interpretation is merely felt, and is viewed as a mystery. As a human idea, atonement is expressed (so far as it can at any one time be expressed) by a peculiarly noble and practically efficacious type of human deeds. This human idea of atonement is also expressed in a postulate which lies at the basis of all the best and most practical spirituality. The Christian symbol and the practical postulate are two sides of the same life, — at once human and divine.