The doctrinal tradition made much also of the deliverance from punishment which follows after the forgiveness of sin.  In fact, in many forms of the dogma, it has been the escape from punishment which was chiefly had in mind.  Along with the forensic notion of salvation we largely or wholly discard the notion of punishment.  We retain only the sense that the consequence of continuing in sin is to become more sinful.  God himself is powerless to prevent that.  Punishment is immanent, vital, necessary.  The penalty is gradually taken away if the sin itself is taken away—­not otherwise.  It returns with the sin, it continues in the sin, it is inseparable from the sin.  Punishment is no longer the right word.  Reward is not the true description of that growing better which is the consequence of being good.  Reward or punishment as quid pro quo, as arbitrary assignments, as external equivalents, do not so much as belong to the world of ideas in which we move.  For this view the idea that God laid upon Jesus penalties due to us, fades into thin air.  Jesus could by no possibility have met the punishment of sin, except he himself had been a sinner.  Then he must have met the punishment of his own sin and not that of others.  That portion which one may gladly bear of the consequences of another’s sin may rightfully be called by almost any other name.  It cannot be called punishment since punishment is immanent.  Even eternal death is not a judicial assignment for our obstinate sinfulness.  Eternal death is the obstinate sinfulness, and the sinfulness the death.

It must be evident that reconciliation can have, in this scheme, no meaning save that man’s being reconciled to God.  Jesus reveals a God who has no need to be reconciled to us.  The alienation is not on the side of God.  That, being alienated from God, man may imagine that God is hostile to him, is only the working of a familiar law of the human mind.  The fiction of an angry God is the most awful survival among us of primitive paganism.  That which Jesus by his revelation of God brought to pass was a true ‘at-one-ment,’ a causing of God and man to be at one again.  To the word atonement, as currently pronounced, and as, until a half century ago, almost universally apprehended, the notion of that which is sacrificial attached.  To the life and death of Jesus, as revelation of God and Saviour of men, we can no longer attach any sacrificial meaning whatsoever.  There is indeed the perfectly general sense in which so beautiful a life and so heroic a death were, of course, a grand exemplification of self-sacrifice.  Yet this is a sense so different from the other and in itself so obvious, that one hesitates to use the same word in the immediate context with that other, lest it should appear that the intention was to obscure rather than to make clear the meaning.  For atonement in a sense different from that of reconciliation, we have no significance whatever.  Reconciliation and atonement describe one and the same fact.