the influence of Jesus, reconciled on our part to God and believing in His unchanging love to us, we are translated into God’s kingdom and live for the eternal in our present existence.  Redemption is indeed the work of God through Christ, but it has intelligible parallel in the awakening of the life of the mind, or again of the spirit of self-sacrifice, through the personal influence of the wise and good.  Salvation begins in such an awakening through the personal influence of the wisest and best.  It is transformation of our personality through the personality of Jesus, by the personal God of truth, of goodness and of love.  All that which God through Jesus has done for us is futile, save as we make the actualisation of our deliverance from sin our continuous and unceasing task.  When this connexion of thought is broken through, we transfer the whole matter of salvation from the inner to the outer world and make of it a transaction independent of the moral life of man.

Justification and reconciliation also are primarily acts and gifts of God.  Justification is a forensic act.  The sense is not that in justification we are made just.  We are, so to say, temporarily thus regarded, not that leniency may become the occasion of a new offence, but that in grateful love we may make it the starting point of a new life.  We must justify our justification.  It is easy to see the objections to such a course on the part of a civil judge.  He must consider the rights of others.  It was this which brought Grotius and the rest, with the New England theologians down to Park, to feel that forgiveness could not be quite free.  If we acknowledge that this symbolism of God as judge or sovereign is all symbolism, mere figure of speech, not fact at all, then that objection—­and much else—­falls away.  If we assert that another figure of speech, that of God as Father, more perfectly suggests the relation of God and man, then forgiveness may be free.  Then justification and forgiveness are only two words for one and the same idea.  Then the nightmare of a God who would forgive and cannot, of a God who will forgive but may not justify until something further happens, is all done away.  Then the relation of the death of Jesus to the forgiveness of our sins cannot be other than the relation of his life to that forgiveness.  Both the one and the other are a revelation of the forgiving love of God.  We may say that in his death the whole meaning of his life was gathered.  We may say that his death was the consummation of his life, that without it his life would not have been what it is.  This is, however, very far from being the ordinary statement of the relation of Jesus’ death, either to his own life or to the forgiveness of our sins.