The responsibility of the existence of all rests squarely with him who has been known to us through the mysterious words, "I AM THAT I AM." The responsibility also for the behavior of creation rests with him. In our theology all results from the action of his personal will; that is, all that is ultimate results from his action. Both the fact and the process known to us as the universe inheres in him, is sustained in being by him, and in him finds its end and purpose.

The eternal God is personal, and as personal communication is the essence of personality, God communicates himself eternally. To whom does he eternally communicate himself? Creation is but a temporal manifestation of the Eternal. If God is personal and eternal, to whom or what does he communicate himself in those eternities of which the temporal is a manifestation or mode of existence? The answer is, of course, that he communicates himself eternally to him of whom he said, "The same was in the beginning with God"-his Word. "Word" as rendered in the New Testament means the "ground of all existence, the reason giving life to all things, and the breath of God's lips." This Word is Christ. God communicates himself-his mind is in eternal self-expression. The form of that expression "usward" is the created universe, which, so far as we are concerned, actualizes the Divine Utterance. That which was in the Word (Doctrine and Covenants 90: 1 d, e, f), and that Word was the eternal self-expression of the eternal God, who became actualized in all that we see and hear and half perceive, the "round ocean and the living air"-Jesus Christ the Word. This means that God is immanent in the world. But this needs some elucidation. Divine immanence is not the same kind of indwelling that occurs when the mind of a man "resides" in machines which he makes. Divine indwelling is more like the immanence of a man in his own body, rather in his own actions. In this again let there be no room for mistakes. Pope's famous "Essay on Man" has this to say:

"All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul."

The Divine Is Immanent

This is "higher" pantheism, which of course, our Scriptures teach us to reject as a complete explanation. The creation does, in some sense, express God's Spirit, and he is active in it, but to say that God and creation are correlates is untrue. A brisk look at creation itself will dispel such a thought. We ourselves are created, and do not always conform to the Divine Spirit, and consequently in us has been born the sense of guilt and inadequacy. If all were expressive of God alone or if sin and righteousness were illusions, then there would be no reason to seek the good. Indeed there would be no ultimate assurance that the universe was not irrational. If our evil actions and our state of sin originates with God, then our sense of responsibility is an illusion, and such things as agency and choice are base fiction. As a creature, we have power from God to exist. The kind of creature we are warrants the supposition that we have agency, and agency means choice, and choice means in part apprehension of what appear to us as good and evil. Apprehension of good and evil means conflict between good and evil, and to decide which course is good for us and which is evil. Further, let us reflect with sobriety that our souls are a battlefield over and in which this conflict rages. We ourselves are the prize for which the struggle takes place. We decide upon which side we shall fight. We decide thus which will gain the victory. If we know anything at all, we are conscious of this. All of this is involved in what we know of ourselves as persons. To blame God for the sin of which we partake and for the fact that we partake, is to make foolishness of life itself. So then, while God is in the world and sustains it in being by his volitional activity, he does not originate the sin which his creatures create because they have power from him to do so. This is another way of saying what the story of the Fall in Genesis says in such delightful metaphor. It is also another way of saying that God is transcendent as well as immanent in the world. So, then, God does not depend upon the world for his existence, but the world does depend upon him. It depends on him utterly-literally. He communicates himself to creation every time the seed stirs in the ground, or a baby is conceived, or as in the emergence of himself in history in the person of his son. The quickening of life in the Virgin Birth was not of man, but of God.

Beethoven was immanent in the music he wrote as he was writing it. But he is not immanent in that music now. God was immanent in the earthly life of his Son, but he is not immanent in that earthly life now. Beethoven left a record of his art, a form of commandment, which if adhered to will approximate the glory which first was expressed in him. The record left by Jesus is infinitely much more significant, of course. But his earthly life was the record of a full and complete glory, and the possibility of a total recall of that life was, he assured us, in the keeping of his commandments. What that earthly life showed forth was the direction which the process known to us as the universe should take and the end and purpose for which it exists. God still communicates himself, but it is himself he communicates; and such communication is never merely in form of words or ideas, it is rather the personal expression of his never changing character. Such communication as was offered to man in the earthly life of Jesus actualizes fully an eternal desire or will which seeks expression everywhere and always. It is the unbounding energy and power of the endless and eternal life of God. He seeks from us the life of his Son or the life revealed in his Son, and for this purpose was that life manifest; namely, that we, in God, might be one-of one Lord and one faith and one baptism.

Creation itself required atonement, for when man was created he was named "Adam," which is "many" (Doctrine and Covenants 22: 21c). And the cardinal distinction between God and us is that he is "one" and we are "many." To bring one out of the many required a manifestation of the One God, for the eternal God cannot be known to his creatures unless he reveals himself. And every revelation is an utterance of his Word, which is Jesus Christ. This is part of the meaning involved in the first few paragraphs of Section 85. Every manifestation of the Divine is a movement upon his part toward at-one-ment, the identification of creation and Creator, through the adjustment of creature toward creator.

Creating and Begetting

What does this mean? God takes responsibility for all that is done, while not personally the doer of all that is done. Dr. Whitehead in his discussion of the nature of creation assumes a parallelism between God and the world, inferring that God arises out of the world process, if I understand him rightly. But there is no parallelism between God and the world in this way. There is unity between God and the world in this way. There is unity between God immanent and God transcendent, but not between God and the world. There is unity between him who begets and him who is begotten, but not between him who creates and him who is created. A created "thing" or "creature" cannot be "one" with its "creator" in the same way that he who "begets" is one with him who is "begotten." For the very essence of our gospel arises from the fact of man's being a creature in transgression and the subsequent perversion of nature which that transgression entails; namely, the creature's own perversion and that of the lower orders over which he has stewardship.

It is idle to speculate on what might have been had no commandment been transgressed, for the fact of our existence and the knowledge that we exist is synonymous with conviction or inadequacy and guilt for sin.

"It is very unhappy," says Emerson in his treatise on "Experience," "but too late to be helped-the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of man."

The fact that we are created and the conviction that we are sinners-these two facts constitute the ground of that revelation of God which leads toward understanding of the atonement. As created, we are utterly dependent, and as sinners, we are in rebellion. Man the creature sinned and all creation suffered.

Nature of Sin

First, let us deal with the nature of that sin which alienates man from his Maker and from his fellows. Later, we can think about the implications of man's dependency as a creature. All our discussion of man's nature must, necessarily, be to some extent, subjective. Objectivity is only relative after all, for even the mathematical-physical aspects of the universe which we know and call "objective," come to us through human minds. I can never, of myself, completely view myself because as I do so some part of me is employed in looking. Our view of ourselves is just as objective as our view of the physical universe. So, then, any discussion of sin must be relative and not absolute. Only one who was absolutely righteous could evaluate fully what sin is, and only One was righteous in this sense. We need this revelation to know ourselves and we must be taken into him for that revealment to be actual. To him we must turn for complete understanding of ourselves and our situation. Sin is coming "short of the glory of God." Any life which does not completely match his life is to that extent sinful. His was a life of perfect love glorified in sacrifice. But what does this mean? How can we know that life? One can only believe, and how can one believe except through a preacher, and how can one preach except he be sent? The initiation of the process leading to self-knowledge rests with the Creator. For sin has not only blinded us to God, but it has obscured us from knowledge of ourselves and knowledge of each other. We are selves, that we know. But what kind of selves are we? Ignorance at this point has been manifested by the rapid growth of the study of human behavior. The vast outer reaches of interstellar space are no more mysterious or challenging than the deep inmost recesses of the human self. In fact, unless our knowledge of the former is balanced and guided by our knowledge of the latter, we are doomed. Little children cry for the moon when they first see it. Grown-up men may someday give it to them. But a grown-up man once cried for little children. Who will give them to him? For to Jesus those who offended little children, those whose lives prevented their coming to him, were the greatest of sinners. "Better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck," he said.

As we have said, the cardinal distinction between God and man is this: He is one, as we are many. Our separate selves emerge as we live our lives. But our use of these selves has driven us apart from God and from each other and divided the self. It is not a sin to be a self. What is sin is that selves such as we are neither know for what we are made nor feel any need to repent. Selves are in themselves the stuff of which, in part, eternal glory may be constituted, or conversely they are occasions which make for our darkness, depending upon how the self is actuated. By nature, each self chooses. Each choice made modifies the self that makes it. So that either the self is evermore self-centered through choice made, or set free from self-centeredness through obedience to God. Each of us has a conception of ourselves to which our energies are harnessed and toward the fulfillment of which our gifts are used. This conception may change from time to time, as the schoolboy is seemingly one boy at school under the watchful eye of the master, another at home, and quite another when he is out playing with his fellows. Varying conceptions of the self usually are in conflict with one another. So the man is divided, but maturity comes as the boy grows into a man, and determining conception of the self gradually hardens and stabilizes itself, and a dominant nucleus of habit guides the life in consonance with that conception. All of us part of the time play God to ourselves. Some of us do this all the time, until our whole lives are consumed in service to the self which we have imagined we would like to be. In the economy of God, only that much of the self which is like him survives. The universe destroys all else.

Self-Knowledge and Agency

Any self which has come to knowledge that he is a self has, by that very fact, a conception of himself which, to him, is the most important consideration in his life. The condition that entails is called the fall of man, and the process by which it is achieved is called original sin. It seems to arise inevitably in each human being, and it arises in this fashion. Each of us has a distinct temporal center of consciousness apart from all others-our bodies; and our bodies originate the notion of selfhood. Our lives are initiated and begin to grow as others serve us. We expect, and rightly expect to a point, that service. Every child has a right to be well born, to be fed, to be clothed, and to be cared for. Thus, we begin our physio-mental life with a logical expectancy that others exist to serve us. Again, physically, we are the center of the universe we see and sense. Our behavior confirms this view, for we draw toward us all that comes within the circle of our being. Thus our life begins with an assumption that we later discover is only partially true, and the tragedy is that this truth-necessarily true for part of our existence-is taken as true for the whole. It is the same situation as presented in the temptation of Eve. Part of what was presented to her was true-eating of the fruit would make her wise. Part of it was not true, for when she thought "I shall not surely die," she was deceived. We grow up thinking we are the center of the universe, acting as if this were true. Relatively it is true that we are the center of the universe, but it is not true absolutely. God is the center, we are not. We come to call things that please us good and the things that displease us evil. We hope what we call good will happen to us again, and strive to make it happen again. What we do not call good, we eschew. So we come to regard what we like and what we dislike as the ground and law of the moral universe, and this is not so. But it is difficult to see how such a conception can be avoided. Social environment entails the presence and the demands and rights of other selves, and modifies to some extent our tendency to utter selfishness. In this modification society is constituted. But at root the fact of our false assumption lies unchanged. Selfishness may be modified, and selves may be expanded to include in their concern other selves. Family life does this. But then it is "our" or "my" family. A self may, by example and practice and discipline, be expanded to include a community; but even so it is "my community." Then we think of my age, my world, my stellar system. God may thus be brought into the circle of this expanding self; but without a radical change of selfhood he remains "my God," not God, whose I am.

Although it may seem dangerous to say, yet does not Section 36 reveal that this conception still lingered in the mind of Enoch? Did he not need a further revelation of the eternal God to finally dispel it? "Behold these thy brethren," came the divine voice to him. So it is the revelation of God ever alone which makes us conscious of their need equally with our own.

How can we be delivered? How can the self be transferred from self as center to God? It cannot be done by self-help alone. The self which I determine myself to be can never lift me off myself as center because I am the determiner. No God devised by man, however noble or lofty, can deliver us. How, then, can it be done? Only as the divine self is actualized, offered, and received by man. And here is the heart of the atonement: "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3: 16).

The sinful state of humanity has been the subject of vast explorations since the days of Janet and Freud. Of course, there were competent psychologists before them-Socrates and Augustine, for instance. But in our day, recognition is given that man is sick, and people of devotion and skill are doing what they can to help and to heal this sickness. There is a vast and ever growing literature upon the subject of man and his mental and spiritual life, and techniques and therapies are constantly being invented and used in aid of the sick-those who are mentally and spiritually sick, whose malady is functional. One of the best books I know in this field for laymen and ministers is Dr. Weatherhead's Psychology and Life. Man is divided from his fellows by the separateness of his psychic organism and by what that has induced in him under the influence of tradition, history, and environment. He is also divided within himself! His war is primarily in his own members. Inner conflicts and anxieties beset us, all of which grown from the fact that the central unifying power was fully revealed in Jesus, who was whole, and because unity has been denied men because men have chosen other powers which cannot make them whole within themselves and one with their fellows. But here is an amazing fact. The very power to imagine a false God and an inward future not corresponding with reality is itself the faculty by which we can be delivered. Speaking theologically, we should say the capacity for sin is also the capacity for salvation.

All our false notions of self, originating our sin, come to us through our experience. We fabricate these idols in the presence of the example set by others. These false Gods are reinforced in us through the gratification of instinct and instinctive emotion. Of course, each has his own peculiar and distinct angle of vision, but this, again, is made up of what passes to him through his senses. Imagination, the power to receive and create free ideas, is the one faculty in man which, when secured and indwelt by God, can convey "God's God" to the mind of man. Robert Browning who was a great "seer" of the human spirit once summed up human history as a process in which

God's God was at work
Remaking man's God in
The mind of man.

But if imagination can work only on what is supplied through experience, how can man experience God unless God shall undergo a human experience? The very nature of man needs the revelation of Christ as means by which that nature is completed, for conduct is determined by what appears to be good. If what appears to be good is not good, as has been and still is the case in large measure both in the church and in the world, then we are lost. We are thus deceived by appearances. For the completeness of human life is not only a matter of social harmony, it is a matter, too, of social Telesis-a matter of the ends and purposes of life. A convoy of ships may sail the ocean in perfect formation and for a time survive, but if there is consciousness aboard the leading vessel of the port to which the convoy should sail, or indeed that any port exists, then the convoy, despite its order, is lost. Or if a convoy is intended to sail westward to a port in the land of promise and sails only southward-ignoring the goal, again, it is only a matter of time until it passes beyond our ken. So it is with states and nations. Some philosopher in the last century praised the Prussian state for its orderly discipline and its glorification of heroism and courage. But where is Prussia today? Prussia had order-but no eternal goal. For salvation is only partly a matter of man's relation to God, who himself is the goal set in creation. And that means, if man is one with God, then he is unified within himself; then-and only then-is he in a position to help others be one with him. That can only be achieved through the revelation of the Divine Word who told us he was and is One with the Father.

Every sane consideration of the human situation cries out that God himself shall come down and dwell in a tabernacle of clay. If we are to be delivered from the lusts of the flesh, and the lusts of a rebellious spirit, God himself must deliver us. This he does in the person of his Son. Let us turn for a moment to the consideration of man as a dependent creature. Physically we are sustained by large and generous subsidies of food, air, sunlight, and water. These in turn are supplied by the nature of the physical universe. Our immediate physical universe is ruled by the perpetual sacrifice which issues in the light of the sun. Christ is the foundation of that sun and his nature, which is love, constitutes it. Our sun, we are told, is dying. By its death we live, and in its sacrifice we are sustained. Our bodies are kept in being by a most marvelous and intricate system of law and consequence. Jesus used these obvious things as examples of God's love and care. The scientist is utterly dependent for his scientific research and achievement upon the law set in the heavens and the earth. Kepler observed that he who discovered these laws "thinks God's thoughts after him." The great scientist is made possible as the Divine Spirit ministers to him, and as he accepts this leadership in the physical universe.

It is similarly the case with the sweet concourses of sound played on the organ or by a symphony. The painter, the poet, and the musician likewise find immortality in their work; because God, who sustains all, made nature to work as a machine and sleep as a picture. Beauty is God's grace bestowed on creation. But man's reproduction or representation of it is made possible in the first place because he is a God of beauty.

When we think of the history of morality, we realize that again and again in the course of history some men have apprehended that it is right to do right, and have stood for the right as they conceived it against all opposition. The prophets of the Old Testament are examples of this. They could be persecuted to death, but they stood firmly. Some died for their conviction. And since the days of Jesus, as before, in every nation he that fears God and works righteousness is accepted of him. Why? Because God is righteous.

So that in every field of human endeavor, in science, in art, in morality, man's advance is dependent upon God, even though his recognition of this dependency may be incidental. All comes from God. But when we have said this, there still remains one area, the most vital area, an area wider and deeper than any, in which men need God's ministry. How can a sinner kill in himself that God which he has created without dying himself? How can this imagined God that "man of sin" which all of us permit to "sit in the temple of God," be destroyed without destroying the self that was responsible? Manifestly when the God that sustains and gives life to the self is destroyed, the self it sustains dies also. Here is our parlous plight, our need, and our claim on the divine love and mercy. We need to die and yet have no desire to destroy the God that gives us life-the false notion of self which is our life. To die to self, that is our need. If we need God's leadership to sustain our science, art, and our morality, how much more do we need to know how to lay down our lives that in so doing we may take them again!

Mortal God?

God is immutable, unchanging and unchangeable. Where is there any possibility that he would ever go against himself as we are required to do if we are to be delivered? His course is one eternal round. We have no course at all. He is the fount of all life. Our life here is "nasty, short, brutal," to use the words of a great English philosopher. If we need his help to be scientists and artists and moralists, how much more shall we need his help to teach us how to die? Where is there any knowledge of experience in God which can captivate our imagination with sufficient power to dispel the selfish gods we have made and replace them with God's God? How can man learn to die unless God shows him how, and how can God show him how unless God himself dies? And how can he, who is immortal, die unless he takes mortality to himself? How could anyone rob God of life? The only way God could die was to lay down his own life.

There is the heart of the matter. The Son of God became man, and did so by taking to himself our nature-all of it. In his own person, he subjected our mortal nature to himself and set in motion those powers which would lead us to the total surrender of our lives. Thus he leads and accompanies us to our death, which just as surely as his own reveals immortality. It was our nature he took-and took with him into heavenly places. We know, then, beyond peradventure of a doubt, that once in us there dwelt God's God, in the person of Jesus Christ, initiating, sustaining, using, and glorifying our human nature. The record of his human nature is thus within our span of life on earth, and this is vital as we shall see later. Truth, beauty, and goodness are made eternal in the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ. This atonement has been set in the course of time; it is a historical fact. It happened. Sin was a deed. Redemption likewise was a deed. It was God's work, not ours. Its fruitage is his gift, not our achievement. To live to Christ is to die to sin. To live to self is to be dead to Christ. It is not alone that God wishes or desires our life to be as the life of Jesus. The fact is, there is no life outside of him.

New Men

To be born of the flesh-that is flesh, but such fleshly life is incomplete and, if left to itself, self-destructive as we have seen. But to be born of the Spirit is life; and such spiritual power as we needed to be reborn required a complete revelation of that life placed in the circle of our selfishness. God's love required that he come down to us. Our sin required his death. But his love and our sin were joined in Calvary to provide a "mercy seat" from which he has and always will judge the "world in righteousness." God showed forth that he alone was God, besides whom there were no others, when he rose again from the dead. His power is that of an endless triumphant glory.

Thus has there been set in the course of time a record which adequately meets our deepest need. We partake of God's beauty, and artists come forth. We apprehend him as lawful and orderly, and scientists emerge. We sense that behind phenomena there is a power not of our making for righteousness, and the conscience within places on us a sense of obligation; so men suffer for the right, and humanity is blessed by such sacrifices. But in Jesus Christ we find the power to die to self, and this power meets our deepest need. But it is his death in which we share, not a self-abnegation which we imagine. His beauty and his intelligence or glory and his righteousness all bless men and make them better, but it is only his love and death that makes them new.

Atonement Theories

There have been many theories of the atonement. Some of them have been colored by the social processes out of which they emerged. It is said that as a boy Edward VI of England had a companion who was whipped every time the young king transgressed. This grew out of the idea that God punished Christ for what we did and so satisfied his wrath. Someone had to pay. Man could not, so Christ did. But any theory of atonement which pictures the Almighty as moving only to exact vengeance and "satisfy" his wrath is pitifully inadequate. Men must have been very cruel in the day such ideas prevailed.

Let us be quite clear, however. The situation created by man's sin required the suffering and death of Jesus Christ if man were to be redeemed from the world. He created it. He owned it. It was his love which motivated that initial act of enormous sacrifice, not his wrath. And be it clearly understood that our Lord surrendered his glory in order to come to us. His initial act of sacrifice can be imagined only if we think what it would mean if we were required to enter a lower order of existence-say that of a dog-in order to raise that order to the human level. The death on the cross resulted because God allowed the sin of normal men to alight on his own Son, and, just as always, sin mutilates the innocent. The Father stood by "with averted face" and, because he loved us, permitted his Son to die. The manner of death was quite incidental. It was foreshadowed in the cultus of Israel; and even before that, sacrifice of animals was instituted among men to teach them "in what manner" they might look forward to the Son of Man. The crucifixion itself was in the fashion current in Jesus' day. Men who were then deemed worthy to die were crucified. Jesus was a divine offering. God gave, and the only motive that can account for the offering is the love of God.

Righteous Wrath

This is not to deny the doctrine of the wrath of God. That wrath is very real and very terrible. God must be "against" me when I sin. Although he loves me, the very nature of sin itself sets me against him, for sin is not, as some suppose, certain acts of mine which can be placed in a different category than the other acts. Sin is rebellion against God, and rebellion against God means war within man's nature; this war is the wrath of God which always is the reward of rebellion. The principle is clearly reiterated in Doctrine and Covenants 2: 2:

 . . . for although man may have many revelations, and have power to do many mighty works, yet, if he boast in his own strength, and set as naught the counsels of God, and follows the dictates of his own will and carnal desires, he must fall and incur the vengeance of a just God upon him.

This kind of wrath, we are sure, was never suffered by our Lord. He sinned not. Whatever suffering was his lot did not grow out of his own transgression; it grew out of ours. The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. It was impossible for this to be otherwise. The nature of man, his organic relation with his fellows, his inheritance from a common stock and from a sinful spiritual tradition, his environment-all these made it inevitable that Jesus should suffer.

If he were fully man-yet without sin-then he was predestined to suffer and to die as we all do. The Word was made flesh. The identity was total, not partial. The Word was made flesh. The revelation was actual, not chimerical. And Christianity teaches that, as touching the "flesh" (humanity in its carnal life) we all inherit the old Adam, so, as touching the Spirit (humanity in Christ), we may, if we desire, inherit the new man. The atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ was an act of God, wrought in the sinful world order induced by fallen man which did two things. It atoned for original guilt and so enabled God to treat man according to his mercy; and it made available to each man a renewal of life which is to condition the coming kingdom. We must now examine both these points and see if we can discern God moving in his majesty and in his power.

Sacrifice and Atonement

All through nature there runs the principle of sacrifice and atonement. The sun rules the day by giving its light. That light issues from a perpetual sacrifice. How the solar system in which we live came into existence is not known for certain, but it appears once to have been part of the same substance as our sun. If this is so, then the light emitted by it simply is an expression of that which is coming to its own, and any schoolboy knows that all we see and hear and taste and touch simply could not exist were the light from the sun withheld.

The earth solidifies. Vegetation appears. The seed is sown and dies, so that in dying it might extend its life and fulfill its ingrained purpose. The vegetable world sustains the animal, and there appears in the animal kingdom man, who is only related to the lower orders in a contingent or temporal fashion. In his body man incorporates and transmutes all the lower visible orders. But in him there appears a factor not present before or below. All exists in sacrificial unity to make man, and man takes all these natural gifts and perverts or attempts to pervert the cardinal act of sacrifice for which all others were fashioned.

We are selves, but our selfhood is a gift of God based on the ordinances of nature; and selfhood, in each one of us, is unique and bestowed alone for one purpose. That purpose is that we might have the supreme and holy joy of offering this unique self of ours in sacrificial love to the Creator and Father of the human race. But in order for this joy to be actual to us, God had to constitute us so that we are capable of refusing to act in this way. Agency is the one factor in life which conditions our joy in God or our sorrow in ourselves. And, as we have seen, we are organic to the whole might of nature. It finds its end point in us. What happens to it at that point is in our hands under God.

What, in fact, has happened or did happen in faraway Eden? Man sinned and all nature became perverted; the word of God, which called it forth and which sought and ever seeks only to return to him with its work accomplished, was, by man's sin, changed in its course. Death supervened and division entered into what had been intended as a perfect harmony. So the stage was set. God could not deny himself, even though the creature denied him. God acted, and at the precise point or occasion of nature's perversion, entered into nature himself to correct and heal the process, to destroy death, to restore the total order of existence to its true and proper frame with the one exception that now, through the sin of man, an even more glorious expression of the divine majesty would be vouchsafed not only to man but to all existence.

Living Law

So the Son of Man atoned for original guilt. It was to rescue us in himself and himself in us that he came, suffered, and died. I have said that the atonement enabled God to treat men according to his mercy. We need to enlarge a little on this. The law of God, his word in nature, was and is operative everywhere and always. That law is just, because it does, in fact, sustain all in being. But that law was not a negative statute in a book with punishments for infractions. It was a living thing, and it still is a living thing. That law constitutes man's being. Whatever any man is at any time is eternal judgment expressed to that time. This law was given by God to all existence as an endowment to fulfill one purpose and one purpose alone. Nature and man cannot ultimately serve any other purpose. To persist in attempting to do so is an open initiation to eternal damnation. That purpose was and is in God; and when man sinned he completely lost sight of that purpose. That is what sin is-to be so full of one's own purpose that God's purpose is thereby obscured.

Man was deceived; he was blinded and led captive. It was not that God had no mercy, but what could mercy do unless man should change his purpose and surrender his will which had captivated nature to serve his own purpose? What can mercy do now? Without some special act of intervention which will put clearly into the center of man's selfish and perverted life the revelation of His own purpose, God is powerless to help man. To be merciful in this sense, and treat man as though his perversion of nature did not matter, was impossible. God dare not make forgiveness cheap. To do so would be to confirm man in his sin.

Yet God loved man, for when he created him he saw his own Son and through his own Son to each man. He loved the creature man, because man was made and created to bear record of him. How could this man, now in the willing thralldom of a rebel will, be rescued? To compel obedience would be no obedience but mechanical conformity. So to win man, with man's own consent, God came down in disguise, as it were, to arrest and hold man's attention and set before him and in him a testimony of man's own true nature and a revelation of that divine purpose for which the true nature was fashioned and in the pursuance of which man would find complete joy. Mercy could claim a creature who turned from self to Him, when such nature and purpose was declared. And so sacrifices were instituted-a shadow of things to come. Today we take Communion in remembrance of things past and things to come.

A Parable

Before we turn to show how the atonement is made available to us and works in us now, one other point needs emphasizing. Sin is more than individual transgression. Sin the "the body of death" and means the total world situation, the condition and state into which every man is born. To make this clear is not easy, but let us suppose our civilization and our world is like an express train with all sorts of people on board. There are one or two murderers, as well as half a dozen saintly unselfish characters. All kinds and shades of character are represented by the other passengers. The train is rushing through the countryside and each passenger is doing and thinking that which is appropriate to his character. Soon there will be no track, for the train is headed for a deep chasm at the bottom of which an inaccessible river rushes savagely. Unless the train is stopped, all will perish; but any attempt to slow it down is met with an immediate protest by all the passengers, so the engineer drives on.

That is what sin has done. It has laid a track to the edge of that chasm, and men are traveling along it quite oblivious to the end toward which they are going. Somehow a new track must be laid, a new train must be put on it, and people who will must be taken off the old one and put on the new. The process must be reversed. That is what atonement is, and that is what it does. It lays a new track to the kingdom and invites and persuades men to board the train going in the opposite direction.

The new track has been laid. The Son of Man has atoned for original guilt. The new track is laid and the train is ready; but how shall the other one be stopped? Many attempts have been made, let us say, without avail. Then there appears on the track a man who waves a red flag, but the engineer will not respect the warning. Suppose that instead of stepping off at the last minute the flagman deliberately stays to be killed? Then, out of a sense of shock and feeling of common humanity, the engineer comes to a halt. People get out, and as they do others come to warn them of their danger and invite them to board the other train.

What the flagman did in this parable, to get the attention of the passengers, corresponds roughly although inadequately to the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. It was designed to get people off the train, so they could hear what God had to say and to accept or reject the invitation to go in the reverse direction.

Necessity for Atonement

The point is, that no matter how good one is, from an individual viewpoint, he is in a state of sin and headed for destruction except he hears what God has said through the sacrifice of his Son and accepts the condition of travel in his direction. This approximates, as I think, the meaning in the Scripture which is expressed thus: "…all mankind were in a lost and in a fallen state, and ever would be, save they should rely upon this Redeemer" (I Nephi 3: 6).

The idea that God will beat with few stripes the sinner who sins, because he is merciful and loving, totally misconceives the condition prevailing in the world in this day or in any other day.

The Church as a Redemptive Agency

The way of redemption is prepared. How can it be made effective? We come now to the extension of the doctrine and its relation to the church as a society functioning in God.

Recent research into the nature of the human mind and especially of human behavior has revealed some startling facts. It begins to appear that each of us finds his individuality growing out of a vast unfathomed sea of human consciousness. William James, the great American philosopher, did some astounding research into the nature of religious conversion sixty years ago. He sampled from history chronicles of saints and sinners in which they told of their own conversion. His book The Varieties of Religious Experience marks, in my judgment, a pivotal exploration in the understanding of human nature. After analyzing many experiences, he concludes that we are connected in the inner man to a vast area of consciousness common to all men that from the deeps of this vast area there may, and very often does, arise that which turns men to God. Is not this another way of saying that the spirit lightens every man who comes into the world? For underlying all men there is a common humanity in which we all share. This common humanity Jesus took, so that from the deeps of consciousness there may come, and very often does come, to us the testimony of the atonement of our Lord.

For, as we said in the beginning, God and the world are not correlates. Yet there is a unity between God transcendent and God immanent, and because God was once (and still is) immanent fully and completely in one man, he has given us the assurance that in him there is a record of what each may be and that record testifies to him and to us of his power to save to the uttermost they that trust him. In this connection, read Section 45, paragraphs 1 and 2. They are extremely significant.

From an individual standpoint one can only bear his testimony; and that I do now. I am conscious that there dwells in me a spirit, or a gift, which I know I did not originate, which urges and persuades me to the sacrificial life revealed in Jesus. If I know anything at all, I know that he inaugurated this in my life. So, when I do as I am urged, I am blest and at peace. When I become confused or fail to do as I ought, this spirit still does not leave me, but expresses itself in disapproval and I am chastened and cast down. But I am sure that it persists in me in spite of my sin and so it is redemptive-because I have the promise that I shall overcome and in the end be victorious. This is the experience of all those who have been reborn.

What is the "end" in which the atonement finds completion? The end is in that one body of Christ. It is that group of people indwelt by his Spirit. And being so indwelt, they endeavor to do for others what Christ has done for them. Who must make the sacrifice for sin? Who made it for us? Did not Christ make it? How can enmity and sin be ended and overcome except once again Christ shall pay the price in us? For what other purpose have we been called? Who, in light of this atonement, would shun to bear the sin and carry the infirmities of others? How can the church be purged of her own selfishness unless we remember him who gave himself?

The Atonement has meaning only for those who strive to continue in its never ceasing activity, for still it goes on. And it will go on-the sun giving of itself and thus blessing the earth as it turns toward the Lord of day; the seed dying in the soil and thus making possible the life it enfolds. So Christ continually re-enacts in his church and in the people of his choice the Atonement, his own sacrifice being an essential symbol of the Divine Life.

For God is God and he is love.