“See if, for every finger of thy hands, There be not found, that day the world shall end Hundreds of souls, each holding by Christ’s word, That He will grow incorporate with all, With me as Pamphylax, with him as John, Groom for each bride! Can a mere man do this? Yet Christ saith, this He lived and died to do. Call Christ, then, the illimitable God.” I DO.
“Merely to repeat His words is not to continue His work; we must reproduce His life, passion and death. He desires to live again in each one of His disciples in order that He may continue to suffer, to bestow Himself, and to labor in and through them towards the redemption of humanity, until all prodigal and lost children be found and brought back to their Father’s house. Thus it is that, instead of being removed far from human history, the life and death of Christ once more take their place in history, setting forth the law that governs it, and, by ceaselessly increasing the power of redemptive sacrifice, transform and govern it, and direct it towards its divine end.”
_Auguste Sabatier, “The Atonement,” p. 134._
It is a bold and hazardous task to say anything on this subject and I must tread with bare, hushed feet, for it is a holy realm which we are essaying to enter. It must be understood from the first that I am not going to thresh over a heap of theological straw. I am not going into that realm of abstract metaphysics where one can always prove any thesis one may happen to assume at the start. I shall keep close to human experience. The pillars of our faith must be planted, not on some artificial construction of logic, but deep down in the actual experience of Life. There are external principles of the spiritual Life which are as irresistible and compelling as the laws of physics or the propositions of Euclid. The task of the religious teacher is to discover and proclaim these elemental truths, but we always find it so much easier to fall back on dogma and theories which have been spun out of men’s heads! In the Gospels and in Paul’s letters the laboratory method prevails--the writers ground their assertions on experienced facts, they tell what they have found and verified, and they always ask their readers to put their truths to the test of a personal experience like their own. Our modern method must be a return to this inward laboratory method.