involves all this, the writer of the notice I have quoted informs us that he has been brought by "the most devout and careful thought of years." I am bound to respect whatever conclusion a man has reached by such a path as this; and yet I find it hard to express the trembling and the dread which take possession of my whole moral and spiritual life when I consider what this conclusion involves. I shrink from saying that even in my calmest and brightest hours I have a knowledge of God and the ways of God which is truer than Christ had, even in His agony. I aare not stand before His cross and tell Him that even for a moment He imagines something concerning God which is not a fact and cannot be a fact. I prefer to believe that it was necessary for the great ends of human redemption that when Christ was on the cross He should submit to the awful suffering arising from "the loss of the sense of God's presence."

Although several other reviewers have objected to what I have written on this mysterious subject, I have not noticed anywhere else so explicit an assertion that the words of our Lord were actually untrue-untrue because suffering "made our Lord imagine for a moment what was not the fact, could not be the fact." Most of those who are unwilling to admit that the cry of our Lord was the result of His actual desertion by the 'Lect. ii. p. 60.

Father, seem to me to be under the influence of an erroneous conception of the conditions and nature of that conscious communion with God of which we ourselves know something, and of which our Lord Jesus Christ knew infinitely more. They seem to imagine that" the light of God's presence" is like the light of the sun, and that if the spiritual eye is healthy the light will shine into the soul as a matter of course. On this theory, if darkness comes, it is the effect either of sin, by which the spiritual vision is either partially or wholly obscured, or else of a severity of suffering which disturbs the normal action of some, at least, of the spiritual powers. This theory seems to me to ignore the free personality of God. It is the creation of the modern tendency to regard God as nothing more than a vast Spiritual Force. It has a close kinship with that conception of prayer which denies that there is any free response on God's side to our requests, and which attributes the whole benefit of prayer to the natural effect on the soul of its voluntary approach to the infinite and unchanging Power, in whom—or in which it lives and moves and has its being. It affirms the personal freedom of man, but suppresses the personal freedom of God.

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"God is light," but He is living light. Our communion with Him is the communion of person with Person. There is action on His side as well as on

ours. Those "interior consolations" about which the old writers on the spiritual life say so much, are not the natural result of our subjective spiritual state; they come from the free action of the Divine love. A certain subjective state may be the condition on which they are granted; but still they are granted, granted by a Divine volition, just as the expressions of our own affection and approval are granted to our children when we think of them with satisfaction as well as with love. It has been a very common opinion that these "interior consolations" are sometimes withdrawn, for a time, even from saintly souls, and withdrawn-not because there has been sin which has provoked the Divine displeasure, but—for the sake of spiritual discipline. The soul holds fast to its faith in the Divine love, but the consciousness of the Divine presence is lost. There is no displeasure in the heart of God, but the free revelation of His presence is suspended. It is not necessary for my immediate purpose that I should discuss this opinion. I have referred to it for the sake of illustrating my own conception of the desertion on the cross. Whether or not, as a matter of fact, the revelation of the Divine presence is ever withheld from us, except on the ground of sin, may be an open question. But the possibility of its being withheld arises directly from the truth that God is as free in His acts as we are, and that our con

sciousness of His presence with us is the result of His voluntary revelation of Himself to the soul.

In the case of our Lord I believe that this revelation was actually withheld; not-if I may be forgiven the irreverence of saying it-because there was any sin in Him which provoked God's anger; not because, through a fictitious imputation to Him of the sin of the human race, God was angry with Him on account of sins which He had not committed; but because it became Him who had endured the other consequences of human sin-physical pain of many kinds, and the anguish of wounded love to endure this consequence too, and by submitting to the loss of the sense of His Father's presence to confess, by a voluntary act, and not merely in words, that this awful desertion is a just penalty of human transgression. This seems to me a more reverential interpretation of His words than to suppose that under the strain of mental and physical suffering His spiritual force had given way, and that while there was no voluntary suspension of the revelation of the Father's presence, He was unable to realise that the Father was with Him,

5.-The Relation of the Objective to the "Moral" Theory of the Atonement.

In a paper read at the autumnal meeting of the Congregational Union at Bradford, in October, 1876, it was stated that in these Lectures I had maintained that "we must choose between the legal and moral aspects of the Atonement, and cannot have them both." I find that the writer of the paper is not alone in placing this extraordinary interpretation upon my position. The passage which appears to have suggested the criticism is on pp. 10, II. "It is doubtful whether it lies within our power to remain neutral in the presence of conflicting theories of the Atonement. The fundamental question, Whether the Death of Christ has a direct relation to the remission of sin, or whether it was simply a great appeal of the Divine love to the human race God's method of conquering the human heart'? -determines the whole attitude of the Christian soul to Christ. One of these two conceptions we must accept, one we must reject, not merely as theologians, but as Christians."

If in discussing the miracles of Christ I had raised the question whether the miracles were wrought at the impulse of compassion for the sorrows of men, or were simply displays of supernatural power, and if I had written several pages to show that they were