The perfection of spiritual growth gives us back the unconsciousness of primitive man, when life flowed on from its source to its close without question or fear of the hereafter. I figure to myself a state when this unconsciousness, like some lost paradise, shall be regained; when the emancipated spirit, having realized its own nature by complete development, and having outgrown the dreary period of self-questioning, shall be conscious of no obligation, shall never hear the "stern daughter of the voice of God;" but follow its own impulse with absolute freedom, and never stray; shall gravitate to good by divine necessity, and know not that it is good, and know no merit in seeking it, because there is no evil in its consciousness with which to contrast it. A seraph at work is a child at play, combining the earnestness of settled purpose with the freshness of immediate impulse, and the glow of a momentary mood. Will such an one ask, "What shall I do to be saved?" Will the sun desire to know the method of its shining, or the stars how far to cast their ray; or the rushing and rejoicing river, the meaning and purpose of its course? The emancipated spirit has outgrown all questions; it derives its knowledge, not through the troubled medium of the questioning, groping, prying, doubting intellect, but directly from the fountain-light of the purified, perfected will. It knows by doing, and in knowing does. Knowing, doing, willing, loving, are no longer the severed and unequal functions of a halting and distracted life, but one undivided, spontaneous action of a life as serene as the source from which it flows. VII. ATONEMENT WITHOUT EXPIATION. "Die Vernichtung der Sünde, dieser alten Last der Menscheit, und alles Glaubens an Busse und Sühnung, ist durch die Offenbarung des Christenthums eigentlich bewirkt worden. * - NOVALIS. THE years of the Christian era are technically styled years "of grace." The term is used without, I suspect, an adequate sense of the import and fitness of that designation. The word "grace" - synonymous with "pardoning mercy"-denotes a special and characteristic trait of the Christian religion; a fundamental distinction between it and other religions. I know of no other religion in which pardoning mercy forms a constitutive, organic element, none which assures forgiveness of sins to penitent souls on the simple condition of repentance, and so absolves from the superstitious fears which other religions connect with the thought of God and the hereafter. I find in other religions the principle of propitiation, which is quite a different thing. When the gods of The proper effect of the Christian revelation is the annihilation of sin, the ancient burden of humanity, and of all belief in penance and expiation. the Gentiles were supposed, by their votaries, to be incensed by neglect or transgression, the only way to pacify them, to bring back the averted eye of their blessing, was to offer animal sacrifices. So only could the Powers be propitiated and the sin atoned. Even this method was not always effectual. The wrath of the Numen, as we read in the old myths, would sometimes continue to burn with immitigable fury against the offender, and even against his remote posterity, as in the case of " Pelops' line." And, when effectual, the result was not forgiveness, but expiation; not grace, but quittance; not pardoning mercy, but satisfied ire. So the Jehovah of the Hebrews is represented as propitiated by sin-offerings and trespass-offerings, which the priest was required to offer with exact and complicated rites for the sins of the people, that they might be remitted. For without blood, by the Law of Moses, there was "no remission." The writers of the New Testament, and especially the writer to the Hebrews, transfer this idea of sacrifice from the old dispensation to the new. They represent the blood of Christ as the substitute for the blood of bullocks and of lambs. By such representations they describe the subjective fruits of Christ's ministry, of his death as the consummation of that ministry, not the objective nature of his work, viewed in its relation to the Godhead. The language is figurative, not dogmatic. I see not how any other interpretation could ever have been put upon it by Christians. Nothing in the history of opinions is more marvellous than that Christian theologians should fail to see, that by treating Christ's death as the satisfaction of a debt, whether in the sacrificial sense of expiation, or the |