380 RELIGIOUS WORK 



the purpose even to create, and to permit the fall. Otherwise the 

 risk of the fall would not have been incurred. The Atonement is 

 never to be thought of as an after-thought; it is always in revela- 

 tion God's forethought, in which all his relations to a race of 

 created men started; it is the ground purpose of the universe. 

 Christ is ever "the Lamb foreordained before the foundation of 

 the world." 



The creator himself purposed from the beginning to become 

 responsible for man's foreseen sin, in such a way as to make possi- 

 ble his glorious recovery from it, and his permanent establishment 

 in positive holiness. That there is such a thing as " original sin " 

 is indeed true. But we are coming to see that, even back of the 

 incipient sin, God provided an " original grace " also, a grace 

 inchoate indeed, until man, by his own free will, should respond to 

 it and make it his own, but still an original provision, adequate 

 to more than cancel the effects of original sin. The fathers used 

 to maintain the doctrine of " total depravity." There is certainly 

 a sense in which man through sin has fallen into a sad bias toward 

 evil. His power for good has been blighted at the root. Now, 

 however, in the light of a better understanding of Christ as the 

 eternal Logos, and his relation from-ever-of-old to our humanity, 

 we are coming to see that if there was in some sense a " total 

 depravity," this is not the whole fact. There is also revealed in 

 the Scriptures in close relation to it, a total inchoate redemption also, 

 stored up in Christ's person and work, a redemption deeper than 

 the acknowledged depravity. There is in Christ a potential new 

 heredity in grace, an heredity that goes into effect for all who die 

 in infancy or in infantine conditions, and which will also become 

 effective in all others, unless by an act of evil free self-will and 

 pride (which, alas, is apparently well-nigh universal), they repu- 

 diate it. Such grace is entirely a conception of the Christian Scrip- 

 tures, and men who are destitute of the Bible, or who reject it, 

 are wholly without any such assurance in deity. The utmost the 

 pagan mind can do is to cherish the hope that there may be some- 

 where, although as yet all unknown, some such being as we have 

 described, some redeemer. 



A Christian missionary in China was one day describing the 

 character of the Christians' God as a loving being, as a God of 

 tender compassion, to a company of Chinese women, w r hen all at 

 once one of the women turned to her neighbor and said, "Didn't 

 I tell you that there ought to be a God like that! " 



As opposed to this, how hopeless and cruel are all ideas of God 

 to which we are shut up by the mere agnostic philosophy of the 

 day. In the bald Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest, 

 for example, what hope is there for the unfit of our race? yet the 



