perfect justice, for the atonement and the forgiveness were simultaneous. So also He was able to tell His disciples at the institution of the Holy Communion that the bread and wine were His body and blood while He Himself yet stood before them; for to Him the succession of the Passionweek events was no succession. And so we can share in the Atonement and accept the sacrifice made for us, for it is now offered. It was, in divine time, never begun nor will ever be finished; it simply is.

These are impossible ideas for the mind to grasp, as impossible as the statements in the Athanasian Creed concerning the Trinity. But if religion were as clear as the balance-sheet of a joint-stock company, it would cease to be religion. We are faced with the choice of a shock to our religious or to our intellectual instincts, and unless we are prepared to claim omniscience, our religious instincts will prevail.

When Jesus emptied Himself of His divine attributes, Verbum supernum prodiens

nec Patris linquens dexteram,'

We

He did not thereby alter His essential nature. continually find that He displays superhuman knowledge and insight into cases with which He had to deal. He shews a power of prophecy upon the circumstances of His own death. We see Him in possession of a reserve of force, and we can conceive that the Incarnation must have been to Him what human language would call a tremendous and ceaseless strain. So also He transcends human limitations of time and space when the Divine purpose necessitates such action. When the Divine life cuts across the plane of human existence, the wonder is not that there are difficulties, but that there are not more of them.

IV

Let us now suppose that a wounded man attempts to arrive at an explanation of his sufferings by the method of exhaustion, by examining the various theories that have

1

been proposed. Clearly, the suffering caused by gunshot wounds is not prophylactic. Is it, then, the consequence of sin? No man can say that he is sinless and therefore, before inquiry can proceed further, he must feel the assurance of Divine forgiveness. Some natures may be brought to seek forgiveness by suffering; others, who would be hardened in their resistance by such a view of suffering, may be influenced by thoughts of the redemptive love. In any case, the sense that his sins have been forgiven is absolutely necessary, before a man can advance further upon inquiry into the cause of his personal suffering. Now forgiveness implies a definite attitude towards God; our sins are not automatically forgiven as soon as they are committed. When the Christian wishes to forgive his enemy, he must consider not only his own but also his opponent's state of mind and the effect which his action will produce upon that opponent's character. It is useless to forgive a man who has robbed you, if you know that your forgiveness will be interpreted by him as a sign of weakness, and will induce him to repeat his crime. Forgiveness is wholly unselfish and is not meant to produce merely a comfortable feeling of self-satisfaction. There are those who tell us that as Christians we ought to forgive Germany. Such forgiveness would imply that we felt complete confidence in Germany and love towards her, with such full assurance of her conduct for the future that we can forget the past. This assurance could only be based upon complete and whole-hearted repentance upon Germany's part, and until that assurance is forthcoming or until we are certain that our generosity would make Germany better and not worse than she is, forgiveness is neither practical nor Christian. We must, until that time, be angry and sin not, and while we withhold forgiveness, there is nothing to prevent us from feeling the deepest sorrow for a misguided people and the deepest longing to see them restored to Christian sanity. We can assume that the Divine attitude towards ourselves is of the same nature, however infinitely deeper in degree, for if our minds are capable of apprehending God, they must bear a certain resemblance, however remote, to the Divine

mind. The vastness of God's love and compassion will not issue in forgiveness until we are capable of being forgiven, the preliminary to which is repentance. Then, when we have made that surrender, we may be friends' with God, as with any human friend whom we may have wronged. The evidence of human forgiveness is not the remission of penalties, but the restoration of love. The child who has been found out desires to see again his father's face cheerful and trusting as before. The man hopes that the debt may be wiped out, the affront forgotten, the stern manner become cordial, and that a new start may be made. If Divine forgiveness proceeds upon similar lines we shall no longer be able to explain our pain as punishment; for forgiveness abandons punishment. And yet we suffer.

We saw that Christ in the Atonement suffered for the sins of the whole world and that those sins and therefore that suffering were finite in quantity. The pain that is endured by the wounded and sick (when not punishment) must, therefore, be part of that quantity. If they bear it, Christ does not, or did not, if we prefer the conventional time expressions, and the sufferer is relieving Christ of a portion of His sufferings. He may, then, think of himself as selected for the highest conceivable privilege, that of bearing some infinitesimal part of the burden borne by Christ. Like Simon of Cyrene, he is permitted to bear the Cross. He is a fellow-worker with God.

V

This explanation of suffering is more satisfactory to the mind of the soldier and the man of action than are nebulous statements of the theme παθήματα μαθήματα. He feels that even while lying in bed he is doing something. It is an explanation that brings comfort to such cases as the man stricken with cancer in the prime of life or the mother whose child is born to linger for a year or two in pain before its premature death. The doctrine of the mystical union with Christ derives new force when considered from this point of view not only has the wounded man died the

death to sin and risen in the new birth to righteousness, but he has also performed a redemptive act in addition to those of which St. Paul speaks: his body has been broken, his blood has been shed, and his sense of fellowship and of union with Christ can be by so much the stronger.

It may reasonably be objected that the metaphysical argument upon which the theory rests, creates as much difficulty as the inferences from it are likely to remove. But it is difficulty of a different order, intellectual instead of moral. The ordinary explanations of the problem of pain fail to satisfy the moral sense, because they overstrain ordinary human faith in the beneficence of God. That suffering is purgatorial as well as remedial or prophylactic, that it can purify and deepen the character, that it may help our sense of unity with Christ is true as far as it goes. But when we can add that what we are suffering, Christ does not suffer, and that if we suffered less, He would suffer more; a definite reason for pain appears; a definite answer can be given to the bitter cry of the hospital wards, 'What's all this pain for?'

H. J. CHAYTOR.

ART. VII. THE WAR: A TURN IN THE TIDE.

1. The War and the Press. A Paper read March 14, 1918, before the Essay Society, Eton College. By WALTER RALEIGH. (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press. 1918.) 2. The League of Nations. The Opportunity of the Church. By CHARLES GORE, D.D., Bishop of Oxford. (London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1918.)

3. General Foch: An Appreciation. By Major ROBERT M. JOHNSTON, U.S.N.A. (Boston and New York. 1918.) 4. Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and their Treatment by Germany. Prepared in the Administrator's Office, Windhuk, South-West Africa, January 1918. (London: Published by His Majesty's Stationery Office.)

SPEAKING at Manchester the other day Mr. Lloyd George said 'I am prouder of nothing in the whole of my public life more than the troublous part I took in achieving unity of command. I am prouder of nothing in the struggle than the fact that it was determined on my suggestion in February at Versailles that Marshal Foch should take a leading part in this direction.'

We have certainly many things for which we have to be grateful to Mr. Lloyd George, but we think that he is right in his satisfaction at what he has done to attain unity of command, and certainly so far as we can judge events have justified his action. Even one who is not an expert can see that in the direction of affairs on the Western Front in the last few months there has been a definiteness of purpose and a cohesion which were wanting before. It is not merely that we have got one commander: we have, so far as we can judge, obtained a good commander. Whether Marshal Foch is a leader of the highest ability