The simplest things in life are the most tremendous, and the things we most take for granted the most mysterious. Yet it is wise sometimes to think about these simple things, these foundation facts. For these are the final mysteries, and when you meet a final mystery you are on a road which leads straight through (though it may be a long road and slow) to God.

And as with life itself, so with what you can say about life. There is a grand simplicity about the judgements which we think it really worth while to pass. We are not so much concerned (perhaps we should be more) with the art-critics and the philosophers. But it is not easy to keep pace with them, and they often speak as experts to experts. Our final judgements are our in virtue of our common humanity and its experiences, and when we express them we express them in terms of good and evil. Beyond those terms we cannot pass. Doubtless we need educating in our moral judgements. But there is no meaning in talk about a sphere beyond good and evil. We have and can have no knowledge, or power of conceiving, of such a sphere. Remember those words of Mr. G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown, addressed to the sham priest who is really the great criminal Flambeau intent upon the theft of the Blue Cross-"Think of forests of adamant with leave of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, 'Thou shalt not steal.' "

And so of life: its final values are its moral values; and of our judgements, none are so simple, so inevitable, but so penetrative to within the very core of life's meaning as those which are based on our recognition of the distinction between good and evil.

But it is not just a distinction: it is a clash and tension of a unique kind. That is revealed in the world's history, and the issue of it becomes the world's judgement. Nay, more, if the clash and tension have reached a point beyond which it is impossible for them to go, if the world'' moral history can be found somewhere condensed into a moment, the whole issue between good and evil made plain, and not only made plain, but passing to a final judgement, which is God's, and not only passing to final judgement, but crowned with a victory which can never be undone, then you have the solution of the problem which is the decision of the battle. One real decision in the warfare between good and evil is enough: for one real decision there holds the reversion of all eternity and settles for ever the question of world-mastery. Only, do not let us imagine that such a decision can be easy, or lack much foreboding and pain for whoever comes to its test and passes within its unsparing gloom. Remove this cup from me; Now is my soul troubles; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. At such a crisis only that perfect unity of the will with God, that "howbeit not what I will but what thou wilt," that "but for this cause came I unto this hour," will carry one through to the end upon whom the moral ends of all the ages have come. Only by taking the whole cost and redeeming it can he make the settlement and win the peace. It is the almighty deed, not any word however mighty, which secures the judgement of this world and the casting out of its prince. I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself.

This vision of the world is, for the Christian, inseparable from his vision of God. For unity here he draws deeply upon the New Testament at its deepest. The theology of the New Testament is throughout a moral theology. It is comparatively little concerned with many speculative problems which vexed men's minds while its book were being written, and vex them still. But when you come to persons and personal relationships, especially the relationship between persons and a world of persons and the God who, whatever else he is, is anyhow as personal as we are, you reach something quite distinctive of the New Testament's handling of evil? This-that evil which makes the difference is not to be looked for outside but within the action of personal wills, and that its real meaning is to be found only as you look at it in contrast with God. God, the god of all holiness and love, has his holy and loving purposes for the world. Those purposes are the best purposes possible, final correspondence with the will of God and peace in its attainment. And evil, as the opposition to those purposes, as the reaction of will against Will, is treason to the one possible highest good. It is sin against God, the destructive force whose triumph would mean the extinction of all true moral values from the universe, the twilight and passing of God. That is the situation which the New Testament and historic Christianity face, a situation threatening disaster, and needing the strongest possible antidote to its own disease. And the most effective cure is a new creation which does not simply pass over the old as though it did not exist (a method of no moral value), but deals with it according to its merits and needs, which is the method of judgement, and yet uses Judgement for salvation and restores while it re-creates.

What we need to grasp, what the New Testament would have us grasp, as the key to the whole matter, is that God deals with the issue raised by moral evil and with its consequences for his world by his own intimate and costly personal action. We begin to understand only as we confess that the whole initiative is his. In the coming of Christ God makes his nearest approach to the world and to its sin. In creation he acts upon the world from without; in redemption he acts upon it from within. He gives himself fully in the one as he had not done in the other. And so he reveals more of himself. We know more of the Blessed Trinity through the work of the Son in his mission and death than we could ever know through the work of that same Son in the framing of the worlds. We see better and more truly because we see more that is finished. There was a finished work of God, greater and more complete, when Christ died upon the Cross than when God rested on the seventh day from all the works which he had created and made. It is this finished work which we describe as atonement. I would press that point. What is the meaning of the Cross? Why did the coming of Christ find its climax in the death of Christ? Why is there more of God's grace in Christ's Cross than of man's sin (which is huge enough), and more of God's grace in that Cross than in any of Christ's gracious words and mighty deeds? For I do not think that there can be any doubt that the New Testament and Christian experience both bring us to the same conclusion and certainty.

Aware as I am, as anyone must be, of the dangers of brevity and condensation at this point, I will try first to condense the answer and then to give some exposition of it. And the answer itself I would give in these words-Christ on the Cross accepts God's judgement upon man, and expresses God's judgement upon sin. He accepts. For such an acceptance was the one thing that a guilty world should offer to God, were it able to offer that. The only way in which the inhabitants of the world can begin to learn righteousness when God's judgements are broad is by accepting those judgements against themselves, and by bearing witness, "Righteous art thou, O Lord, who judgest." If a guilty world could expiate its own offences and make itself fit to receive the divine forgiveness it would be by bowing its head under the divine judgements, and letting God have his way with it. And he who was made one with his brethren in their nature was made one with his brethren in their sin. He was made sin-he the Holy One in whom the Father was for ever well-pleased-made one with sinners in that most awful of all identifications. He spared not himself so that he might help us to uttermost. Everything fell on him, disappointment, apparent failure, cowardice, treachery, torture, death. Everything seemed to fall away from him, even the light of his Father's countenance. He had been a sinner, what more was there for him to expect and receive from men and God? What bitterer cup to drink? "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God." That was his way in the world, his way to the end. He did that will, while he endured all that it brought upon him not arbitrarily, not vindictively, not as though that will ever did or could stand in any sort of hostile relationship to him. Such an idea, could anyone hold it, would be moral insanity. Yet God's controversy with a sinful world could not cease because his Only Son had stepped within the borders of the world, nor could the Son be isolated from the incessant reaction of the divine holiness expressing itself in judgement upon the world. But what the Son did was a new thing, and what the Father beheld was a new thing, the whole-hearted acceptance of judgement in willing sacrifice and in the blood outpoured for the forgiveness of those sins whose burden he took. And so the chastisement of our peace was upon him. He did for us what we never could have done; but it was a work of no private interest or restricted range. For he is greater than the world, as its Redeemer and not only as its Creator, and as he accepts God's judgements upon the world so he creates the world afresh to God and as the Head of the new humanity binds all men by a closer tie to himself.

But there is more even than this. In the Cross of Christ judgement is not only accepted but delivered. Christ works against sin even while he puts himself within the power of the judgement which it inevitably brings. His death is the condemnation of sin. The judgment which he accepts from God because of sin is at the same time God's final judgement upon sin. The Cross is that bruising of the head of the serpent from which there is no recovery. The adequate confession of god's holiness is the shaming of sin and the breaking of its power. That old idea of the devil outreaching himself in the death of Christ and so compassing his own destruction is in substance, whatever it be in form, much more than a piece of curious mythology. It bears witness to the triumphant side of the Cross, to that counter-destructiveness which out-matches the destructiveness of sin. If sin is ever really judged, it is thereby, in its root and in its final issues, rendered impotent. All such judgement is the judgement of God. In a world or moral realities and values there is and can be no such thing as self-acting judgement which is not at the same time the judgement of God.

And so the cloud of sin is lifted off the world. The old passes away: it is atoned and reconciled, and the new order takes its place. Reconciliation without atonement would not do justice to God, and so not to man. Atonement stands for that linking of sin with judgement, which is the penal consequence of sin. There is no disparagement of God's free forgiveness here. Who would dare to say that God has ever failed to forgive freely one who truly repented? But the forgiveness of sins is part of the moral world-order, and not the whole of it. It works individually, and God's moral relationship to the world is more than, and indeed different from, a set of particular individual relationships. Those continue in process of completion, and sin and forgiveness go to their unmaking and remaking. It is against the background of a reconciled world that the appeal to the individual goes forth. God has in Christ reconciled the world to himself, and so "Be ye reconciled with God." That is the true Christian order, and the only one which does full justice to the Cross in the whole economy of Christian thought and life.

III

But if all this is ascribed to the Cross, where is the special triumph of the Resurrection? Is it not left rather as an epilogue than as a relevant part of Christ's great work? Let me quote you an old thought of Mr. H.G. Wells, and not at all one of his happiest ones, that we may see at least what we have to avoid:

"When U think of the Resurrection I am always reminded of the 'happy endings' that editors and actor managers are accustomed to impose upon essentially tragic novels and plays. . ."

Wherever he got that thought he did not get it from the New Testament. The New Testament knows nothing whatever about an essentially tragic story which is converted into something else for the benefit of a number of third parties. And where the writer is, from the point of view of the New Testament, utterly at fault is that while the Resurrection reminds him of an ending, it is in that original literature quite regularly acclaimed as a beginning. It is not the end of anything at all. It is the first manifestation of the new order which has been brought into existence by Jesus Christ. He is its creator, and it is first manifested through the manifestation of him. Nor is the Resurrection a reversal of a tragedy; it, with the Ascension that follows, is the crowning of a victory. The fact is that in the Gospels there is a straight line through to the Cross and the Resurrection and beyond. You can see that in the way our Lord spoke of the things that were to befall him; there is no sharp distinction made between the passion and the rising again. We suffer more than a little from unreal dislocations in our theology and even in our practical religion. The Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection go together; that made up one living, concrete whole, and as a whole offer themselves to Christian belief and experience. Nevertheless, I would say this. I believe that our theology of recent years has suffered some real harm through a lack of emphasis on the fact of the Resurrection. For that is a fact which we ought not to ignore in our interpretation of the Gospel records as a whole, while the whole of our Christian profession is illuminated when it is consciously linked with him whose priesthood stands, as the writer to the Hebrews puts it, in the power of an indissoluble life.

We live in no easy world. It has its gifts and joys, but also much that seems to frustrate the one and to overshadow the other. The adjustment to it of those who are counted most fortunate has neither mark of perfection nor promise of permanency. Nor in itself does it move forward to moral victory. But to the Christian believer that is but the outside of the matter. He knows that the real order is the redeemed order of the new creation which the Holy Father established in his Son and has destined for eternity. All that truly belongs to it abides for ever. Sorrows and disappointments and losses may fall on those who share in it; nor are they, because they have a part in its holiness, thereby escaped from all sin. We may think of is as the Church; we may think of it as the Kingdom. But always it is the restored Garden and Paradise regained, and the Tree of Life which stands at its centre and round which it grows is the Tree of judgement and salvation, the Cross of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

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