The Atonement and the Modern Mind

The Atonement and the Modern Mind is a religious book. The Death of Christ: its place and interpretation in the New Testament. It was no part of his intention in that study to ask or to answer all the questions raised by New Testament teaching on the subject ; but, partly from reviews of The Death of Christ, and still more from a considerable private correspondence to which the book gave rise, he became convinced that something further should be attempted to commend the truth to the mind and conscience of the time. The difficulties and misunderstandings connected with it spring, as far as they can be considered intellectual, mainly from two sources. Either the mind is preoccupied with a conception of the world which, whether men are conscious of it or not, forecloses all the questions which are raised by any doctrine of atonement, and makes them unmeaning ; or it labours under some misconception as to what the New Testament actually teaches. Broadly speaking, the first of these conditions is considered in the first two chapters, and the second in the last. The title — The Atonement and the Modern Mitid — might seem to promise a treatise, or even an elaborate system of theology ; but though it would cover a work of vastly larger scope than the present, it is not nappropriate to any attempt, however humble, to help the mind in which we all live and move to reach a sympathetic comprehension of the central truth in the Christian religion.