to his “Credo”.  But, if the illustrations are not too simple, swimming and bicycling offer parallels.  A man will never understand how water holds up a human body, as long as he stays on dry land.  In practical things, the venture comes first; and it is hard to see how a man is to understand Christ without a personal experience of him.  All parents know how much better bachelors and maiden sisters understand children than they do; but as soon as these great authorities have children of their own, the position is altered a little.

The change that Jesus definitely operates in men, they have described in various ways—­rebirth, salvation, a new heart, and so forth.  What they have always emphasized in Jesus Christ, is that they find he changes their outlook and develops new instincts in them, and that in one way and another he saves from sin; and they have been men who have learnt and adopted Jesus’ own estimate of sin.  When, then, we remember that, with his serious view of sin, he undertook man’s redemption from it; when we add to this some real reflection upon how much he has already done, as plain matter of history, to “take away the sin of the world,” we surely have something to go upon in our attempt to determine who he is.  The question will rise, Have Christians overstated their experience, or even misunderstood it?  Has forgiveness been, in fact, achieved—­or salvation from sin?  Can sin be put away at all?  What will the evidence for this be?  I do not know what the evidence could be, except the new life of peace with God, and all the sunshine and blessing that go with it.  This new life is at all events all the evidence available; and how much it means is very difficult to estimate without some personal experience.

Here again the great theories of Redemption will help us to recover the experience they are to explain; and once more we may note that they are not the work of small minds or trivial natures, however badly they have been echoed.  Substitution implies at any rate some serious confession of guilt before God, some strong sense of a great indebtedness to Christ.  The theory of Sacrifice implies the need of reunion with God.  Robertson Smith, in his “Early Religion of the Semites” brings out that the essence of ancient sacrifice was that the tribe, the sacrificial beast and the god were all of one blood; the god was supposed to be alienated; the sacrifice was offered by the party to the quarrel who was seeking reconciliation, namely, the tribe.  When we look at the New Testament, we find that the emphasis always lies on God seeking reconciliation with man (cf. 2 Cor. 5:19).  The theory of ransom—­a most moving term in a world of slavery—­implies the need of new freedom for the mind, for the heart and the whole nature, from the tyranny of sin.  All these are similes; and tremendous structures of theory have been built on every one of them—­and for some of these structures, simile, or, in plainer language, analogy, is not a sufficient foundation.