It is probably true that all our current explanations of the work of Christ in Redemption have in them too large an element of metaphor and simile.  Yet Christian people are reluctant to discard any one of them; and their reluctance is intelligible.  There is a value in the old association, which is found by new experience.  Every one of these old similes will contribute to our realization of the work of Christ, in so far as it is a record of experience of Christ, verified in one generation after another.  We shall make the best use of them, when we are no longer intimidated by the terminology, but go at once to what is meant—­to the facts.

We come still closer to the facts in the less metaphorical terms of the New Testament.  For example, there is the New Covenant.  The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews went back to a great phrase in Jeremiah, and by his emphasis on it he helped to give its name to the whole New Testament—­“I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (Heb. 8:8-12; Jer. 31:31-34).  Using this passage, he brings out that there is a new relation, a new union, between God and man in Jesus.  He speaks of Jesus as a mediator bringing man and God together (Heb. 8:6)—­language far plainer to us than the terminology of sacrifice, which he employed rather to bring home the work of Jesus with feeling and passion to those who had no other vocabulary, than to impose upon Christian thinkers a scheme of things which he clearly saw to be exhausted.  Then there is Paul’s great conception of Reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18-20).  Half the difficulties connected with the word “Atonement” disappear, when we grasp that the word in Greek means primarily reconciliation.  As Paul uses the noun and the verb, it is very plain what he means—­God is in Christ trying to reconcile the world to himself.  These attempts to express Christ’s work in plain words take us back to the great central Christian experience—­to the great initial discovery that the discord of man’s making between God and man has been removed by God’s overtures in Christ; that the obstacles which man has felt to his approach to God—­in the unclean hands and the unclean lips—­have been taken away; and that with a heart, such as the human heart is, a man may yet come to God in Jesus, because of Jesus, through Jesus.

The historical character of Christian life and thought is surely evidence that Jesus Christ has accomplished something real; and when we get a better hold of that, the problem of his person should be more within our reach.  The splendid phrase of Paul—­“Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1)—­or that of 1 Peter:  “In whom ye rejoice ... with joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Pet. 1:8)—­gives us the keynote.  The gaiety of the Early Church in its union with Jesus Christ rings through the New Testament and the Christian fathers from Hermas to Augustine.  The Church has come