Let us once more try to get our thoughts Theocentric as Jesus’ are, and our problems become simpler, or at least fewer.  God’s generosity in forgiveness, God’s love, he emphasizes again and again.  Will a man take Jesus at his word, and commit himself to God?  That is the question.  Once he will venture on this step, what pictures Jesus draws us of what happens!  The son is home again; the bankruptcy, the hideous solitude, the life among animals, bestial, dirty and empty, and haunted with memories—­all those things are past, when once the Father’s arms are round his neck, and his kiss on his cheek.  He is no more “alienated from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18; Col. 1:21), “without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12), an “enemy of God” (Rom. 5:10); he was lost and is found, and the Father himself, Jesus says, cries:  “Let us be merry” ("Euphranthomen").  If we hesitate about it, Jesus calls us once more to “think like God,” and tells us other stories, with incredible joy in them—­“joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.”  We must go back to his central conception of God, if we are to realize what he means by salvation.  St. Augustine (Conf., viii. 3) brings out the value of these parables, by reminding us how much more we care for a thing that has been ours, when we have lost it and found it again.  The shepherd has a new link with his sheep lost and found again, a new story of it, a shared experience; it is more his than ever.  And Jesus implies that when a man is saved, he is God’s again, and more God’s own than ever before; and God is glad at heart.  As for the man; a new power comes into his heart, and a new joy; and with God’s help, in a new spirit of sunshine, he sets about mending the past in a new spirit and with a new motive—­for love’s sake now.  If the fruit of the past is to be seen, as it constantly is, in the lives of others, he throws himself with the more energy into God’s work, and when the Good Shepherd goes seeking the lost, he goes with him.  Christian history bears witness, in every year of it, to what salvation means, in Jesus’ sense.  Punishment, consequences, crippled resources—­no, he does not ask to escape them now; all as God pleases; these are not the things that matter.  Life is all to be boundless love and gratitude and trust; and by and by the new man wakes up to find sin taken away, its consequences undone, the lost faculties restored, and life a fuller and richer thing than ever it was before.

Somehow so, if we read the Gospels aright, does Jesus conceive of Salvation.  To achieve this for men is his purpose; and in order to do it, as we said before, his first step is to induce men to re-think God.  Something must be done to touch the heart and to move the will of men, effectively; and he must do it.