They proclaimed an interpretation of Calvary that made Christ’s death the expiation of man’s sin and the reconciliation of an offended Deity; in McLeod Campbell in Scotland and Horace Bushnell in New England, the Atonement was restated, in forms that did not revolt men’s consciences, as the vicarious penitence of the one sensitive Conscience which creates a new moral world, or as the unveiling of the suffering heart of God, who bears His children’s sins, as Jesus bore His brethren’s transgressions on the cross.  They were insisting that the Bible was throughout the Word of God, and that the commands to slaughter Israel’s enemies attributed to Him, and the prayers for vengeance uttered by vindictive psalmists, were true revelations of His mind; and Humanitarianism refused to worship in the heavens a character less good than it was trying to produce in men on earth.  These men of sensitive conscience did for our generation what the Greek philosophers of the Fifth Century B.C. did for theirs—­they made the thought of God moral:  “God is never in any way unrighteous—­He is perfect righteousness; and he of us who is the most righteous is most like Him” (Plato, Theaet. 176c).

From this movement of thought our chief gains have been: 

(1) A view of God as good as the best of men; and that means a God as good as Jesus of Nazareth.  Older theologians talked much of God’s decrees; we speak oftener of His character.

(2) The emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus and of our ability and duty to become like Him.  Spurred by Romanticism’s interest in imaginatively reconstructing history, many Lives of Christ have been written; and it is no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known and understood at present than He has been since the days of the evangelists.

A third quarry is the Physical Sciences.  As its blocks were taken out most Christians were convinced that they could never be employed for the temple of faith.  They seemed fitted to express the creed of materialism, not of the Spirit.  Science was interested in finding the beginnings of things; its greatest book during the century bore the title, The Origin of Species; and the lowly forms in which religion and human life itself appeared at their start seemed to degrade them.  Law was found dominant everywhere; and this was felt to do away with the possibility of prayer and miracle, even of a personal God.  Its investigations into nature exposed a world of plunder and prey, where, as Mill put it, all the things for which men are hanged or imprisoned are everyday performances.  The scientific view of the world differed totally from that which was in the minds of devout people, and with that which was in the minds of the writers of the Bible.  A large part of the last century witnessed a constant warfare between theologians and naturalists, with many attempted reconciliations.  Today thinking people see that the battle was due to mistakes on both sides;