that for which Christian institutions stand. We may illustrate with that
which he says concerning Christ's vicarious sacrifice. Substitution
cannot take place in the moral world. Ethical salvation could not be
conferred through such a substitution, even if this could take place.
Still, the conception of the vicarious suffering of Christ may be taken
as a symbolical expression of the idea that in the pain of
self-discipline, of obedience and patience, the new man in us suffers,
as it were vicariously, for the old. The atonement is a continual
ethical process in the heart of the religious man. It is a grave defect
of Kant's religious philosophy, that it was so absolutely
individualistic. Had he realised more deeply than he did the social
character of religion and the meaning of these doctrines, not alone as
between man and God, but as between man and man, he surely would have
drawn nearer to that interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement
which has come more and more to prevail. This is the solution which
finds in the atonement of Christ the last and most glorious example of a
universal law of human life and history. That law is that no redemptive
good for men is ever secured without the suffering and sacrifice of
those who seek to confer that good upon their fellows. Kant was disposed
to regard the traditional forms of Christian doctrine, not as the old
rationalism had done, as impositions of a priesthood or inherently
absurd. He sought to divest them indeed of that which was speculatively
untrue, though he saw in them only symbols of the great moral truths
which lie at the heart of religion. The historical spirit of the next
fifty years was to teach men a very different way of dealing with these
same doctrines.

* * * * *

Kant had said that the primary condition, fundamental not merely to