In beginning the consideration of this important subject, we would, first of all, clearly define what is meant by the Atonement. It is a word made up of three distinct syllables, at-one-ment--the latter part of the word being formed from the Latin mens, the mind, and, consequently, the word signifies at one mind. This doctrine takes into consideration that God and man--owing to man's having fallen from the state in which God created him, and intended him to live and advance--have become of two minds. Man departed from communion with God's goodness and wisdom, and sank into a state of evil and falsehood, which, in the Scriptures, is meant by death. "To be carnally minded," the Apostle says, "is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace" (Romans 8:6). This state of things commenced with the fall, and increased with each transgression as men continued to fall, because they continued to sin.

There was no possibility of bringing these two, God and man, who had become of two minds, into communion, so as to make them of one mind again, except by the work of our Lord Jesus Christ in "reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19). God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." This reconciliation is the Atonement, and the doctrine upon the subject is the doctrine of Atonement, or at-one-ment, or agreement, or reconciliation.

The doctrine of the Atonement, as we have said before, is the doctrine which turns our attention to that state and period when man, disobeying his Maker, incurred the penalty attached to his transgression, which says, "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:17). Then some have imagined that God became angry and indisposed to make man happy any longer because he had become disobedient. But the view that we conceive is taught in the Sacred Scriptures--in harmony with the three grand points upon which we have dwelt--is that although man suffered loss of light, loss of happiness, loss of power for good, loss of communication with God, and loss of that spiritual-mindedness which is called life, and sank into sin and thence into sorrow, God still continued the same. Man changed, but God did not change, because he is unchangeable. He followed man with his care, with his kindness, with his messengers, with his Word, with his teaching, with angels and prophets, and at length he himself became as a man upon the earth, under the name of Jesus Christ, in order that he might save man from sin and the unhappiness which invariably attends sin.