The centre of everything

To bring sin home, and grace home, the Holy must be brought home. but that again can be done, on the scale of the Church and the world, only by replacing [re-placing,] the cross at the centre of Christian faith and life, as an atonement not indeed to outraged dignity, nor to talionic [eye for an eye] justice, but to this holy love. The centrality of the cross belongs to it only as a holy and atoning cross. Only if Christ atoned for the world did he culminate in the cross, and do the great thing there. and it is as an atonement that the Church has kept the cross at its spiritual centre. This is still the moral problem of the Church in relation to society, to keep the gospel of the cross at the centre. The form, indeed, of the Church’s moral problem will always depend on the social conditions of the hour; but the substance of it is always the same. It is practical. It is to place the moral centre of society upon the moral centre of the soul, [not the individual soul, but the soul of everything], upon the moral centre of the moral universe. And what is that but to place the conscience of society on Calvary?  

From The Cruciality of the Cross, by P T Forsyth, page 24.