Thus we have—“made a curse for us”—“bare our sins”—“hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”—“made to be sin for us”—“offered to bear the sins of many”—“borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”—“wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities”—“tasted death for every man.” The whole Gospel is a texture, thus of vicarious conceptions, in which Christ is represented, in one way or another, as coming into our place, substituted in our stead, bearing our burdens, answering for us, and standing in a kind of suffering sponsorship for the race.

Now the word vicarious is chosen to represent, and gather up into itself all these varieties of expression. It is the same word, in the root, as the word vice in vicegerent, viceroy, vicar, vicar-general, vice-president, and the like. It is a word that carries always a face of substitution, indicating that one person comes in place, somehow, of another. Thus a vice-president is one who is to act in certain contingencies, as and for the president; a viceroy, for the king. The ecclesiastical vicar too, was a vicar as being sent to act for the monastic body, whose duties were laid as a charge upon him; and the pope is called the vicar of Christ, in the same way, as being authorized to fill Christ’s place. Any person acts vicariously, in this view, just so far as he comes in place of another. The commercial agent, the trustee, the attorney, are examples of vicarious action at common law.

Then if we speak of “sacrifice,” any person acts in a way of “vicarious sacrifice,” not when he burns upon an altar in some other’s place, but when he makes loss for him, even as he would make loss for himself, in the offering of a sacrifice for his sin. The expression is a figure, representing that the party making such sacrifice for another, comes into burden, pain, weariness, or even to the yielding up of life for his sake. The word “vicarious” does not say all, nor the word “sacrifice,” but the two together make out the true figure of Christ and his Gospel.

In this sense it is that Christianity or the Christian salvation is a vicarious sacrifice. It does not mean What vicarious sacrifice does not mean. simply that Christ puts himself into the case of man as a helper; one man helps another without any vicarious relationship implied or supposed. Neither does it mean that Christ undertakes for man in a way of influence; one man tries to influence another, without coming at all into his place. Neither does the vicarious sacrifice imply that he simply comes under common liabilities with us, as when every citizen suffers for the wrongs and general misconduct and consequent misgovernment of the community to which he belongs. Nor that he simply comes into the track of those penal retributions which outrun the wrongs they chastise, passing over upon the innocent, as the sins of fathers propagate their evils in the generations of their children coming after. The idea of Christ’s vicarious sacrifice is not matched by any of these lighter examples, though it has something in common with them all, and is therefore just so much likelier to be confounded with them by a lighter and really sophistical interpretation.

This now we shall find is the exact conception held of them at all points in the representations of Scripture. Some of them we are expressly taught, The Scripture shows them as in sacrifice. and we know not how many, are men, or the spirits of men, once living on earth; just as soundly real as they ever were, or as we ourselves are to day. And what is more they are only acting in character, precisely the same kind of character which they lived in as members of our race. They were men who bore great burdens of toil and suffering for the people of their times, and only learned to bear them in that manner for the people of all times. They found a cross in their virtue itself, even as Christ did, and all that we discover, in their ministries among us now, is that they have not forgotten their cross, or grown tired of it.

Thus we are expressly informed that the angels of the transfiguration are Moses and Elias; and they spake with him, most naturally, of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. By which we are to understand, not that they informed him of his crucifixion, for that he knew already, but they joined their feeling to his, and comforted him by their suffering sympathy, and the assured sympathy of the heavenly worlds. For which, too, they had been effectually trained by their own former trials and burdens of love on earth; Moses when he cried, sinking under such burdens, “I can not bear this people,” and Elias when he groaned underground in his cave, “I have been very jealous for the Lord of Hosts.” And who was that angel in John’s vision who said, “I am of thy brethren the prophets?” Was it Daniel who fasted in such broken plaints of sorrow for his people and country? or was it Jeremiah who cried, “O that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears?” All these, and other such holy men of old, had borne the cross of love in their time, and have not forgotten it, now that they are classed as angels. The ministries they fulfill are only their old ministries enlarged and made perfect. They lived in vicarious sacrifice before they went up, and the tragic joy they had in it draws them to it now.

Meantime we shall find that, in all which is told us of these angelic ministries, they are set in close analogy with the ministry of Christ himself. They are with Hagar by the fountain of the wilderness, as Christ with the woman at Jacob’s well. They are with Elijah the starving prophet in his sleep under the juniper tree, offering him their cake which they have baked upon the coals, even as Christ prepared his fire of coals, and the fish and the bread, that his hungry friends, on landing from their boats, might receive the token of his divine hospitality. They had such a feeling of tender sympathy for innocent children, coming forth into a rough world of sin and sorrow, that they took hold, every one, of some one child, or more than one, to become their unseen guardians—“Verily I say unto you their angels do always behold the face of my father”—even as the incarnate Lord himself clave to the children everywhere, and laid his hands and his dear blessing on them, saying—“of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”

In these specifications, or specified corrections, we have seen exactly what and how much is implied in the position, that we, as a race, in being restored to God, are to be perfected in the common, universal standard of goodness, and so to be established with Christ in the same way of sacrifice. We are thus prepared to open the Scriptures, and take their declarations in their true meaning. To them, accordingly, I now appeal; for it is a question resting on their simple authority, and no other.

I begin with the explicit declarations of Jesus himself. Thus, considering his own life as a ransom for sin, in the sacrifice to be made of it, he lays it Christ calls his followers to follow him. on his disciples to follow him and be, if they may, the ransom purchase of others, saying—“even as the Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

Again, citing his own cross, when, as yet, nobody understands what it means, least of all that God’s own love supports a cross of patience even from eternity, he says—“And he that taketh not up his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.” He does not mean by this that he is under a cross of abnegation, but only that he is going to be crucified for love’s sake. For love’s sake and work, therefore, they are to suffer with him, and bear a cross after him.

He calls us in the same way to bear his “yoke” and “learn of him” in doing it; for there is a way, as he will teach, to bear love’s burdens joyfully. They shall not be dry penances or heavy laden drudgeries, he testifies, but only such sacrifices of joy as love itself will assume for its objects—“the yoke, therefore, is easy and the burden light.”

His death is to be the crowning fact of his sacrifice, as all agree, and yet, he does not claim any exclusive right to die in this manner, but even lays it down as the universal test of love and discipleship—“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be my disciple.” Obedience unto death is to be a law for them as truly as for him.

He contrives furthermore a scene, at the close of his ministry, where the great main truth is to be acted and so made visible—I refer to the scene of washing the disciples’ feet—where his language, most carefully measured, and his action, most deliberately formal, quite exceed the supposition of many, that he is only teaching, in this way, tile single grace of humility. Neither, at this solemn, almost parting hour, can it be imagined, that he is laboring any such limited and subordinate matter. Rather is he condensing all the matter of his humiliated suffering life of sacrifice, into a single scene, or picture, or parabolic action, that he may impress it in a total application on his disciples. And so he says at the end—“Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am. If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done to you.” In one word, for that is what he means, “as I have stood back from no sacrifice, or shame, for you, at the low point of your sin, so are you to seek and serve, all pride apart, the perishing brothers of your race.”

Again, if we imagine something official in his mission of sacrifice, we find him consecrating his disciples, in his last prayer, to the same mission and in fact the same office—“As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified through [literally in or upon] the truth.” However true the doctrine for which this is commonly cited as a proof text, nothing could be farther from any thought of his on the present occasion, than to be discoursing on the truth as a means of sanctification. He obviously means to say—“And for their sakes I consecrate myself as an offering, that they also may be consecrated and offered, in like manner, in the service, or upon the dying testimony, of the truth. So he says, “for their sakes,” as if he had come into his sacrifice, in part, that he may put them in the same—so to send them into the world, even as he was sent into the world.

Now the impressive matter, in all these citations, which might be indefinitely extended, is that Christ expects his followers to be with him at the very point of his sacrifice; just where it is even commonly assumed that we can, of course, have no part with him, and where it would even be a kind of insufferable presumption for a mortal to think of it.

We pass now to a different and more interiorly related class of citations; in which it will be seen, that the whole economy itself of Christian virtue is based in the principle, and flavored by the spirit of vicarious. sacrifice.

Thus it will be noted in the very first discourse of Jesus, his sermon on the mount, that he can not even Sacrifice the economic law of discipleship. get through the beatitudes, and scarcely into them, without opening to view, and turning round for inspection, this grand first principle of devotement and unselfish love. Blessed are the poor in spirit, they that mourn, the meek, the merciful—these to him are the candidates for beatitude; and we see, from his subdued and tender manner, that he is thinking of his own sacrifice and beatitude. And thus it is that he goes directly on, to tell his friends how they will be reviled and persecuted by those whom they serve, and for his sake, adding—“Blessed are ye. Resist not evil. Smitten upon the right cheek turn the left. Robbed of your coat give up your cloak. Love your enemies, bless them which curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you; that (this is the argument, and how high does it reach) ye may be the children of your Father in heaven. Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” There has been much debate over this language. It means simply this; that we are to have one standard even with God, and that, a law of sacrifice and suffering patience—the same which Christ himself fulfills.

What the feeling of Christ is respecting the participation of his sacrifice by his followers, comes out even more strikingly, on a certain occasion, from the fact that he is drawn away to it, by his associations, without apparently any previous intention. He is led to speak of his death, and of the general principle that the good must die, in order to be fruitful—“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit.” And then, as if drawn along to think by degrees of others, and finally of none but others, he adds—“He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. If any man serve me let him follow me.” How close the relation between him and his disciples, when he calls them, in this manner, into his very death itself, and commands them to be with him, in all the sublime economy of sacrifice by which he is reconciling the world.

His apostles, accordingly, follow after, teaching, all, the same great law of sacrifice, and presenting a gospel packed with symbols of sacrifice in The apostles follow their Master. every part. This word sacrifice they apply to men as freely as to Christ himself; Paul exhorting, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice.” “Let no man seek his own.” “Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.” “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, took upon him the form of a servant, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross;” Peter, when he writes, “For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye take it patiently, but if, when ye do well, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. For even hereunto were ye called; because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that ye should follow his steps.” “But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are made partakers of Christ’s sufferings.” “If any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God on this behalf;” John, also, when he writes, “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”

In these and other like passages which might be cited, from Christ and his three apostles, it is very commonly not discovered, I admit, that any such thing as a vicarious element is included in the Christian virtue. Every such conception is excluded by the reverently meant, but most injuriously false and really irreverent assumption, that nothing vicarious, whether in spirit or mode of life, is possible to a merely human being. Christ takes this whole field, it is believed, to himself, let no sinning mortal intrude! And yet, when Mock sentiment. this vicarious meaning, or element is excluded from the passages referred to, they become passages of mock sentiment only; words that have a sound, but no deep, earnest meaning. Their real and truly magnificent import is, that it lies in the very scheme and economy of the gospel, to regenerate a Christly virtue in men, a character that bears the type of Gethsemane and the cross.

Again we discover a closer, in some respects even more convincing kind of evidence, in the testimony given by one of Christ’s disciples out of his own human consciousness; I speak of the apostle The Pauline consciousness. Paul. The same is discoverable in others, only in a manner less striking. In later times, for example in George Fox, the Christly consciousness is revealed in a manner almost equally sublime. Now Paul is but a man, and yet he is a man so Christed, or possessed by Christ, that the very sacrifice of Christ is consciously and even visibly in him. As regards mental suffering, it is not to be supposed, of course, that Paul had any sensibility capable of as intense feeling; or any love to mankind capable of being as heavily burdened, as Christ is seen to be in what is called his agony; but in respect of mere physical suffering, I see no reason to judge that Christ made a heavier sacrifice, in his three years’ ministry and death, than his servant did, in his long, laborious, always imperiled, persecuted life and martyrdom. So deep was he in the spirit of his Master, so heartily entered with him into the burdens of love. He can not even hide it from himself that he is in his Master’s sacrifice—“Always bearing about,” he says, “in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we, which live, are alway delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.” He dares even to conceive that his suffering life is somehow complementary to that of his Master— “Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh, for his body’s sake, which is the church. Under the heading—“as workers together with him,”2 Cor. vi. he goes on to catalogue, in almost a whole chapter, these Christly losses, works, and pains, that he is bearing with Christ and for his sake. Nor is it mere bodily hardship and peril that he undergoes; we find him, at times and according to his measure, in a kind of mental Gethsemane, for the burden of love, and care, and grief for others, which has come upon him; as when he writes—“I have great heaviness and continual sorrow of heart; for I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ, for my brethren, my kinsmen, according to the flesh.” There has been much debate over these words; but a soul that is really under Christ’s yoke, and bearing his burdens, will be deep enough in the struggle of vicarious sacrifice, to know what they mean. Furthermore, it is remarkable, that Paul has reached no such point of theologic scruple, that he can not freely apply to his own life just the same sacrificial terms that he applies to Christ himself” I am now ready to be offered.” “Yea, and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy and rejoice with you all.” He goes still farther, exhorting all Christians to be offered willingly in sacrifice like their Master—“And walk in love, as Christ, also hath loved us, and given himself for an offering and a sacrifice to God, for a sweet-smelling savor.”

This now is the true Christian consciousness, in all of the best and noblest human examples. The gospel of life takes hold of a man all selfish, a fiery and proud persecutor, and it so changes all his inward aims and feelings, that he lives no more for himself, but for others; encountering perils, pains, privations, indignities for his whole life long on their account; so burdened for them in feeling, at times, that he could even find relief in the imprecation that he might be accursed from Christ for their sake. So clearly is the Christian believer entered himself, as a matter of fact, into the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus. This is the new character it undertakes to beget in him, and the exact amount he has of Christian evidence is graduated by the amount of this new character found in his life.

I have given this large review of the Scripture citations on this subject, that it may be seen how freely, variously, constantly, they consent in the testimony, that Christianity begets, and, is to beget, in human character, the same kind of sacrifice that is found, or revealed in Christ. I have selected only a few of the passages that persist most undivertibly in this kind of testimony. It is not then by any speculation, or undue pressure on. words, that I gain this conclusion. Nothing but a theologic pressure, kept up for ages, has availed to empty the Scripture of a truth that is so plainly taught, under so great a multitude of forms, and is set even in the foreground of the Christian plan.

Arresting my argument here, I still can not close the chapter, without calling my reader’s attention to the immense loss Christianity has suffered, and is now suffering, in losing out the faith that Christ is to be really followed by his followers. There is little importance in The immense damage suffered here. these discussions, if they do not help the gospel to assert its true idea, and exert that practical power it has undertaken to exert on the world. And whatever hinders, or weakens that power, even though it take the name of Christian doctrine and is fairly meant as such, is about the greatest wrong that can be committed against both Christ and mankind. What then shall we think of any theologic doctrine or dictum, that makes a blank space at the very heart of the gospel, or which raises fences of obstruction, to keep men off from just that common standard of the heavenly virtue, in which all perfect minds are to meet; which breaks down the fact of community between Christ and his disciples; which says, this kind is for Christ, another for mankind; which gives him love in its genuine power, and gives them love in a sense so qualified, that all his most living and life-giving sacrifices would be stifled under it. The supreme art of the devil never invented a greater mischief to be done, or a theft more nearly amounting to the stealing of the cross itself, than the filching away thus, from the followers of Christ, the conviction that they are thoroughly to partake the sacrifice of their master. Such words I know sound harshly, but they are not harshly meant. I raise no accusation in them; for I do not, for a moment, imagine that perversity, or art, or any malign purpose has ever been concerned in the mischief referred to. I only use strong language to express my own strong convictions; taking this very deplorable matter simply as an example of the immense, and fearfully desolating wrong that may be done to God’s truth and the world, by t e well meant, but misguided, speculations and schemings of men, whose theories unwittingly reduce the gospel to their own measures. Having found a necessity that God’s justice should be satisfied by some given quantum of suffering, and that Christ, in his death, made the contribution for us of that suffering, and that in this fact is contained all that belongs to his vicarious sacrifice, what should they infer but that we, in following Christ, are excluded, of course, from any such kind of sacrifice? All which is done with the better feeling of reverence, that it puts the Saviour in a figure of merit so superlative!

The effect that follows is such as only can. It is as if the gift of the incarnation had been half taken back again. A wide hiatus still yawns Effects of the hiatus between us and Christ. between even the ideal of our virtue, and that of our Christ. Nor is it any thing to say, that whatever he does vicariously belongs to his office, and that we have no such office. It belongs, we have already seen, not to his office, but to his character; that is to his love, which is the spring of his character; the same, which is the root of all goodness in all good beings, drawing them as good to such as are evil, and putting them in a way of tender self-identification, that virtually assumes and bears the bad and shameful lot it compassionates. Without this vicarious property, love is not love. Pity there may be, philanthropic benevolence, esteem, approbation, admiration, but the vital distinction of love is wanting. It is very true that we are not to set ourselves up as Redeemers of the world. Our petty measures of quantity and character forbid such a thought; just as any feeble and low man would be only absurd, in attempting what is given to some most qualified and strongest man of his own species. Still any such feeble and low man is to be, and may truly be, in the same kind of love with one who is most qualified and strongest. Nay, if this latter has been suffering and painfully watching for him, it will even be a chief point of his benefit and the raising of his life, that he so loves the person of his benefactor as to suffer his suffering. And just so it is that Christ, in his suffering love—always a fact, and only a fact revealed in his agony and passion—gets never the just degree of power in our feeling, till we are able to love his love and suffer with him in his suffering. Here only it is that he touches us at the quick, and becomes the soul renewing power of God. Vicarious love in him answered by vicarious love in us, tiny and weak though it be, as an insect life fluttering responsively to the sun—this is the only footing of grace, in which Christ is truly received, and according to his glorious power. Hence, in no small degree, the amazing dullness of the gospel to men’s feeling, and even in men’s feeling after they seem to have believed—we wonder often how it is ourselves. It is because there is no common footing between them and their Lord; because, in his superlative merit and suffering, he takes a different plane, from which they are excluded. They are shut away, thus, from exactly what is most vital and most quickening in his passion. The cord of sympathy is cut, at just the point where it was to have the closest tension, and be most stringently effective.

Doubtless it will be said, in reply, that such kind of criticism is unjust. While it is very true that we exclude ourselves from any part with Christ in what is vicarious, do we not always insist that men are to follow Christ, to bear the cross, to deny themselves, to suffer wrong, to love and bless even their enemies? Undoubtedly, but how blurred, how sadly miscolored are all such teachings, when the huge exception we speak of is added. They are now to follow Christ in just that limited kind of sacrifice which he knew nothing of. They are to bear the cross for the discipline, and not for what love sees to be won by a cross. They are to deny themselves because it is good to put themselves under negation, or self-suppression—even as the monasteries kill out selfishness by the wearisome and dry torment of ascetic practices—not to deny themselves in love’s own suffering, but joyful and free ministry. They are to suffer wrong even as Christ did, only they are to do it in no such feeling as he did, when he bore the lot of transgression. They are to love and bless enemies, because it will school them in patience and humility, not as Christ bore enemies out of pure devotement to them; or they are to exercise themselves in acts of benevolence towards enemies, towards the impenitent, towards the heathen, in the name of love, when confessedly they are excluded from any such tender identification with their bad lot as Christ, for love’s sake, took upon him when he bore their sins.

And so it results that our discipleship, so called, is a discipleship fallen half way out of Christianity, even as our theology of the cross becomes a dry, stunted, half conception of it; reducing Christ to a mere book-account factor of compensation by suffering, and making nothing of him as the revelation of vicarious sacrifice in God; that which is the supreme fact and glory of his incarnate mission. Did we see this glory upon him, did we look upon him as sent into the world to beget us in the same character, and enter us into the same kind of life, how different our conceptions of his doctrine, how different the whole manner and power of our discipleship. The scheme, and scale, and meaning, of the gospel, as a grace related to our feeling and life, is no more the same. And the world, having such a grace installed in it, would begin, how soon, to glow, and burn, and tingle with new life in every part.

Why now this very remarkable devotion to the healing of bodies? Coming into the world, as we all agree, His object in the healing of bodies. for ends so intensely spiritual—to be a deliverer of souls, and to become the Head of a universal kingdom gathered in his own glorious likeness and beatitude—why does he strike directly into this low level of labor, and concern himself in this large degree, with the diseases and disabilities of men’s bodies?

It is a very common answer made to this question, that he does it from a wise consideration of the advantage he will gain by it, in men’s prejudices, or the power he will thus obtain over them, in the separate matter of their spiritual choices and affections. On the same principle, we, it will be urged, are to go directly down into the economic struggles and physical pains of men, ministering to their needs and the terrible woes of their vices, taking them, in that manner, at a wise advantage, and not shoving them away from us, by endeavoring to bolt in spiritual lessons upon them, without any care for their bodily wants and ailments.

There can be no doubt of this as far as we are concerned, in our own human charities. Neither is there any room to doubt, that Christ’s whole ministry and life change look, because of his healings, and the very systematic and tender care he has of men’s bodies. Omitting these, or conceiving these very practical mercies never to have been shown, his teachings would be only lectures, and the whole work of his ministry, comparatively speaking, flashy and thin. Every thing now is in a robust and rounded figure, just because these practical works in bodies keep away the look of theory and Targum, giving us a Saviour to worship and not a Rabbi to hear.

But that Christ really put himself to his works of healing for this purpose, we shall not be satisfied, after all, to believe. He has too much heart in His incarnation connects him with the fortunes of bodies. these works, to permit a thought that he is in them prudentially, or to gain some ulterior and remote advantage. No, there is a deeper reason. He is here as the incarnate Lord of the worlds, and he could not even be thought in that character, if, being flesh, he did not turn himself to all he meets in the flesh. And so much is there in this, that any one having deep enough insight to read such a matter beforehand, would say that if the Word is to be incarnate, then he will assuredly appear to bodies, minister to bodies, claim the kindship of bodies, by a tender sympathy for their pains and a healing touch upon their diseases. Being, in this manner, Son of Man, he is brought close to man, upon his human level. He has come to be with him in that level—touched with the feeling, not of his mental, or more respectable infirmities, but of those which are lowest and most loathsome. What could a fastidious Saviour do here? one who is too delicate and spiritual, to concern himself with the disagreeable and often revolting conditions of bodies?

Besides, he is here in God’s own love, and what shall that love grapple with, when it comes, but precisely that which is deepest in the consciousness of suffering?

In this manner it was, that the conversion of Paul began at the point of that piercing word—“I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest.” Penetrated and felled by that arrow of the divine love, his “exceedingly mad” feeling dies, and his resistance, from that moment, is gone.

3. There greatly needs to be, and therefore, in Christ, is given, a type of the new feeling and life to be restored. Abstract descriptions given of holiness or holy virtue, do not signify much to those who Stands for the exemplar. never knew them inwardly by their effects. To conceive a really divine character by specification, or receive it by inventory is, in fact, impossible. No language can give the specification, and no mind could take the meaning of it accurately, if it were given. Hence the necessity that we have some exposition that is practical and personal. We want no theologic definition of God’s perfections; but we want a friend, whom we can feel as a man, and whom it will be sufficiently accurate for us to accept and love. Let him come so nigh, if possible, let him be so deeply inserted into our lot and our feeling, that we can bury ourselves in him and the fortunes of his burdened life, and then it will be wonderful, if having God’s own type in his life, we do not catch the true impress from it in ourselves.

In these three points, we perceive, that the suffering life and death of Jesus are the appropriate and even necessary equipment of his doing force, in what he undertakes for character. Observe now what this doing includes, and in how many ways and forms it is set forth. Thus he quickens—“and The Scriptures make him a renewing power. you hath he quickened.” He gives life—“that he should give eternal life.” He liberates the bondage of souls—“If the Son shall make you free.” He new-creates—“new-created in Christ Jesus.” He begets—“hath begotten us again to a lively hope.” He raises from the state of spiritual death—“and hath raised us up together.” He converts—“turning away every one of you from his iniquities.” He is the captain, or bringer on, of salvation—“bringing many sons unto glory.” He reconciles, or changes to conformity of life with God—“to wit that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.” He redeems—“made unto us redemption.” In the same way he is called “the light of the world,” “the day-star,” “the truth,” “the water of life,” “the bread of life,” the mirror of God’s glory, before which “we are changed from glory to glory.” In short there is no end to the images that spring up, at every turn of the New Testament writings, to express the operative purpose and manner of Christ’s soul-renewing work-presenting it continually as the something he is doing upon us, or to revolutionize and restore our character. This would be more impressively shown, if we could pause on all these various expressions, such as I have briefly cited by catch words, and unfold them by a deliberate exposition of their meaning.

But instead of this, I will recall, in this manner, a single expression, or figure, as directly referred to him as any of the others, and commonly overlooked as having any such reference at all—the figure I mean of birth, or regeneration. It is even commonly taught that Christ is not immediately concerned in the change called regeneration, but only in the preparation of forgiveness for it, when the change is wrought by the Holy Spirit, in the office that belongs to him. What then signify such examples as these? “But as many as received him [Christ] to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe in his name; which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” [i. e. of God as in Christ.] Again—“Every one that doeth righteousness is born of him,” [Christ.] And again—“Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, [the Logos] that liveth and abideth forever.”

This matter of regeneration is referred also to the Holy Spirit, it is true; but not in any such exclusive sense that it is not referred with equal None the less a Regenerator that the Spirit is also. truth to Christ; for it is even declared to be the office of the Spirit to glorify Christ in the soul. Christ is a power to the soul before its thought, and by that which is given to thought in his person. The Spirit is a power back of thought, opening thought as a receptivity towards him, and, in that manner, setting the subject under the impression of Christ’s life, and death, and character. “He shall glorify me,” says the Saviour, “for he shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you.” In Paul’s view conversion is to be described accordingly as the inward discovery of Christ. “When it pleased God,” he says, “to reveal his Son in me,” giving that as the account of his conversion. Christ then is, or is to be, an operative power on men, in the sense that they are to be regenerated in holiness by him. In a remoter and equally true sense, they are regenerated by the Spirit; in a closer and more proximate sense by Christ, as the moral image and love of God, set forth to engage their love and renew them in character. The work required is no such work as can be summarily struck out, by the mere efficiency, or force-principle of God. It requires all there is of God, in the incarnate life of Jesus, in his feeling, in his Gethsemane, in his death; a brooding of the whole deific mercy, and truth, and patience, and holiness, over the inthrallment and death-like chill of the soul. Even as Paul testifies again—“But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.

Such is the kind of efficacy which the Scriptures attribute to Christ, and for this kind of efficacy in human character they conceive him to be sent into the world. And, by this kind of efficacy, too, we shall see that he The Christed consciousness in all disciples. is revealed in the consciousness of his disciples. It is not the account of their Christian experience, and of the gospel as related thereto, that Christ has done something before God’s throne, and wholly apart from all effect in them, to make their acceptance possible; and then that the Holy Spirit, by a divine efficiency in them, changes their hearts. No such theologic gospel of dry wood and hay is the gospel of the apostles. They find every thing, in their human nature, penetrated by the sense, and savor, and beauty, and glory of Christ. Their whole consciousness is a Christ-consciousness—every thing good and strong in them is Christ within. Worsted in all their struggles of will-work and self-regeneration, they still chant their liberty in Christ and say—“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free.” Their joy is to be consciously Christed, fully possessed by Christ; to have him dwell in them, and spread himself over and through all the senses and sentiments, and willings, and works of their life.

This is Paul, for example, a man transformed, all through, by Christ living in him; consciously weak and little and low in himself, and possible to be lifted only in the hope that, as Christ hath risen from the dead, he may also rise with him, to walk in newness of life. Not that he was captivated simply by his life. He was even more profoundly captivated by his death, and found, in fact, his deepest inspirations there; desiring ever to be with him in the fellowship of his sufferings, and to be made conformable to his mighty sacrifice in them. In that sacrifice it was that he most felt his working. That broke his heart, and there he took the saintly fire that burned so brightly in him. It is as if the Paul-soul were all wrapped in by the Christ-soul, and he only speaks aloud what he feels within, when he says—“Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

It is also a singular confirmation of this kind of evidence, that all living disciples of our own time give the same kind of testimony from their experience, This same view is virtually accepted by those who deny it. when, by their doctrine, they have no right to it. They have no such view, it may be, of Christ, as that he is sent to be a regenerative power on character; the lean kine of judicial satisfaction have devoured the good kine of God’s regenerative bounty, and yet they cling to Christ for a wonderful and blessed something still, which he puts in their feeling, and call him lovingly their life. Sometimes they look after a reason why they are so much bound up in him, and imagine that it is their sense of gratitude to Christ for the squaring of their account with God, by his sufferings; as if they could have him in so great endearment for what he has suffered before God, apart from all that he is and pleads before us. No, this working grace of Jesus goes before all gratitude, to beget us in a spirit of gratitude, when we have none; it is not the satisfaction of our debt, but it is the noble sympathy in which he draws himself to us, the agony of his concern for us, the lifting up of his cross, in which he proves his faithfulness even unto death—by these it is that he installs himself in so tender a devotion, in all believers’ hearts. Thus it is that he gets into their prayers, into their sense of liberty, into their good conscience, bathing them all over in the glorious confidence and bliss of his consciously participated life. They sigh after him with Thomas a Kempis, rest in him with Brainard, sing him as the mighty power with Wesley, even though they know him in their doctrine, only as a sacrifice before God’s justice.

Indeed it will be observed that all effective preachers of Christ under the penal satisfaction doctrine, quit their base in it instinctively, when they undertake the capture of the heart—falling, at once, into modes of appeal that make him God’s Regenerative Argument. They show how he loves the world, and testify “the love of Christ constraineth us.” They magnify the tenderness of his healing ministry. They picture the cross to human sensibility, as if they really believed that Christ was lifted up to draw men to himself. They can not sufficiently praise the beauty of his wonderful character. If they think of God’s wrath that could be assuaged only by his blood, no present feeling of consistency forbids their seeing God’s patience in him, and the sacrifice he will make for his enemies. So they preach him directly to men’s hearts, in all the most winning, and subduing, and tenderest things they can say of him; as if he were really incarnated in the world for that kind of use. Meantime they call it preaching Christ, only when they preach the satisfaction, and complain, it may be with real sadness, that now-a-days, there is so little preaching of Christ; understanding in particular, that kind of preaching. When alas! the poorest, most repelling thing done is precisely that; and so little of that is done, just because the poverty and repulsiveness of it are silently and irresistibly felt. In general harmony with these appeals to fact and living evidence, it becomes a considerable and sad part Reclamations of lost Scripture. of my duty, in this chapter, to reclaim the lost proof texts, which have been carried over to the side of the satisfaction theory, and away from their very obvious natural meaning. I do not charge it as a fraud, that so much of Scripture has been stolen away from its rightful use and import—every mistaken theory or doctrine of religion, which obtains long use, gradually and unconsciously, or by fixed necessity, converts the Scripture symbols to itself and makes them its proselytes. Take for example the texts that follow.

“Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.”John i. 29. It is not said that he taketh away the punishments of the world, but “the sins”—just that which was signified by the sacrifices of the altar and the scapegoat sent away into the wilderness. The lamb was not punished, neither was the goat. The very thing signified was the removal, or deportation of the sin. “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten son into the world, that we might live through him.”1 John iv. 9. “That we might live” gets to mean that we might have our penal liability released and nothing more. A previous verse in the epistle—“For the Life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness and show unto you that Eternal Life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us”—raises no barrier against a construction so frigid, even though it tells us expressly that Christ was incarnated to be the manifested Life, the same that was with the Father and is to beget, or be, eternal life in us.

“Who his own self bare our sins, in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sin, might live unto righteousness; by whose stripes ye were healed.”1 Peter ii. 24. This passage is used very much as if the “bearing of the sins,” and the “stripes” spoken of, were the whole matter; whereupon the judicial substitution theory has nothing to do but to assign its own construction and take the text into its own particular service. Meantime the very bearing of sins has its end, or aim, plainly declared and is itself to be qualified by its aim—it is that we may “live unto righteousness;” being, as we see, an appeal of suffering for us, to work a change inwardly in our life, and beget us anew in righteousness. And so of the “stripes;” they are not penal stripes, inflicted for God’s satisfaction, but such kind of suffering as works a divine healing in us—“By whose stripes ye were healed.”

“For Christ also hath suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us unto God.”1 Peter iii. 18. As if this suffering, the just for the unjust, must, of course, mean a suffering of penalty for the unjust, when it is even declared, as the object of the suffering ministry and mission—“that he might bring us unto God.”

“Who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world.”Gal. i. 4. It is not from God’s justice, not from any future wrath, that Christ will deliver, when he gives himself for our sins—no compensation to God’s law is even thought of—but he gives himself to deliver us from a state of evil now present; from corrupt custom, the law of this world, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.

“Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ.”Gal. iii. 13-14. Probably the expression “being made a curse for us,” does imply that he somehow comes under the retributive consequences of our sin—in what manner will hereafter be explained—but that will not justify the conclusion that Christ’s chief errand is to satisfy God’s justice, and so to prepare the forgiveness of sin. Is not the object plainly declared, viz., “that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles?” Is it then the blessing of Abraham, that God is satisfied in him, and forgiveness of sins obtained by him? or is it rather that the Gentiles might come as near to God as Abraham was, and be so wrought in as to be also friends of God with him?’

Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold all things are become new. And all things are of God who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ.2 Cor. v. 17-18. How much do we hear of the reconciliation of God by Christ! and yet the very word is a word of transformation wholly inapplicable to God; and what is more, it is here even formally applied to us—“hath reconciled us.” Besides the “all things” which are said to come of God, in this reconciliation, are precisely the new things before comprehended in the becoming “a new creature.” It would seem to be even impossible to get these words into the use they have so commonly been made to serve. And then how much more, when it follows immediately as a whole description or summation of the gospel itself—“to wit, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.” It is one thing to reconcile the world, and a very different to reconcile God.

“That he might be a merciful and faithful high priest, in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered, being tempted, he is able to succor them that are tempted.”Heb. 17-18. Here we have the priestly figure, and the “reconciliation” is a different word, derived from the atonement service of the altar; and it is a reconciliation not of man, but “for sins;” all which appears to favor, in a certain degree, the satisfaction theory which it is continually cited to support. And yet the object specified in the words that follow turns back, how plainly, all such constructions, showing, at the same time, how easy it is to miss the genuine import of this kind of figure, by taking it too closely and with too little range of liberty. For, in that he himself hath suffered, in his great trial and sacrifice, says our apostle, he has brought us succor in our trial, so that he, by that succor, is truly our priest, as he undertook to be, and becomes the soul-help in his sacrifice that takes away our sin. Every thing turns after all, in these high figures of the altar, and is meant to turn, on the nearness into which he is brought, and the dear sympathy proved by his sacrifice.

I will not go on to cite other texts that have shared the same hard fortune, but will only say, in general, that a numerous and very important class, which represent the lustral figures of the Old Testament, and speak of Christ in one way or another as having “washed,” or “purged,” or “cleansed,” or “sprinkled,” the soul, are systematically converted from that natural and easy signification, to denote a clearance before the law, now satisfied; when there is, in fact, no cleansing wrought in the defilement that was created by disobedience to it. Whereas it is the very purpose of these lustral transactions, or rites—that for which they were specially prepared of old—first, by a kind of implicit force, or power of religious association, to push the mind of a crude age forward into a cleanness it could not think; and then, afterwards, to be a symbol under Christ of that spiritual cleansing otherwise difficult to be expressed. Thus when the argument is, “For if the blood of bulls and of goats and the ashes of an heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God”Heb. ix, 13, 14.—what can be more plain than that the cleansing here spoken of is no mere change in the soul’s legal possibilities, but a lustration of “the conscience” itself, and a turning of the soul inwardly, away from sin, to the service and obedience of God? So of all the like figures—they have no reference whatever to the matter of a judicial satisfaction, but simply to sanctification of character.

If now all these reclamations of Scripture were made, there would be very little left to give a complexion of authority to any other conclusion, than that Christ is here for what he can do in the restoration of character. To prove a negative so wide is difficult, and therefore only do I withhold from saying that nothing will be left. Still, if I am able to show, in the next chapter, that he is represented as having come, first of all, and above all things beside, to be a power on character, which power he became in the vicarious suffering of his life and death, it will amount, as nearly as possible to the same thing.

Beginning thus at the conception Christ has of himself we should naturally look to find expectations going before, and impressions of witnesses coming after, holding a perceptible agreement The ancient Scriptures have this conception of the Messiah. with him. Thus we have a picture given of his coming in the stately Messianic Psalm—“He shall come down, like rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water the earth. In his days shall the righteous flourish, and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth. He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the rivers to the ends of the earth.” Being thus like rain, or like showers, he will quicken men’s hearts by absorption, as it were, of his fertilizing properties, and so take “dominion” from within.

So the famous vicarious prophecy of Isaiah is a prophecy, in fact, of power. He shall heal by the “stripes” of his patience. He shall even be a great conqueror—not by his prowess, but by his suffering death. “Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death.” To the same general effect is the prophet’s word, when he writes—“Who is this that cometh from Edom, and with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel traveling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness mighty to save.” There is a mixture of suffering and power, crowding each the other, as it were, all through the picture. His apparel is “red” with stains of blood, and yet it is “glorious apparel.” He “treads the wine-press alone,” yet “travels in the greatness of his strength.” Finding “none to help or uphold,” he is none the less “mighty to save.” And what is the solution but that power is to be the fruit of his suffering?

It is generally understood that Ezekiel’s rill, flowing out from under the threshhold of the temple, widening into a river in its flow, and pouring on through desert regions, “healing the fishes,” and causing “every thing to live, where it cometh,” fringing also its border all the way with trees whose “fruit shall be for meat and leaf for medicine,” is a picture of that originally despised but ever increasing power, by which Christ will renovate and restore the world. It will be that kind of power which is at once silent and sovereign, moving by no shock, but only as health, when it creeps in after, and along the subtle paths of disease.

With these more ancient prophecies and expectations the contemporaneous impressions of John correspond. He announces a great king at hand, who shall be so transcendent in dignity, that he himself shall not be worthy even to untie his sandals—“He must increase, but I must decrease.” Some of the imagery he employs is energetic and almost violent; but when the Great Expected appears, what but this is the greeting he offers—“Behold the Lamb of God!”

In this manner we are prepared, when we come to the apostles and first preachers after Christ, to hear them break into expression, by some word more adequate and thought more definite. And therefore we are not surprised, when they put down their testimony, in the word power. And this we shall find is their impression of the gospel and of Christ as the His apostles coming after have the same. sum of it. They have other, more circuitous and tropical expressions, but when they come directly to the matter as it is, they say Power—“declared to be the Son of God with power”—“to us who are saved the power of God”—“the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.”

Of these three several testimonies, the first is connected with the fact of the resurrection. “Declared to be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection from the dead;” with which another expression corresponds; viz., “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection.” The impression is not that there is any such renewing power in Christ’s resurrection itself, but that in the fact of his resurrection comes out the real height of his person, and that so the moral wonder of his sacrifice is there, for the first time, discovered. Before in his death he was but a man, a defeated and prostrate man, covered with unutterable ignominy; but when he rises, the fact of some transcendent nature is discovered in him, and a great revision follows in the impressions had of his person. He becomes, at once, a wholly different being, whose life and death take, both, a wholly different meaning. In respect of the flesh, he was the seed of David; now he is the Son of God with power, according to the higher divine Spirit working in his person.

In the second passage cited, the preaching of the cross is the subject, and any kind of preaching, which undertakes to catch men by fine words, and tricks of philosophic subtilty, is deprecated, because it makes “the preaching of the cross of none effect.” All genuine effect, the apostle is showing, comes of the power of the cross itself. This to us who are saved is even the power of God; or, as he says again shortly after, unable to get away from the ruling thought of his ministry—“Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Again, in the third passage, the apostle is giving his deliberate account of the gospel, that which constitutes the essential meaning and operative value of the gift—“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” Therefore he was always sighing—“that the power of Christ may rest on me.” I know not how it is, but this word power appears to pass for nothing in common use, and the passage is apparently understood as if it read only—“the way of God unto salvation”—the understanding had of it being, that Christ has purchased forgiveness for us and made salvation possible and nothing more. Whereas it was the particular intent of the apostle to give his deliberate summation of the gospel in this very word power, and to magnify Christ in it, as being the new-creating life of God in souls—in that sense and no other a salvation. And if any one still doubts, whether he has any so stringent and decisive meaning in this word, imagining that he does not think, after all, of asserting any thing in that precise way, but only throws in the word for declamation’s sake, as a word of emphasis, or enhancement, it will be found that he uses the word again in a connection that shows him to be thinking specially of the moral efficacy of Christ, and also with a predicate of degree that fixes the meaning. For God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness [saying, “Let there be light”] hath shined [with a like moral sovereignty] in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” [as if vessels of power in ourselves.] If he means, after all, to only magnify the gospel in a declamatory way by this word power, why does he fasten our attention down upon the degree of its efficacy by this predicate of “excellency?”

Thus far we appeal to Paul. Peter also expresses the same conception of the gospel, only less vigorously, when he says—“According as his divine power hath given us all things pertaining to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him [Christ] that hath called us by glory and virtue;” that is, by the manifested glory and excellence of his life. The English translation, “called us to glory and virtue” it is generally agreed is mistaken.

John again expresses the same thing in many ways, as when he says—“the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin;” or again when he says—“Ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins.” To cleanse us from all sin, to take it away, by force of what is manifested in him, is the same thing as to be the moral power which masters the soul’s inward disorder, and renews it in holiness of life.

I will not go on to multiply citations, but, lest it should seem that we are obliged to glean for them, I will simply say that this moral power of God in Christ bears The apostles make use of all most violent figures when they speak of it. such immense sway, in the feeling of all the New Testament writers, that they are continually seizing on this or that image, or fact of physical power in the world, to give their impression. Even the most forcefully violent and terrible images are laid hold of—any thing to represent the all-subduing, all- transforming, inwardly renewing, outwardly dominating, efficacy of Christ and the kingdom of God, revealed in his Messiahship.

They conceive him as a wondrously detergent power in souls, “washing and making white,” “cleansing from sin,” “purging the conscience.”

They conceive him going through the sick, disordered mind, even as some healing medicine, or miracle, goes through the hidden maladies of bodies, to search out and expel disease.

They call him a power of leaven, brought into the world to work; heaving in the general mass and willful stupor of it, till all is leavened.

They call him the day-star, because he heralds the mind’s day and the expulsion of its dreadful night; and the light, because the instant flash of that element strikes farthest into God’s physical empire, and changes most the face of it; and the sun, because the exhaustless heat of that central fire in the sky, has power to keep the planet in habitable order, and even to vivify the otherwise dead matter of it in processes of growth.

They call him Life itself, because the quickening spell of it, among the world’s dead atoms, carpets the ground with beauty and fills the air itself with hovering motion.

They conceive him as a fire that is already kindled, in the rubbish of the world’s prescriptive falsities and wrongs, whose burning nothing can stop.

His kingdom and the resistless moral power of his gospel, they resemble to lightning, darting from east to west, and flashing across all boundaries.

His word they compare to the swing of an earthquake, “shaking not the earth only but also heaven”—shaking down, that is, all stoutest fabrics of error and prescriptive wrong, and leaving nothing to stand, but that immortal truth and good that can not be shaken.The passage referred to (Heb. xii, 36-7) is commonly interpreted as relating to the second coming of Christ, and perhaps it is partly so used by the apostle, but the promise cited from Haggai (ii, 6) plainly relates to his first coming, in which view the things shaken are the old religion; those which remain and can not be shaken, the gospel.

They describe him in his cross as an immense, world-compelling attraction, moving such control in the once dead feelings and convictions of sin as will “draw all men unto him,” even as the whirlpool draws all drifting objects and even passing ships into its vortex.

He is even to be a chariot of thunder in the clouds—“coming in the clouds of heaven in power and great glory”—by that oriental sign of royal majesty, showing that the kingdom of God is come with power.

It is, in short, as if some new, great power had broken, or was breaking into the world, in the life and cross of Jesus, which all the known causations of the land, and sea, and air, and sky, can but feebly represent. The difficulty appears to be that no force-figures can be forcible enough, to express the wondrously divine, all-renovating, all-revolutionizing, moral power of God in the gospel of his Son.

I have only to add, as a considerable argument for the moral view of Christ and his sacrifice, in distinction The day of his coming coincides. from all others, that the time of his coming coincides with this only. Had he come, having it for his principal object to satisfy God’s justice and be substituted, in that manner, for the release of transgression, there appears to be no reason why he should have delayed his coming for so many ages. If the effect was to be on God, God was just as capable, at the very first, of feeling the worth of his sacrifice, as at any time afterward; and, if this was to be the salvation, why should the salvation be delayed? But if lie came to be the moral power of God on men, nothing is so difficult as the due development of any such moral power; because the capacity, or necessary receptivity for it, has itself to be prepared. Thus, if Christ had come to the monster age before the flood, when raw force was every thing, and moral greatness nothing, his death and passion, all the significance of his suffering and sacrifice, would have been lost, and probably would not even have been preserved in the remembrance of history. The world was too coarse, and too deep in the force-principle of violence, to apprehend a visitation so thoughtful and deep in the merit of character. There was no room or receptivity, as yet, for Christ in the world. A long drawn scheme of economy is previously needed, to prepare that receptivity; a drill of outward sacrifice and ceremony, a providential milling of captivities, deliverances, wars, plagues, and other public judgments; commemorated in hymns, interpreted and set home by the preaching of a prophet ministry; till finally there is a culture of mind, or of moral perception produced, that is sufficiently advanced, to receive the meaning of Christ in his sacrifice, and allow him to get an accepted place in the moral impressions of mankind. Conceiving, in this manner, that he came to be the moral power of God on character, there is good and sufficient reason for his delay. He came as soon as he could, or, as the Scripture says, “in the fullness of time;” came in fact, at the very earliest moment, when it was possible to get hold of history.

Indeed, so very slow is the world in getting ready for the due impression of what lies in moral power, that only a very partial opening to it is prepared even now. The world is still too coarse, too deep in sense and the force-principle, to feel, in any but a very small degree, the moral power of God in the Christian history. Slowly and sluggishly this higher sense is unfolding, but there is a perceptible advance, and we may anticipate the day, when there will be a sense opened wide enough for Christ, in his true power, to enter; thus to fill, and new-create in good, all souls that live. Then, and not till then, will it be known how grand a fact the moral power of God in the person of his Son may be.

This result had been mitigated, somewhat, by his works and word and Providence, before the coming of Christ. But the tendency still was to carry back all the more genial impressions thus unfolded, and merge them in the attribute-power, by which, as an unseen, infinite being, we had before contrived to think and to Christ incarnated to obtain moral power. measure his character. Till, finally, in the fullness of time, he is constrained to institute a new movement on the world, in the incarnation of his Son. The undertaking is to obtain, through him, and the facts and processes of his life, a new kind of power; viz., moral power; the same that is obtained by human conduct under human methods. It will be divine power still, only it will not be attribute power. That is the power of his idea. This new power is to be the power cumulative, gained by Him among men, as truly as they gain it with each other. Only it will turn out, in the end, to be the grandest, closest to feeling, most impressive, most soul-renovating, and spiritually sublime power that was ever obtained in this or any other world.

Hence that peculiar and continually recurring set of expressions in the New Testament which appear, in one form or another, to attribute so much to the name of Jesus. For if we can rightly distinguish between a name and a fame, if we can exclude the airy fictions of repute and coveted applause, conceiving that the name obtained by Jesus signifies the condensed reality of all that he is, no power will be so genuine, or vital, or so like a sun-rising on transgression.

How it is with him, in this law before government, we shall find by a simple reference to ourselves, and Conception of the law absolute. the methods of our own moral nature; for we exist in His image. I think of space, for example, and this eternal, necessary idea of space goes with me, compelling me to see all outward extensions, or distances in it. I think of cause, and this necessary idea compels me, or qualifies me, to see all goings on of change, under terms of causation. These ideas are, in fact, forms of the mind; forms to which it adverts in all thinking, and without which it could not think at all. The same is true of the ideas of time, and number, and quantity. Being in the form of time, I am put on thinking when; of number, on thinking how many; of quantity on thinking how much. So I think of truth, in general idea, and having that form of thought developed, I begin to think what particular things are true. In the same way is developed the grand, all-regulative, Moral Idea of Right; which to simply think, is to be put in everlasting obligation. For it is the distinction of this idea, that it is the Monarch Principle of the soul. It puts all moral natures under an immediate, indefeasible bond of sovereignty. They become moral natures because they are set before this idea of right. Animals think no such thought, and are never set before this idea. They probably have the ideas of space, and cause, and number, but right is of a higher range; else if they could think it, they would be moral natures in common with us.

Here then, as being simply existent with a moral nature, and without being commanded, or before, we are put in a state of fixed obligation. It matters not whether we know of a God; for, if we do, we are none the more truly under law after his commandment comes than before-though we may be more effectively under it. The simple idea of right, if we accept the authority of it, and set ourselves to it for a total homage and conformity, will be a complete regulation for the life—for every thought, and act, and disposition—and will fashion us in a completely harmonic character and state of righteousness. It only can not do this after we have fallen away from it, and been thrown out of spiritual order, by the shock of our disobedience. Then it will even require a salvation to restore us.

Let us not forget, or overlook, at this point, the distinction between the eternal, one idea which contains all law, as regards the principle—being Applications doubtful, the law, never. a simple, universal, always present, never doubtful idea—and those questions of right or wrong, so called, which relate to particular actions. Here we have abundance of doubt, and debate, and perplexed casuistry, bringing us here to one conclusion, here to another, and sometimes to none at all. To settle these questions we make appeal to custom, to Scripture usage and precept, to what is useful, to what is beautiful, setting our critical judgments at work, and our memory, and our tastes, and mental associations. But these subordinate and particular questions of duty are only executory, it will be observed, as regards the general principle, and it matters little if we mistake, or differ in these, doing it honestly, provided only we are trying to enthrone the Monarch Principle and put every thing in allegiance under it. Meantime, in this law of laws, we all agree without a shade of difference. It is the same to one human creature, in one part of the world, as to any and every other, in parts most remote; the same to the Gentile as to the Jew, to the heathen as to the Christian. Nay, it is the same to created souls in all orders, as to God uncreated, and the same to God as to them.

There is then a law before government, which is common to all moral natures, and in which all moral distinctions have their root. It is, in fact, the law of the conscience; for though it is common to speak of the conscience as a throne of government inserted, by the creative and constructive purpose of God, it does not appear to be true that God ever contrived a conscience, in any other sense than that he has appointed a moral nature for us, in distinction from one that is not. The conscience of God is only the fact itself of his moral nature, and our conscience is but the fact of our kinship with him, in the central idea that contains the mold and law of his perfections. If we use the term conscience to cover the ground, not merely of that central idea, but of all particular actions under it, the conscience would, in that case, be a really infallible oracle for infinite questions in us, apart from all helps of judgment and discriminations of reason; only it is plain as need be, and can not well escape our discovery, that we certainly have no such oracle in us; for if we have it, whence come so many unsolved questions and debates of duty?

On this point of a law before government, and a conscience that enthrones it, we require no better exposition than that which is- given by the apostle, when he declares,Rom. ii, 12-15. that as many as commit sin without law, [instituted law] shall also perish without the same; and that only such as sin against instituted law will be judged by it; for, though they have it not, they are yet a law [uninstituted] to themselves, their conscience bearing witness before all commandment, and apart from all administrative enforcement. What he means to say is, that their moral nature itself answers, with inevitable conviction, to the eternal, necessary principle of right; placing them, so far, in a condition where they are a law to themselves, and would be forever, if no rule, or judgment, or judge from without, should appear, to authenticate, or vindicate, the obligation they feel.

Let us now conceive it possible, that God and all moral natures exist, for a time, under this ideal, necessary law, or law of laws, having no The Law Absolute supposed to rule for a time by itself. other; that government is not yet undertaken, God having not come forth as yet, to be the maintainer of this law, or to assume it as the charge of his voluntary administration. The moral natures, in this view, simply exist upon a common footing of necessary obligation—bound, all alike and together, as a matter of inmost conviction, to do and be only right. I do not say, it will be observed, that the law moral had ever any such precedence of time, or any but a precedence of order, before the fact of government assumed. Still it can do no harm to raise the supposition of such precedence in time, if we are careful enough to use it only as a means of distinguishing certain points, in the great subject we have in discussion, that could not be as well distinguished in any other way.

Having thus all moral natures upon this common footing of ideal, necessary law, and no personal authority, Obedience makes complete society. or will-force embarked, as yet, in the purpose to govern for it and be its vindicator, one of two things will be the result; either that the grand impersonal law will be accepted and obeyed, or else that it will not. God, we know, will receive it in everlasting honor; for exactly that he has done from eternity; and his being thus united to the right, fixedly and totally, is his righteousness—the sum, in that manner, of all his perfections. If created minds and orders cleave also to right, in the same way, they will be instated also in the same righteousness, and so in the same perfections with God. All moral beings, united thus in their homages to right, will be united also in love; love to each other, and love to the law, by which they are set in society and everlasting chime together, as in ways of mutual right-doing. Indeed the necessary and absolute law of right, thus accepted, is very nearly answered by the relational law of love; so that any realm of being, compacted in right, will as certainly be unified in love, doing and suffering, each for each, just what the most self-immolating, dearest love requires. Even God, in such right-doing, will bend himself to any most expensive, lowest burden of sympathy, for the benefit and well-being of such as are humblest in the order of their dignity. The humblest in order, too, will as certainly magnify and worship the Infinite Right-Doer, because there is proportion in their sense of right-inspiring an homage that looks up in the lowliest, as truly as a way of sacrifice that looks down in the highest. In this manner the perfect, universal righteousness will organize a state of everlasting order and good fellowship, whose ideal we name, in the words, Complete Society.

But there is another alternative; viz., that some one or many races of moral natures, in the state of impersonal law we have described, will throw Consequences if any disobey. off the law, and break loose in a condition of unsubjection; and here it becomes a very important matter, as regards the great questions we have now in hand, to note the consequences that will follow, and the new kinds of work and office that will be undertaken.

First of all, the internal state of the disobedient race, or races of moral natures, will be immensely changed. As certainly as they are broken loose from right, they will be chafing in the bitter consciousness of wrong, doing wrong to each other, feeling wrong, contriving wrong, writhing in the pains of wrong. Their whole internal state will be under a nimbus of confusion. For though nothing is contrived in them and the world to have a retributive reaction, their simply being moral natures will compel them to suffer a tremendous shock of recoil. There will be a terrible disjunction of order in their parts and powers; so that what they call their soul will be scarcely better than a wrangle of contrarieties, or cage of growling antipathies. As to any self-restoration that will be effective, it is quite impossible. A flock of birds let fly could much less easily be gathered back from all the remotest points of heaven. For the internal confusion is so complex and wild—so nearly infinite-that no power of thought can conceive it, or how it should be set in the recomposition needed; no power of self-exertion accomplish the recomposition, if it were conceived. The whole moral nature, in short, is so far abused and suffers a recoil so dreadful, in the rejection of its law, that consciousness itself becomes a mordant element, with no power left to master the self-corrosive sublimation of its wrong. Not that in this fall, or self-undoing, it suffers any thing which is called justice, under the political analogies. We do not know that it suffers any thing in the scale of desert, which is the common notion of justice; we only know that it receives a shock of necessary pain, or disorder, from the violation of an immutable idea, that belongs inherently to its moral nature. If necessity does not know how to think, or any way get up a scale of justice, then it is quasi justice, and we probably can not say more—only the necessity of it is too absolute to be avoided. We may even dare to say, with all profoundest reverence to God, that if He, the All-Holy, were to cast off Right—the law before government—in the case supposed, his wrong would be an earthquake shock, strong enough to shiver the integrity of his mold, and leave him a wreck of eternal incapacity, as respects both wholeness of being and a recovered harmony in good. This, not because there is any ordinance of justice above him, but that such is right, and such his moral nature, as related thereto—both self-existent—that, without regard to justice, the crystal must so break, by its own necessary law, and so He must irrecoverably fall. Thus, too, any race of finite moral creatures, falling irrecoverably in the same way, would be not less fearfully undone; not by justice, but only by the inevitable recoil of their offended moral nature.

Secondly, as another sad consequence, the law so much loved by all the obedient natures, including God, is diminished in its honor, desecrated, trampled, and mocked, and their minds are filled with deepest concern for it. It is as if the very law of their own beatitude were dying under its wounds. Asserting itself unhelped, and vindicated by no force but its own, it seems to be even going down, or vanishing away.

These two painful and disastrous consequences having arrived under the law before government; viz., the fall of multitudes beyond any power of God will institute government and redemption together. self-redemption; and the law itself trampled in dishonor; is there any thing that God will certainly undertake? His infinite righteousness contains the answer; for by that he is ever lastingly fastened, in profoundest homage, to the law, and about as certainly to the well-being of all moral natures related, with Himself, to the law. He will therefore regard himself as elected, by his own transcendent powers of will and working, to assume the charge of a Ruler, and will institute government; contriving by what assertions of authority, supported by what measures, he may reinforce the impersonal law, and repair its broken sway. To this end he will organize a complete frame of statutes, and penalties, and motivities general, for the will, such as He, the Infinite Lord, and Head Power of the worlds, may count worthy of his wisdom and universal sovereignty—the same combination, we may well enough suppose, that we have to admire in his word and Providential order now. In this manner, or in some other closely related, we shall see that He has taken the government upon his shoulder.

Nor is it a matter very widely different, that he will undertake the redemption, or restoration, of the fallen race, or races; for he can hardly do for the law broken down all that he would, without recovering the disobedient to their full homage and allegiance. Besides, they are fellow-natures with Himself, and the righteous love he bears them will unite him to their fallen state, in acts of tenderest sacrifice. And so the instituted government and the redeeming sacrifice will begin together, at the same date and point, and work together, for very nearly the same purpose. In the largest and most proper view, the instituted government will include redemption; for, beginning at the point of transgression, already broken loose, mere legislative and judicial action, plainly enough, can not bring in the desired state of obedience. Legislation wants redemption for its coadjutor, and only through the divine sacrifice, thus ministered, can it ever hope to consummate the proposed obedience. Redemption also wants legislation, to back its tender appeals of sacrifice, by the stern rigors of law. Both together will compose the state of complete government. We are brought out thus by our supposition, upon the conception of a redeeming work, undertaken, or that would be undertaken, for and before the ideal law of right, and apart from any conditions of government, previously instituted, or violated. Precisely how, or by what plan, the restoring agency will operate, we, of course, do not know. Doubtless it will involve the grand, principal fact, that God is in vicarious sacrifice; and, if that is best, he will go forward in just the same ways of sacrifice, and the same revelations of love, that he has made in the suffering life and death of Christ. For since he is grounded, as respects all his perfections, in the eternal law of right now cloven down, he will love the principle itself, and love its adherents, and love, for the law’s sake, as well as for their own, all the transgressors and enemies who may haply be recovered to it. And so we shall have on foot a grand work of redemptive sacrifice, that has no reference whatever to claims of justice previously incurred. The problem can not, therefore, be to satisfy, or pacify justice, but simply to recompose in the violated law the shattered, broken souls, who have thrown down both themselves and it, by their disobedience.

A beginning will probably be made much like that of the Christian history, in the establishment of sacrifices, the sending of prophets, the strong discipline of Providential judgments, the long drilling and milling times of observances, defeats, and captivities. And then, when the fullness of time is come, we may look for an act of incarnation, provided ally thing can be so accomplished; for the love of God will bring him down to the fallen, and a life in the flesh among them, just as it has done in Christ. He will come in the very spirit of the law rejected, and they will see, in him, how good and beautiful it is, and what burdens of suffering it will put upon him to bear for their benefit. I am not authorized to say that, in the peculiar case supposed, he will do just every thing which he has done by Christ and his cross, I only say that he will shrink from no sacrifice, or sorrow, or cross, that he may regain the erring ones to their law, and have them reestablished in everlasting righteousness. And there appears to be no reason for doubting, that he will go. through a historic chapter of vicarious sacrifice, closely correspondent with that which is transacted in Christ.

Thus far onward we are brought, in the lead of a supposition. Let me not be understood as resting any thing on the deductions made, beyond what the certain fact of a law before government will justify. There is really no such precedence in time, but only a precedence of rational order. Instituted government is, to all created subjects of God, as old as ideal principle, and they never had a moment under this, before coming under the other. My whole object in tracing this supposed precedence of time, has been simply to get certain distinctions of idea unfolded, that will serve the future uses of my argument. The supposition is a fiction, the distinctions are profoundly real and important—allowing us to get a footing for the subject, where it will be less oppressively dominated, by the merely political, or judicial analogies.

The distinctions of idea referred to are such as these; which any one will see to be legitimated Conceptions legitimated. in the exposition now traced—legitimated, that is, as conceptions, though not established as existing facts.

1. That there might be a scheme of cross, and sacrifice, and restoring power, every way like that which is executed in Christ, which has nothing to do with justice proper; being related only to that quasi justice which is the blind effect, in moral natures, of a violation of their necessary law.

2. That instituted law is no necessary precondition of redemption.

3. That the righteousness of God is not by any means identical with his justice, but includes all the perfections of God in his relation to the law before government, and never requires him to execute justice under political analogies, save as it first requires him to institute an administrative government in the same.

We can hardly be satisfied, I think, with this. Indeed we could not approve ourselves in putting on a wrong doer the evil he deserves to suffer, without finding some reason for it besides his desert. And yet we could not be satisfied, in reducing God’s justice to a mere consideration of public ends, or reasons of beneficence. We feel that there is, and ought to be something more fiery and fateful in his justice than that. What then is the conception that meets our feeling, and what, exactly, do we mean, when we say that justice and desert are ideas that go thus fitly together?

We mean, first of all, that there is a deep wrath-principle in God, as in all moral natures, that puts him down upon wrong, and girds him in The wrath-principle of justice no law to God. avenging majesty for the infliction of suffering upon wrong. Just as we speak of our felt indignations, and tell how we are made to burn against the person, or even the life of the wrong doer, so God has his heavier indignations, and burns with his more consuming fire. But this combustion of right anger, this wrath-impulse so fearfully moved, is no law to God certainly, requiring him to execute just what will exhaust the passion. It is only that girding power of justice that puts him on the work of redress, and that armature of strength upon his feeling, that enables him to inflict pain without shrinking. And then, at just this point, comes in another function, equally necessary; viz., wisdom, counsel, administrative reason, which directs the aim, tempers the degree, and regulates the measures and times, of the pain. Thus it is that we ourselves dispense and graduate justice; and then, standing at the hither point of our vindicative passion, we say that we have done upon the wrong doer just what he deserves. Standing, farther off, at the point of counsel, and considering how we have graduated the measure of his punishment, we should say, that we have done upon him, only what the welfare of society, and the due sanctification of law requires.

There is, then, no such thing in God, or any other being, as a kind of justice which goes by the law of desert, and ceases to be justice when ill desert is not exactly matched by suffering. God’s ends, and objects, and public reasons, have as much to do with his justice as the wrath-principle has, which arms and impels his justice. It is no breach of justice therefore, and no real fault of proceeding, that God tempers justice by mercy, and mercy by justice, whenever he can most advance the solid interests of character and society by so doing. There is no principle which any human being can state, or even think, that obliges him, on pain of losing character, to do by the disobedient exactly as they deserve. The rule, taken as a measure, has no moral signification. God therefore need not give Himself up to wrath, in order to be just; he can have the right of counsel still. Perfect liberty is left him to do by the wrong doer better than he deserves, and yet without any fault of justice—better that is, considering his own condemning judgment of him, and the man’s condemning judgment of himself, than he might well do, or even ought to do, if the sublime interests of his government should require.

2. It is another misconception, just now stated in the introduction of this chapter, that we assume the essential priority of law and justice, as related Another misconception as respects the priority of justice. to mercy; as if it were another dispensation having a right, in its own precedence, to be undisturbed and qualified by no different kind of proceeding. Was not every thing put upon the footing of law, and since we have broken through the law, how can God bring us into justification without overturning the law Himself? Will He mock his law, because we have mocked it? and will he give it up, because we have turned away from it? What remains then for Him, but to do justice upon us? How can he justify, in this view, unless there be some satisfaction, or compensation of justice provided?

There does not after all appear to be any solid merit in this kind of argument. It matters not whether we say that we have two dispensations, or Justice and mercy co-ordinate and co-operative. one; in some sense we have two, viz., justice and mercy; but it does not appear that there is any priority of time in one as related to the other, or that both are not introduced to work together for one common result. Then, whether we understand the mythic tree, or test-tree of the garden, to be the law before government, or to be some instituted precept in which it is presented more specifically, the sin of the sin is, in either case, the casting off of the former; that which carries with it a revolution of character down to its deepest principle. And the “death” that followed was the moral dying that must come with such a revolution—no death of God’s infliction, but a declarative death, connected with the fall out of principle. Then follows what is called the promise, and what is called the curse-the promise first and the curse afterward—that as the new hope, this as the new state of wrath and penal discipline. And both together, having one and the same general aim, are inaugurated, as the right and left hand, so to speak, of God’s instituted government. They are to have a properly joint action; one to work by enforcement, and the other by attraction, or moral inspiration; both having it as their end or office, to restore and establish the everlasting, impersonal law. God never expected and never undertook, calling that his government, to bring his subjects on and consummate his purposes regarding them, by statutes and penalties of justice. It might as well be imagined that he undertook to govern his heavens by the centrifugal force, and added the centripetal afterward, to bring the flying bodies back.

There is a certain antagonism, it is true, in the modes of action observed by the law-power of God’s statutes and the justifying power of Christ; even as there is between the two great forces of nature just referred to. But the antagonism is formal, not real; partial, not absolute. They are to be co-factors in the operation of a government that undertakes, for its object, the reconciliation of fallen men to God—a state of beatific worship and complete society. And to this end one is set to enforce obligation, stir the conscience, intimidate and set back the impetuosity of sin, so to waken right conviction and prepare a felt necessity of the other; and then the sensibility taken hold of and impressed, softened and melted, in one word drawn by that other, is to win a choice, raise that choice into a love, in that love become a new revelation, so a salvation. And so much is there in this twofold action that without some such grip of law and justice on the soul, no grace-power of God could ever win it back; and without the grace-power felt in its blessed attractions, no mere law-and-justice power could beget any thing closer to God than a compelled obedience, or fear that hath torment. There was in fact an antecedent necessity of their conjoined working, that, in the due qualifying of each other, they may complement what would otherwise be a fault in each.

Thus by the retributive principle running through all our natural and Providential experience, the self-sacrificing, vicarious, love-principle is How the two co-operate in redemption itself. so tempered as to make our time of grace a thoroughly rugged and stern holiday; while by the love-principle, gently interfused, all the retributions of our experience are held back and qualified, to be only fomentations of thoughtfulness and holy conviction. Indeed we may go farther and have it as a fact discovered, that these partially contesting agencies only press us yet more effectively, because they seem to be in a race for us with each other. The retributive principle is propagating disorder, misrule, blindness, obduracy of feeling in our sin, closing up, as it were, the gates of receptivity; so that shortly nothing shall be left for love and sacrifice to work upon—at which point, as far as we can see, justice gets entire possession of us and has our everlasting future to itself. Or reversing the example, the mercy-principle in Christ’s sacrifice gets advantage of the retributive, winning the soul to itself and begetting it anew in God’s liberty—when of course the justice-claim falls off to be a claim gone by forever. In this manner they both work together, striving, as it were, to outstrip each other, and exert, in that way, only the more stringent motive pressure on the life and character. Let no one then imagine that they are in a state of real contrariety, because they are so far antagonistic in their action. The celestial analogies already referred to show that order and static equilibrium are, in fact, the resultant of contending forces. Were either one of these to stop its endeavor, the condition of wreck would be forthcoming speedily. And just so nature, all through, is packed with analogies that correspond. Heat and cold, light and darkness, land and sea, central fires and weights of rock above, are all doing battle round us in the same way, and the result is an accruing order and stability that represents eternal beneficence.

How far then is it conceived by God, in the appointments of justice and mercy, that they really infringe upon each other; how far that the rugged and rough power of justice is like to be injured and borne down by its tender competitor, enough to want some compensation for its injuries? The real fact is, that God’s instituted law really commands through love and sacrifice; for no created mind could possibly be thrust straight through into good, by penal enforcements and motivities. It never is in good, till it has cast out fear and gone forever clear of it, to love the right, or the holy, for its own sake. Law has nothing to do with such a result save initially. It even supposes a captivating power working with it, to bring out the result, and consummate the love in which the law’s intentions are fulfilled.

Or suppose that in the race of contestation just now described, it should happen, as one or the other gets exclusive and final dominion of the soul, that the excluded party suffers a real infringement. Then, by the supposition, justice may have taken away the chances and infringed the rights of mercy, as truly as mercy can have violated the rights of justice; when if compensations are to be made, the mercy-impulse of God’s feeling has as good a right to compensation from his justice, as that from his mercy. For his mercy is as old as his justice, and began as soon, and is a character certainly not less dear or sacred. Justice, too, may as fitly groan for the pacification of mercy, as mercy for the pacification of justice.

On this point of infringement and rightful compensation, I have looked intently for some declaration of Scripture, and am only surprised that I do not find what I should have expected to meet in many examples; for nothing is plainer than the distinctness of manner and How the Scriptures hold this antagonism. office, in what are called justice and mercy. One acts retributively, the other compassionately; one by laws of natural consequence, the other by supernatural intervention; one goes by desert, the other by self-sacrifice transcending desert; one condemns just where the other undertakes to even justify; so that, factors though they be in forwarding a common result, we should not be surprised to find them set against each other in Scripture terms, and described as reconcilable, only in the fact that one pays tribute to the other. Still I know not where it is done. God nowhere signifies that he has given up the world to the prior right of justice, and that mercy shall come in, only as she pays a gate-fee for the right of entrance.This complete silence of the Scripture, concerning a compensation, or necessary satisfaction paid to justice, has probably been noticed by many. I have only fallen upon a single instance, in the Lectures of Mr. Veysie. Admitting the commonly received Scripture ideas of reconciliation and propitiation, he considers all that is said of satisfaction, as their necessary ground, to be originated wholly by the speculations or constructive theories, of men; and he says—“Now the sacred writers nowhere, as far as I know, expressly assert any satisfaction at all as having been effected by the death of Christ.—Veysie’s Bampton Lectures.—I. A reference is frequently made to two passages of Scripture as implying one of them, and the other affirming, a repugnance between justice and mercy, which only God’s wisdom in his Son can sufficiently reconcile. Thus, when it is declared, in sovereign promise, that “mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other,”Ps. lxxxv. 10. the supposition is that by some wondrous compensative grace of God, as in Christ, these incompatibles are made to coalesce. Whereas nothing is meant, as will be seen by a reference to the Psalm itself, but that in the public restoration promised, goodness and fidelity, and right and concord, shall return as a benignant constellation of graces, to bless and adorn the new society. Again it is repeated, how often, that “mercy rejoiceth against judgment;”Jas. ii. 13. as if that were even the key principle of the gospel plan. It very well might be, only taking the two to be merely as distinct in their action, as was just now represented. But then it would be just as true, that judgment rejoiceth against mercy. The passage however has nothing to do with either of these two modes of contrariety. By the “mercy” it means simply the man who does mercy, and that he rejoiceth against judgment, or over it, in the sense that his heart is too strong, his confidence too immovable, to be shaken by any sort of condemnation—“he shall have judgment without mercy, that hath showed no mercy, and mercy [when it is faithfully done] rejoiceth against judgment.” “Boldness in the day of judgment” is a promise of the same thing.

It would be difficult, on the other hand, to represent all the figures of community and close conjunction held by these words in the Scripture. Sometimes it is conceived that God’s mercy has its opportunity in his justice, and not any obstacle at all. Even as the great Hebrew poet, conscious of no dereliction from orthodoxy, testifies, “Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy; for thou renderest to every man according to his work.”Ps. lxii. 12. Sometimes the two co-factors are strung together, as pearls that are alike, on the same string—“I am the Lord which exercise loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth;”Jer. ix. 24.. “The weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith;”Math. xxiii. 23. “Knowing therefore the goodness and severity of God.”Rom. xi. 22. They sometimes, even cross over into the province one of the other, and change offices; “the terror of the Lord persuades,”2 Cor v. 11. even as “the cross lifted up draws;”John xii. 32. and “the law slays”Rom. vii. 11. even as Christ rejected “reproves of sin.”John xvi. 8. Again they both alike support the appeal of warning—“behold the judge standeth at the door!”Jas. v. 9. “behold the bridegroom cometh!”Math. xxv. 6. The rule of judgment is also declared to be the same in both, according to even the same chapter—“For as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law;”Rom. ii. 12. “In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel.”Rom. ii. 16. The judge, too, is to be at once the eternal Lawgiver and, in some equally true sense, to be Christ himself. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”Gen. xviii. 25. “Hath given him authority also to execute judgment because he is the Son of man.”John v. 27.

We shall find also, both in the old Testament and the New, declarations made of God and of his Son that represent both in the same general combination The old and new dispensations, how related. of attribute; asserting themselves, at once, both in all the rigors of justice, and all the tender concern of a forgiving sacrifice and sympathy. Thus we have from the Old—“The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty, [that is the incorrigible.]Ex. xxxiv. 6-7. And again, answering exactly to this we have from the New—“Tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doeth evil, [continueth incorrigible in it] of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile. But glory, honor, and peace, to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.”Rom. ii. 9. And what have we, in fact, but a complete summing up of all such combinations in these two words—“the wrath of the Lamb?”

Does any one ask what, in this view, becomes of the superior grace, or graciousness of the New Testament? I see no room for a superior grace, that requires a superior and better kind of God. The two dispensations are not two, in the sense of being opposite, but only in the sense of being one of them more full and complete than the other at once could be. The New Testament is only a new edition of the Old, greatly enlarged and improved—yet still accordant faithfully in its radical import. They both declare the same God, only in different stages of human thought or development; neither of them could be true, if they gave us different kinds of God, or of government. Still though God is just in both, and merciful in both, the former was likely to be taken more legally and felt more as a bondage, because it was a drill of outward rites and observances; and the latter to be taken even as a deliverance from that bondage, because of the incarnate person who could fitly represent to men’s feeling the dear charities of God, and show the rites fulfilling their idea in his own complete and all sufficient sacrifice. No one was obliged to stay fast in the legalities of the old religion; multitudes of the glorious fathers and prophet teachers and little ones of faith did not; they broke through into the faith-world, as God was helping them to do, even by means of their rites; but in general they stuck fast in the letter, and the letter was death. The new ministration therefore in the incarnate person was life in comparison, a ministration of righteousness that doth exceed in glory.

But while the offices of justice and mercy are so plainly in a close relationship, and are brought along God dispenses justice in a right of discretion. so cordially together in the Scripture, intertwining both as forces of good in the government and governmental character of God, I most freely admit the necessity that God’s justice should be maintained in the highest possible degree of emphasis. It is necessary to God’s administrative character. As regards that character, he can as well be perfect in a shortened benevolence, as in a restricted and diminished justice. Or if we look only at the defenses of law, and the motivities at work for the regaining of souls, it is a matter of the highest necessity, that there should be no appearance of slackness in God, and that his justice should be kept fast in the loftiest, most sovereign pitch of firmness possible. And what is this? Is it the truest firmness of justice that it is itself fast bound by the letter, having no liberty but to exact precisely the pound of flesh, suffering no reduction? Is the weight of God’s justice heaviest, when it is according to some formally exact standard of measurement conceived for it by theologic opinion—a standard it must meet, in order to be itself justified? Must He be a precisionist in order to be passed as just? On the contrary he seems to me to be most grandly just, when he holds his firmness in a certain way of liberty—most grandly merciful too, when he dispenses mercy, as one taking counsel of justice. He should seem, in his justice, to say that he will suffer no jot or tittle of the law to fail; and then to make the saying still more certainly good, he should, for the law’s sake, add such argument of love and mercy, as will restore both jot and tittle and, if possible, the whole broken body of the law. Nothing goes highest in God’s attributes, when it loses out the chance of liberty and discretionary counsel. Not even the righteousness of God will be fitly expressed, when his eternal liberty, in the principle, is hampered by the letter, in his penal enforcements.

We shall conceive this subject most worthily, I think, if we revert a moment to first principles in the Justice dispensed by natural law. universal order. Saying nothing here by of justice, as regarding its necessities, or ends, or the vindicatory character, or the vindicatory function it discharges in the matter of government, let us look directly at the single point of executive certainty and firmness, in the way of dispensing justice. And here we shall very soon convince ourselves, it appears to me, that God has not undertaken to dispense justice by direct infliction, but by a law of natural consequence. He has connected thus, with our moral and physical nature, a law of reaction, by which any wrong of thought, feeling, disposition, or act, provokes a retribution exactly fitted to it and, with qualifications already given, to the desert of it. And this law is just like every law of natural order inviolable, not subject to suspension, or discontinuance, even by miracle itself. And justice is, in this view, a fixed principle of order, as truly as the laws of the heavenly bodies.

This, too, seems to be the prevailing representation of the Scriptures; as when they testify that “the wages of sin is death;” “that whatever a man soweth, that shall he also reap;” that the rust of gold and silver, cankered in the hoards of covetousness, “shall eat the flesh as it were fire;” that by the law of the judgment itself, we “shall receive the things done in the body”—having them come back as tormentors; that talents improved shall be doubled, and talents misimproved “taken away;” that wickedness shall “go to its own place;” “go away;” “depart;” passing off henceforth to be with itself, and be “filled with its own devices.” A good many declarations of Scripture appear to speak of something more nearly inflictive; but it is better to conceive, in such cases, that the language is declarative only of what is coming to pass, by the fixed laws and causes of natural retribution,—which laws and causes have a self-propagating action without limit; for no disorder can issue itself in order.

And yet, as we have been saying, these same ordinances of justice are to go along with mercy and in some possible way of conjunction are to The natural law of justice never infringed by mercy. work out, with her, even redemption itself. But how is this? where is the possibility of this, without even a subverting, by mercy, of the retributive laws just described? Do I then subvert the law of gravity, when I lift a weight from the ground? or by kindling a fire, cause the smoke to ascend in spite of gravity? Or, when I forbid the simples of gunpowder to unite in the touch of fire, by throwing a water-bath on them, do I therefore overthrow, because I so decisively dominate in, the chemical affinities concerned? Were not all these laws and affinities intended to be just so far submitted to my will? If then, by my will, acting in among them, they are brought to act in serviceable ways, as they otherwise would not, or not to act at all, is their nature therefore violated, or their law discontinued?Vide, Nature and the Supernatural, p. 58, §§.

III. Christ adds authority and honor to the law-precept, as being, in his own person, the incarnation of it. In itself, what we call law is impersonal, He is himself the incarnation of the precept. a cold mandatory of abstraction. Its authority, as such, is the conviction it is able to produce of its own imperative right. An additional honor and authority is given it also, when God reaffirms it, and from the point of his invisible majesty, assumes the maintenance of it. A certain authority is gained for it also by impressive circumstance, when it is delivered from the thundering and smoking mountain top. By the cold intimidation of such a pronouncement, it even becomes appalling; it makes the people quake and shiver. Still the coldness and the stern decretive majesty partly benumb conviction. To have its full authority felt, it must be brought nigh in its true geniality and warmth, as a gift to the higher nature of souls; exactly as it is, when it is incarnated and made personal in Christ, addressing human conviction by his human voice. For Christ is not, as many seem to fancy, a mere half-character of God incarnate, a kind of incarnate weakness in the figure of a love-principle, separated from every thing else in God’s greatness, necessary to the tonic vigor of love. Being the incarnation of God, the full round character of God as he is must be included—authority, justice, purity, truth, forgiveness, gentleness, suffering love, all excellence. All these, in fact, belong to God’s character, and they are here brought nigh, brought into concrete expression, thus to be entered, by Christ, as a complete moral power, into souls, They work all together, in his charities, in his miracles, in his doctrine, in his death, resurgent with him, as it were, when he rises and goes up on high, there to assume the kingdom with him and to judge the worlds. Hence the remarkable authority that is felt to be somehow embodied in him, even from the first. There is really more of authority for the precept of law, in the fifth chapter of Matthew, than there is in the whole five books of Moses; nay, there is more in his simple beatitudes themselves. For moral ideas and the claims of duty under God, are brought specially nigh, when spoken thus, out of human feeling, to the living sensibility. and conscious want of human hearts. Scarcely necessary was it for him to add, that no jot or tittle of the law should fail; still less, when the mysterious authority of his manner and person were always enforcing the same impression. He spake with authority, they said, and not as the Scribes; “never man spake like this man.” His simple definition, or summation of law—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”—seemed, to the captious scribe, a kind of second giving of the law, so divinely impressive was the manner, and he durst not question farther. Nothing could be more natural; for, in his person, not the love only, but the law, nay, the instituted government of God itself is incarnated and become a person, It is seen when he is looked upon, heard when he speaks. What then shall be so felt as the authority of his manner? How else shall law, too, get a presence so majestic in the world, as when it thus becomes the good, great King of promise—Immanuel—Messiah? But these are all inferior and scarcely more than accessory arguments; the principal remains to be added which is this—

IV. The almost inconceivable honor Christ confers on the law precept, in the fact that his incarnation, life, and death upon the cross—all that I have His life and death are his obedience to law. included in his vicarious sacrifice—are the fruit of his own free homage and eternally acknowledged obligation to the law; in one word his deific obedience.

I have spoken of the law before government, the eternal absolute law of right. Under it, and by it, as existing in logical order before God’s perfections, even they, as we found reason to believe, have their spring. It was not necessary here to go into any very elaborate argument; for it can not escape the discovery of any one, that if God has moral perfections of any kind, they must have a standard law, and obtain their quality of merit, by their fulfillment of that law. Of course there is no precedence of time in the law, as compared with the date of God’s perfections, but there must be a precedence of order, and the law must be obligatory in that precedence. But we come now to a matter which, to most minds, will be more remote and more difficult; viz., to the fact, that God has not only a character ever lastingly perfected in right, but that, by the same law, he is held to a suffering goodness for his enemies, even to that particular work in time, which we call the vicarious sacrifice of Christ. Christ was, in this view, under obligation to be the redeemer he was; and fulfilling that obligation, he conferred an honor on the law fulfilled, such as could not be conferred by any stringency of justice laid upon the race itself. A point so remote from many, and yet of so great consequence, requires to be more carefully established.

Consider and make due account then, of the fact, that the eternal law of right, which we can not well deny is the basis of God’s perfections, and of all The Law is Love and Love is Vicarious Sacrifice. law human and divine, is only another conception of the law of love; and that, as the righteousness of God fulfills the Right, so it is declared that “God is Love,” as being another equally valid conception of his eternal perfections. The two principles, right and love, appear to exactly measure each other. One is the law absolute, or ideal, commanding the soul, even if it were to exist in solitude; the other is the law relational, grounded on the sense of relationship to other beings, who may be socially affected by our acts. Thus every one who will be and do right, in the large and complete sense of the principle, will as certainly love all beings, whether God or men, whether friends or enemies, whether deserving or unworthy, with whom he finds himself in relation. The law of love appears to be, in some sense, a law of. revelation, as the law of right is not. And yet the law of love is just as truly grounded in nature, commands the assent of natural conviction just as invincibly, when it is once stated. The only reason why it is not propounded universally as a principle of natural morality, is that the close relationality of it is cross to our humanly selfish habit. We can talk of being right, and are willing to think of that as a duty, because we can put a lower, merely conventional, and market sense on the word, that accommodates our self-approbation; but we shrink from the law of love, and do not propose it in our schemes of ethics, because we do not consciously recognize and practically own the brotherhood of other beings. In a certain philanthropic and romantic way, we do it, but to have the law drawn close enough to put us under bonds of concern for them, and even of suffering and sacrifice for their sake, is not a kind of standard that we naturally propose. Very admirable and truly great is the example, when it is fulfilled; we are even quite melted in the tenderness it excites; but the goodness is too nearly superlative, the standard too high, and we look for some other in some lower key.

But this will not be the manner of God. Love to him is Right and Right to him is Love. And, as certainly as he is in this law of love, he Christ fulfills eternal obligation. will suffer the pains of love, he will go beyond all terms of mere justice or desert, yield up resentments, pass by wrongs already suffered, put himself in a way to receive the wrongs and bear the violence even of personal enemies, if he can hope to do them good with no counterbalancing injury. In a word, he will so insert himself into the miseries, and even into the guilt of their state, as to have them as a burden on his feeling, contriving, by whatever method, at whatever expense, to bring them relief. All this in eternal obligation. We do not commonly speak of God as a being under obligation, because, being transgressors ourselves, we associate some idea of constraint and even fear with obligation; yet what are God’s moral perfections, but his mind’s free homage to binding principles? And if the principles are not good enough to bind, what is the merit of their observance? God is of course amenable to no law, as prescribed by a superior—enough that he is freely, gloriously, amenable to law, in its own self-asserting majesty; that which, like himself, is eternal, that which he “possessed in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.” Perhaps it is better not to say that he is under law, lest we associate some constraint, or limitation, but that he is in it, has it for the spring of his character and counsel, and so of his beatitude for ever. Even as Hooker eloquently says—“that law which hath been of God and with God everlastingly”—“it is laid up in the bosom of God.”

God then does not make the law of love, or impose it upon us by his own mere will. It is with him as an eternal, necessary, immutable, law, existing in logical order before his will, and commanding, in the right of its own excellence, his will and life. This being given, all his plans, decrees, creations, and executory statutes are built to it, as the heavens by the eternal laws of geometry. And so, all government being cast in this mold, God is united to creatures, creatures to God and to each other, by this one common term, which interprets and unifies all. Were there any being, whether Creator, or creature, who had a different kind of law, prescribing a different kind of virtue, he would be unintelligible to the others, and practically unrelated to them. And his virtue, call it by what ever epithets of distinction, could not even pass the audit of a common respect and praise.

In this manner we are prepared for the conclusion and even brought down close upon it, that Christ came into the world, as the incarnate Word The cross not optional but obligatory. and Saviour of sinners, just because the eternal, necessary law of love made it obligatory in him to be such a Saviour. It is with him even as the apostle represents, when he says—“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” It is not commandment that he speaks of, but it is law, that same which rested on the divine nature and which Christ fulfilled in his sacrifice; that same in which he gave himself, for love’s sake, even to death for malefactors and enemies. The essentially vicarious action of the love-principle and the manner in which it makes the want, or woe, or even sin, of others its own personal concern, I have sufficiently shown already,Part I., Chapter I. but I find the point so finely conceived by Edwards, that I am tempted here to cite his language; only wishing that he could have seen the reach of what he is saying, as affording the only good and right solution of the substitution of Christ, or of the scripture expressions The substitutional action of love perceived by Edwards. concerning it. “A strong exercise of love excites a lively idea of the objects beloved. And a strong exercise of pity excites a lively idea of the misery under which he pities them. Christ’s love and pity fixed the idea of them in his mind, as if he had been really they, and fixed their calamity in his mind as though it had been really his. A very strong and lively love and pity towards the miserable tends to make their case ours; as, in other respects so in this, in particular, as it doth, in an idea, place us in their stead, under their misery, with a most lively, feeling sense of that misery; as it were feeling it for them, actually suffering it in their stead by strong sympathy.”Edwards’ Miscellaneous Observations, p. 5. Thus it was that Christ bore his burden as being under the eternal law of love, and so fulfilled it as to make it, in some really impressive sense, his law—“the law of Christ.”

There was no constraint in the obligation, it is true; the more wonderful therefore is the grace of the obedience that is yielded so freely. And of course the obligation, when we thus speak, is not any obligation due to us. We had no claims to lay upon him, any more than our enemy has a claim upon us, that we shall sacrifice our peace, or life, to his benefit. It was simply obligation to the grand, everlasting, essentially vicarious principle of love, an obligation to be gracious, and do by his disobedient subjects, since he could well do it, better than they deserve; which if he could not consent to, he must be quite another and less approvable character before the standards of his own perfect mind. There is nothing optional, as many conceive in his sacrifice. He could renounce it, only as he could the honors of his own perfect character. In it he is just as good as he is in obligation to be. If better, then either he is better than he should be, or the law less good than it ought to be. Whereas it is the exact merit, the glory of both, that they punctually meet in the utmost limit of good.

The conception of some such obligation, or obedience to obligation, in the work and sacrifice of Christ, has been more or less nearly approached Anselm and Bellamy. by many. Thus Anselm, while conceiving that Christ undertakes the work at his option, still imagines a kind of obligation post requiring it of God himself. “Does not the reason why God ought to do the things we speak of seem absolute enough, when we consider that the human race, that work of his so very precious, was wholly ruined, and that it was not seemly that the purpose which God had in man should fall to the ground?”Cur Deus Homo, Lib. 1., Cap. iv. Bellamy also conceives that God, in requiring perfect obedience of man as the condition of his well being, even carefully squared his own action by the golden rule, in a way of volunteer allegiance to it, saying, “I did as well by mankind, as I should desire to have been done by myself, had I been in their case and they in mine; for when my Son, who is as myself, came to stand in their place, I required the same of him.”Vol. I., p. 259.

But there is another version of the obedience of Christ—the same which is indicated in these last words—which requires our attention. Thus The obedience of Christ to the Father, his obedience to law. many, giving to certain words of scripture a meaning favored by their most superficial acceptation, look upon it never as the obedience of God himself to the eternal, necessary law, but as being that of a certain second person, who is somehow other and not God, contributed by him to God for sinners. Obtaining thus a peculiar merit by his suffering obedience, the second person, they conceive, is able to pay the first for the letting go of their punishment. And they quote, as authority for this, all the texts that speak of Christ as being sent, or commanded by the Father, as doing his will, as obedient unto death, for the Father’s reward. As if one person of the Trinity, putting another under command, and sending him into the world to suffer and die for sin, were any permissible account either of the Trinity, or of the suffering. Why must we take hold of words in this manner, without considering at all the conditions of the subject matter? The Father is above, representing the eternal government; the Son is a man below, acting, so far, under and obeying that government. But in another, wholly consistent view, he is, in his human person, the express image and outward type of what is most intense and deepest in the character and action of God himself; representing, in what is called his obedience to the Father, the everlasting obedience of the whole divine nature to the ideal, fundamental law. Thus when he testifies—“I came not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”—“as the Father gave me commandment so I do,” he is to be understood just as he is when he says—“the Father is greater than I;” that is, not as declaring his literal inferiority, and his subjection as the eternal Son, or second person, to the Father’s mandates, but as speaking for the human state he is in, and refusing to be made an idol of in his human figure. He is only saying, do not stop at me, and localize God quantitively in me, when he is only in me, as being expressed by me. Let your thought begin at me, and then, counting me one with the Father, in what you have discovered by me, let it travel up and crown itself in him. Having gotten out of me the feeling and character of the God invisible, count that having seen me “ye have seen the Father that sent me;” that, in what I have called my obedience to Him, ye have seen that everlasting obedience to law, which is the essence and soul of his perfections. Let your homage therefore be to Him, as the God above limitation, discovered to your love in and by limitation.

In this manner, Christ is always contriving to carry men’s thoughts above, or up through, his humanity, and forbid their coming to a period of stunted measurement in his human person. He takes the subject state, doing and showing every thing in and by that state, and then, referring it back to that unseen sovereign state of which it is the representation. Any other conception of the matter, such as puts the Son literally under the tutelage and authority of the Father, is a superstition put for doctrine, and not any rational belief. God is three in no such sense that he is not one; least of all is he three, in any such sense, that he has relations of authority and subjection in his threeness. The obedience of Christ, then, represents just that which we have seen to be included in God’s moral perfection, or righteousness; viz., the everlasting obedience of his nature to the law of right, or of love. Nay, if we will let our plummet down to the bottom of this great sea, the cross of Jesus represents and reveals the tremendous cross that is hid in the bosom of God’s love and life from eternity.

It is obvious enough that, in such a way of obedience, Christ makes a contribution of honor to the law he obeys, that will do more to enthrone The immense honor paid to the Law by Christ’s obedience. it in our reverence, than all the desecrations of sin have done to pluck it down—more too, than all conceivable punishments, to make it felt and keep it in respect. The grand evil of sin is that it tramples law and brings it into contempt. Many, too, apprehend danger from the full remission of sin, lest it should leave the law trampled and without vindication, and reveal a kind of indifference to it in God, that will be fatal to all due impressions of its authority and sanctity. Here then, over against all such damages and apprehended mischiefs of laxity, we now place the momentous, grandly impressive, fact of Christ’s obedience—his obedience unto death—taken as an exhibition of God’s eternal homage to law, and of the cross of sacrifice by which his feeling and will are everlastingly bowed to the burdens of pity and suffering. Even as Christ himself conceives the representative nature of his whole life, when he says—“I have glorified thee on the earth.”

Now I do not undertake to show, be it observed, that Christ came into the world, in a plan to set his obedience over against the damages and Compensation enough were compensation wanted. debts of sins; or that he came to fill out any scheme of satisfaction, or compensation. If any thing is wanting to compensate the loss of punishment, it will be enough that the very things suffered and done to make the forgiveness an executed fact, give back greater honors to the law than are lost by the loss of punishment. No, Christ came just because the law he had been in from eternity sent him, and his incarnate appearing was but the necessary outcoming in time of God’s eternal Love. He descended to the lot of men just because he had them in his heart. His object was only to minister. His compassions, even before he came, were tinged all through with sorrowing tenderness. His emotional nature was stung and wounded every day, after he came, by the scenes of wrong and cruelty he was compelled to look upon, the sicknesses, and pains, and deaths, and torments of spiritual disorder to which he ministered. The storms of the world’s madness gathered round him in his work, and the inward storms of mental agony rolled heavily over him sometimes in his private hours. But his effort was to simply fulfill such a ministry to lost men as would gain them back to God and eternal life. He strove, in particular, by his teachings, healings, sympathies, and the impressions of his personal suffering, to inaugurate a new and more adequate moral power by his ministry; so to get hold of their moral convictions, so to work on their guiltiness, by the due manifestation of God, and his love, as to even regenerate their character. And doing all this, going even to the cross for love’s sake, in a perfectly simple devotion, what will more certainly follow than that even the law thus gloriously fulfilled in his ministry, is itself raised into power by the honor he confers upon it? Every thing gets a moral power that he touches, or looks upon—the Jordan, that he went down into it; Nazareth, that it saw his childhood; Capernaum, that it heard his first sermon; the waters of Gennessaret, that they floated his boat and settled into peace under his word. Nay, if we could find it, even the rock of the mountain that supported his head in the sleep of his solitary night, would have itself a sacred power from his person. Why not then the law, that which he had with him before the world was, that which he taught so convincingly, that which he fulfilled by so many exhaustive labors, and by sorrowing even unto death?

Grant that here is no contrived compensation to law, is it any the less truly compensated, any the less sacred, and honorable, and powerful on a lost world’s feeling, that he has glorified it forever in their sight by his simple obedience? Whatever we may say or think of the matter of judicial compensation, as a purpose to be answered by his death, he could not be ignorant that the highest possible honor would be imparted to the law by his obedience to it; still it does not appear that even this was any principal end of his engagement. His principal end was in the sacrifice itself; viz., in the fulfilling and bringing forth of God’s love to men, and the organizing of God’s kingdom among them, by his glorious, world-transforming power. In this he did not fail, and it is only affirming a very subordinate matter, to say that his power, which came out of the law, came back also upon it, and made it a greater power than either the obedience, or the punishment of all past ages could.

As regards the degree of honor thus conferred by his obedience on the law, two points need especially to be observed. First, that the law fulfilled The very law dishonored organizes the redemption. by his vicarious love and ministry, was exactly the same that our sin had cast off and desecrated—this it was that put the lost world upon his feeling, proved its goodness in his goodness, shaped the beauty of his beauty, travailed for us in his agony, and held him to the obedience even unto death. So the violated law comes back upon us to overwhelm us, by showing us, in Christ, just what goodness was in it. Secondly that, in this suffering and sacrifice of Jesus, there was nothing new, but only a new revelation of that which was old as the perfections of God. As a new waking up of feeling in deity, always before impassible, it would be a fact too violent for belief. Contrary to this, it is but the letting out of God’s feeling, that could get no such sufficient vent of evidence before. This same agony and passion heaved in the breast of God’s virtue, even from before the world’s foundations. God was suffering in feeling for the ages to be, even before the evil was. In his counsel of creation he could not think of wrong, and disorder, and pain breaking loose, without being exercised for it according to its nature. There was a losing side of pain, in his goodness, just because it was good; only the loss was never a true loss, because it was eternally repaid by the willingness to lose for love’s sake. The Gethsemane of his compassions kept company with his joys, and the conscious goodness of one was high enough to exalt the conscious bliss of the other. All this now appears, in the specially human facts of Christ and his passion. The law that was being thus sublimely fulfilled, in God’s suffering love from eternity, is only now fulfilled to human view, by the suffering ministry of Jesus. No such revelation was made, or could be, in the field of nature before. Scantily and feebly was it made, so as to just glimmer and nothing more, in the word of the ancient prophets, and the guesses of the ancient saints. Now it is out in the full, revealed in time—God is in the world in love, fulfilling his eternal law Himself, for the saving of its rejectors.

It has been convenient, thus far, to speak of penal enforcements simply as compelling motives, or as warnings and intimidations addressed to prudential The immense moral power of judicial severities. consideration. But they have a much deeper and more nearly basal office, which is commonly not observed. They have even a certain moral power in themselves, which is of a wholly different cast from that of Christ in the sacrifice, but which he contrives to unite with his own, by the sturdy severities of his doctrine. In our discussions, for example, of punishments in the civil state, and particularly of capital punishments, it appears to be taken for granted, that these two, the intimidation of crime, and the reclamation of the criminals themselves, are the only objects of penalty. Whereas the grandest, and most real, and deep-working office of punishment is the fearfully sharp sense it wakens of crime itself, by such tremendous severities or thunderclaps of extermination—wherein even the good, protective law can so utter itself and must, against the deeds of wrong that shake society. The moral conviction roused is the main benefit—that sensibility to order, and law, and right, that runs quivering through the bosom of all citizens, when the almost sacrilegious violence of justice turns upon the felon’s life, commanding the scaffold and the rope to stop his breath! And precisely in the same way it is to be conceived, that strong and terrible retributions, not only serve as motive powers of interest in the government of souls, but have another and weightier office, in creating moral sensibility, or setting in moral conviction, as regards the sanctity of law and the dreadful criminality of sin. Without this, no visitation of mere gentleness and suffering sacrifice will make a salvation that has the true efficacy. The very subsoil of guilt requires to be stirred by God’s terrors. They must not simply skim the surfaces of fear, but strike through into the deep underwork of moral conviction itself. All the better too, if we behold the terrible thunder-strokes of Providential severity falling on the head of whole communities, or nations, or specially on the head of the most deserving peoples; because it visibly is now, not sins, but sin, not any special crimes, but the comprehensive criminality of a state unrelational with God, that requires or instigates so great severity. Hence, the great common woes that fall on whole peoples, in what are called the severities of nature—the storms, fires, earthquakes, pestilences, famines, wrecks, orphanages of the world—the unspeakably appalling facts are known, and they have no other solution that is either satisfactory or tolerably sufficient. The language of Christ, applying all such things to the common guilt of mankind, shows in what manner they were understood by him. “Suppose ye that these Galileeans were sinners above all the Galileeans, because they suffer such things? or those eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you nay, but except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish.”

It appears then that Christ, coming to us in his sacrifice, to unbosom the love of God, and publish the free forgiveness of sins, is fully awake, nevertheless, to the sacred necessity of maintaining law by Christ therefore denounces eternal punishment and assumes the judgment of the world. adequate enforcements, and ploughing up moral conviction by great Providential and judicial severities. Only the more fit subject of wonder is it, therefore, that so many teachers are disturbed by their very unnecessary concern for what they call the law; imagining that a free remission may somehow kill the law and contriving even schemes of punition for the Son of God himself, that they may save it! As if the supernatural grace he brings, to rescue from the penal retributions of God, were quite taking away the enforcements; which it, in fact, only makes effective. Most strange it is that, when they are going every way to bring counsel from afar for the saving of law, they can yet see nothing in two such facts as these—continually reiterated by Christ himself—facts almost as new and distinctive even as the forgiveness of sins by his cross; (1.) eternal punishment; (2.) the judgment of the world by himself. Publishing announcements like these, and making even love to thunder, in motives so appalling, is it to be feared that Christ is letting down authority, and obliterating the fixed lines of duty, by some unguarded license of mercy? Why the law never before got itself really uttered, and the grand awards of the future life never showed their true figure of majesty, till they were revealed in this fearful way of emphasis by Christ himself. Accordingly, to these two very remarkable points in the public teaching of Christ, considered as related to the enforcement of law, I now invite the reader’s particular attention. And—

I. To the specially Christian declaration of future punishment, sometimes called eternal, or endless punishment.

I am well aware of the disappointment I may inflict on certain progressives, or disciples of the new gospel, that, in so free a handling of what is held by authority, I still give in to a doctrine of the future punishment that is so revolting to reason, and, as they will say, to thoughtful minds already so nearly outgrown. If they can allow any reason for the fact that does not imply a subserviency to prudential motives, let it be that I am thoroughly fixed in the purpose, and that on grounds of reason, never to make a gospel—either to have no gospel at all, or else to accept the gospel that is given me. I have been through all the questions, taken all the turns of doubt, suffered all the struggles of feeling in respect to this confessedly hard looking doctrine of future punishment; I have even learned, in these struggles, to pity the meagerness of any soul that has encountered no troubles and painful misgivings concerning it. Neither is this pity at all diminished but increased, rather, by the fact, that I am brought back finally to acquiesce in it myself, and even to look upon it as being probably a necessary factor of the Christian salvation. What else can we infer, when we find, as we shall by a little search, that our merciful Christ, he that comes in love, and saves by the sacrifice of his life, is the first distinctly responsible promulgator of it himself?

But, before proceeding to show this fact, let us attend to some considerations in which the doctrine may be duly qualified and cleared of the severities, by which it is made unnecessarily shocking to many.

We could well enough allow that the epithet “eternal” [αὶωνὶος] need not mean eternal, in the exact, The word “eternal” not very decisive. speculative sense. It is of no great consequence, that we insist on it as a term of duration logically infinite. Enough that we receive it practically, as giving that finality to thought, beyond which there is, for us, nothing to be meditated farther. It is very true that the same epithet is used respecting the duration both of punishment and of blessedness—“These shall go away into everlasting punishment, and the righteous into life eternal”—but it is surmised by some, without any great violence, that as we get only the slenderest impressions any way of the state of suffering called eternal, the intent of Christ may only be to shove our thought over on that sea, and let us get the measures of it by our long, long voyage afterward; that the punishment is called eternal as the life, because it is the punishment of the eternal state, and is best apprehended here, when taken as a practical finality for the mind.

I make this concession, partly because I have no care to press the matter so far as to make a bad eternity hang on the form of a word, and partly because it is sometimes argued, in the same way, that as the capacity and blessedness of the life are to be forever amplified by exercise, so also are the capacity and woe of the punishment. And this latter is almost certainly not true. It may even be argued, with a considerable show of evidence, that the immortality of the soul does not belong to its mere nature, but depends rather on the eternally imperishable nature of that on which it feeds—God, truth, duty, self-sacrifice, holiness—and that when it only knows and goes after the phantoms of condition, or of mere conventional and temporal good, it must finally die out, for the poverty of that soul-food which it takes for its life. What is sometimes called the doctrine of the annihilation, or literal destruction, of the wicked, is the same more coarsely conceived. A good many passages of Scripture, too, are cited for it, without any great show of violence; and a good many others, with only that common kind of violence which consists in taking literally what is figuratively given.

Rejecting, however, this annihilation theory as, plainly enough, not being the doctrine of Scripture, we still do observe, as a matter of fact, The certain reduction of the soul by sin. in this present life, that souls under sin are not amplified by their experience in it, as they are by their experience in good. Gaining vigor, it may be, for a little while, they finally begin to shrink in quantity, losing out capacity for both character and the higher kinds of suffering; a fact in which the scheme of purgatorial restorationism loses all show of evidence, or we may almost say of possibility. Every thing we see of sin, in the world of fact, shows it to be a desolating, extirpating power in souls; killing out, by degrees, even the faculties and possibilities of religion, and reducing, in that way, all the hopes and chances of restoration, down to the very last edge of life. Almost any thing, therefore, can be more easily believed, than that, dropping off that edge, with but half a nature left, transgressors are there to be converted and finally restored, by the mere smart of their pains—that which would distract their love-impulse if they had it, and can not do much to restore it if they have it not.

But while this diminution of quantity in souls under sin is fatal, as it certainly is, to any hope of purgatorial The higher powers extinguished, but not the soul. recovery, it does not go the length of proving their extinction, but gives exactly the point of view that yields the least exaggerated and truest impression of the Scripture view of punishment. Thus we observe that, for a little while, the human faculties appear to be invigorated by the struggles of passion, or selfish ambition; but that shortly they begin to be inevitably wasted in quantity, narrowed in volume and capacity, so as finally to produce the impression, that their intensity—as in cunning, hatred, envy, policy, and avarice—is getting to be a kind of intensified littleness; a fire still hot, but running low in fuel, and sure to be as much less considerable in its energy, as the substantive quantities of the soul are more diminished. So the wasting goes on doubtless hereafter as here, and the penal wear of bitterness and wrong continues. But it does not follow that the waste will operate a cessation of being, because there are faculties and powers not wasted. The memory is as faithful a recorder of what is bad, as it could be of what is good. The conscience, with its law of right, is not extirpated any more than the sense of time or space. The will is even confirmed by habit in a state of unsubduable capacity, and the will is the grand centralizing element of personality itself. The affinities for what is bad are as durable as they would be in good. The progressive diminution, therefore, is never to end in cessation, but may well be figured by the asymptote curve, which, as the mathematicians will even demonstrate, has the remarkable distinction of forever approaching a straight line even by a fixed law, yet never making coincidence with it. So, probably enough, it may be, and we may even take it as the true conception, that souls which have become only hacks of punishment, will forever continue in being, spinning along their lengths of mediocrity, intensified in points but not enlarged, and having their eternity as the protracted opportunity of their moral insignificance and hopelessness. Under the grand organic law, that faculties not used, or badly misused, are finally extirpated, their religious nature is likely to be nearly, or quite gone by. All the Godward summits of being and thought—aspiration, susceptibility for good, the sense of moral beauty, the power of realization by faith—are demolished, and a coarse, hard nature only remains, graveled by low animosities, without great sentiments, and rising never into any look of altitude, save when it is raised by the vehemence of its passions. Even the suffering that is left is that of a nature tapering down to a diminished grade of feeling, or abject continuity of consciousness, that is only the more desolate that it can not utterly die.

Holding this conception, we go clear, it will be seen, of that very shocking extravagance, which maintains Infinite punishment denied. the infinity of future punishment. Mere infinity of duration does not make the quantity infinite, as many so hastily assume; for, if there be a diminution of degree as there is an extension of time, the quantity will never exceed a given amount. So too, if the continuance be endless, not on the score of old sins long ago committed—the sins of the previous lifetime—but as being ordered to match, and measure, and punish, the continuance of new sins, freely committed and persistently adhered to, the eternal punishment so-called, may be only a stream of temporal retributions, appointed to match the stream of eternally recurring transgressions. As regards this matter of amount, or quantity, we can really have no very definite conceptions; for though the state of punishment be endless, we have no gauges of intensity that we can apply, and do not even know how far the continuance rests on the continuance of transgression.

At the same time, we do perfectly know, that the arguments often used to show that the punishment of sin ought to be, and therefore must be, infinite, are groundless—carried by a practice on words that plays them into inferences not contained in their meaning. Thus it is argued that the law of God has infinite value, and that sin therefore, being a violation of it, must be an infinite evil, worthy of an infinite punishment. The constitution of our government, I reply, has very great value, but it does not follow that any particular man’s treason, however bold, is in exactly the same measure of consequence. The physical universe is infinite, but it does not follow that any man’s infringement of its laws is an infinite infringement. Sometimes the argument is, that every sin heads a train of consequences that is endless, and is therefore infinite, requiring an infinite punishment. So does every most common, or trivial act, bring on after it an endless train of consequences that otherwise would not have happened; no man goes to his breakfast without this result, but it does not follow that his breakfast was infinite. Sometimes the argument is, that since the law of God is the best law possible, he ought, in true justice, to make the strongest expression of attachment to it that is possible; therefore that he ought to inflict the strongest possible punishment for the breach of it. But that strongest possible may be only a finite, carefully moderated punishment; for if God were to lay his omnipotence into the severity of it, he would only shock the sensibility of the public world addressed, by a cruelty visibly monstrous, and the suffering inflicted would have no expression at all that belongs to punishment.

First of all, the ingenuous admission, here made, that the justice of God is satisfied from within Himself, or by punishment dispensed upon Himself, A very weak justice that God exacts of himself. is even admirably fatal. What kind of power any Ruler must hold, in the impressions of his subjects who, to make sure of justice, takes all his punishments out of himself, it is not difficult to see. There plainly could not be a weaker figure in the name of government.

Besides the justice gotten, in this manner, must be as insipid to Him, as it is useless for the purposes of government. Justice wants what is just if And the justice is not just beside. it wants any thing, and here it is found feeding itself out of that which is exactly not just—what vestige of justice can there be in any punishment which a righteous God gets out of Himself? Is it so then, after all, that this inexorable, undivertible, Nemesis of God’s ethical nature, this judicial sentiment which must be satisfied first and before every thing else, will be just as well satisfied with a punishment not just, as with one that is?

There also appears to be a remarkable oversight here, in the scheme of satisfaction proposed, as regards the God suffers—not his compassions. penal suffering itself. “The Divine compassion itself bears the infliction of the Divine indignation in the place of the transgressor.” Why the divine compassion, more than the divine justice? Does the justice punish the compassion? For aught that appears there is no suffering in the compassion more than in the justice. By supposition, the truth is, merely, that there is a conflict between the two contrary impulses, justice and compassion, and the divine nature—not specially the compassion, not specially the justice—suffers. These words justice and compassion do not as having each distinct sensibilities make up the deity; they inhere in a Being, and that being, as being, suffers, by their conflict. Does it then satisfy justice, that the being in whom it inheres, suffers partly on account of it?

Besides, if it were conceivable that the being took so much suffering wholly on his love, or on account of his love, did it never occur to the writer that Withheld from suffering would have suffered more. if He had refused, for love’s sake, to encounter so much suffering he would certainly have suffered infinitely more? Nay, that such a refusal would even have turned the Divine bosom itself into a hell of suffering forever? Given the fact of God’s Infinite Love, he suffers demonstrably, not more, but less, in consenting to be the deliverer of men—by suffering however great.

But the scheme breaks down most fatally of all in the confusion of meaning, or the covering up of a double meaning, in the word justice. A The Justice conceived is ambiguous. sufficient discrimination here would have shown that the absolute justice pertaining to ethical natures is a fiction, without any shadow of reality. It is almost incredible, that a really intelligent writer should throw himself upon the axiom, “God must be just,” “God is inexorably obligated to do justly,” without perceiving that we assent to it for no other reason than that the words “just” and “justly” mean “righteous” and “righteously.” God can not of course do any thing unrighteous, or, in that sense, unjust; that is God must keep his integrity. Is that the same thing as to say that God has no option left, but to stand by retributive justice and do by all men exactly as they do to others? Calling “the impulse to punish” justice, has he no liberty left, but to follow that impulse, just as far as it must go to be exhausted? If that should possibly be true, it will require something more to establish it than simply to propound it as an axiom. Interpose, at this point, two very simple distinctions and the supposed infallible argument vanishes.

First, the distinction between righteousness and justice; righteousness, being a character grounded in the Righteousness and Justice, Wrath and Justice. absolute, unconditioned law of right existing before government; and justice, being a rectoral, politico-judicial character, maintained by the firm vindication of government; conditioned of course by the wants of government. Second, the distinction between the wrath-principle and justice; the wrath-principle being only that moral sensibility, or passion, that impels a moral nature to the infliction of evil in redress of wrong, and steels it against the restraints of false pity; and justice being, in the administration, a due infliction of such evil, according to the ill desert of the wrong. By the first distinction, righteousness is seen to be absolute, and justice to be a matter only of means to ends, and so of deliberative counsel. By the second, the wrath principle is seen to be no law at all, but only an impulse to be regulated by counsel; which, when it is, makes justice; when it falls short, laxity; when it runs to excess, revenge and cruelty. I have the same kind of ethical nature as God, and it is even a praise in me, nay, an obligation upon me, to do by my enemy better than he deserves—to forget my injuries and even to suffer for his good. Is it then a fault in God that he does the same? It is very true that I administer no government over my enemy, and so far there is a difference. But this difference leaves it optional with God to do by his enemy still better than he deserves, when-, ever he can do it, without injury to the public interest of government. And if that is agreed, where is the absolute, all-conditioning, unconditioned justice-element of his nature—the wrath that is to bridle and bestride everlastingly his will and counsel? Ceasing ii this manner to call righteousness justice, and justice wrath, the claim that wrath is God’s first attribute, and must be satisfied, is seen to be quite groundless. And the supposed adamantine cup, that requires to be kept exactly full of blood, to let forgiveness into the world, is happily found to be only an ambiguous term in speech and nothing more!

It will occur to almost any one, that this very huge mistake respecting the absolute nature of justice, originates in a confounding of righteousness and justice. That is absolute, unconditioned, unconditional, a law to all moral natures and even to God; a law, as we have seen,For the distinction between righteousness and justice, See Chap. I., Part II. before God undertakes to so much as organize a government for it. For this law absolute, the government Righteousness absolute, not justice. of God including his justice only maintains guard, just as guillotines do for statutes; but guillotines are not statutes themselves, neither is justice the same as the everlasting law of right whose wrongs it avenges. It was not the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the smoke, and the sound of a trumpet that were engraved in stones, but it was the law. Law is the principal and absolute matter, the variable and conditional is what counsel arranges and does to vindicate law.The Hebrew scriptures have a way of putting these two ideas righteousness and justice together that is instructive. They make use of two distinct sets of words, one that is morally significant, the other forensically; and it is remarkable how firmly these two sets of words, occurring almost constantly in a kind of twin relationship, keep themselves to their places; scarcely ever, or quite never crossing over to uses that confuse their meaning. Thus we have—“righteousness and judgment”—“righteous judgment”—“justice [i. e., righteousness] and judgment”—“just [i. e., righteous] judgment”—“judgment and justice” [i.e., righteousness]—with a great variety of similar combinations; where it will be observed, in the last three cases, that our English translation, putting justice and just in the place of righteousness and righteous, makes a considerable look of confusion; owing to the fact that the words just and justice are so often used, in English, in the judicial and vindicatory sense. It would have been very much better if the translation had excluded this ambiguity, by steadily representing the steadiness of the original, in a use only of the words righteous and righteousness, and reserving the terms just, justice, judgment and the like, for the other class of uses, the vindicatory, in the manner observed by the scripture. Nobody in that case would ever have begun to imagine that retributive justice was an original, everlasting, unconditioned, first principle in the moral nature of God. That is true of righteousness only, never of justice. or executive counsel, as truly as the fire that fell on Sodom, or the destruction of the golden calf. Or if we use the epithet as a word of character, the character is not original and absolute in God, but is obtained by doing justice. Which again requires to be done, only because, and just so far as, it is means to ends in a way of maintaining government; not because God’s nature contains a wrath-principle absolute, that must be exactly satisfied. And still it is, with many, a question how far, or whether in fact ever, it can be relaxed? also whether, if relaxed by forgiveness, it must not be somehow compensated? And they even go so far as to be sensitively concerned for God’s law, if he is conceived to let go any sin, without some exact equivalent obtained. To proclaim a free remission, without some such equivalent, they do not hesitate to say would quite break down his government; he might be a good adviser still, they will say, but nothing more—no real governor at all.

And yet we can easily see that any such kind of concern is theologic with us, and not practical. We do not practically feel, after all, that in After all, have no such concern for God’s justice. the universal free remission published by Christ, God’s rectoral authority is at all weakened, or requires any new buttress of support to be added. And the probable reason is that the immense reinforcement of eternal obligation by Christ’s doctrine of future punishment, and of the future judgment by himself, puts all thought of concern for God’s authority so far away, that it can not even occur to us. We find ourselves quivering for dread, under even mercy itself. The necessity of some compensation made to God’s justice occurs to no man, save in a way of theory.

Passing now into another field, let us consider, in a way more positive, what Christ has really done that affects, or may be seen to affect, the interests of justice. The remainder of the chapter will be occupied with matter that I could well enough put forward as a way of compensation; suffering no doubt whatever that it would be more satisfactory, closer to the problem of compensation itself, and more genuine than the others of which I have been speaking. But I shall offer it, instead, simply as proof, how closely God adheres to law and justice still in the very matter of vicarious sacrifice. And I let go, in this way, what might be a considerable relief, or commendation to many, just because I have too little respect for the compensations, to be accessory, in any way, to this kind of wrong against the simplicity of the gospel. These compensations have a too contrived look, and suggest too easily the ingenious littleness and tumid poverty of man’s invention. I would rather have the gospel in God’s way of dignity without them, than to have it in a guise so artificial and meager without the dignity.

We come back thus upon the apostle’s great text of justification, to settle, if we can, the true construction of its meaning. And it could hardly The three words then, are moral not judicial. be more clear, I think, that none of the words here grouped together, righteousness, just, justifier of, are to receive a judicial, or judicially vindicative meaning; which, again, is but another form of the conclusion that, in Christian justification, there is no reference of thought whatever to the satisfaction of God’s retributive justice, or to any acquittal passed on guilty men, because the score of their account with God’s justice has been made even by the sufferings of Christ. The justification spoken of is a moral affair, related only to faith in the subject, and the righteousness of God, operative in or through his faith. In this conviction we shall be farther confirmed, if we take up each of the three co-relative words and follow them into their relational uses.

1. The righteousness of God. Many teachers appear to understand this expression, in the particular case now in hand, as meaning, in fact, the vindicatory justice of God. God declares his justice, they conceive, in the penal sufferings of Christ, so that he can remit the sins that are past and keep his justice good. If so, there is no other such use of the term. We do not read “the justice of God which is by faith;”Rom. iii, 22. nor No judicial meaning in the righteousness of God. “by the justice of one the free gift came upon all;”Rom. v, 18. nor “going about to establish their own justice, have not submitted themselves to the justice of God;”Rom. x, 3. nor “the justice of God unto all, and upon all them that believe.”Rom. iii, 22. These passages all turn upon the word righteousness, and if we substitute their meaning by that of justice, they only become absurd, or even revolting.

2. That he might be just. Here it is often conceived, that God must needs keep himself just, in men’s convictions; The being just not judicially meant. that is just in the judicial and vindicatory sense, as the avenger of transgression, else he can not forgive, or justify. The English word just occurs only twice in the New Testament, in this retributive and judicial sense, where it translates, not δικαιος, the moral word, but ενδικος, a word always retributive.Just now referred to in the note, p. 414. Meantime, in the more than thirty other examples, where it translates δικαιος, it means simply just in the sense of right, or righteous, and can not be made to mean any thing else. In the phrase we are now debating, therefore, we can not understand the word just to mean retributively, forensically just, without supposing that, in this one single use, the original word has forgotten its meaning—which is the most unlikely thing possible. Besides, the adversative construction that goes almost necessarily with the idea of a retributive meaning in the epithet just, is favored by nothing in the grammar, but is forbidden rather. It does not read—“that he might be just [retributively] and yet justify,” but “that he might be just and justify;” that is that he might be so conspicuously, gloriously righteous, as to communicate righteousness to every believer. Neither will it signify any thing to say that, in undertaking to be so conspicuously righteous, he will rather repel than draw, and of course will do any thing but communicate; for though there may be something appalling in the perfect and pure righteousness of God, it is also, in another view, a character most tender, benignant, and patient. If I were a wholly righteous man, given up to right in a perfect and unfaltering homage, I should certainly forgive my enemy for that reason. And in just this way an apostle conceives the righteousness of God, saying—“faithful and just [that is, righteous] to forgive us our sins.”1 John i, 9. His opinion of God’s righteousness is such, that he even grounds the confidence of forgiveness in it. And another apostle grounds the confidence of a most tender treatment of the undeserving, on the same idea of God’s righteousness, saying—“God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, in that ye have ministered to the saints,” &c.Heb. vi, 10. Fallen sadly away from their faith, he even conceives that God will have it still as a point of righteousness, to remember their good deeds and make more of them than they deserve. In this way, God will have declared his righteousness in Christ-shown him self righteous, even to the extent of putting righteousness upon every one that believeth.

3. And the justifier of. Here we have the causative mood of the Old Testament word reappearing in the The justifying not judicial. New. And there is no example, that I know, where it carries a judicial meaning though there is, of course, a large variety of meaning in the uses. When it is declared that men shall “justify God,” it certainly does not mean the same thing as when God is said “to justify the ungodly;” and yet there is a closer approach of meaning, in the two cases, than might, at first, be supposed. When men justify God, they pass him righteous, and when God justifies the ungodly, he passes them righteous—only he becomes, besides, the righteousness upon them that makes it true. The justification is purely moral in the first case, because no justification but a moral one is here possible; and that, in the second, there is no thought of a judicial acquittal, on account of penal compensations paid by Christ, will be most conclusively shown from the fact that the common uses of the word so plainly relate to what is moral only. Thus it is declared, by our apostle, in the very discussion we are having in review, that Abraham “believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness;”Rom. iv, 3, 20-22. and the very particular matter of promise on which he believed, being so justified by his faith, is given us expressly; viz., that he should have an heir to perpetuate his family. He is justified, we can see, by simply being brought nigh enough to God in his faith, to be the friend of God, and become in vested in God’s righteousness. This justification again is called “the justification of life,”Rom. v, 18. supposing evidently the fact of some life-giving power in the dispensation of it; and where is the life-giving of a mere acquittal, passed on the ground that the bad account of sin is made even? Again Christ is declared to have been “delivered for our offenses and raised again for our justification.”Rom. iv, 25. But if the whole matter of the justification depends on what he has suffered for our offenses, we shall as certainly be justified, or have our account made even, if he does not rise, as if he does. Doubtless the rising has an immense significance, when the justification is conceived to be the renewing of our moral nature in righteousness; for it is only by the rising that his incarnate life and glory are fully discovered, and the righteousness of God declared in his person, in its true moral power. But in the other view of justification, there is plainly enough nothing depending, as far as that is concerned, on his resurrection. When, again, he is himself declared, though “manifest in the flesh” and subject to its low estate, to be “justified in the spirit,”1 Tim. iii, 16. what does it mean but that his higher life is seen to be invested with tile evident righteousness of God—inwardly just, or justified? To imagine that he is only declared to be legally acquitted, judicially justified, is quite impossible. When again we read—“but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God”1 Cor. vi, 11.—what is the very subject matter of the declaration, but the moral renewing of the soul? Besides, “the Spirit of God” is conceived to be concerned in the justifying spoken of; as he certainly could not be and is never even supposed to be, in the doctrine of a mere compensational and judicial justification.

Having now these three main points of the apostle’s language made out and established, in a manner that leaves no room for dispute, we need also The “declaring” and the “remission” explained. to notice, in a very brief manner, two or three of the subordinate points which affect the general meaning. The expression “to declare,” is rather insufficient. The original, very forcible expression is, “for the in-showing” [ενδειξιν,] that is, “for producing an effective impression of, the righteousness of God.” For every thing, as regards a justifying effect depends, it will be seen, on the powerful demonstration made of God’s righteousness, in the incarnate life and death of Christ. It appears to be a matter of doubt, with the commentators, whether the phrase, “through the forbearance of God,” is to be connected with the participial clause, “that are past,” or with the clause, “for the remission.” But the participle, “that are past,” does not mean “that are passed by,” but only “that took place in past time.” To conceive, therefore, that the sins took place, by the forbearance of God, is too weak to be a true conjunction. Say, instead, “for the remission, by God’s forbearance, of sins in the ages past;” and the vigor of good sense returns. There appears to have been a fear of saying “the remission of sins by God’s forbearance,” lest it might not be the true theology. It is not considered, perhaps, how the declaration of God’s righteousness will have covered up that laxity, if laxity there was.

We read the whole passage then as follows—“To declare [that is, demonstrate, inwardly impress] his righteousness, for the remission, by God’s forbearance, The true version. of sins heretofore committed; to declare [demonstrate,] I say, for this present time, his righteousness, that he might be righteous [stand full before us in the evident glory of his righteousness] and the justifier [righteousser] of him that believeth in Jesus.”

If any apology is necessary for using again this very ungrammatical, mock-English substitute for the word “justifier,” it must be that, without some Catholic and Protestant versions both considered. such device, I do not see in what way I can steer my exposition exactly enough, through the close and perilous strait between the Catholic doctrine on one hand, and the Protestant on the other, to avoid an appearance of lapsing in this or that—when both, in fact, are only unsuccessful attempts to exhibit the true gospel idea. The Catholic says, “making righteous;” the Protestant says, “declaring to be righteous;” neither of which is the exact conception of Christian justification. The Christian is not a man made righteous in himself, or in his own habit; neither is he a man held to be righteous, when he is not, by what is called a “declaratio pro justo;” for it is no fitting way, for a gospel of divine mercy, to end off in a fiction that falsifies even the eternal distinctions of character. Hence there is wanted here a verb that we have not—even as the Greeks appear to have made one out of their adjective—so that we also may say, “that he might be righteous and the righteousser,” &c.; for it is the peculiar and exact result of this outlandish word, that it describes a state, where the righteousness may be conceived as a flowing in of God’s righteousness upon the believing soul, thus and forever to flow. The subject is not conceived to be made righteous personally, by infusion, and started off as an inherently right-going character, but is thought of as being held in everlasting confidence and right-going, because he is vitally connected, by his faith, with the inspirations of God, or of the righteousness of God. He is made righteous, using the Catholic words, in the sense that he is always to be so derivatively from the righteousness of God; accounted righteous, using the Protestant, in the sense that he is always being made so, by the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith. And this is his condition of justification; his being always just because he always believes; never to be just, for a moment, after he ceases to believe.

In this careful exposition of what may be called the charter text of Christian justification, two points have been held in reserve for separate consideration; viz.. the righteousness of God as related to justification; and the relation we ourselves have to God’s righteousness, in the faith by which we are justified.

In this sense the ancient sacrifices were, no doubt, appointed to be types of the higher sacrifice; visible forms, or analogies that, when the time is come, will serve as figures, or bases of words, to express and bring into familiar use, the sublime facts and world-renewing mysteries of the incarnate life and suffering death of Jesus. There were no types in nature, out of which, as roots, the words could grow, that. would signify a matter so entirely supernatural, as the gracious work and the incarnate mystery of Christ. The only way, therefore, to get a language for him at all, was to prepare it artificially; and the ancient ritual of sacrifice appears to have been appointed, partly for this purpose. It had other uses for the men who were in it, but the analogical relation between it and the supernatural grace of Christ, hereafter to be represented in the terms it is preparing, is one that reveals a positive contrivance. We discover in it, both the strictly divine origin of the sacrifices, and that they were appointed, quite as much for the ulterior, higher uses to be made of them, (which no man would even conceive for ages to come,) as for the particular, immediate, benefit of the worshipers in them. An apostle speaks of them, it is true, as “the example and shadow of heavenly things,”Heb. viii, 6. and as “a figure for the time then present.”Heb. ix, 9. They were indeed such examples and figures, and were used as rites of practical religion for the time then present; but he only means to say that the ancient worshippers received impressions in their use, answering to “the heavenly things” in Christ, without conceiving, either him, or the analogical relations of their worship. They had nothing to say themselves of a future sacrifice, shadowed in their rites; though it was their privilege, apart from all such impossible expectations, to be inducted into a temper and state, in the use of them, that was after a heavenly pattern—even the sacrifice that was in God and that, being shadowed in their forms was after wards to be revealed in Christ himself.

There is, then, we perceive, an inherent appointed relationship between the ancient sacrifices and the sacrifice What meaning had they to the worshipers? of Christ, such that we shall come into the true sense of what is meant by his sacrifice, offering, blood, only by an accurate and careful discovery of the meaning, and use, and power, and historic associations of the ancient sacrifices. What then did these sacrifices signify? what were they appointed to do, for the persons who accepted and observed them as the cultus of their religion?

When we set ourselves to answer this question, we are met by two very common assumptions, or teachings, They made nothing of the pain of the victims. that only misdirect our search, and throw us out of the true line of discovery. Thus a great deal is made, by many, of the fact that the animal is slain for the sacrifice—thrust down into death, it is conceived, in the worshiper’s place. Quite as much also is made, or even more, of the fact that the animal suffers pain in dying; and thus is an offering of so much pain to God, in substitution for the deserved pain of the transgressor, Both these constructions upon sacrifices belong, it will be seen, to schemes of expiation, or legal substitution, asserted for the gospel, which in fact require and look for the discovery of similar ideas in the analogies of the ancient ritual.

As to the latter, the pain of dying, it is no light and trivial way of answer, to say that, if the pain of the animal was any such principal thing, then there was no need of any thing farther. To burn the flesh and sprinkle the blood were of no consequence, if the sacrifice was already complete. Offering the flesh in smoke was nothing, if only the pain was offered; for there was no pain in the dead victim. Even supposing the pain to be valuable to the worshiper in a way of expression, the expression is complete, as soon as the victim is dead. What is wanted therefore is the killing of the animal, which requires no special ceremony.

Furthermore it is, to say the least, a very singular thing, if so much of the power and significance of the sacrifices lies in the death and the dying pains of the animals, that no single worshiper of the old -dispensation, ever has a word to say of these animal dyings and pains of dying, drops no word of sympathy for the victims, or of sympathetic relenting for sin on their account, testifies no sorrow, witnesses to no sense of compunction, because of the impressions made on him, by the hard fortune they are compelled to suffer. I recollect no single instance in the whole Scripture, where the faintest intimation of this kind appears; and yet, by the supposition, impressions to be made in this way are even a principal matter in the sacrifices!

Besides, it is also another fault in all such representations of the mode of what is called atonement by sacrifice, Had no tender sympathy for the victims. that they suppose a tenderness of feeling, as regards the death and suffering of animals, which this people had as little of as every pastoral people must; that is, very nearly none at all. They lived, every day of their lives, on the animals killed in the morning at the tent door. Every woman, every child, looked on at the butchering and grew up in the most familiar habit of seeing life taken; nor was any thing more common than for women, or even for quite young children, to kill and dress a lamb, or a kid, with their own hands. And yet their sacrifice of atonement, it is conceived, is going to have its effect, by the impressions of death and dying pain it wakens in their delicate sensibilities! The fictitiousness of such conceptions is quite too evident.

Moreover it is a great point in the observance of these rites that the animal shall be the first born of its The choice quality of the animal signified more. dam; a male without spot or blemish. But why, on what principle, if the chief value of the sacrifice depends on the death and dying pains of the animal? Would not any other, a third born, a female, or a lame or blemished animal, die as convulsively and suffer as much?

It is also a very significant objection to these constructions of sacrifice, that, when two goats are brought to the priest for the people’s offering, one is slain and his blood sprinkled on the mercy-seat and about the holy place, to remove the defilement The deportation of the sin signified by the scape-goat. supposed to be upon them, from the sins and uncleannesses of the people; and then the other, by which they are to be personally cleansed themselves, suffers no death, or dying pain at all, as their substitute, but having their sins all put upon his head, by the priest’s confession, is turned loose alive and driven off into the wilderness—so to signify the deportation, or clean removal of, their guiltiness. It is therefore called their “atonement” and is, in fact, an offering just as truly as the other that was slain, only it is sacrificed by expulsion, and without even so much as a thought of its death or pain of dying.

Excluding now these unsupported and really forced constructions of the sacrifices, the question returns, what, in positive reality, were they? Ordained to be a liturgy. wherein lay their use and value? They were appointed, I answer, to be the liturgy of their religion; or, more exactly, of their guilt and repentance before God as a reconciling God—not a verbal liturgy, but a transactional, having its power and value, not in any thing said, taught, reasoned, but in what is done by the worshiper, and before and for him, in the transaction of the rite.

The people, it must be conceived, have not yet come to the age of reflection. They know nothing about piety, or religious experience, as reflectively defined, preached, tested, by words. Always going out after their eyes in objective ways of action, and never returning upon They wanted a religion for the eyes. themselves, they have no reflective action, no discovery of themselves by self-testing criticism. They are conscious of certain single acts, which they feel to be sins, but not definitely conscious of sin as a state of moral disorder. Of course they are religious beings, guilty beings, but these deep ground-truths of their nature work out in them, from a point back of their distinct consciousness; felt only as disturbances, not discovered mentally in their philosophic nature and reality. Now to manage such a people and train them towards himself, God puts them in a drill of action, works upon them by a transactional liturgy, and expects, by that means, to generate in them an implicit faith, sentiment, piety, which they do not know themselves by definition, and could not state in words that suppose a reflective discovery.

This transactional liturgy, taken as a divine institute, is a contrivance of wonderful skill. Considered as in Their fine adaptation as a transactional liturgy. reference to the capacities of the worshipers, and also to results of repentance for sin and newness of life, it displays a wisdom really divine. It begins at a point or base note of action, that, so far as I can recollect, is wholly unknown to the cultus, or the sacrifices, of any heathen religion. Moving on results of purity, or purification from sin, it supposes impurity, and lays this down as a fundamental figure, in what may be called the footing of ceremonial uncleanness. Then the problem is to cleanse, or hallow the unclean.

As regards the words themselves, it may be well to note, in the first place, that the English word atonement is entirely an Old Testament word, not Two ruling conceptions. Atonement and Propitiation. occurring at all in the translation of the New, except in a single instance;Romans v, 11. where it is given as the translation of a word that is twice translated reconciliation, in the previous verse, and in every other place in the New Testament is translated reconciliation. And yet the deviation in this particular instance is less remarkable, because the English word atonement, at the time when the Scriptures were translated, meant to reconcile, that is, to at-one. And it is in this sense of making reconcilement, putting-at-one, that the word is so often used in the Old Testament. There, however, it is not so much the literal translation or transfer of the Hebrew word in its own type, as a new, though very good and proper construction, put in its place. The Hebrew word is cover, the very same root from which our English word cover is derived. Thus where we read so often, “he shall make atonement for you,” “scape-goat to make atonement,” and the like, it means the same thing as to make sin-cover, that is, reconciliation; the conception being, that sin is thereby covered up, hidden from sight or memory. Exactly the same thing is meant, when, using a different figure, it is said to be purged, cleansed, taken away. When the transgressor is said to be atoned or reconciled, the being covered is taken subjectively in the same way; as if something had come upon him to change his unclean state, and make him ceremonially, or, it may be, spiritually, pure.

But the subject thus atoned is not only covered or cleansed in himself, but he is figured as being put in a new relation with God, and God with him; and it is as if God were somehow changed towards him—newly inclined, mitigated, propitiated or made propitious. It resulted accordingly, that the Hebrew word to cover was very frequently translated in the Greek Septuagint, by a word that signifies to propitiate or make propitiation. And the same word occurs, in six instances in the New Testament, and under three grammatic forms; where it is translated, three times, “propitiation;” once, “to make reconciliation;” once, “be merciful;” and once, “mercy-seat;” the three latter examples having, of course, their fair equivalents, in the phrases, “make propitiation,” “be propitious,” and “seat of propitiation.”

We have then, two ruling conceptions of sacrifice, connected with, or resulting from, the figure of a sin Both conceptions miscolored by expiation. cover; one representing the effect in us, and the other an effect in God as related to us—reconciliation [at-one-ment,] and propitiation. I shall recur to them again, at the close of the chapter, to settle more exactly their relative import, when applied to the Christian sacrifice. Meantime, another very weighty matter demands our careful attention; viz., the question of expiation.

Both these terms, atonement and propitiation, are turned from their true meaning, in our common uses, by the false idea of expiation associated with them, or entered theologically into them. To atone is no more to reconcile, that is to restore and make clean, but it is made to mean the answering for sin, making amends for it, by offering expiatory pains to obtain the discharge of it. Propitiation is made in the same way, to signify the placation of God, by a contribution of pains and expiatory sufferings. We can not therefore recover the two words, atonement and propitiation, to their true meaning, without going into a deliberate and careful investigation of the false element by which they are corrupted.

The word expiation does not once occur in the Scripture. The idea is classical, not scriptural at all, but the word has been sliding into use by the Expiation not a word of the Scriptures but of the classics. christian disciples and teachers, and getting itself accepted interchangeably for such as belong to the Scripture, till it has come to be even a considerable test of orthodoxy. I do not object to it, however, because of its origin, but because of its incurable falsity. A new word applied to christian subjects is not, of course, to be condemned, because it is new. Neither is a pagan word to be always cast out. But a word both new and pagan, made staple as in application to an old, divinely ordered, staple institution of Scripture, like that of sacrifice, must be admitted, I think, to wear a suspicious look. It should certainly have been carefully questioned, before it was baptized, into the faith, as I very much fear it was not.

They begin with the grand primal fact of the incarnation; for it is only in that, and by that mystery, that the person arrives whose history is to be entered into the world. Viewed in this light, the person arriving is not merely a man, but, as we must believe, a veritable God-man. Taken as being simply a man, the facts of his life would certainly be remarkable and valuable, he would only be a much greater and more incredible mystery, considering the morally perfect, and therefore superhuman character he is in, than he is when conceived as an abnormal, extra-mundane person, let into the world from above it, to fulfill a specially divine mission. All the after facts change color and consequence, accordingly, as they are viewed in one mode or the other. Considered as the God-man, there is not a single fact, or scene, in the history which, fitly conceived, does not yield some lesson of power; the infancy; the thirty years of silent preparation; the recoil of the poor human nature, called the temptation, when the work begins; every healing, every miracle, every friendship, every commendation, every denunciation, the lot of poverty, the hour of oppressed feeling, the weariness and sleep, the miraculous hem of his garment, the transfiguration, the prayers, the amazing assumptions of a common glory and right with the Father, the agony, the trial, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the appearings and tender teachings afterwards, and last of all the ascension, followed by the descent of the Spirit to represent and be himself, according to his promise, a Christ every where present, every where accessible—no longer limited and localized in space—in all these and in all he said and taught concerning God, himself, and us, the preacher is to find staple matter for his messages. There is almost nothing, even as to his mere manners and modes, which, if he is truly alive—and no Christian man has a right to be dead—will not open some gate or crevice into chambers of glory, for the conscience or the heart.

Here has been one of the great faults or deficiencies in the preaching of Christ. Too little, by a thousand fold, A great fault of preaching has been here. has been made of the facts of his life. By some they are almost never dwelt upon, with the exception, perhaps, of two or three that could not be utterly passed over; the rest are as if they were not. Commonly the feeling is not brought close enough to them to find the life that is in them—what can they signify of importance, after the main doctrine of all has been decocted? How much easier to preach the decoction and let the dried herbs of the story go. It might be so, if they were really dry; but since they are all alive, fresh and fragrant as a bank of roses, how much better to go and breathe among them and catch the quickening odors. How little indeed does any preacher know of the true gospel, who only finds a dull, stale matter, in the wonderful, morally sublime record of such a character! No good news will ever go forth out of him. He thinks he has exhausted the gospel and gotten the whole matter of it in his head, just because he has gotten nothing, and knows not that there is any thing to get, besides what his formula contains. He mourns a little, it may be, over the want of power in his preaching, when in fact there ought to be no power, because there is no fact in the grand life-history of Jesus that is alive to him. He fails just where any really high ministry must begin; viz., in the ability to show forth Christ alive, in the facts that represent his living personality; thus to raise conviction, thus to keep interest in a glow, thus to conquer the heart and testify a Saviour who mediates peace.

I think it would be hardly possible for a preacher of Christ to be too much in the facts of his life. Only they must be so handled as to raise great subjects, and kindle the heat of a true fire, as they always may. The mere doling of these facts, or the setting them off in a garnish of scene-painting or mock sentiment, or frothy laudation, does not fulfill the idea of such preaching. Something worthy of God’s love, something deifically great must be found in them, and the feeling must be raised, that he is personally nigh, rich in his gifts, strong in his majesty, terrible in his beauty, heavyhearted and tender in the suffering concern of his love. We come next—

3. To another and more difficult matter, as regards the power of the gospel in its uses, and the due impression of it, as a way of salvation; viz., No sufficient gospel without the altar forms. the right conception and fit presentation of it, under the altar forms provided for it. For, besides the outward figure of the facts, occurring under conditions of space and time, and significant to human feeling in that manner, God has contrived a thought-form, to assist us in that kind of use which may conduct us into the desired state of practical reconciliation with himself. In the facts, outwardly regarded, there is no sacrifice, or oblation, or atonement, or propitiation, but simply a living and dying thus and thus. The facts are impressive, the person is clad in a wonderful dignity and beauty, the agony is eloquent of love, and the cross a very shocking murder triumphantly met, and if then the question rises, how we are to use such a history so as to be reconciled by it, we hardly know in what way to begin. How shall we come unto God by help of this martyrdom? How shall we turn it, or turn ourselves under it, so as to be justified and set in peace with God? Plainly there is a want here, and this want is met by giving a thought-form to the facts which is not in the facts themselves. They are put directly into the molds of the altar, and we are called to accept the crucified God-man as our sacrifice, an offering or oblation for us, our propitiation; so to be sprinkled from our evil conscience, washed, purged, purified, cleansed from our sin. Instead of leaving the matter of the facts just as they occurred, there is a reverting to familiar forms of thought, made familiar partly for this purpose, and we are told, in brief, to use the facts just as we would the sin offerings of the altar, and make an altar grace of them—only a grace complete and perfect, an offering once for all. According to the Epistle to the Hebrews, the ancient ritual was devised by God, apart from its liturgical uses, to be the vehicle in words of the heavenly things in Christ, molds of thought for the world’s grand altar service in Christ the universal offering, regulative conceptions for the fit receiving and effective use of the gospel.

And so much is there in this that, without these forms of the altar, we should be utterly at a loss in making any use of the Christian facts, that would set us in a condition of practical reconciliation with God. Christ is good, beautiful, wonderful, his disinterested love is a picture by itself, his forgiving patience melts into my feeling, his passion rends open my heart, but what is he for, and how shall he be made unto me the salvation I want? One word—he is my sacrifice—opens all to me and beholding him, with all my sin upon him, I count him my offering, I come unto God by him and enter into the holiest by his blood.

But the principal reason for setting forth the matter of Christ’s life and death as an oblation remains to be stated; viz., the necessity of somehow Wanted to produce an attitude of objectivity. preventing an over-conscious state in the receiver. It was going to be a great fault in the use, that the disciple, looking for a power on his character, would keep himself too entirely in the attitude of consciousness, or voluntary self-application. He would be hanging round each fact and scene, to get some eloquent moving effect from it. And he would not only study how to get impressions, but, almost ere he is aware of it, to make them. Just here accordingly it was that the Scripture symbols, and especially those of the altar service, were to come to oui aid, putting us into a use of the gospel so entirely objective, as to scarcely suffer a recoil on our consciousness at all. The sacrificial offering was in form, an offering wholly to God, even as the smoke rolls up from the altar and comes not back. The result was that the worshiper was made clean; that is, according to the political, or statutory sense; and if, perchance, he was made clean in a deeper sense, it would be implicitly, just because his mind was going up wholly to God, with the smoke of his offering. So, when I conceive that Christ is my offering before God, my own choice Lamb and God’s, brought to the slaying, and that for my sin, my thought moves wholly outward and upward, bathing itself in the goodness and grace of the sacrifice. Doubtless there will be a power in it, all the greater power that I am not looking after power, and that nothing puts me thinking of effects upon myself.

In this manner coming unto Christ, or to God through Christ, in the symbols of sacrifice, we make an escape, as it were, from ourselves and that state of consciousness which is the bane of religion; an escape, I must frankly admit, which is none the less necessary, when we conceive that Christ has come into the world, not to expiate sin, but to be a power upon it; furthermore, an escape which God has provided, to make him more completely a power. For it is in these symbols that God contrives to get us out of ourselves into the free state of faith, and love, and to become the new inspiration of life in our hearts. And accordingly we should find, in the ready and free use of these symbols, our best means of grace, if only we could have them clear of misconstructions that often fatally corrupt their meaning. Oppressed with guilt, we should turn ourselves joyfully to Christ as the propitiation for our sins, Christ who hath borne the curse for us, Christ who knew no sin made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. We should cry in our prayers; O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, take away our sins; or thinking of that sacred blood, by whose drops that fell as touches of life on the world’s grand altar, Calvary, we should cry—wash us, O Christ, in the blood of thy cross and make us clean; or wanting, in despair of ourselves, some Helper and Friend to bear the sins we can not bear ourselves, we should take up tenderly the words of the poet, if not in his meaning, yet in the meaning which they ought to have—

“My soul looks back to see The burdens thou didst bear, When hanging on the accursed tree, And hopes her guilt was there.”

We want, in short, to use these altar terms, just as freely as they are used by those who accept the formula of expiation, or judicial satisfaction for sin; in just their manner too, when they are using them most practically. Indeed, it is one of the enviable advantages of their scheme that they are able to use them freely; for, when they are so used, they will not always keep themselves close in the dogmatic misconstructions put upon them, but will often pour into the heart, in their true Scripture meaning, as chariots into some pos tern gate that is not closed. A more subjective gospel, one that looks to effects on character and the renewing of the life in God, has even a better right to their use; and they are almost indispensable, to save it from an otherwise nearly fatal subjectivity.

Nor is there any thing so peculiar in this need of an objective form for the gospel. We need what is like it Objective terms a first want of language. every where, and human language is full of it. A very great part of the terms and expressions of language, and those that are liveliest and freshest, are such as put into things and facts meanings which are really not there, but in ourselves. We say that a thing is painful because we suffer pain from it; putting the pain into the thing, which is really in ourselves. We say, in the very palpable and common matters of color, that things are red, blue, white, and the like, when, as we all know, the colors are in us and not in the things. Subjectively speaking, we should have to say, awkwardly and pedantically, that we have sensations of redness, blueness, whiteness, before the things. We say that a thing has a sweet taste, when the sweet taste is not in the thing at all, but wholly in ourselves. The language of Christ, which is about as nearly perfect as it can be, abounds in these objective representations of subjective facts and ideas. Glance along the sermon on the mount, looking go farther, and we get examples like these, “If thy right eye offend thee”—“if thine eye be evil;” where he has no thought of any thing blamable in the eye, o! any thing without offending the eye, but only of the lustful, or grudging soul, that looks through it. “Lead us not into temptation;” where he means, not that God might lead us into it, but that we need to be kept from leading ourselves into it. “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven;” where he does not imagine that we have access to heaven, so that we can put in treasures there, but that we are to get heavenly treasures garnered in ourselves. Again—“straight is the gate, broad is the way;” where he seems to say that God’s gate of life is made narrow, and his way of destruction broad. He could not raise any fit impression, by the real subjective fact, that our perverseness makes the gate of life narrow and difficult to enter, and the way of destruction broad and easy; so he puts the case objectively, willing, even at the expense of an almost seeming reflection upon God, to set us in a distinct feeling of the fearful alternative we are required to meet.

To carry these illustrations of the genius of language, and especially of Scripture language a little farther, and show, on how large a scale, the forms Hence the Devil, or bad king. of truth are affected by the instinct of objective representation, I will refer to the devil, or ὀ διαβολος, of the Old and New Testament. Here we have a kind of bad God, over against the good, who leads the powers of darkness and manages the interest of evil. But there is no more reason to suppose that God has created any such being, or that any such really exists, than there is to suppose that there is a real being called the prince of this world, or another called antichrist, or two others called Gog and Magog. The devil is that objective person, whose reality is the sum of all subjective seductions, or temptations to evil; viz., those of bad spirits, and those of the corrupted soul itself. These bad spirits, sometimes called Legion, together with our own bad thoughts, are all gathered up into a great king of art and mischief and called the devil. Whether it is done by some instinct of language, or some special guidance of inspiration, in the use of language, or both, we do not know; the latter is more probable. But however it came to pass, we can see that it serves a most important use in the economy of revelation. In the process of recovery to God, men must be convinced of their sins, and made thoroughly conscious of their guiltiness, and this requires a turning of their minds upon themselves in reflection and a state of piercingly subjective attention to their own ill desert. And yet they must be taken away, somehow, from a too close, or totally subjective attention, even to their sins. For if they are to be taken away from their ill desert and guiltiness, they must be drawn out into a movement of soul in exactly the opposite direction; viz., in the direction of faith which is outward. And this exactly is what the grand objective conception of the devil prepares and facilitates. First, their sin is all gathered up with its roots and causes into the Bad King conceived to be reigning without; and then it is permitted the penitent, or the disciple struggling with his enemy, to conceive that Christ, in whom he is called to believe, is out in force, to subdue and crush the monster. And so he is helped away from the torment of a merely reflective state, even when contending with the sins of his own bosom.

Only two days previous to the writing of this paragraph I was conversing with a very intelligent and, withal, a truly liberal Christian friend, who said, as arguing for the existence of the devil, that he liked to think of such a being, in distinction from thinking always of his sins, about which he knew very little, and then to hang his faith on Christ as warring with him, and able to pluck him down; for this takes in every thing and makes a clean issue, when we do it, in the simplest manner possible. To which the very obvious reply was, that for this very purpose God has given us the objective devil of Scripture to be hated, and conspired against, and by faith cast down, when the real, multitudinous, inconceivable matter to be thus hated, conspired against, and by faith cast down, is working subjectively in ourselves. And, what is more, there is no other conception of the devil of Scripture that makes him so profoundly real as this; partly because there is no other that has any look of credibility.

We find then, as we look at language, whether out of the Scriptures or in, that objective representations are always best for us, most sought after, and prepared on a very large scale, because they take us away from mere self-management, and carry us out to rest our hope and faith in God. If we represented every thing subjectively which is subjective, we could do it only by using the most awkward and tedious circumlocutions. In one view, these outward projections of what is within are not true, and yet they are the more vigorously true for that reason. Shut up to saying every thing subjectively, our language would be only a torment.

Any strictly subjective style of religion is vicious. It is moral self-culture, in fact, and not religion. We The outgoing state is thus secured. think of ourselves abundantly in the selfishness of our sins. What we need, above all, is to be taken off the self-center and centered in God. Ceasing to go by contrivance, we must learn to go by inspiration; that is, by the free impulse of God in our faith. Hence the profound importance of the altar symbols, divinely prepared and fashioned, to be the form of the Christian grace. They compose for us even a kind of objective religion; that is, a religion operated for us and before us. In one view they are not true, just as the ten thousand objective expressions of language referred to are not, and yet there is nothing so sublimely, healthfully true, in the practical and free uses of faith, because we are so simple in them, and so completely carried out of ourselves. Of course we shall be conscious beings still; we must be conscious always and in every thing we do; but how much does it signify that we can have an altar and an offering, once for all, where we can go with our confession, and pay our tender worship, without thinking, for the time, of any thing but what is before us and is done for us. Here it is that we drop out self most easily, and come away to God, in a liberty most perfectly unembarrassed by the habit of our guilty self-devotion. In the sacrifice we cling to and call our own, we are respited, and the ceasing from our will, makes us plastic to the grace that molds us. The new element we are in is peace; we are atoned, reconciled.

But we encounter, at this point, a very great difficulty, in the fact that all these Scripture symbols have been so long and dreadfully misapplied, A great difficulty met. by the dogmatic schemes of expiation, penal suffering, and judicial satisfaction. Thus, if we attempt to use them, we are disturbed by the feeling, that neither we, nor they, will be understood, in any sense that is true. How shall we venture to speak of Christ as a sacrifice for sin, when even the ritual sacrifice, on which the figure is based, has been made to signify, not a confessional offering, or offering of pious devotion, in which the worshiper is turned to God, but the offering of a substituted victim, to even the penal account with God, or reconcile God to him? So of all the other symbols; the lamb is the victim, in the sense that he suffers; the slaying of the victim is death for death, and the dying of the victim is pain for pain; when truly nothing was made, either of the death, or the pain, but only of the offering of some choicest animal, as a reverently careful act of homage and repentance for sin. The blood sprinkled here and there is no more the life, that sacred element which pacifies every thing it touches, but it is the blood of slaughter, signifying that God is reconciled only when sin draws blood. Even the bearing of sin by the scape-goat—a beautifully contrived figure, to signify the deportation of sin—what is it but the certain fact of theology, that, if sins are to be removed, they must yet be borne by somebody? In the same way atonement is not the covering of sin, or the reconciliation of the sinner, but it is that paying for sin which evens the account. And so of all the lustral figures—making clean, washing, purifying, purging, sprinkling by the hyssop branch—they only mean that expiation is complete, and a clean, or even account made by it. So, too, of the extra-ritual figures. Redemption and ransom are not figures of release from captivity, but penal satisfactions paid to even the account of justice. The stripes that heal, too, are become the stripes that satisfy God’s wrath.

What then shall we do with these forms of the altar, when they have come to be thus sadly disfigured and turned from their true meaning? Shall we use them freely and rightly, and let such impressions be taken as certainly will be? Shall we use them with salvos and parentheses of explanation? That would be awkward and troublesome and besides would despoil them of all right effect. Shall we then give them up entirely and let them go? Many, alas, are doing it, contriving how to find a sufficient gospel in the forms of the facts themselves, described in the terms of common speech. And the result is, that they preach a philosophy of Christ instead of the Christian oblation, a Christ who is to work on souls under the natural laws of effect, and not a Christ to be our sacrifice before God. We can not afford to lose these sacred forms of the altar. They fill an office which nothing else can fill, and serve a use which can not be served without them. It may perhaps be granted that, considering the advance of culture and reflection now made, we should use them less, and the forms of common language more; still we have not gotten by the want of them and we never shall. The most cultivated, most intellectual disciple wants them now and will get his dearest approaches to God in their use. We can do without them, it may be, for a little while; but after a time we seem to be in a gospel that has no atmosphere, and our breathing is a gasping state. Our very repentances are hampered by too great subjectivity, becoming as it were a pulling at our own shoulders. Our subjective applications of Christ get confused and grow inefficacious. Our very prayers and thanksgivings get introverted and muddled. Trying to fight ourselves on in our wars, courage dies and impulse flags. And so we begin to sigh for some altar, whither we may go and just see the fire burning, and the smoke going up, on its own account, and circle it about with our believing hymns; some element of day, into which we may come, and simply see, without superintending the light.

No, these much abused symbols are indispensable and must be recovered. It may be a task of some difficulty, yet of much less difficulty than How to get back the lost symbols. many suppose. It only requires a little resolute courage here, as always, to retake a battery that is lost. Let the preacher go before, in one or two discourses, showing what the sacrifices were not, and what they were; then how Christ, without expiation, becomes an offering for us, our lamb, our blood of remission, fulfilling the highest reality of sacrifice, and meeting all our highest Christian uses, in such molds of sacrifice; and then let him throw himself on the using of all these altar figures freely, allowing just such impressions to be taken as there sometimes probably will be; still going on without any sensitive concern. The result will be that, in a little while, the abused terms will right themselves and come into their places, rejoicing as it were in their own redemption, as the souls they fructify rejoice in the grace they minister by their use. And this act of reclamation is due to the Scriptures not less than to our ourselves. Not even the grand Scripture doctrine of justification by faith can be named in many places, without raising associations that are painful—such as follow in the train of penal suffering, expiatory death, literal substitution, judicial satisfaction, legally imputed righteousness. And this being so, there is no loyal way left but to retake the whole field, and restore all these lost symbols to their rightful meanings and places.

I could not excuse myself, in the closing of this last chapter, if I did not call attention directly to the very Our doctrine ends where the first age began. instructive and somewhat humbling fact, that we are ending here, just where Christianity began. After passing round the circuit of more than eighteen centuries, occupied alas! how largely, in litigations of theory and formula, we come back, at last, to say, dropping out all the accumulated rubbish of our wisdom, preach Christ just as the Apostolic Fathers, and the Saints of the first three centuries did; viz., in the facts of his personal life and death; and these facts in the forms of the altar; and withal in his judgment sanctions, and his second coming to judge the world. If we look at the effects wrought, these first three centuries of Christian preaching have never been matched in any other three, and yet they had no formula at all of atonement, and had not even begun, as far as we can discover, to have any speculative inquiries on the subject. All our most qualified historians agree in this, and we can see for ourselves, from the epistles of Clement and other Apostolic Fathers so called, that no such inquiries had yet arrived. Is it then to be the end of all our litigations, theories, and attempted scientific constructions, that, after our heats of controversy have cooled, and our fires of extirpation have quite burned away, we come back to the very same kind of preaching alphabet, in which the first fathers had their simple beginnings? Be it so, and yet the labor we have spent is by no means lost. We shall come back into that first preaching, with an immense advantage gained over these fathers. What they did in their simplicity, we shall do in a way of well-instructed reason. Their simplicity, in fact, supposed the certainty of all these long detours of labor and contest afterwards to come; but we, in our return, come back with our experiments all made, and detours all ended, not simply to preach Christ in just their manner, but to do it because we have finally proved the wisdom of it, and the foolishness of every thing else; advantages that are worth to us all they have cost.

And what if we shall seem to have proved something else that is more positive still; viz., that the formulizing God’s true formula in place of all others. industry, in which we have so long been occupied, was anticipated by God from the first, and that he Himself, to save us from a task so far above our powers, provided us in fact a formula of his own. Perhaps I do not mean by this exactly what we commonly mean by the word, and yet perhaps I do. A formula is a little form, a condensed representation, by figure, of some spiritual truth; for every spiritual truth comes into figure and form of necessity, when it comes into language, or a statement in words. We commonly understand by a formula what is really never true of it, or is true only to the apprehensions of ignorance; viz., a propositional statement that conveys the spiritual truth or doctrine of a subject by words of exact notation. In this latter impossible sense of formula, there is none, of the Christian gospel, and what is more there never will be or can be any. But in the former and true sense, or only possible sense, the altar, with its offerings and rites of blood, is the very form and formula that God has provided for the gospel; provided, I may say, by long centuries of drill, in a liturgy of rites contrived, in fact, to serve this very purpose. After we have tried our own hand long enough, in the absurd endeavor to get up a formula, better than God’s, in the common terms of abstraction, shall we not come back humbled and shamed, to rest in the discovery that the Scripture figures of sacrifice and blood make up a complete investiture for the gospel, in all its highest meanings and profoundest mediatorial relationships? Here we have, in small, all that Christianity is, or can do for us, in the way of our reconciliation to God. Preaching, and praying, and giving praise in these words of the altar, we have the gospel in its fullest and best use, with the advantage that every thing done, in that way of use, is a confession we are always reciting. In these terms of sacrifice we are kept fresh in the gospel, and the gospel is kept fresh and vital in us. It can never die and never be corrupted, as long as our faith keeps up its confession under these figures, unless the figures themselves are corrupted by artificial and false constructions put upon them—which is more than can be said of almost any other creed, on any other subject. No church, or synod, or council, need be at all concerned for the gospel, lest it should die for the want of a creed to keep it safe, as long as Christ is accepted and clung to in God’s own chosen forms —the soul’s great sacrifice, the Lamb that bears and takes away its sin, the blood that sprinkles its foul conscience and makes it clean, the life that, being in the blood, quickens and hallows every thing. Let this be the preaching word of the preachers and the repenting and praising word of guilty souls, and the gospel is safe, even for eternal ages; because it is a gospel in power. Let any one contrive to make it safe, by any other guard of orthodoxy, when it is not in power, and he will not be long in making the discovery that it is gone already. Hither, last of all, then, we return, and here we raise, in deep sorrow and shame, our confession.

O, thou God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, into what strange places, and how far away, hath our foolish We return to God. conceit been leading us. We thought we must needs make out for thy dear Son—dear also to us because he hath come to bring us life—some wisely framed doctrine, bearing the stamp of our own wise thought and science—not so familiar and so merely practical as thy choice words of sacrifice. But we have wearied ourselves in the greatness of our way. We have raised long controversies, and held learned councils, and contrived exact articles; and though we have seemed to settle many things wisely, yet nothing is either settled or wise; but whatever we devise turns dry, looks empty, disappoints the craving of our wants, creating after all only such consent as consists in a common discord. Commanded by thee to build our altar of “whole stones” and “lift up no tool of iron upon them,” we have thought to improve its look, and make it stronger, by squaring them carefully and hewing them into shapes more scientifically exact; and now that we have done it, we. perceive that we have only cut them into our own stale forms, and made them “stones of emptiness.” Mortified in our conceit we return, O God, to thee, and to thy free word in Christ. We are ashamed that we could go so far to find so little, and the more that, when we return, every thing seems to: be found already. Thy cross, taken as our altar, O thou Christ of God, and thou thyself the offering once for all, for our sins—what other and more sure confession do we need? We renounce the foolishness and poverty of our inventions; only be thou our sacrifice, and let us be offered up with thee in thy offering. We could not dare to put our sins upon thee, but since thou hast taken them on thyself to bear them, let us also come and take hold of thy sorrows and pains, to suffer with thee. Having boldness to enter thus into the holiest, by thy blood and priesthood, need we more to keep our unity in the truth, and is there more of truth for us to have, than to go in and out together with thee, and behold, with faces bowed, the wings of thy cherubim overspreading the mercy-seat of thy peace? Truly there is no formulary that can tell so much of thy gospel, as to call thee Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world! For if we come to confess our sins upon thy head, we have our fearing, guilt-stricken heart made strong in the confidence, that they are truly taken away. Being thus made consciously clean, is not thy great renewing power upon us, and what more is there to be found?

Coming back then to thy own formulary, O God, and having it for our sufficient confession, let our Christ himself be the mold of our doctrine, the medium of our prayers, the soul of our liberty, the informing grace and music of our hymns—wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Be thy saints gathered speedily. O Lord, into these; gathered away thus from their distractions into thy clear unity; away from their own contrived poverties of meaning, into thy riches and the glorious liberties of thy truth. And so let the better ages of thy promise come; even as they meet us in the vision of thy prophet—a fair river of healing, deepening, spreading wide in its flow, and making every thing to live whithersoever the river cometh; because it issues, O Lord, from under Thine Altar.