THE

NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT

AND ITS RELATION TO

REMISSION OF SINS

AND

ETERNAL LIFE

BY

JOHN McLEOD CAMPBELL.

Cambridge:

MACMILLAN AND Co.

1856.

CONTENTS.

THE

NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT.

CHAPTER I.

THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED IN THE ATONEMENT AWAKEN THE EXPECTATION THAT WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND ITS NATURE.

THE fundamental place which the atonement occupies in Christianity, gives importance to every aspect in which it can be contemplated. Of these aspects the chief are, its reference, its object, and its nature. For whom was it made? what was it intended to accomplish? what has it been in itself?

These are distinct questions, though the discussion of any one of them has generally more or less involved that of the other two. Certainly to be in possession of the true answer to any one of them must be a help in seeking the answers of the others; as also a misconception as to the answer of one must tend to mislead us in our consideration of the others. This is true, whichever aspect of the subject we may regard as the most important, or as having in it most light.

The question between the Reformers and the Church of Rome--the question of justification by faith alone--was most closely connected with the second aspect of the atonement, viz. what it has accomplished. The discussions which subsequently divided the Reformers among themselves turned on the first; being as to whether the atonement had been made for all men, or for an election only. Much recent advocacy of the atonement has dealt freely with the third point, i.e., what the atonement is in itself, as to which there was no question raised in the earlier discussions, but as to which it has been latterly felt, that the other questions could not be rightly taken up until this one was more closely considered; and as to which the advocates of the universality of the atonement have begun to feel, that the received conceptions of its nature have given to the advocates of an atonement referring to an election only, an advantage in argument which a true apprehension of what the atonement has been would do away with.

It is this third aspect of the atonement--i. e., its nature--that I now propose to consider; which I propose to do with more immediate reference to the second aspect of the atonement, viz. what it has accomplished--i. e., its relation to the remission of sins, and the gift of eternal life. The first point, viz., the extent of the reference of the atonement, it is no part of my immediate purpose to discuss. I believe that the atonement has been an atonement for sin, having reference to all mankind; I believe this to be distinctly revealed; I believe it to be also implied in what the atonement is in itself. But it is the illustration of the nature of the atonement which I have immediately in view; for it is in the prevailing state of men's minds on this subject that I feel a call to write.

I have just noticed that the exigencies of controversy, and the natural desire to give a philosophical harmony to theological system, has recently led to a reconsideration of the subject of the nature of the atonement. I shall subsequently have occasion to notice particularly what the result has been; and why, I am not satisfied with that result: which had I been, I should gladly have felt this volume superseded. But the intellectual exigencies of systems are, if real, closely connected with the spiritual exigencies of the living man; and something higher than an intellectual demand, though that is not to be slighted as if it were not of God also, is felt to call for light on the nature of the atonement, when previously received conceptions no longer satisfy conscience, developed, and spiritually enlightened. The internal evidence of Christianity all prize, and anything felt to be a real addition to it all must welcome, though the freedom with which men seek such increase in the internal light of the gospel, is various. Some, indeed, may give too much ground for the charge of intellectual arrogance, in the demand they make for internal evidence at every step; while others, while thankfiilly receiving such evidence, fall into the error of treating it as something over and above what was needed for faith. I believe the former little realise how much more they believe than they understand; and I believe the latter as little realise how much their reception of what they believe depends ultimately upon what of it they do understand, and spiritually discern to be to the glory of God. I am not now to write on the nature of the atonement as one whose first faith in the atonement rested on a clear understanding of its nature; and yet I do not look back on that first faith as unwarranted and unreal. Our first faith may have in it elements which are true and abiding, although mingled with much darkness, which, in the low undeveloped condition of conscience, causes us no pain or uneasiness. As the divine life is developed in us, these two things proceed happily together, viz. a growing capacity of judging what the conditions are of a peace with God in full harmony with his name and character; and the apprehension of these conditions as all present in the atonement. But it would be altogether in contradiction to the nature of that love, which, while we were yet sinners, gave Christ to die for us, to suppose that true yieldings to the drawings of that love, however dimly and imperfectly apprehended, ever deceive the heart; or that the hope towards God, which accompanies them, can ever disappoint. To come to see more of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is not to come to see reason to conclude that my hope was vain while I saw less. Yet surely, on the other hand, that God acknowledged me while I saw least, yet seeing something truly, is no reason why I should not seek to see more,--yea as much as God may give me to see.

The kindness and love of God our Saviour towards man--the grace of God which hath appeared bringing salvation to all men--has a twofold aspect; the one retrospective, referring to the evil from which that grace brings deliverance; the other prospective, referring to the good which it bestows. Of that evil men have the varied and sad experience, as they have also feelings that may be interpreted as longings after that good; but that experience is unintelligent and these longings are vague, and the grace which brings salvation is itself the light which reveals both our need of salvation, and what the salvation is which we need; explaining to us the mystery of our dark experience, and directing our aimless longings to the unknown hope which was for us in God.

The light which reveals to us the evil of our condition as sinners, and the good of which God saw the capacity still to remain with us, reveals to us, at the same time, the greatness of the gulf which separated these two conditions of humanity; and the way in which the desire which arose in God, as the Father of spirits, to bridge over that gulf, has been accomplished. That way is the atonement; as to which it is certain that, if we were so far from seeing the evil of our own evil state as God saw it, and, I may say, so much farther still from being conscious to the measure of our own capacity of good, the way in which God was to accomplish the desire of his love for us we could not have of ourselves anticipated, but God himself must make it known to us.

But we know that, though the gospel alone sheds clear and perfect light on the evil of man's condition as a sinner, conscience fully recognises the truth of that revelation of ourselves which the gospel makes to us. Were it otherwise, assuredly its light would be no light to us. So also as to the gift of eternal life. When that gift is revealed to our faith, its suitableness to us, and fitness to fill all our capacities of well-being as God's ofispring, is discerned by us in proportion as we are awakened to true self-consciousness, and learn to separate between what God made us, and what we have become through sin. And, in like manner, I believe that the atonement, related as it must needs be, retrospectively to the condition of evil from which it is the purpose of God to save us, and prospectively to the condition of good to which it is his purpose to raise us, will commend itself to our faith by the inherent light of its divine adaptation to accomplish all which it has been intended to accomplish. Nor can I doubt that the high prerogative which belongs to us of discerning, and, in our measure, appreciating the divine wisdom, as well as the divine goodness, in other regions of God's acting, extends to this region also; which doubtless is the highest region of all, but which, while the highest, is also the region in which our human consciousness, and the teaching of the Spirit of God in conscience, should help our understandings most. When the apostle represents himself as by manifestation of the truth commending himself to every man's conscience in the sight of God, we are not to doubt that he so speaks with reference, no less to the atonement itself than to the high ends which it contemplates.

In this view the internal evidence of the atonement ought to be the securest stronghold of Christianity: whereas we find many who profess to rest all their hope of acceptance with God upon the atonement, receiving it as a mystery which they do not feel it needful to understand; so that to them it is no part of the evidence of revelation, being commended to their faith only by the authority of a revelation itself received upon other grounds; while there are others to whom the presence of that doctrine in revelation is a strong objection to revelation itself. In this state of things it is natural to ask, "Can it be that conception of the atonement which the apostle expected would commend itself to every man's conscience in the sight of God which some thus treat as an argument against revelation, and which others, while receiving it, hold only as a mystery?" and the latter part of the question is the more difficult: for a rebellious spirit may reject revelation for the very reason for which it has most claim to be received; while a meek, obedient spirit may be expected at once to receive and to understand. For the secret of the Lord is with them that fear him, and he will shew them his covenant.

The lowest measure of internal evidence claimed for the doctrine of the atonement is, that conscience testifies to a need be for an atonement. It has been usual, in arguing with those who refuse to concede even this much, to urge the fact that in all nations, in every age, men have sought to atone for sin by sacrifice. Whether this practice be referable to the universal tradition of an original institution of sacrifice, or be regarded as a consentaneous utterance of humanity, expressing its thoughts independently at all successive periods, and in places the most remote from each other, it is unquestionably an arresting fact. But, not to found a sweeping rejection of all the elements of the worship of the heathen on the testimony that they sacrificed to devils and not to God, even in the highest view that can be taken, their worship was that of "the unknown God,'' and, when brought by us to a higher light, must be judged by that higher light. If, in attempting so to judge, one man says,--"I see here sacrifices offered to propitiate the divine favour. They are offered in manifest ignorance, for some of them are monstrous and revolting, and the least objectionable are manifestly inadequate to the end contemplated; but still we must respect the feelings that suggested sacrifice;" another may reply, "To me the feeling and its expression are alike referable to radical ignorance of God." Clearly the determination of this controversy must be sought elsewhere than in the historical fact which is its subject.

As to the use that has been made of the recorded instances of heroic self-sacrifice connected with assumed divine requirements,--in reference to which it has been lately beautifully said that the love of Christ was "foreshadowed in these weaker acts of love'' (Thomson, p. 35),--however much we must admire the self-devotion manifested, it is not very clear how far the moral element in the sacrifice, by which the person sacrificing himself was endeared to those for whose sakes he so devoted himself, was that which was supposed to give its value to the sacrifice in the eyes of the angry deities whom it was sought to propitiate. All that the demand implied was the high value of the offering to those from whom it was required, and the offended gods may have been thought of only as accepting what cost the people dearly; as Moloch received the children cast into the fire. But if indeed we are to conclude that the spirit of self-sacrifice in the victim was recognised as constituting the virtue of the sacrifice, there is here unquestionably a marvellous ray of light, from the midst of that gross darkness, shed upon the nature of atonement.

But if the testimony of conscience on the subject of the need be for an atonement, is sought in the history of religion, let it be sought in the history of Christianity: and let not this seem a begging of the question. No man is entitled to put aside the assertion of a true man, declaring what the testimony of his conscience is, because that testimony coincides with the man's faith. And to those who say that they find in themselves no internal testimony to the doctrine of the atonement, we present a fact which no serious mind will lightly put aside, when we refer, not to the dark and blind endeavours of the heathen to propitiate an unknown God, but to the experience, recorded by themselves, of those who, in all ages of the Church, have seemed to have attained to the highest knowledge of God, and closest communion with him, and who have professed that they have seen a glory of God in the cross of Christ; that is, in the atonement as the channel through which sinful man receives the pardon of sin and eternal life. No one, indeed, is called upon to constrain his conscience to adopt the testimony of the conscience of others, whoever they may be. But if a man understand the nature of conscience, and realise how imperfect its development usually is, and how much the more matured Christian mind of one man may, without dictating, aid the faith of another man, he can never make little account of the conclusions on this great subject at which men characterised by holiness, and love to God and man, have arrived.

But the question is not to be decided by authority. Nor would I seem to be insensible--for I am not--to the force of what may be urged, even in reference to the recorded experience of the better portion of the Church, as to the extent to which theological systems, and traditional habits of thought, may affect, and have affected, religious experiences. I have, indeed, seen, in cases of deep awakening of spirit on the subject of religion, an identity of experience in reference to this matter under teachings so very different as to form of thought, as to preclude the idea that these experiences were an echo of the teaching; while, most certainly, they were not traceable to any previous habits of thought in the taught. But I dwell not on the argument from this source, as no man will, or should accept the doctrine of the atonement because it has commended itself to the consciences of others while it does not as yet commend itself to his own.

But a response in conscience as contemplated by the apostle, implies much more than a reception of a need be for an atonement; nor can it be regarded as accomplished, unless the atonement revealed be felt to commend itself by its own internal light, and its divine fitness to accomplish the high ends of God in it. And as this presupposes that these ends are themselves seen in the light of God, it is necessary, before proceeding further, to fix attention for a little, on the amount of the assertion, that there is a response in conscience to the testimony of the gospel regarding the evil condition in which the grace of God finds us, and the excellence of the salvation which it brings.

When it is said that the representations of revelation on the subject of our sin and guilt, and need of forgiveness, have a response in conscience, this is not asserted on the ground of the ordinary habit of thought of men's minds on these subjects, or of the feeling with which they usually treat the statements of the word of God regarding them. Men, indeed, readily enough confess that they are sinners, and that they need forgiveness; but this does not at all imply that they understand the charge of guilt, which the Scriptures contain, far less respond to it; or that they have any conception of the forgiveness which they need, while they speak about it so easily. How far it is otherwise becomes very manifest when the reality of sin is steadily contemplated, and the charge of guilt is weighed, and the testimony of conscience in reference to that charge is calmly listened to, and its solemn import is considered. All the experience that now ensues, shews how much the fact of sin is a discovery to the awakened sinner. Seeing what it amounts to, he now shrinks from the admission which he had previously made so easily;--though he may not now dare to recall it;--while, as to forgiveness, in proportion as he comes to understand that he really needs it, he finds it difficult to believe that he himself, and his own sins, can be the subject of it. As long as to confess that I am a sinner is felt to be nothing more than to confess that my moral state is an imperfect one, that it presents a mixture of good and evil,--that much in me needs forgiveness,--I cannot say how much; while I trust that there is also good in me which God accepts, and which may so far counterbalance the evil, I can easily say, "'I know I am a sinner; but I trust in God's mercy." But when the light of that word, ''Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself," shines in upon me, and the clear, calm, solemn testimony within, is heard responding, "It is true--so it ought to be;" and in proportion as I am honest with myself I feel constrained to reply, "But it is not so with me, I do not so love God, I do not so love my neighbour;" then the case is altogether changed. I am tempted to turn away, alike from the testimony of Scripture, and the testimony of conscience.--shrinking from the confession which, if I listen and reply honestly, I must make. Or, if I am too much awakened, and too much in earnest, so to tamper with the light that is dawning on me,--if I feel that I must look this terrible fact of sin full in the face, and do look at it; then does the forgiveness, of which I spoke easily while I knew not what it was to be forgiven, become to me most difficult of faith.

Now it is not strange, or, in one sense, wrong, that we should shrink from the feeling of simple unqualified guilt. It would not be well that it should be otherwise than both painful and terrible to conclude that, in the sight of God, I am guilty of not loving God, and not loving men. Things would be worse than they are with us, if such a discovery could be without causing both self-loathing and fear. Nor, as to forgiveness, is it to be wondered at, that, when we really come to understand that we need it, we find it most difficult to believe in it. God has been to us too much an unknown God, and our thoughts of him too far removed from the apprehension that there is forgiveness with God that he may be feared, to permit it to be otherwise. But, however painful the discovery of our sin, and however unprepared we may be to bear it by the knowledge of the help that is for us in God, the thoroughly awakened conscience, or rather conscience when we are thoroughly awakened to hear its voice, forces upon us the conviction, that the testimony of the Scriptures as to our sin and guilt before God, and our need of forgiveness,--of a forgiveness that shall be purely and simply such,--the forgiving of a debt to one who has nothing to pay, is just and true.

If any will not concede this much,--if any will extenuate the guilt of sin by referring what man is to his circumstances,--or by treating his moral condition as a low state of development, corresponding to that in which intellectually he is found in savage life, and if the forgiveness needed be thus reduced to the lowest possible amount, until, indeed, it ceases to be forgiveness, and there is room left only for a benevolent pity at the most; from persons in this mind I cannot expect that they will take the next step with me in this path, seeing they do not take the first. But, although I can concede much qualification of the apprehension of sin which we find uttered by newly awakened sinners, and admit that their language is very much affected by their ignorance of God, and the perturbing effect of the awful discovery as to their own moral and spiritual state which they have made, I cannot qualify the assertion, that the testimony of Scripture as to the reality and guilt of sin, and the sinner's dependence upon free grace for pardon, has a clear and unequivocal response in conscience; the recognition of which response on the sinner's part, is the proper attitude for his mind to assume, in listening to, and weighing the doctrine of the atonement.

Nay, more, looking at sin in reference to a still deeper weighing of a man's own state as a sinner, I believe that the experience which the apostle Paul speaks of, in the close of the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, must be recognised as the completeness of that development of conscience, which fitly prepares the mind for understanding and welcoming the atonement. I refer to that condition of the human spirit in which a man has so seen the claims of the law of God in the light of conscience, that he can say, "I delight in the law of God after the inner man," while, by that same light, he judges what his own flesh is, and what its power over him makes him to be; so that he says, "I find a law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin that is in my members," and his heart's cry is, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Until, not only the contrariety that is between sin and the law of God, and the position of guilt in which it places the sinner, are seen in the light of conscience; but, beyond this, the inward contradiction with the law of his own well-being, and with that which he must recognise as the true ideal of excellence for humanity, is also seen in that light, and painfully felt, a man is not truly having the full testimony of conscience on the subject of sin, or conscious in himself to that foil response which is in man to the teaching of revelation on this subject. And until a man has come to stand at this point, he is not fully prepared to consider the atonement retrospectively, that is, in its relation to the evil condition from which it is our deliverance.

As to the testimony of conscience to the discovery of revelation on the subject of the gift of eternal life, to which the atonement has prospective reference, the fact of this testimony is not alleged on the ground of men's ordinary habits of thought and feeling, in this case any more than in the former. The intelligent apprehension of that which is said, when it is said, that "God has given to us eternal life," and the enlightened self-consciousness in which that gift is welcomed as altogether suited to man, and the highest good of which he is capable, imply a development of conscience, and a clearness of inward light, beyond even what the fullest reception of the teaching of the Bible on the subject of sin, and guilt, and spiritual death, supposes.

But conscience is capable of such development; and eternal life may be apprehended by us as a manner of existence--a kind of life, the elements of which we understand, the excellence of which commends itself to us, and our own capacity for participation in which as originally created in God's image, and apart from our bondage to sin, we can discern in ourselves.

I speak of eternal life--that life which was with the Father before the world was, and which is manifested in the Son--of his own acquaintance with which as a life lived in humanity, through his acquaintance with Him in whom it was manifested, the apostle John speaks with such fulness of expression in the beginning of his first epistle. I do not speak of an unknown future blessedness, in a future state of being, of which conscience can understand nothing; but I speak of a life which in itself is one and the same here and hereafter,--however it may be developed in us hereafter, beyond its development here. Of this life conscience can take cognisance, its elements it can understand and consider,--comparing them with the elements of that other perishing life of which man has experience; and, taking both to the light of what man is as God's offspring, it can, in that light, decide on the excellence of eternal life, and on the great grace of God in bestowing it, and the perfect salvation in which man partakes in receiving it. How little men's consciences address themselves to this high task, is too manifest; inasmuch as ordinary religion is so much a struggle to secure an unknown future happiness, instead of being the meditation on, and the welcoming of the present gift of eternal life. But to this high task conscience is equal, and to engage in it is the imperative demand which the preaching of the gospel makes on it, that preaching which seeks to commend itself to every man's conscience in the sight of God.

This, then, is the second part of the due preparation for considering the nature of the atonement, with the purpose of coming to know what response that doctrine has in the heart of man, viz.--that the gift of eternal life, revealed as bestowed on us through the atonement, be taken to the light of conscience; and what that gift is, be there seen; and the high result that is accomplished in man in his coming to live that life, be truly conceived of. For thus having before the mind what God has proposed to do through the atonement, now prospectively, as formerly retrospectively, there is the likelihood that its nature, and its suitableness for accomplishing the divine end, shall become visible to us; if that may be at all.

These two extreme points being clearly conceived of, and together present to the mind; and the evil condition of man which the gospel reveals, and the blessed condition to which it raises our hopes, being seen in the light of conscience, developed to this degree under the teaching of God; the gulf which separates them is seen to be very great. We are contemplating extreme opposites, in the highest and most solemn region of things:--spiritual darkness and death, sin and guilt, the righteous condemnation and wrath of God, inward disorder and strife between man and the law of his own well-being;--from these our thoughts pass to divine light filling humanity, eternal life partaken in, righteousness and holiness, the acceptance and favour of God, inward harmony experienced in the fulfilment in man, of that ideal for him which was in the divine mind from the beginning.

It is difficult for us to realise the opposite states, which, by such words, we attempt to describe. The very words we use, though we know them to be the right words, we use with the consciousness, that they have, in our lips, but a small part of their meaning. If
we set ourselves steadfastly to study their use in the Scriptures, and listen with open ear and heart to the interpretation of them, which conscience, under the teaching of the Holy Spirit, accepts, we find these awful realities of evil and good, becoming gradually more and more palpable and real to us; so that they come to be felt as the only realities, and existence comes to have its interest entirely in relation to them. But the wings of our faith do not long sustain this flight. Not that we come to doubt the conclusions at which in such seasons we have arrived; but that, so to speak, we descend from this high region of light and truth, and come down to the earth, and to ordinary human life, and the conditions of humanity that present themselves around us; and, looking at men and women as they are, and at the mixture of good and evil which they exhibit,--seeing also ourselves in others--we practically reconcile ourselves to them, and to ourselves; and the vision of unmixed evil, and of perfect good, fades from our remembrance, or, at best, from having been felt as that which was most real, becomes but as an ideal.

One cause of the practical difficulty that is experienced in keeping our habitual thoughts and feelings in harmony with the perceptions of our most far-seeing moments, is this, that the world in which we are is actually a mixture of good and evil; that it presents neither the unmixed evil of which the Scriptures speak, and to which conscience testifies as man's sinful state, nor this unmixed good, which the Scriptures reveal, and which, in the light of conscience, we recognise as eternal life. We are not in a world yet unvisited by the grace of God; on the contrary, we are encompassed by fruits of that very atonement in which we are called to believe. Nay, the appearances presented in man's condition as we know it, which have furnished the objectors to the atonement with their most specious arguments, are actually to be traced to that atonement itself; while, at the same time, the power for good which belongs to the atonement, and its true working, have no perfect realisation in what men are seen to be; for none are, simply and absolutely, what the atonement would make them; so that, on the one side, none are seen so far from God as, but for the atonement, they would have been;--while, on the other hand, none are seen so near to God as it has been the end of the atonement to bring them. The light shining in the darkness modifies the darkness, even while the darkness comprehends it not;--and, even where it is comprehended, the darkness is not yet seen altogether destroyed by it.

Therefore we must, in studying the subject of the atonement, exercise our minds to abide in that sense and perception of things to which we attain, when the teaching of the Bible, as to the sinful state from which the atonement delivers us, and the eternal life which through it we receive, is having a full response in conscience. So shall we see the work of God in Christ in the light of a true apprehension of what that work had to accomplish; and shall not fall into the error of allowing the partial effects of that work itself to be to us arguments for doubting its necessity and reality.

The first demand which the gospel makes upon us, in relation to the atonement, is, that we believe that there is forgiveness with God. Forgiveness--that is, love to an enemy surviving his enemy, and which, notwithstanding his enmity, can act towards him for his good; this we must be able to believe to be in God toward us, in order that we may be able to believe in the atonement.

This is a faith which, in the order of things, must precede the faith of an atonement. If we could ourselves make an atonement for our sins, as by sacrifice the heathen attempted to do, and as, in their self righteous endeavours to make their peace with God, men are, in fact, daily attempting, then such an atonement might be thought of as preceding forgiveness, and the cause of it. But if God provides the atonement, then forgiveness must precede atonement; and the atonement must be the form of the manifestation of the forgiving love of God, not its cause.

But surely the demand for the faith that there is forgiveness in God has a response in conscience; and doubtless it is, in part at least, ignorance of God that causes the difficulty in believing in forgiveness, which is felt when an actual need of forgiveness that shall be purely such, is realised. For it ought not to be difficult to believe that, though we have sinned against God, God still regards us with a love which has survived our sins. Nay more, we cannot realise the two ideas with reference to man which we have just been considering, viz.,--the evil state into which sin has brought him, and the opposite good state of which the capacity has remained in him, as together present to the mind of the Father of the spirits of all flesh, without feeling that he must desire to bridge over the gulf that separates these two conceived conditions of humanity;--that if it can be bridged over He will bridge it over; that, if that conceivable good for man is a possible good for man, it will be put within man's reach. Therefore, the first tone that catches the ear of the heart in hearing the gospel being, that ''there is forgiveness with God," it ought not to be felt difficult to believe this joyful sound. It ought to have, and doubtless it has an answer in conscience.

The expression once familiar to the lips of ministers of Christ in our land, and which the greater awakenedness of their people's minds on the subject of sin, caused them to feel the need of practically, viz., "that it is the greatest sin to despair of God's mercy," surely is a record of the inward sense of mercy as entering into our original and fundamental apprehension of God: ''Unto us belong shame and confusion of face: unto the Lord our God belongeth mercy," is an instinctive utterance of the human heart. Accordingly, when our Lord teaches us to "love our enemies that we may be the children of our Father in heaven, who makes his sun to shine on the evil and on the good," he assumes, that the witness without which God has never from the beginning left himself, in that he has given rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, has addressed something in man which could interpret the acting of love to enemies.

The atonement, I say, presupposes that there is forgiveness with God; and in doing so has a response in conscience. But this is not the question which the doctrine of the atonement raises, neither is it because it implies such forgiveness that it has been objected to: on the contrary, the objection has been made,--but an objection that could apply only to a false view of the atonement,--that that doctrine did not recognise the mercy that is essentially in God, inasmuch as it represented God as needing to be propitiated--to be made gracious. An atonement to make God gracious, to move him to compassion, to turn his heart toward those from whom sin had alienated his love, it would, indeed, be difficult to believe in; for, if it were needed it would be impossible. To awaken to the sense of the need of such an atonement, would certainly be to awaken to utter and absolute despair. But the Scriptures do not speak of such an atonement; for they do not represent the love of God to man as the effect, and the atonement of Christ as the cause, but,--just the contrary,--they represent the love of God as the cause, and the atonement as the effect. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him, might not perish, but have everlasting life."

Those, therefore, who object to the doctrine of the atonement on the assumption that the atonement is presented to them as the cause of God's forgiving love, are placed under a great disadvantage by this misapprehension of the demand that is made on their faith. What they are asked to believe has its difficulties,--and I do not wish to understate these; but they are as nothing in comparison; and let them learn with thankfulness, that that is not the true conception of the atonement which has so repelled them. That which they are really asked to consider as what, it is expected, being truly apprehended, will commend itself to conscience in the sight of God, is the way in which the forgiving love of God has manifested itself for the salvation of sinful men.

Those who, being under no misapprehension on this point, still draw back from the faith of the atonement, do so as feeling a difficulty which may be thus expressed: Seeing that there is forgiveness with God, that he may be feared, and that his love not only survives men's transgressions, but can confer new gifts on those who have transgressed, why should not this love be manifested without an atonement? Why should not the pardon of sin as an act of Divine Clemency be simply intimated? Why should not this new and great gift of eternal life be simply bestowed, and presented to men as the rich bounty of God?

I have referred to the difficulty which a thoroughly awakened sinner feels in believing that God will pardon his sins, and grant to him eternal life; and such an objector would say, "Why should he feel any such difficulty? Is it not the evidence of a morbid moral state so to feel?" Now I have admitted that the feeling in question, arises in part from the extent to which God has been previously an unknown God. But only in part. There are other elements in that difficulty which are connected with the dawn of a true knowledge of God. God's mercy has not been previously apprehended, otherwise it would be felt wrong to despair of it;--but neither have God's holiness and righteousness, and his wrath against sin been previously apprehended;--and the fears, represented as indications of a morbid moral state, are, I believe, in reality the effect of light visiting the spirit of the man--flight as to the real sinfulness of sin, and its contrariety to the mind of God. Admitting that there is much perturbation of mind;--admitting that the light that is shed upon the truth of man's moral and spiritual condition, is but partial, and that the name of God and its glory have not yet shone in upon his soul and conscience full orbed,--still it is light that is visiting the man who uses language as to his own sinfulness, and the deserts of his sin, with the expression of fears as to the wrath of God, which the objector would refer to a morbid state of mind,--fears which may, indeed, seem extravagant, and almost madness to others who have not yet taken themselves, and what they are in themselves, to that light of God in which he sees himself, and who can therefore speak to him of trusting in God's mercy, and rebuke his fears, so easily; not because they know more of God's mercy and forgiveness than he does, but because they have such different apprehensions of that sin, as to which forgiveness is needed.

Nor is the distress experienced connected with the forgiveness of past sin alone. That grace for the time to come--that gift of eternal life--which it appears to the objector to the atonement may so easily be believed in as the free bounty of God, may be so far conceived of by the awakened sinner, and may so commend itself to him, that he can say, "I delight in the law of God after the inward man;"--and yet, to believe that the good he apprehends is freely granted to him, is so far from an easy and natural act of faith in God's goodness, that the ideal which has dawned upon him, is felt to be the ideal of a hopeless good. He finds "a law in his members warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin that is in his members;"--so that he cries out,--"O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

Now, we know that where, in such cases, all general urging of God's mercy and clemency, and willingness to pardon and to save, fail to give peace, or quicken hope; the presenting of the atonement for the acceptance of faith does both. Awakened sinners, (and I use the expression simply as to my own mind the most accurate, while also it is the echo of the word "Awake, thou that sleepest,") who are finding themselves unable to believe that God,--not because He is not merciful and gracious, but though merciful and gracious, and however merciful and gracious He is,--can pardon their sins and bestow on them eternal life, are found able to believe in such pardon, and to receive the hope of eternal life, when these are presented to them in connexion with the sacrifice of Himself by which Christ put away sin, becoming the propitiation for the sins of the whole world.

This fact is surely deserving of the serious consideration of those whose objection to the atonement is, that it should be enough for man's peace and hope to be told, that the Lord God is merciful and gracious and ready to forgive, and to relieve all who call upon him. Here there is manifested an inability to believe in God's forgiveness as meeting man's need, when presented simply as clemency and mercy;--but, presented in the form of the atonement, it is believed in. Not surely because less credit for love and mercy is given to God now;--for on the contrary the conception of love simply forgiving, and of love forgiving at such a cost to itself, differ just in this, that in the latter, the love is infinitely enhanced.

An objector may reply that doubtless this is a remarkable mental phenomenon, and that he does not deny that what are called religious memoirs abound in illustrations of it; but that he cannot assume that those who have had this history were in the light, and that he himself is in the dark;--and that, to his mind, to preach forgiveness, and the gift of eternal life, in connexion with an atonement, is only to increase the difficulty of faith;--for that, while he sees in both these, contemplated simply in themselves, what he receives as worthy of the goodness of God, the addition of the doctrine of the atonement introduces other, and to him, mysterious elements into the question, complicating what should be a simple matter, and, in fact, representing the love of God as not at liberty freely to express itself, but, having difficulties and hindrances to encounter,--the removal and overcoming of which involved such mysteries as the incarnation, and the self sacrifice of the Son of God.

It is even so: and this, doubtless, is the difficulty,--the great and ultimate difficulty; and let its amount be distinctly recognised. That God should do anything that is loving and gracious--which implies only an act of will--putting forth power guided by wisdom, this seems easy of faith. But, either that any object should appear desirable to God's love, which infinite power, guided by infinite wisdom, cannot accomplish by a simple act of the divine will, or that, if there be an object not to be thus attained, God will proceed to seek that object by a process which implies a great cost to God, and self-sacrifice,--either of these positions is difficult of faith. But the doctrine of the atonement involves them both: and this we must realise, and bear in mind, if we would deal wisely, nay justly, with objectors.

Yet, doubtless, the elements, in the atonement which cause difficulty are the very elements which give it its power to be that peace and hope for man which the gospel contemplates, and which a simple intimation of the divine clemency and goodness could not quicken in him. It is that God is contemplated as manifesting clemency and goodness at a great cost, and not by a simple act of will that costs nothing, that gives the atonement its great power over the heart of man. For that is a deep, yea, the deepest spiritual instinct in man which affirms, that in proportion as any act manifests love it is to be believed as ascribed to God who is love. No manifestation of power meeting me can so assure me that I am meeting God as the manifestation of love does. Therefore they greatly err who seek an external evidence of power, instead of an internal evidence of love, in considering the claim of anything to be received as from God.

Accordingly, a high argument in favour of Christianity, and which has awakened a deep response in many a heart, has been founded upon this very aspect of the doctrine of the atonement, viz., that it represents God as manifesting self-sacrificing love; and so reveals the depth, not to say the reality, of love, as creation and providence could not do. And as a final cause for the permission of a condition of things, giving opportunity to the divine love to shew the self-sacrificing nature of love, and to bless with the blessedness of being the objects of such love, and, as the fruit of this, the blessedness of so loving--in this view--this argument is both true and deep.

But the internal evidence which at the point at which we stand in our inquiry we need, must be something different from this. The evil condition to which sin had reduced man, the good of which nevertheless man still continued capable; these ideas in relation to man being conceived of as together present to the divine mind, it appeared to us that we could believe, that the desire would arise in the heart of the Father of the spirits of all flesh to bridge over this gulf if that could be: nay, it seemed impossible to believe that that desire should not arise. Now the gospel declares, that the love of God has, not only desired to bridge over this gulf, but has actually bridged it over, and the atonement is presented to us as that in which this is accomplished. What we seek is internal evidence--a response in our own spirits, as to the divine wisdom manifested in what is thus represented as the means by which divine love attains the object of its desire.

CHAPTER II.

TEACHING OF LUTHER.

THE evil of the condition in respect of which we needed salvation, and the excellence of the salvation given to us in Christ; and the reality and exceeding greatness of the difficulties which stood in the way of our salvation, and which the Saviour had to encounter in accomplishing our redemption, have perhaps never been more vividly realised than by the great reformer Luther. And, though he does not afford much help to one seeking a clear intellectual apprehension of the nature and essence of the atonement, or of that might by which Christ prevailed; yet that his spiritual insight into these things has been great, is implied in the depth of his understanding of justification by faith, and of the relation in which peace in believing stands to that which our Lord asserted concerning himself when He said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." I believe it will be of much advantage to us subsequently to occupy a little space here with the consideration of his teaching in relation to the atonement, and what it has accomplished.

I have referred more than may meet the indulgence of some readers, though less than my own feeling of its value as a source of light would have inclined me to do, to the experience of deeply awakened sinners. The great reformer was such an one: and this part of his history has impressed a special character on his teaching more than anything else that went to make him what he was. To any who read his words, not as extravagance and fanaticism, but,--as I believe they are entitled to be read,--words of truth and soberness, his commendation of his great doctrine of "Justification by faith alone" from his own experience of its preciousness, is deeply interesting, and, I may say, most affecting. For, when Luther speaks of the law and the Gospel,--of the righteousness of works, and of the righteousness of faith, it is not as a speculative theologian, reasoning out principles to their conclusions, and arranging the parts of a system in their due relations. He speaks of the law as what wrought with his spirit until it had brought him to the brink of despair. He speaks of the gospel as what had spoken peace and life to him, and, by its revelation of Christ to his faith, had raised him as from hell to heaven. Seeking to be justified by works is to him no mere theological error, as to which he can conclusively reason. The very thought of it moves him to the depths of his being; renewing to him, with all its horrors, the past in which he had himself so sought justification, and stirring him to a vehement indignation against those who direct men's steps into that path of death. On the other hand, the righteousness of faith seems to be to him that of which he cannot speak without the renewed sense of his first peace and joy in believing, and of the excellent glory of that "new world" into which "faith mounts up, where is no law, no sin, no remorse or sting of conscience, no death, but perfect joy, righteousness, grace, peace, life, salvation, glory." (p. 84.) The law and the gospel in their relation to the human spirit, are to Luther as two spiritual regions which his spirit knows, having trembled and agonised in the one, and rejoiced and triumphed in the other;--but the former of which has no claim upon his presence in it, and ought to be to him as if it were not; being, indeed, done away by Christ, and having no existence now but through unbelief; while in the latter it is the will of God that he should dwell by faith; to do which is to give God glory and be righteous in His sight. The vividness and picturing form of his speech is quite startling: yet is it in no sense figurative or rhetorical; for he is manifestly keeping as close to the simple expression of his mental and spiritual perceptions as he can. Reading his pleadings against the law, and for the gospel, it is impossible not to feel that he who gave such a fundamental place to justification by faith, was himself the preacher of it in an altogether distinctive and preeminent sense.

I shall endeavour briefly to express the conception of Luther's mind on the subject of the atonement which I have received from a careful study of his full commentary on the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians.

This epistle has had a special interest to Luther, because he recognised Paul's controversy with the judaising teachers, by whom the Galatian converts to Christianity had been seduced, as substantially the same with that in which he himself was engaged with the church of Rome; and, as is common to him with the other Reformers,--his arguing on the subject of the atonement has a special character impressed upon it, by the relation to certain errors in the church of Rome in which he was contemplating it. Luther had not to contend with persons denying the doctrine of the atonement: what he had to contend against was human additions to the provision for peace of conscience and hope towards God, revealed in the gospel; and what we learn of his mind on the subject of the atonement is what he is led to utter in pleading for justification by faith alone.

I have said that no man ever more realised than Luther did, that there were actual difficulties in the nature of things to be dealt with in accomplishing our redemption,--difficulties which a simple act of the Divine will could not do away with; but which have been successfully and triumphantly dealt with in the atonement for the sins of men, made by the Son of God. His deep feeling of the dishonour done to Christ by combining any other element with our vision of Him by faith, in our peace and confidence towards God, may have, in part, moved him to the use of the strong language which he employs, both in setting forth what Christ had to accomplish, and how He has accomplished it. But it is manifest that he could not speak of these subjects without feeling it difficult to find language strong enough for his convictions. And the law, and sin, and death, and the devil who had the power of death, are set before us as awful realities against man; and as to be encountered and overcome by Him who had undertaken to save man: and Christ's victory over them is seen in Luther's words, not as a simple act of divine, resistless, power, but as a moral and spiritual victory,--the triumph of good as good over evil as evil, of righteousness and life, over sin and death; bringing with it all secondary external results in its train.

Not that on these difficult and mysterious subjects, he does not,--as well as those who do not give the same impression of having approached them nearly,--leave us disposed to ask many questions. He, as well as others, speaks of our sins as laid upon Christ, without helping us to understand what this means;--while he is distinguished from others by the anxiety he shews to select the strongest words to express the identification of Christ with our sins; refusing (p. 300) to understand "was made sin for us," in 2 Cor. v. 21, as meaning a sacrifice for sin, (while he admits that the word used will bear that meaning) choosing rather to insist that He was made sin for us in some more absolute way of identifying Himself with us and our sin, in order that we, with whose sin He had so identified Himself, might be identified with Him in respect of His righteousness; and that sin and righteousness meeting in Him, and righteousness triumphing over sin, we might partake in the triumph and all its fruits.--"Because in the self-same person which is the highest, the greatest and the only sinner, there is also an everlasting and invincible righteousness; therefore these two do encounter together the highest, the greatest and the only sin, and the highest, the greatest and the only righteousness. Here one of them must needs be overcome and give place to the other . . . righteousness is everlasting, immortal, invincible . . . therefore in this contest sin must needs be vanquished and killed, and righteousness must overcome and reign. So in Christ all sin is vanquished, killed and buried, and righteousness remaineth a conqueror and reigneth for ever." (pp. 294, 295.) This conception of Christ as the one man, having present together in Himself the sin of all other men, and His own righteousness, Luther endeavours in all possible forms of speech to present as an actual fact, and as what justifies, and underlies
such statements as that, "the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all," and that "He bore our sins in His own body on the tree." And, whatever difficulties the matter may have presented to Luther's own mind, or whatever difficulties his words may cause to us, attempting to attach to them a definite and consistent meaning, he leaves no room to doubt that what he sought to set forth he conceived of as a reality, and not as a legal fiction. For he thus illustrates the identifying of Christ with men,--"For when a sinner cometh to the knowledge of himself indeed, he feeleth, not only that he is miserable, but misery itself; not only that he is a sinner, and is accursed, but even sin and malediction itself. For it is a terrible thing to bear sin, the wrath of God, malediction and death. Wherefore that man which hath a true feeling of these things, as Christ did truly and effectually fed them for all mankind, is made even sin, death, malediction." (p. 300.) But to think of Luther as really having any unworthy conceptions of Christ would be altogether erroneous. It was, doubtless, because of his great realisation of the divine and perfect righteousness which were in Christ, and which in the deepest, and doubtless, he must have felt only absolute sense were alone His, that he was able to use that which he thus calls an "apostolic liberty of speech" in setting forth the reality of His bearing our sins.

Such is Luther's teaching as to the retrospective aspect of the atonement. His teaching as to its prospective bearing,--the positive fruits of benefit to us through Christ's victory, the gift of eternal life itself,--is the following out of that root conception of Christ's identifying of Himself with us. In virtue of this identification, the freedom and righteousness and life which are in Christ, being His own proper endowments, and of which His coming under our sins did not despoil Him, but which proved themselves mightier than all that power of darkness,--coming forth triumphant from the conflict,--these all are ours. As ours we are called to recognise them. As endowed with them we are called to conceive of ourselves. As the provisions of the salvation granted to us we are to use them. As the elements of our new divine life we are to live in them and by them. They are all ours as Christ is ours,--"He is made of God unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption." Christ our life is presented to our faith, that believing in Him we may live,--yet not we, but Christ in us. Faith does not make these high endowments, the elements of the gift of Christ, ours: they are ours by the gift of God. Faith apprehends them, accepts them,--gives God glory in accepting them; and thus faith saves by bringing us into living harmony with the divine constitution of things in Christ;--and, come into this harmony, God pronounces us righteous,--and, abiding in this faith, light, and life, and joy in God abound in us, and the end of God in Christ is being fulfilled in us;--partially now and here,--to be completely so hereafter.

I do not feel that I can more pointedly express Luther's conception of faith than in saying, that it lifts us into Christ and makes us one with Him, both in our own consciousness, and in God's judgment of us;--as we were, before faith, one with Him in God's gracious desire and purpose.

Luther's conception of how God is justified in "justifying the ungodly who believe," we may learn from what he says, first of Faith's own nature; and then of the results of the living relation to Christ into which it brings us.

First of Faith's own nature he says, "Paul by these words 'Abraham believed,' of faith in God maketh the chiefest sonship, the chiefest duty, the chiefest obedience, and the chiefest sacrifice. Let him that is a rhetorician amplify this place, and he shall see that faith is an almighty thing; and that the power thereof is infinite and inestimable; for it giveth glory unto God, which is the highest service that can be given unto Him. Now to give glory unto God, is to believe in Him, to count Him true, wise, righteous, merciful, almighty; briefly, to acknowledge Him to be the author and giver of all goodness. This reason doth not, but faith. That is it which maketh us divine people, and, as a man would say, it is the Creator of (a) certain divinity, not in the substance of God, but in us. For without faith God loseth in us His glory, wisdom, righteousness, truth, and mercy. To conclude: no majesty or divinity remaineth unto God, where faith is not. And the chiefest thing that God requireth of man is, that he give unto Him His glory and His divinity; that is to say that he taketh Him not for an idol, but for God, who regardeth him, heareth him, sheweth mercy unto him and helpeth him. This being done, God hath His full and perfect divinity, that is. He hath whatsoever a faithful heart can attribute unto Him. To be able therefore to give that glory unto God it is the wisdom of wisdoms, the righteousness of righteousness, the religion of religions, and sacrifice of sacrifices. Hereby we may perceive what an high and excellent righteousness faith is, and so, by the contrary, what an horrible and grievous sin infidelity is. Whosoever then believeth God, as Abraham did, is righteous before God, because he hath faith, which giveth glory unto God; that is, he giveth God that which is due to Him." (pp. 250, 251.)

But, secondly, because this excellent condition of faith is in us but as a germ--a grain of mustard-seed--a feeble dawn, God, in imputing it as righteousness, has respect unto that of which it is the dawn--of which, as the beginning of the life of Christ in us, it is the promise, and in which it shall issue, even the noontide brightness of that day in which the righteous shall shine as the stars in the kingdom of their Father. So he adds in reference to the words "it was imputed to him for righteousness,"--"For Christian righteousness consisteth in two things, that is to say, in faith in the heart, and in God's imputation. Faith is indeed a formal righteousness, and yet this righteousness is not enough; for after faith there remain yet certain remnants of sin in our flesh. This sacrifice of faith began in Abraham, but at last it was finished in death. Wherefore the other part of righteousness must needs be added also, to finish the same in us, that is to say God's imputation. For faith giveth not enough to God, being imperfect; yea our faith is but a little spark of faith, which beginneth only to render unto God His true divinity. We have received the firstfruits of the Spirit, but not yet the tenths . . . Wherefore faith beginneth righteousness, but imputation maketh it perfect unto the day of Christ, (p. 252.) . . . Wherefore let those which give themselves to the study of the Holy Scripture, learn out of this saying, "Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness," to set forth truly and rightly this true Christian righteousness after this manner:--that it is a faith and confidence in the Son of God--or rather a confidence of the heart in God through Jesus Christ; and let them add this clause as a difference; which faith and confidence is counted righteousness for Christ's sake . . . For as long as I live
in the flesh sin is truly in me. But because I am covered under the shadow of Christ's wings, as is the chicken under the wings of the hen, and dwell without fear under that most ample and large heaven of the forgiveness of sins, which is spread over me, God covereth and pardoneth the remnant of sin in me; that is to say, because of that faith wherewith I began to lay hold upon Christ, He accepteth my imperfect righteousness even for perfect righteousness and counteth my sin for no sin, which notwithstanding is sin indeed." (p. 254.) The essence of the difference between the law and the gospel, as conceived of by Luther, seems to be shortly this;--that the law reveals man himself to man,--that the gospel reveals God to man;--that the law brings man to self-despair, in order that the gospel may teach him faith and hope in God. Therefore, in the gospel, and not in the law, is God to be seen and known.

And this is substantially true. For, though the law, being love, may seem to reveal God who is love, yet is it rather a demand for love than a revelation of love; and, though it might have been, in the light of high intelligence, and where there was no darkening of sin, concluded that love alone could demand love, yet does the mere demand never so speak to sinners;--but "by the law is the knowledge of sin:" wherefore ''the law worketh wrath." But the first front and aspect of the gospel is, the revelation of love; then follows the end contemplated, the quickening of love in us, (in fact the fulfilment of the righteousness of the law in us,--Rom. viii. 4,) but its instrument of working is, not the law, but grace. "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins;" "We love Him because He first loved us."--"If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another."--I John iv. 11.

Therefore, the gospel being the revelation of what God is, rather than of what He calls for,--though therein implying what He calls for, and providing for its accomplishment,--Luther, understanding this, rests, not in the scheme of redemption as a plan, or in the work of Christ as a work, the parts of which he is careful to analyse, that he may turn them to their several uses in his intercourse with God; but, in the scheme and the work, and shining through all the details of the work, he sees God appearing to him as He is in Himself, as He eternally is; and he yields his heart and his whole being to the attraction of the heavenly vision. Thus he learns that "God is the

CHAPTER III.

CALVINISM, AS TAUGHT BY DR. OWEN AND PRESIDENT EDWARDS.

IF the great Reformer's teaching had obtained and kept possession of the faith of the reformed Church, and that I could calculate on the presence in the minds of my readers of his preaching of Christ, I might now proceed to consider the nature of the atonement, without further preface or preparation. But I need not say how far the fact is otherwise. And as I am anxious to carry along with me the minds of those who not only believe in the atonement, but give it that very prominent place which it has in the teaching usually designated "evangelical,"--though my appeal is not to what is specially distinctive of any, but is to the consciences of all,--I shall now detain my readers for a little with the teaching on the subject of the atonement associated with the name of Calvin.

Calvinism, as now living in our generation of men, presents to our attention two very distinctly marked forms:--the one, that which I believe those who hold it would recognise as best expounded by Dr. Owen and President Edwards; to whom I may add Dr. Chalmers; (whose recognition of Edwards as his theological teacher is known, and is abundantly manifest in his Institutes of Theology;) the other is that recent modification of Calvinism which is presented to us in the writings of Dr. Pye Smith, Dr. Payne, and Dr. Jenkyn, in England; and Dr. Wardlaw, in Scotland. I name these writers only--while I am aware that there are others, because my knowledge of the system is derived from them.

CHAPTER IV.

CALVINISM, AS RECENTLY MODIFIED.

CALVINISM, as recently modified, differs from the earlier Calvinism in these points:--First, as to the reference of the atonement, which is held to have been for all men, and not for the elect only. Secondly, as to the need be for an atonement, which is not regarded as arising out of the demands of distributive and individual justice, requiring that each man should receive his due desert, according to an eternal necessity in the divine nature, as maintained by Owen and Edwards; but is held to arise out of the demands of rectoral and public justice, which necessitate God, as the moral governor of the universe, if He extend mercy to sinners, to do so only in a way that will preserve inviolate the interests of His moral government. Thirdly, as to the nature of the atonement,--Christ's sufferings for our sins not being held to be the endurance, on the part of the Saviour, of the same punishment, or of punishment equivalent in amount of suffering, with that to which those for whom He suffered were exposed, but to be the substitution of other sufferings for the threatened punishment, which substituted sufferings were equivalent in reference to the result in relation to God's moral government;--and Christ's meritorious obedience not being held to be the fulfilling of the law in our room and stead, so as to provide us with a righteousness to be imputed to us, investing us with a right to the reward of righteousness,--but a moral excellence giving a moral virtue to the atonement whereby it is made a fit ground on which may be rested all acts of grace and clemency towards sinners, and all bestowal of favours upon them.

CHAPTER V.

REASON FOR NOT RESTING IN THE CONCEPTION OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT ON WHICH THESE SYSTEMS PROCEED.--THE ATONEMENT TO BE SEEN BY ITS OWN LIGHT.

THE idea that the Divinity of our Lord was a prerequisite to the atonement, because it made the endurance in time of infinite penal sufferings--sufferings therefore commensurate with the eternal sufferings which were the doom of sin--possible, has, as we have seen, been felt repulsive; and it has been thought a worthier conception to regard the personal dignity of Christ as giving infinite value to His sufferings, without relation at all to their amount. Yet the immeasurably great, if not infinite amount of Christ's sufferings is still dwelt upon; nor is any attempt made on the ground of the dignity of the sufferer to weaken the impression which the sacred narrative had hitherto been felt to give of what was endured by the man of sorrows, and more especially of the awful and mysterious agony in the garden and on the cross. Faithfulness to the inspired record is not alone the explanation of this. The awful conceptions of the Saviour's sufferings which have from the beginning entered into men's thoughts of the atonement, have been so manifestly at the foundation of the apprehensions of the divine wrath against sin, and the divine mercy towards sinners, which the faith of the atonement has quickened in men, that it could not but be felt, that to lower these conceptions would be to lessen the power of the atonement on human spirits. But the truth is, that however much it may be felt that the dignity of the sufferer gave infinite value to any suffering to which He submitted, and how ever true it is--and it is most true--that infinitely less than we believe our Saviour to have suffered for us would, being believingly apprehended by us as expressing our preciousness to the heart of God, inspire in us hope towards God; and however much, on the other hand, we may feel repelled by that weighing in scales of the sufferings of the Son of God, and the sufferings of the damned, in which their conceptions of divine justice and of the atonement which it demanded, engaged the earlier Calvinists, the sufferings of Christ arose so naturally out of what He was, and the relation in which He stood to those for whose sins He suffered, that though His divine nature might be conceived of as giving them weight, however small in themselves, yet, to that very divine nature must we refer their awful intensity, and, to us, immeasurable amount. The necessity which has, as we have seen, been felt alike by earlier and later Calvinists, in attempting to specify the elements of the Saviour's sufferings, to keep within the limits indicated by who and what He was that suffered, has obliged them to recognise holiness and love as what in Christ made the sources of pain specified, sources of pain to Him; and if the sinfulness of sin, and the misery to which it exposed sinners, were painful to Christ because of His holiness and love, then must they have been painful in proportion to His holiness and love.

But there is a further and a still more important thought which these details, on which (in much reverence of spirit, I believe, and love to Him who was their hope) these men of God have ventured, seem to me fitted to suggest. What I have felt--and the more I consider it, feel the more--is, surprise that the atoning element in the sufferings pictured, has been to their minds sufferings as sufferings, the pain and agony as pain and agony. It no doubt arose out of the conception that the sufferings endured was the punishment of our sin,--endured for us by our substitute,--that the pain present should as pain become the prominent object of attention. But my surprise is not that, believing the sufferings contemplated to be strictly penal--a punishment, the pain as pain should be the chief object of attention, being indeed that for which alone, on this view, a necessity existed; but my surprise is, that these sufferings being contemplated as an atonement for sin, the holiness and love seen taking the form of suffering should not be recognised as the atoning elements--the very essence and adequacy of the sacrifice for sin presented to our faith.

President Edwards seems to have put this question to himself, "Christ being what He was, how could God, when imputing the sins of the elect to Him, lay the weight of these sins upon Him and punish Him for them, subjecting Him to the infinite suffering which was their due?" And he has answered thus:--"Christ being infinitely holy, God was able to cause Him to feel the awful weight of the sins of the elect by revealing their sins to Him in the spirit--so bringing Him under a weight and pressure of these sins to be measured by His holiness;--thus God laid the sins of the elect on Christ:--and again, Christ loving the elect with a perfect love, God was able,--by bearing in upon Christ's spirit the perfect realisation of what these objects of His love were exposed to suffer,--to make, through His love to them, their conceived-of suffering, real, infinite suffering to Him." In this way God is represented, not only as punishing the innocent for the guilty, but as, in doing so, availing Himself of a capacity of enduring pain which consisted in the perfection of holiness and love,

CHAPTER VI.

RETROSPECTIVE ASPECT OF THE ATONEMENT

THE atonement considered in its retrospective aspects is--

I. Christ's dealing with men on the part of God.

It was in our Lord the natural outcoming of the life of love--of love to the Father and of love to us--to shew us the Father, to vindicate the Father's name, to witness for the excellence of that will of God against which we were rebelling, to witness for the trustworthiness of that Father's heart in which we were refusing to put confidence, to witness for the unchanging character of that love in which there was hope for us, though we had destroyed ourselves.

This witness-bearing for God, and which was according to that word of the Prophet--"I have given him for a witness to the people," was accomplished in the personal perfection that was in Christ--His manifested perfection in humanity--that is to say, the perfection of His own following of the Father as a dear child, and the perfection of His brotherly love in His walk with men. His love and His trust towards His Father, His love and His longsuffering towards His brethren--the latter being presented to our faith in its oneness with the former--were together what He contemplated when He said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

This witness-bearing for the Father was a part of the self-sacrifice of Christ. The severity of the pressure of our sins upon the Spirit of Christ was necessarily greatly increased through that living contact with the enmity of the carnal mind to God into which Christ was brought, in being to men a living epistle of the grace of God. His honouring of the Father caused men to dishonour Him,--His manifestation of brotherly love was repaid with hatred,--His perfect walk in the sight of men failed to commend either His Father or Himself,--His professed trust in the Father was cast up to Him, not being believed, and the bitter complaint was wrung from Him--"reproach hath broken my heart."

Not that His task in doing the Father's will, "not hiding His righteousness within His heart,'' but "declaring His faithfulness and His salvation," was altogether cheerless: on the contrary, the Man of sorrows could speak to the chosen companions of His path, those who knew Him most nearly, of a peace which they had witnessed in Him--nay, of a joy, a peace and a joy as to which He could expect that they would receive as the intimation of a precious legacy to be told that these He would leave with them,--could even expect that the prospect of having these abiding with them would reconcile them to that tribulation which was to come to them through their relation to Him. That which He had presented to their faith would not have been a true and successful witnessing for the Father, had this not been so;--it would have been less than that of the Psalmist, ''O taste and see that God is good." Whatever sorrow may have been seen as borne by the Son of God in confessing His Father's name in our sinful world--and this could not have been but in sorrow--yet must a joy deeper than the sorrow have been present, as belonging to that oneness with the Father which that living confession implied; and to have hidden that joy would have been to have marred that confession,--leaving imperfect that condemnation of sin which is by the manifestation of the life that is in God's favour, and the shining forth of which in Christ is the light of life to man. Therefore the peace, the joy of which our Lord speaks as what the disciples had witnessed in Him, and what would be recalled to them when He used the expressions, "My peace," "My joy," were a most important element in His declaration of the Father's name.

But not less important as an element of that declaration, not less essential to its perfection, were the sorrows of the Man of sorrows, of which also they were the chosen witnesses. It has been said, "If God should appear as a man on this sinful earth, how could it be but as a man of sorrows?" The natural outward expression of Christ's inward sorrow from the constant pressure of our sin and misery on His spirit--a pressure under which, as God in our nature, with the mind of God in suffering flesh He could not but be--would of itself have been enough to justify the appeal to those who saw Him nearly, "Look, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow?" But to the vindication of the name of God, and to the condemnation of the sin of man, that actual meeting of the eternal love with the enmity of the carnal mind, which took place when Christ came to men in the Father's name--in the fellowship of the Father's love, was necessary; and, therefore, however much it added to Christ's suffering as bearing our sins, it was permitted; and the Father ordered the path in which He led the Son so as to give full and perfect development and manifestation to the self-sacrificing life of love that was in Christ, fulness and perfection to His declaration of the Father's name.

We have been prepared for recognising our Lord's honouring of the Father in the sight of men, as an element in the atonement in its retrospective aspect, by the power to arrest the course of judgment, and stay the plague which expressed the divine wrath, found in that outcoming of zeal for God, and sympathy in His condemnation of sin, by which Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, made atonement for the children of Israel. If the principle of the divine procedure in that case be recognised, we shall have no difficulty in seeing the place which the perfect zeal for the Father's honour, the living manifestation of perfect sympathy in the Father's condemnation of sin, the perfect vindication of the unselfish and righteous character of that condemnation as the mind of Him who is love, which were presented to men in the life of Christ, being perfected in His death,--we shall, I say, have no difficulty in seeing the place which this dealing of Christ with men on the part of God has in the work of redemption.

If we at all realise the cost to Christ, we can have no difficulty in contemplating as included in the expression, "a sacrifice for sin," what Christ endured in this witnessing for God. But I am anxious that the way in which the sufferings of Christ now before us entered into the atonement, and not the fact only that they did enter into it, may be distinctly understood,--that it was as being necessary to the perfection of His witness-bearing for the Father. For, while these sufferings have also received a place in the atonement, in the systems which have been considered above as forms of Calvinism, it has been on the entirely different ground that they were a part of what our Lord endured in bearing the punishment of our sins; and I have already urged the impossibility of regarding as penal the sorrows of holy love endured in realising our sin and misery--the impossibility of believing that He who said, "Rivers of water run down mine eyes, because men keep not thy law," could have felt the pain of the holy sorrow which caused His tears to flow, to have been penal suffering, seeing that that pain was endured in sympathy with God, and in the strength of the faith of the divine acceptance of that sympathy.

But apart from the objection to our regarding the sufferings of Christ now contemplated as penal, presented by the very nature of these sufferings, is there any reason to feel, that they would be a more fittmg element in the atonement had they been penal, than as being, what we know they were, the perfecting of the Son's witnessing for the Father? The distinction between penal sufferings endured in meeting a demand of divine justice, and sufferings which are themselves the expression of the divine mind regarding our sins, and a manifestation by the Son of what our sins are to the Father's heart, is indeed very broad: and I know that the habit of thought which prevails on the subject of the atonement is such as will cause minds, under the power of that habit, to think it more natural to connect remission of sins with sufferings having the former,
than with sufferings having the latter character. But, independent of the necessity which the nature of the sufferings which we are considering impose upon us to refuse to them the former character--while we know that they certainly had the latter--is not the habit of mind which creates any difficulty here, delusive? We are accustomed to hear it said, that the law which men had violated must be honoured, and the sincerity and consistency of the lawgiver must be vindicated. But what a vindicating of the divine name, and of the character of the lawgiver, are the sufferings now contemplated, considered as themselves the manifestation in humanity of what our sins are to God, compared to that to which they are reduced if conceived of as a punishment inflicted by God! No doubt, even in this view, there would remain to us a ray of light in the love that is contented to endure the infliction; but, however precious the thought of love willing so to suffer, the full revelation of God is not that divine love has been contented thus to suffer, but that the suffering is the suffering of divine love suffering from our sins according to its own nature; a suffering, therefore, in relation to which the sufferer could say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

II. But Christ's honouring the Father in the sight of men, which was His dealing with men on the part of God, is only one aspect of His mediatorial work. We have to consider also His dealing with God on behalf of men. And this, indeed, is the region in which penal suffering should meet us, if penal suffering had entered into the atonement. We cannot conceive of the Son of God as enduring a penal infliction in the very act of honouring His Father. But when we contemplate Him as approaching God on behalf of man,--when we contemplate Him as meeting the divine mind in its aspect towards sin and sinners, and as dealing with the righteous wrath of God against sin, interposing Himself between sinners and the consequences of that righteous wrath,--we feel, that here we have come to that which men have contemplated when they have conceived of Christ as satisfying divine justice in respect of its claim for vengeance upon our sins, and that here was the place for outcoming of wrath upon the Mediator, and penal infliction, if such there had been,--and, as such there has not been, that here is the place in which we should find that dealing of the Mediator with the divine wrath against sin which has had the result which men have referred to His assumed bearing of the punishment of sin; and which, being understood, will be felt to meet all that was right, and according to truth, in the feelings which men have expressed by the words, ''appeasing divine wrath,"--"expiating the guilt of sin."

I say, "all that was according to truth in these expressions," for there was truth in them, though mingled with error--how much error, the separating of the truth will best shew. But the wrath of God against sin is a reality, however men have erred in their thoughts as to how that wrath was to be appeased. Nor is the idea that satisfaction was due to divine justice, a delusion, however far men have wandered from the true conception of what would meet its righteous demand. And if so, then Christ, in dealing with God on behalf of men, must be conceived of as dealing with the righteous wrath of God against sin, and according to it that which was due: and this would necessarily precede His intercession for us.

It is manifest, if we consider it, that Christ's own long-suffering love was the revelation to those who should see the Father in the Son, of that forgiving love in God to which Christ's intercession for men would be addressed; and so also, I believe, does Christ's own condemnation of our sins, and His holy sorrow because of them, indicate that dealing with the aspect of the divine mind towards sin which prepared the way for intercession.

That oneness of mind with the Father, which towards man took the form of condemnation of sin, would, in the Son's dealing with the Father in relation to our sins, take the form of a perfect confession of our sins. This confession, as to its own nature, must have been a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin of man. Such an Amen was due in the truth of things. He who was the Truth could not be in humanity and not utter it,--and it was necessarily a first step in dealing with the Father on our behalf. He who would intercede for us must begin with confessing our sins. This all will at once perceive. But let us weigh this confession of our sins by the Son of God in humanity. And I do not mean in reference to the suffering it implies viewed as suffering. Christ's love to the Father, to whom He thus confessed the sin of His brethren,--His love to His brethren whose sin He confessed,--along with that conscious oneness of will with the Father in humanity, in the light of which the exceeding evil of man's alienation from God was realised; these must have rendered His confession of our sins before the Father a peculiar development of the holy sorrow in which He bore the burden of our sins; and which, like His sufferings in confessing His Father before men, had a severity and intensity of its own. But, apart from the question of the suffering present in that confession of our sins, and the depth of meaning which it gives to the expression, "a sacrifice for sin," let us consider this Amen from the depths of the humanity of Christ to the divine condemnation of sin. What is it in relation to God's wrath against sin? What place has it in Christ's dealing with that wrath? I answer: He who so responds to the divine wrath against sin, saying, "Thou art righteous, O Lord, who judgest so," is necessarily receiving the full apprehension and realisation of that wrath, as well as of that sin against which it comes forth, into His soul and spirit, into the bosom of the divine humanity, and, so receiving it. He responds to it with a perfect response,--a response from the depths of that divine humanity,--and in that perfect response He absorbs it. For that response has all the elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin of man,--a perfect sorrow--a perfect contrition--all the elements of such a repentance, and that in absolute perfection, all--excepting the personal consciousness of sin,--and by that perfect response in Amen to the mind of God in relation to sin is the wrath of God rightly met, and that is accorded to divine justice which is its due, and could alone satisfy it.

In contending "that sin must be punished with an infinite punishment," President Edwards says*, that "God could not be just to Himself without this vindication, unless there could be such a thing as a repentance, humiliation and sorrow for this (viz., sin), proportionable to the greatness of the majesty despised,"--for that there must needs be, "either an equivalent punishment or an equivalent sorrow and repentance"--"so," he proceeds, "sin must be punished with an infinite punishment," thus assuming that the alternative of "an equivalent sorrow and repentance" was out of the question. But, upon the assumption of that identification of Himself with those whom He came to save, on the part of the Saviour, which is the foundation of Edwards' whole system, it may at the least be said, that the Mediator had the two alternatives open to His choice,--either to endure for sinners an equivalent punishment, or to experience in reference to their sin, and present to God on their behalf, an adequate sorrow and repentance. Either of these courses should be regarded by Edwards as equally securing the vindication of the majesty and justice of God in pardoning sin. But the latter equivalent, which also is surely the higher and more excellent, being a moral and spiritual satisfaction, was, as we have now seen, of necessity present in Christ's dealing with the Father on our behalf. Therefore, to contend for the former also would be to contend for two equivalents. This of course Edwards had no intention of doing. For,

*Satisfaction for Sin, Ch. II. 1-3. though the thought of that moral and spiritual atonement which would be presented to God in the adequate confession of sin, passed through his mind, he did not recognise the presence of this "equivalent repentance" in the work of Christ. He had set out with the assumption that Christ came to bear the punishment of our sins, and to work out a righteousness to be imputed to us; and, as we have seen that the latter part of this assumption hindered his so seeing the Father in the Son as to recognise that law of love to all men which was fulfilled in Christ, as in truth the law of God's own being, so here we see that, in consequence of the former part of that assumption, it has come to pass, that, notwithstanding all his deep and earnest study of the work of redemption, and notwithstanding his feeling constrained to recognise moral and spiritual elements as alone present in the sufferings of Christ, the thought of an atonement for sin by an equivalent repentance has suggested itself to him only in connexion with the manifest impossibility of such a repentance being presented by the sinner himself to God in expiation of his guilt. And in the connexion in which the idea of repentance as an expiation for sin presented itself to the mind of Edwards, his conclusion was just. A condemnation and confession of sin in humanity which should be a real Amen to the divine condemnation of sin, and commensurate with its evil and God's wrath against it, only became possible through the incarnation of the Son of God. But the incarnation of the Son of God not only made possible such a moral and spiritual expiation for sin as that of which the thought thus visited the mind of Edwards, though passing away without result, but indeed caused that it must be. Without the assumption of an imputation of our guilt, and in perfect harmony with the unbroken consciousness of personal separation from our sins, the Son of God, bearing us and our sins on His heart before the Father, must needs respond to the Father's judgment on our sins, with that confession of their evil and of the righteousness of the wrath of
God against them, and holy sorrow because of them, which were due--due in the truth of things--due on our behalf though we could not render it--due from Him as in our nature and our true brother--what He must needs feel in Himself because of the holiness and love which were in Him--what He must needs utter to the Father in expiation of our sins when He would make intercession for us.

I have said that in approaching the dealing of Christ with God on behalf of men, we approach the region in which we should have met penal infliction as endured by Christ for our sins, had such infliction entered into the atonement; and, as it has not, where we should see that, whatever else it was, which has been Christ's dealing with God's righteous wrath against our sins. What I believe that dealing to have been, I have, I trust, expressed with sufficient clearness,--while I have laboured more to illustrate the nature of this expiation by confession of our sins, than the intensity of suffering to the soul of Christ thus made an offering for sin, which it involved.

Yet is it needful that we should, in realising the elements of these sufferings, endeavour to realise also their intensity,--that it was according to the perfection of the divine mind in the sufferer, and the capacity of suffering which is in suffering flesh. And this meditation, as I trust the reader will feel, is a very different thing from weighing the sufferings of Christ in scales against the sufferings of the damned. That belongs to the following out of the conception of the Son of God suffering the punishment of our sins. But what I contemplate is the following out of the conception of the Son of God suffering in suffering flesh that which is the perfect response of the divine holiness and divine love in humanity to the aspect of the divine mind in the Father towards the sins of men. No thought unworthy of the faith that the sufferer is God in our nature, comes through exalting our conceptions of the measure of the suffering endured on account of sins, when such exalting is thus but the raising of our apprehensions of what our sin is to the heart of God.

And I may here refer to what has been urged by some as a reason for holding that the sufferings of Christ were penal, viz. that otherwise there is no explanation of the sufferings of one who was without sin, as endured under the righteous government of God. Do we never see suffering that we must explain on some other principle than this? Surely the tears of holy sorrow shed over the sins of others--the tears, for example, of a godly parent over a prodigal child, are not penal, nor, if shed before God in prayer, and acknowledged in the merciful answer of prayer in God's dealing with that prodigal, are they therefore to be conceived of as having been penal. But the fact is, that the truth that God grieves over our sins, is not so soon received into the heart as that God punishes sin,--and yet, the faith that He so grieves is infinitely more important, as having power to work holiness in us, than the faith that He so punishes, however important. But there is much less spiritual apprehension necessary to the faith that God punishes sin, than to the faith that our sins do truly grieve God. Therefore, men more easily believe that Christ's sufferings shew how God can punish sin, than that these sufferings are the divine feelings in relation to sin, made visible to us by being present in suffering flesh. Yet, however the former may terrify, the latter alone can purify, because the latter alone perfectly reveals, and in revealing vindicates the name and character of God, condemning us in our own eyes, and laying us prostrate in the dust because we have sinned against such a God. The entrance of sin has been the entrance of sorrow,--not to the sinful only, and as the punishment of sin, but also to the holy and the loving, and as what holiness and love must feel in the presence of sin. That such suffering as the suffering of Christ should have existed in the universe of God in connexion with innocence and holiness, moral and spiritual perfection, must, indeed, be felt to suggest a solemn question, and one which must receive an answer, if we are to be in a condition to glorify God in contemplating that suffering. The answer that it was penal, is precluded by the nature of the suffering itself. Yet, that it was for sin, is also implied in that very nature, and for the sin of others than the sufferer, for He was without sin; therefore was it vicarious, expiatory, an atonement,--an atonement for sin as distinguished from the punishment of sin.

And with this distinction, how much light enters the mind! We are now able to realise that the suffering we contemplate is divine, while it is human; and that God is revealed in it and not merely in connexion with it; God's righteousness and condemnation of sin, being in the suffering, and not merely what demands it,--God's love also being in the suffering, and not merely what submits to it. Christ's suffering being thus to us a form which the divine life in Christ took in connexion with the circumstances in which He was placed, and not a penal infliction, coming on Him as from without, such words as, ''He made His soul an offering for sin"--"He put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself,"--"By Himself

CHAPTER VII.

PROSPECTIVE ASPECT OF THE ATONEMENT.

I HAVE said above, that the atonement is to be regarded as that by which God has bridged over the gulf which separated between what sin had made us, and what it was the desire of the divine love that we should become. Therefore its character must have been determined as much by the latter consideration as by the former; and, on this ground, I have complained of the extent to which the former consideration, rather than the latter, has been taken into account in men's recognition of a need be for an atonement.

Yet an atonement such as they contemplate, and consisting in substituted punishment, might allowably be so regarded, being like the paying of a pecuniary debt, at least as to the definite relation of the payment to the debt, the latter determining the former without direct reference to the ulterior results involved in the debt's being paid. But such an atonement as that which the Son of God has actually made, cannot be contemplated but as in its very nature pointing forward to the divine end in view.

Accordingly, I have not been able now to enter freely upon the subject of that intercession for transgressors, which the prophet mentions as an element in the atonement, because that intercession cannot be conceived of as limited to the remission of past sins, but must necessarily have had reference to what Christ, in His love to us, loving us as He did Himself, desired for us. So also the confession of our sin, in response to the divine condemnation of it, must, when offered to God on our behalf, have contemplated prospectively our own participation in that confession as an element in our actual redemption from sin. And even the witnessing of Christ for the Father in the sight of men, as connected with the righteousness of God in the extension of the divine mercy to us rebels, must have had its place in the atonement, not merely as a light condemning our darkness, but as the intended light of life for us.

All views of the work of Christ, of course, imply that its ultimate reference was prospective. Whether conceived of as securing, in virtue of a covenanted arrangement the salvation of an election from among men, or as furnishing, in reference to all men, a ground on which God may extend mercy to them, the work of Christ has equally been regarded as what would not have been but with a prospective reference. But on neither of these views is the justification of God's acceptance of the propitiation itself, bound up with the question of the results contemplated. On the one view, the penal infliction is complete in itself as a substituted punishment; the righteousness wrought out is complete in itself as conferring a title to eternal blessedness, irrespective of results to be accomplished in those in the covenant of grace. On the other view, a meritorious ground on which to rest justification by faith is furnished, which is complete in itself, irrespective of any effect which is anticipated from the faith of it. But, what I have now been representing as the true view of the atonement, is characterised by this, that it takes the results contemplated into account in considering God's acceptance of the atonement. Not that the moral and spiritual excellence of the work of Christ, could have been less than infinitely acceptable to God, viewed simply in itself;--but that its acceptableness in connexion with the remission of sins, is only to be truly and fully seen in its relation to the result which it has contemplated, viz. our participation in eternal life;--or, in other words, that the justification of God in "redeeming," as He has done, "us who were under the law," is only clearly apprehended in the light of the divine purpose, "that we should receive the adoption of sons."

This direct reference to the end contemplated, which distinguishes the view of the atonement now taken, as compared with those other systems in which that reference is more remote, I lay much weight upon. It explains, as they cannot otherwise be explained, those expressions in Scripture in which the practical end of the atonement is connected so immediately with the making of the atonement,--as when it is said, that "Christ gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity,"--that ''we are redeemed from the vain conversation received by tradition from our Fathers, by the precious blood of Christ,"--that "Christ suffered for us, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God." Men have been reconciled by the seeming necessity of the case to the idea that such language is employed, because these are the ultimate and remote consequences of that shedding of Christ's blood, which, it is held, immediately contemplated delivering us from the punishment of sin by His enduring it for us. But I regard as a great scriptural argument in favour of the view now taken of the atonement, that it represents the connexion between these results and Christ's suffering for our sins as not remote, but immediate. While, as to the internal commendation of the doctrine itself, my conviction is, that the pardon of sin is seen in its true harmony with the glory of God, only when the work of Christ, through which we have "the remission of sins that are past," is contemplated in its direct relation to "the gift of eternal life."

CHAPTER VIII.

FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION AS DETERMINING THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT AND THE FORM OF THE GRACE OF GOD TO MAN.

I HAVE said that the character of the Mosaic institutions, as commented upon in the Epistle to the Hebrews, ought to have saved us from the direct connecting of the atonement with the subject of rewards and punishments, and more especially from that direct connecting of forgiveness through the blood of Christ with exemption from punishment which has so prevailed, seeing that the blood of the victim was intended to purify and cleanse for participation in worship. In this light as to the relation of the sacrifice to worship, and seeing the worship typified to be that worship which is sonship, we see how perfectly that which our Lord taught in saying, "No man cometh unto the Father but by me"--meaning to fix the attention of His disciples on what He Himself was in their sight, as the revealer of the Father by the manifested life of sonship,--accords with the elements of confidence in drawing near to God, which the Apostle enumerates in exhorting men to "draw near in the full assurance of faith, having their hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and their bodies washed with pure water." That our Lord and the Apostle must have contemplated the same thing as the due and accepted worship we cannot doubt. But it is only when we understand, that the shedding of the blood of Christ had direct reference to our relation to God as the Father of our spirits, and to the opening of a way in which we as rebellious children can return to the bosom of the Father's love, according to the truth of what the Father is, and what sonship is, that we see that, "having boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He hath consecrated for us through the veil, that is to say His flesh, and having an High Priest over the house of God," is the same thing with the Son of God being to us a living way to the Father.

The doctrinal form of thought which the language of the Apostle presents, would probably have been more difficult of apprehension to the disciples, who had yet to learn that "it behoved Christ first to suffer and afterwards to enter into His glory," than even their Lord's language as to their own favoured position as the chosen companions of the path of Him who could say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Yet, afterwards, they could look back and see the identity of what they subsequently learned, with what had been presented to their faith in their personal acquaintance with Christ. These disciples, indeed, knew not then the form which the work of redemption must take in being perfected, but they had received under the Lord's personal ministry that spiritual teaching, for the want of which, no familiarity with the full record of the finished work of Christ can compensate, and in the absence of which, our study of that record never is safe; for already they were fit subjects for that high testimony from their Lord, "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world;" they had received the Son as coming to them in the Father's name, and that was quickened in them which was according to the truth of our relation to God as the Father of our spirits. Their attraction to their Master was, that they felt that He "had the words of eternal life;"--their cry was, "Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us;" and so, when the true worship, of which their temple service had been a type, was subsequently clearly revealed to them as that worship which is sonship, and when they learned distinctly to contemplate the heart of the Father as the Holy of Holies, they were prepared to know the Son of God as both the sacrifice and the High Priest.

This unity of their recollections of the Lord as they knew Him so nearly, with the light that afterwards shone to them in His blood shed for the remission of sins, and in His relation to them as the High Priest over the house of God, is illustrated to us by that opening of the first Epistle of John which has already engaged our attention. The fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ, which the Apostle had entered into in receiving the knowledge of eternal life, we have already noticed. This divine fellowship he proceeds at the 5th verse to speak of as calling Him to declare to men as the divine message--the Gospel--"that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." This statement in the connexion in which it is made has clearly the same fixedness of character, as respects the terms of grace and the way of salvation, which we have seen in the Saviour's own words, "No man cometh unto the Father but by me." For, he adds, "If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: but if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another." This is, indeed, but the same spiritual law or necessity elsewhere declared in the words, "there is no communion between light and darkness." But the experimental character of the. Apostle's language as used by one claiming to have the fellowship with God of which he speaks--fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus

CHAPTER IX.

THE INTERCESSION WHICH WAS AN ELEMENT IN THE ATONEMENT CONSIDERED AS PRAYER.

IN recognising at the outset a need-be for the atonement, I sought to separate between what is sound and true in the feelings of awakened sinners, and what is to be referred to their remaining spiritual darkness. At the same time I have desired that we should be in the position of learning from the atonement itself why it was needed, as well as how it has accomplished that for which it was needed. The error which in its grossest form has amounted to representing the Son as by the atonement exercising an influence over the Father to make Him gracious towards us, (but which, even when such a thought as this would be disclaimed, has still led to seeking in the atonement a ground of confidence towards God distinct from what it has revealed as the mind of God towards man,) has become very manifest in the light of the nature of the atonement as a fulfilling of the purpose of the Son, "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God,"--His ''declaring of the Father's Name." In the light of that will as fulfilled,--that Name as declared, our faith has been raised to the Eternal Will itself thus revealed, to the Unchanging Name thus declared: as the Apostle speaks of those that believe in Christ as those ''who by Him do believe in God, who raised Him from the dead, and gave Him glory; that our faith and hope might be in God." I Peter 1:21. Yet it seems to me that in this high spiritual region some of the difficulties which we experience in all our deeper meditations on the ways of God, are more realised when we are fully delivered from the error to which I have now referred than they were before. I say this, contemplating especially the aspect of the atonement as a dealing of the Son with the Father on our behalf--a mediation, an intercession. I have spoken of the nature and ground of this intercession--its combination with the confession of our sins, and its relation to our Lord's own consciousness in humanity--His experience of sonship in humanity--His experience of abiding in humanity in the Father's favour. But a more close consideration of what is implied in intercession as intercession seems called for--a more close consideration, that is, of the hope for man in which the Son of God made His soul an offering for sin, as that hope was a hope in God, sustained by faith and prayer.

We are so much in the way of looking on the work of Christ as the acting out of a pre-arranged plan, that its character as a natural progress and development, in which one thing arises out of another, and is really caused by that other, is with difficulty realised. Yet we must get deliverance from this temptation,--the painful temptation to think of Christ's work as almost a scenic representation,--otherwise we never can have the consciousness of getting the true knowledge of eternal realities from the atonement. All light of life for us disappears from the life of Christ unless that life be to us a life indeed, and not the mere acting of an assigned part. Unless we realise that in very truth Christ loved us as He did Himself, we cannot understand how near an approach to a personal feeling there has been in His feeling of our sins, and of our misery as sinners. Unless we realise that His love to Himself and to us was the love of one who loved the Father with all His heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, we cannot understand the nature of the burden which our sins were to

CHAPTER X.

THE ATONEMENT, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE DETAIL OF THE SACRED NARRATIVE.

REGARDING the atonement as the development of the life that was in Christ, I have now considered its nature in the light of that life,--and the unity of a life has, I trust, been felt to belong to the exposition offered. But the life of Christ had an external history, and took an outward form, from the successive circumstances in which our Lord was placed, from the manger to the cross, according to the divine ordering of his path. And while this history can only be understood in the light of that inward life of which it has been the outward form, the contemplation of the outward form must help our understanding of the inward life; and if the view taken of the nature of the atonement be the true view, must both confirm it and illustrate it.

We are thus prepared to find the outward course of life appointed for the Son of God, as that in which He was to fulfil the purpose of doing the Father's will, determined by the divine wisdom with special reference to that purpose. Another condition, also, we expect to find fulfilled in the circumstances in which the Son is seen witnessing for the Father, viz., that they shall accord with the testimony of the Father to the Son. The witnessing of the Son for the Father would have manifestly been incomplete as to us without the Father's seal to it. But this sealing was an essential part of the divine counsel,--not only that outward testimony, however solemn and authoritative, which was in the words of the angel to Mary, the voice from heaven at the Lord's baptism by John, and again on the mount, but that also to which these special testimonies of the Father to the Son in humanity direct our minds, viz., that testimony of the Father to the Son in the Spirit which always is, and out of which all responsibility for faith in the Son of God arises, being that on which such faith must ultimately rest. With this testimony of the Father to the Son, as well as with the witnessing of the Son for the Father, the divine ordering of our Lord's path would necessarily accord; so that, however the aspect of that path, judged according to the flesh, might seem in contradiction to the words, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," seen in the light of God it would be known to harmonise with that acknowledgment. What would accord with the Father's testimony to the Son must manifestly be one with what would accord with the Son's honouring of the Father in our sight; so that we have not really here two conditions to be fulfilled, but one only; nor does the need-be that there should be fitting scope for the manifestation of brotherhood in relation to men, add any new element, seeing the unity of sonship towards God and brotherhood towards men. But it is important that we approach the consideration of the course of our Lord's life, realising that we are to contemplate it in relation equally to the Father's acknowledgment of the Son, and to the Son's witnessing for the Father,--"No man knoweth who the Son is but the Father, and who the Father is but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him."

This, therefore, is the aspect in which we are to contemplate the actual history of the work of redemption. We are to contemplate it as the Son's witnessing for the Father by the manifestation of sonship towards

CHAPTER XI.

HOW WE ARE TO CONCEIVE OF THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST, DURING THAT CLOSING PERIOD OF WHICH SUFFERING WAS THE DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER.

THE sufferings of Christ during the hour and power of darkness have been dealt with in two quite opposite ways.

I. They have been regarded in their simply physical aspect; and aid to the imagination and the heart in realising their terrible amount has been eagerly sought in pictured representations or picturing words; and thus a lively feeling of the pain endured by our blessed Lord, under the hands of wicked men, has been cherished as a help in measuring the evil of our sins and our obligations to the Saviour. I am not afraid to regard all that was attained of knowledge of the sufferings of Christ in this way as only a knowing Christ after the flesh, and therefore what had no virtue to accomplish any spiritual development in men,--no virtue to impart a true knowledge of sin, or to raise the spirits of men into the light of what our sins are in the sight of God,--what they are to the heart of God. Feelings of a strong and solemn, as well as tender character, have, doubtless, been thus cherished; and, doubtless, the element of gratitude has been present: yet there was not, for there could not be, in images of physical suffering anything of the nature of spiritual light,--however such light may have been present along with them, being received otherwise.

II. But there has been manifested also, and this especially recently, a tendency to deal with the detailed sufferings of Christ, as these were endured at the hands of wicked men, in the quite opposite way of making as little account of them as possible; I do not mean denying their reality,--denying that our Lord's flesh was suffering flesh--but rashly admitting the justness of a comparison of them with other cases of suffering inflicted by man on man.

Of such other cases it is not difficult to find many recorded that would bear the comparison; cases in which the cruellest tortures have been submitted to with such fortitude and patience of endurance as, if this way of viewing the subject had been admissible, would excuse the sneer of the infidel. Indeed, dealing with the sufferings of the Saviour on this principle, those who have done so have escaped from justifying that infidel sneer only by referring the language of our Lord, in relation to the cup given Him to drink, to an apprehension of what the cup contained, altogether unrelated to His being delivered into the hands of sinful men. Nay, because of its seeming to shut us up to the view which they have taken of what that cup contained, viz., that it was filled with the wrath of God, the concession has been willingly made of the alleged disproportion between our Lord's agony in the garden of Gethsemane, in looking forward to the coming hour and power of darkness, and those sufferings which the history of that hour records.

And here let me say that I entirely feel that our Lord's physical sufferings viewed simply as physical sufferings, and without relation to the mind that was in the sufferer, could not adequately explain the awful intensity of the feelings which accompanied His prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. But, on the other hand, apart altogether from the insuperable objection that presents itself on other grounds to the conception that the cup which was the subject of Christ's prayer contained the Father's wrath, it seems impossible, without putting aside the record, not to connect that cup with these minutely detailed sufferings, foretold, as they had been, to the disciples on the way up to Jerusalem, and having their commencement immediately after the answer of His prayer in the garden was revealed to the Lord; being also, as we have seen, met and submitted to by Him, with words which identified them with the cup as to which He had prayed.

While John records the words already quoted as addressed to Peter, "The cup which my Father gives me to drink shall I not drink it." Matthew gives these--"Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?" words which, as well as all else, suggest, not a wrath coming forth from the Father, but a power of evil which the Father permitted to have its course. We cannot indeed doubt what the impression on the disciples as to that to which their Lord was subjected, must have been; and accordingly, after our Lord's resurrection, in that interview of touching tenderness with the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, when He joined Himself to them and said, "What manner of communications are these which ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?"--their sad thoughts were "concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people: and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to death, and have crucified Him." On these events were their minds going back, and on these events did He give them light. "O fools, and slow of heart to believe all the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets,

CHAPTER XII.

THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST, IN WHICH THE ATONEMENT WAS PERFECTED, CONSIDERED IN THEIR RELATION, 1ST, TO HIS WITNESSING FOR GOD TO MEN, AND 2DLY, TO HIS DEALING WITH GOD ON BEHALF OF MEN.

I. THESE sufferings were the perfecting of the Son's witnessing for the Father, being the perfected manifestation of the life of love as sonship
towards God and brotherhood towards man.

The trial of our Lord's love to men, and its triumph in the prayer on the cross, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,"--and the trial of His love to the Father, and trust in the Father, of which the final and perfected expression was these words in death, "Into thy hands, O Father, I commend my spirit,"--were accomplished together by one and the same elements. The power of the life of sonship and of conscious oneness with the Father in His mind towards His brethren, to enable Christ to abide in love, and overcome evil with good, is in truth that which we have now been contemplating. The sense of His Father's fatherliness was the strength in which He manifested this perfection of brotherhood. For that perfection of brotherhood was just His following of the Father as a dear child,--and all He suffered in this path came to Him as doing His Father's commandments, and abiding in His love; and thus was the Father in all this glorified in the Son. The very words, "Father, forgive them," testify how within the light of the Father's love and favour the Intercessor abode while suffering,--finding in that favour strength to suffer, and not only to suffer, but to intercede. And as the experience of the utter weakness of suffering flesh was necessary to the completeness of the trial of His love to men, so was it also essential to the development of perfect trust in the Father,--for there remained to the sufferer no strength but the strength of faith.

The outward history of the hour and power of darkness we have detailed to us by the Evangelists. We have not, however, much from them to help us to see that "hour" as from Christ's side. But there is a portion of Scripture, one of the Psalms, which is usually received as having this special interest to us, and which therefore is taken in supplement of the gospel narrative; and our Lord's own partial quotation of this psalm on the cross, as well as its own contents, seem to justify our so receiving it. I refer to the 22nd psalm, which I shall now venture to use in this way--being the more desirous to do so, because, while I believe that it is altogether confirmatory of the view now taken of the cup given our Lord to drink,--I mean especially as a permitted trial of the faith of the Son in the Father, and not an expression of wrath in the Father towards the Son,--the first words of the psalm, as quoted by our Lord, have been the words chiefly rested upon as the intimation to us of our Lord's having been the object of such wrath,--an interpretation which seems to me a violent straining of these words, taken alone; but which, if we take them as a part of the psalm, and to be understood in harmony with it, is altogether untenable, being indeed directly opposed to the tone and character of the psalm, as a whole. Its concluding verses, by the largeness of the reference to men, connect this psalm with the character of the crops as a trial of the love of brotherhood in Christ. But the first and larger portion of it places the suffering

CHAPTER XIII.

THE DEATH OF CHRIST CONTEMPLATED AS HIS "TASTING DEATH," FOR EVERY MAN;" AND THE LIGHT IT SHEDS ON HIS LIFE, AND ON THAT FELLOWSHIP IN HIS LIFE, THROUGH BEING CONFORMED TO HIS DEATH, TO WHICH WE ARE CALLED.

I HAVE nothing to add in direct elucidation of the view now taken of the nature of the atonement; but both the necessity for the perfecting of the atonement in the death of our Lord on the cross, which the fact of His death in connexion with His prayer in the garden implies, and the constant reference to the cross as suggestive of the whole work of redemption, are reasons for presenting here to the reader's attention some thoughts in relation to the death of our Lord, viewed in itself and in the light of His consciousness in passing through death, which may be profitable, and especially, practically.

The words of our Lord in death, "Into thy hands, O Father, I commend my spirit," are given to help us to understand the life of sonship, which we are seeing passing out of our sight, and to reveal to us in this its final triumph the secret of its victory all along. For, in this trust in death, we are not contemplating a new manner of faith. The perfection of its development and measure of its manifestation only are new. The faith which this last utterance of the voice of sonship presents to our faith, is not anything else than that trust in the Father manifested in death, which had pervaded the Lord's whole life; for, Christ's following of God as a dear child, walking in love, always implied that direct and immediate living by the Father, which these words used in death expressed. He ever through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God. To hold and use this life in the flesh in sonship, and to yield it up in sonship, these were divers actings of one faith. Therefore, the words, "Into thy hands, O Father, I commend my spirit," should shed light back to us on the whole of our Lord's path on earth. There was a saying, "Not my will, but thine be done," a dying to live in all our Lord's life, as well as at the close.

I have already spoken of the shame of the cross in its relation to that second commandment of which Christ's perfect brotherhood towards man was the fulfilment, as His sonship towards the Father was the fulfilment of the first. If we know anything of life as a meeting in the strength of sonship the call which the first commandment makes on us, and know that rejection of all independent life in self and our neighbour which this implies, our own experience will help us in endeavouring to realise the oneness of the faith in which Christ lived, seeking not His own glory, but His glory who had sent Him, with the faith in which in death He said, "Into thy hands, O Father, I commend my spirit." The Apostle speaks of "dying daily;" and, if we are attempting to "follow God as dear children, walking in love," we know that this implies such a dying daily as is possible only in a faith which is a constant commending of our spirit into the Father's hands. For lonely as death is, not less lonely is true life at its root and core,--I mean lonely as respects the creature, a being left alone with God.

But, while the faith tried and proved in our Lord's tasting death was the same that had been tried and proved in His whole life, yet was the trial peculiar and extreme, and in its nature fitted to be the final trial, as well as to shed light back on all former trials. I have already noticed the sinless,--I should rather say righteous,--desire of the life that is in man's favour, which our Lord's fulfilment of the second commandment implied, and which explains to us the intenseness of feeling under the injustice done to Him in men's estimate of Him, expressed in the words, "Reproach hath broken my heart." In bearing the contradiction of sinners, our Lord was continually drinking of cups, which naturally and sinlessly, nay, because of love, and therefore righteously, He must have desired not to drink; which yet as presented to Him by His Father He desired to drink, and which, in the strength of the eternal life which is in the Father's favour, He did drink.

Now death itself, as the close of life so lived and passed through in the strength which the words reveal, "Into thy hands, O Father, I commend my spirit," "was in harmony with such a life and its fitting close; for it was the perfect manifestation and consummation of the faith in the Father, which was the secret of that life. I say, it was the "perfect manifestation" of that faith, because it revealed the strength in which our Lord had been able to do without the honour which cometh firom man,--the life that is in man's favour,--and how it was that He had not feared those whose power can go no further than to kill the body. The life which was common to them and to Him, the life through which they could reach Him and cause Him pain, that life had conferred upon them no power over His spirit; for that life He had held, as He now parted with it, in the strength and freedom of sonship. I have also said, "consummation," because it was the perfected development of that faith. I cannot help having the words in reference to Abraham's offering up of Isaac here recalled to me, "Now I know that thou lovest me." "By works was faith perfected." The faith that could offer up Isaac was there before it was proved; yet something further had come to pass in the spirit of Abraham, and in the sight of God, when it was proved. So of all our Lord's sufferings, in that, though a Son, He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. The sonship was there perfect all along; yet something came to pass, something was developed in the humanity of the Lord in each successive outcoming of the obedience of sonship under suffering; something which the Father had desired to see in humanity, and now saw, and which the incarnation, simply as such, had not accomplished, but which was being accomplished as the life of the Son in humanity progressed under the Father's discipline, and educating of Him as the Captain of our salvation. And if this be a true apprehension as to the previous sufferings of the Lord, and their progressive intensity, so also must it be of His tasting death. In substance, in spirit, He had all along said, "Into thy hands, O Father, I commit my spirit." In actual death He now said so.

The simplest positive idea which I am able to form of the glory given to the Father, in saying, in death, "Into thy hands, O Father, I commend my spirit,"--I receive in realising the nakedness of simple being, stript of all possession but what is possessed in the heart of the Father, which is suggested to us as that in the consciousness of which this trust is exercised. It is the most perfect and absolute form of that experience, "I am not alone, for the Father is with me." It takes away creation and leaves but God. It is not difficult to see the glory given to God in this faith. Never does the Son, who dwells in the bosom of the Father, utter more to our hearts what it is to possess the Father as our Father, and to be sons of God, than when He says in death, "Into thy hands, O Father, I commend my spirit."

And we must note, that this is not said in simple naked existence, as it might be the utterance of sonship in a spirit just awakened to the consciousness of existence, knowing yet no possession but God, who has given it being. It is an utterance in death. He who thus puts trust in the Father is tasting death while doing so. It is very difficult for us, though most desirable, to apprehend what this should add to our conception of that declaring of the Father's name which is in Christ's death. When I think of our Lord as tasting death, it seems to me as if He alone ever truly tasted death. And this, indeed, may be received as a part of the larger truth, that He alone ever lived in humanity in the conscious truth of humanity. But when I think of death as tasted by our Lord, how little help to conceiving of His experience in dying do any of our own thoughts, or anticipated experiences, seem fitted to yield! What men shrink from when they shrink from death, is, either the disruption of the ties that connect them with a present world, or the terrors with which an accusing conscience fills the world to come. The last had no existence for Him who was without sin; neither had the world, as the present evil world, any place in His heart. And even as to that purer interest in the present scene, which the relationships of life, cherished aright and according to God's intention in them, awaken, and the trial that death may be from this cause, there was in our Lord's case nothing parallel to it; unless that care of His mother, which He devolved upon the beloved disciple. But, death as death, is distinct from such accompanying considerations as these, and our Lord tasted it in the truth of that which it is. For, as He had truly lived in humanity, and possessed and used the gift of life according to the truth of humanity, so did He also truly die; death was to His humanity the withdrawal of the gift of that life which it closes. As men in life know not life as God's gift, neither realise what it is to live; so neither do they in death know God's withdrawal of that gift, nor consciously realise what it is to die. "For as a man liveth, so he dieth." But it was altogether otherwise with our Lord. It was a part of His sinless consciousness in humanity to possess life in the pure sense of it as God's gift; and, therefore, it was a part of His sinless consciousness in humanity to cleave to it,--to desire to retain it. This desire was in Him a true and sinless utterance of humanity. And as we have seen in what truth of humanity, and how intensely, Christ was affected by the malice of the wicked, though as respected the perfection of His faith He could say, "I have overcome the world;" so are we to understand that the eternal life in which He passed through death did not make death as nothing to Him, but that the true conception is, that it enabled Him perfectly to taste of death,--to taste of it as was only possible in the strength of eternal life.

Further, as our Lord alone truly tasted death, so to Him alone had death its perfect meaning as the wages of sin, for in Him alone was there full entrance into the mind of God towards sin, and perfect unity with that mind. We have seen before, that the perfect confession of our sins was only possible to perfect holiness; and so we may see also, that the tasting of death in full realisation of what it is, that God who gave life should recall it, holding it forfeited, was only possible to perfect holiness.

CHAPTER XIV.

COMPARATIVE COMMENDATION OF THE VIEW NOW TAKEN OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT AS TO (1) LIGHT, (2) UNITY AND SIMPLICITY, AND (3) A NATURAL RELATION TO CHRISTIANITY, AND (4) HARMONY WITH THE DIVINE RIGHTEOUSNESS.

MY conception of the nature of the atonement, and of its relation to the remission of sins and the gift of eternal life, being now before my readers, I might stop here, and leave it to receive that measure of consideration which, in the naked statement of it, it may be felt to claim for itself. If it come with that self-evidencing light to others, with which it has come to me, it will not only commend itself as the truth, but also, by its light, reveal the root of error in any erroneous view which it may find in possession of the mind. Yet I cannot conclude without pointedly directing attention to some of the aspects in which it contrasts with the system with which it will be most compared.

1. Understanding the words, "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God," to be the key to the atonement, and to contemplate that Eternal Will of God, in respect of the nature of which it is true that "God is love;" and that therefore the doing of this will by Christ is to be seen in this, that love was the law of the spirit of the life that was in Him; which took form in its outcomings according to its own nature, and as the path in which the Father led Him gave it development and manifestation,--the conception of the atonement received in tracing the work of redemption, has been full of light.

For, however imperfectly I have executed the high task which I have attempted, I hope it has been felt that the path in which I have led the reader has been one in which the mind has advanced in conscious light. I do not, of course, mean the light of the conviction that what I have set forth as the atonement, has been the atonement; this has been my own consciousness, and may, I trust, have been that of many of my readers: but I mean a conviction distinct from this, and which, I hope, has been felt even when that further conviction may not have been imparted, viz., the conviction that all the elements of the work of Christ stated, were really present in that work; are seen clearly to have arisen out of the life that was in Him; and are all what, in the light of that life, we can as to their nature understand, though their measure be beyond the grasp of our capacity. For this has been so, whether these elements in the work of Christ do, or do not, constitute its atoning virtue.

Now this is an important point of contrast between what has now been taught, and the conception of the atonement as Christ's being, in respect of the imputation of our sins, the object of the Father's wrath; and so bearing, as our substitute, the punishment of our sins. Whatever light may be recognised in that system as shining from the work of Christ's as a whole, the great central fact in it is so represented, as to remain necessarily shrouded in darkness. But what our Lord would feel in bearing our sins as His doing so has now been represented, we can in measure enter into; and that, too, a measure which must enlarge, as the life of Christ progresses in us: while, as to its fulness, as it is our blessedness, in contemplating the work of our redemption, to be occupied with the height, and depth, and breadth, and length of a love which passes knowledge; so is it also to an experience of suffering and self-sacrifice on our behalf, which passes knowledge, that our faith is directed; the measure as the nature of Christ's sufferings being that of the divine love which experienced them.

But the difference is immense, even the difference between light and darkness, between knowing in measure what passeth knowledge, and not knowing at all: and this, and nothing less, is the difference between, knowing, as to their nature, the elements of Christ's sufferings, being ourselves called to the fellowship of them, and knowing nothing of their nature at all. And, assuredly, whatever elements of Christ's sufferings are still held to be what we are to understand, and to share in, that special suffering which was proper to the assumed consciousness of having our sin imputed to Him, and its punishment inflicted on Him; that which is represented as the personal sense of the Father's wrath coming out on Him personally,--the wrath of God coming forth on the Son of His love: this is, and must be to us, simply darkness--a horror of darkness, without one ray of light.

The conception that Christ suffered as our substitute--so by His suffering superseding the necessity for our suffering, itself implies that the sufferings of His which such expressions contemplate, must remain in the nature unknown to us; an experience in our Lord's humanity which, though it has been an experience in humanity, we have not been intended to share in: a conception that seems to me improbable in the bare statement of it. For an experience of the Son of God in humanity not within reach of man's vision as partaking in the divine nature, is to me what there is a strong presumption against. How much that deeply-meditating believer in Christ, President Edwards, has ventured to expect in the way of understanding the elements of Christ's sufferings, we have seen above; while we have also seen how unsuited to his conception of their being penal sufferings, the sufferings which he has specified are, though altogether in accordance with the conception of the atonement now advocated. But all beyond what he has thus specified, which the words "the Father's wrath," may be expected to suggest, however awful it must be supposed to be, must be felt to remain--necessarily to remain--unconceived of. Men's minds are indeed accustomed to this darkness as resting upon the central point in the great work of redemption. Yet surely it is a presumption in favour of the view of the atonement now taken, that it makes that central point no longer darkness, but light--the light of the life of Christ concentrated in His death; or rather present in His death, in a fulness which sheds back light on all His life.

;2. The life of Christ being the light of life to us, and the atonement being the form of that life, it must needs be light, and not darkness. That which sheds light on all else must needs be light in itself, and be visible in its own light; as we not only see all things by the light of the sun, but also the sun itself. Further, that in the nature of the atonement, which imparts to it this character of light, also imparts that of simplicity and unity.

Although I have found it necessary to consider the work of Christ in the two aspects of a dealing with man on the part of God, and with God on behalf of man; and in the two references of a retrospective relation to the remission of sins, and a prospective relation to the gift of eternal life; I trust the unity and simplicity and natural character of a life has been felt to belong to all that has been thus traced. It is all grace reigning through righteousness unto eternal life. All is in harmony with the purpose, "Lo, I come to do thy will, O

CHAPTER XV.

THAT GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, THE ULTIMATE TRUTH ON WHICH FAITH MUST HERE ULTIMATELY REST.

THAT natural relation of the atonement to Christianity, on which so much weight has now been laid, is the full meeting of a demand which must be more or less felt in any deep realisation of the divine righteousness; the demand which is so far met when those who represent our acceptance with God as turning upon our trust in the merits of Christ's work, are I still careful to illustrate the moral tendency of such trust, founding systems of "Christian Ethics" on the atonement; the demand which is recognised when those who regard the actual imputation of Christ's righteousness as what justifies us in the sight of God, are careful to deny the character of justifying faith to any faith that does not sanctify: for Luther alone have we found setting forth the excellent righteousness which is in the faith which justifies viewed in itself. In truth, all care to exclude antinomianism, in whatever way that care is expressed, is an indication of the depth and authority of the feeling which forbids our ascribing to the righteous God any constitution of spiritual and moral government, which does not contemplate results in harmony with the divine righteousness, and which has not its justification in these results. So that, though, in form of thought, a near approach is made to saying, that the great husbandman values the fruitful branch, not because of His delight in the fruit it bears, but because of His delight in the imputed excellence of the vine; still the real feeling of the heart is in harmony with the words of our Lord, "Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit." But, as these words, "Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit," indicate, we find that it is only in the light of the relation in which the scheme of redemption stands to the fatherliness of God that the necessity for a natural relation of the atonement to Christianity can be adequately conceived of.

The great and root-distinction of the view of the atonement presented in these pages, is the relation in which our redemption is regarded as standing to the fatherliness of God. In that fatherliness has the atonement been now represented as originating. By that fatherliness has its end been represented to have been determined. To that fatherliness has the demand for the elements of expiation found in it been traced. But the distinction is broad and unmistakeable between simple mercy proposing to save from evils and bestow blessings, and finding it necessary to deal with justice as presenting obstacles to the realisation of its gracious designs,--which conception is that on which the other view of the atonement proceeds; and this of the love of the Father of our spirits going forth after us. His alienated children, lost to Him, dead to Him through sin, and desiring to be able to say of each one of us, "My son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found."

Not, indeed, that supposing the only elements of the divine character concerned in determining the nature of the atonement to have been mercy and righteousness, the conception to which I object, would meet the requirements of these attributes more adequately than that which I offer instead. On the contrary, the moral and spiritual expiation for sin which Christ has made, has dealt with the justice of God, whether contemplated as absolute or as rectoral, in a way infinitely more glorifying to the law of God, and more fitted to open a free channel for mercy to flow in, than an atonement consisting in the endurance of penal sufferings by the Son of God as our substitute, would have done. But while this lower ground is tenable, we should not be justified in coming down from the point of view to which the gospel raises us, to what, while true, is not the ultimate truth revealed. So to do, would be to forget that the gospel, and not the law, affords us full light here; the law being subordinate to the gospel, as our relation to God as our righteous Lord, is subordinate to our relation to Him as the Father of our spirits,--the original and root-relation, in the light of which alone all God's dealings with us can be understood. How far, indeed, this subordinating of our relation to God as we are the subjects of His righteous rule, to our relation to Him as we are His offspring, is from depreciating that which is subordinated, has, I trust, been made abundantly manifest, seeing that it is the law of the spirit of the life that is in Christ Jesus, that is to say, sonship, in which alone the power is found to accomplish the fulfilment of the righteousness of the law in us, and that our being reconciled to God, whose law we have violated,--the writing of His law on our hearts, so that it becomes to us a law of liberty, is the result of revealing to us our Father in our Lawgiver, and shewing us the law of the Lawgiver in its fountain in the Father's heart.

But while to reveal the Father in the Lawgiver is that which reconciles us to the Lawgiver, the only adequate statement of the high result accomplished, is, that it is reconciliation to the Father,--the quickening in us of the life of sonship. However high a conception it is that the "disobedient should be turned to the wisdom of the just," that alone is commensurate with the excellence of the salvation granted to us which is conveyed by the words, "Following God as dear children walking in love."

As to the place now recognised as belonging to the fatherliness of God in the history of our redemption, viz., that it is the ultimate ground for faith, I would add to what I have urged above these two considerations: 1st, It is a special glory to God that the fatherliness, which originates our salvation, and determines its nature--that it shall be the life of sonship--is itself that in which the saving power resides. For, as we have seen, the Son of God saves us by a work whose essence and sum is the declaring of the Father's Name. A result so high, accomplished by the power over our spirits found to be in the Name of God,--that is to say in what God is, is manifestly the highest glory to God. No result referable to simple Almightiness could be the same glory. That God should by a miracle change a rebellious child into a loving child, would be no such glory to God, as that the knowledge of the fatherliness rebelled against, should, by virtue of the excellence inherent in that fatherliness, accomplish this result. "We love Him because He first loved us." The power to quicken love in us is here ascribed to the love with which God regards us, considered simply as love. For it clearly is not the meaning, that, because God loved us. He wrought a miracle of Almighty power to make us love Him. And do we not feel a special glory to accrue to the divine love from this, as the history of our love to God? a special glory which vanishes, whatever other manner of glory may be supposed to remain, the moment the fact of our loving God is resolved into a miracle of Almighty power. 2nd, But not only is this history of our being reconciled to God what is full of glory to God. If we consider well we must see that our being reconciled to God must have this history. We have seen that the words "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God," indicate the difference between that blood of Christ which cleanseth from all sin, and the blood of bulls, and of goats, which could not take away sin. And so the Apostle, when illustrating this, goes on to say, "By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once." Our sanctification therefore is accomplished by the will of God as acting on our will by the moral and spiritual power of what that divine will is in itself. For the will of God, in order to be welcomed with that welcome which is holiness, i. e., the free consecration of our will, must be welcomed just because of WHAT IT IS.

This is a point which it is most important that we should see clearly. Nothing extraneous to the nature of the divine will itself to which we are to be reconciled, can have a part in reconciling us to that will. Fear of punishment, hope of reward, have here no place. However they may have been included in the history of our awakening to the importance of the relation in which our will stands to the divine will, they must go for nothing--they have ever been found to go for nothing--when the soul is alone with God, feeling itself under His searching eye, all its self-consciousness quickened by the realisation of the divine knowledge of its thoughts "when yet afar off." Simple earnestness, intense desire to be safe and assured of happiness, is then valued only at its true value; neither is itself deceivingly supposed to generate anything better than itself. In the light of God, all that springs from the desire of safety and happiness, is seen to continue but the desire of safety and happiness still; and this, though not wrong,--nay, though in a lower sense right, as the working of an instinct in our being which God acknowledges, and which God addresses,--yet assuredly is not holiness, nor any approach to a delight in God's holy will. Nor, if we should, on any ground, have come to conclude that we are assured of the safety and happiness which we have desired, and, in consequence, should feel grateful to God for this great boon, is such gratitude, though a higher feeling than mere fear, or hope, to be recognised as holiness, or as what implies our being reconciled to God spiritually and truly.

At how great a distance from all oneness of will with the Holy God a human spirit may still be, even when esteeming itself saved, and thanking God for salvation, is most instructively illustrated by President Edwards, in his analysis of delusive appearances of conversion which had come under his own observation, occurring under the awakening power of much urging of the importance of salvation. But, indeed, clearly understood, the statement is felt to be self-evident, that the will of God must reconcile us to itself by the power of what it is, or not at all. Therefore that the Son reconciles us to the Father by revealing the Father, is not only a way of salvation full of glory to God, but is, in truth, the only possible way. So that our salvation would have been impossible had there not been in the heart of the Father what, being revealed to us, and brought to bear on our spirits, would reconcile us to Him, making His condemnation of our sin to become our own condemnation of it. His choice for us our own free choice for ourselves, His love the light of life to us, His fatherliness the quickening of sonship in us. There being that in God which was adequate to this result, our salvation was not only possible, but the way and manner, as well as the nature of our salvation, were thereby fixed and determined.

CHAPTER XVI.

CONCLUSION

HAVING, in this attempt to illustrate the nature of the atonement, insisted so much on the application of the words, "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men," to the whole work of Christ in making His soul an offering for sin, I am anxious not to be misunderstood as to the aspect of the subject of the atonement, in which it has appeared to me reasonable to expect it to be light to us, and not darkness; and that, in closing this volume, the reader should carry away with him a distinct conception of the limits, which, in writing, I have realised, and kept in view.

I have not attempted to divest the subject of the atonement of all mystery. I have not cherished the hope, or, in truth, the desire, of doing so. The self-righteousness that takes the form of a submission of faith to mysteries, I, indeed, feel to be altogether a delusion. The assumed merit of a blind faith, in addition to the error implied in all conception of merit on our part in relation to God, involves the absurdity of expecting to please God by exalting one of His good gifts, to the depreciation of another gift, equally to be traced up to the grace of the Father of lights. Any manner of subordinating of reason to revelation must be wrong, in which it is forgotten that we honour God in assigning to reason its due place, as truly as we do in assigning to revelation its due place; for to be jealous for reason is to be jealous for God, as truly as to be jealous for revelation is to be jealous for God. If self comes in, and forgets that reason is a gift, as well as revelation, and, claiming reason as its own, is puffed up on behalf of that which we have thus identified with ourselves, the temptation that thus arises to exalt reason and depreciate revelation is obvious, and the evil consequences to be anticipated great. But the remedy, the true and the only remedy, is, that we should hear the voice of God in reason as well as in revelation--that God in whose presence no flesh shall glory.

But as to mysteries, reason has its mysteries as well as revelation; and to shrink from mysteries, is to shrink from all deep thinking on any of the high problems of our existence. The practical question for us, as God's thinking, intelligent offspring, always is as to the limit of light and darkness; which practical question we are to entertain under the sense of this twofold responsibility; that, as it would be wrong to attempt to push beyond that limit, or to be impatient of its existence, so would it be also wrong to fix it more near to us than it is in the truth of things, or at least in relation to the dispensations of light vouchsafed to us by God. For would not this be to refuse to use some portion of the grace of God to us, and be one form of folding in a napkin and hiding in the earth a talent of which an account must be rendered?

Therefore, under the sense of a responsibility of which the twofold aspect has appeared to me thus unquestionable, I have now considered the elements of the work of Christ as what His participation in humanity, and our participation in the divine nature through Him, seemed to place within the limit of the light of life that shines for us in Him; while I have simply recognised, abstaining from all attempt at explanation, or elucidation, the underlying and deeper facts of the relation of man to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, implied in the relation of the work of Christ to all men, and in the spiritual reality of that which is stated when it is said, that "this is the testimony of God, that God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son." As to these deepest facts of our being and of our relation to God, I have not even attempted to determine the line that separates the darkness and the light now; or at all to say what its eternal and necessary place is; while neither am I to be understood as passing any judgment on attempts to do so, or on the going of others nearer to that awful line than I have done. But I am anxious that the reader should realise how much on the light side of that line I have kept, having determined to approach it no more nearly than an attempt to illustrate the nature of the atonement required me to do.

Reason has its mysteries as well as revelation, the mysteries of deepest interest to us being, indeed, common to them both; though, inasmuch as revelation carries us further into the region to which mystery pertains, the sense of mystery in occupation of mind with the discoveries of revelation is greater. But the aspect in which the atonement has now been contemplated does not belong to the proper region of mystery at all. That region, whether as respects reason or revelation, is the divine and the infinite; and the atonement has now been considered simply as a transaction in humanity, contemplating results in man, to be accomplished by the revelation of the elements of that transaction to the spirit of man, and in a way of participation in these elements on the part of man. It is not in this transaction, viewed in itself, that mystery was to be expected, or could exist, but in that relation of the Son of God to man which this transaction presupposes. This relation, whether we contemplate it as participation in our flesh, or as that relation to us in the spirit in respect of which Christ is our life, having power over all flesh to this end, is indeed a mystery as to its nature and manner, and to be known by us only in its results.

And this is true, whether we contemplate the personal work of Christ in making His soul an offering for sin, or His work in us in respect of which it is true, that when we live to God we must say, "Yet not we, but Christ liveth in us." The divine perfection of sonship in humanity, presented in Christ to our faith, is, in respect of its perfection, what leads us up to the mystery of the divinity of Christ as truly as His power to quicken and sustain sonship in spirit and in truth in us does. I can realise neither without feeling shut up to the faith of the divinity of the Saviour; while that faith so accords with the facts the contemplation of which thus leads directly to it, that, being received, it sheds light on them. For, believing in the divinity of Christ, we see how the atonement has that commensurateness with the infinite evil of sin, and infinite excellence of righteousness, which imparts to it its peace giving power; we see how Christ is near to us in that nearness that accords with His being our life, and has that power in relation to us which justifies the confidence that through Christ strengthening us we can do all things.

But viewed in itself, this faith has in it the deepest mystery; but it is mystery in the region in which we are prepared for mystery, being, first, in the manner of being of God, and then, where the line of meeting is between God and man. For here, also, we are prepared for mystery; and while we expect to understand what pertains to the human side of this line and to the divine nature as in humanity, we do not expect to understand what is on the divine side, and pertains to the acting of God as God. As to that ultimate mystery which our faith receives in believing in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, while in itself eternal, and irrespective of all finite existence, we can only be called to the study of it in its manifestation in connexion with man. But even in this manifestation there remains a necessity for recognising the distinction now made. What the divine sonship is in its spiritual essence and consciousness, as presented to our faith in Christ, and as that to the fellowship of which we are ourselves called in Him, this, the very nature of the divine purpose in relation to us prepares us to expect to understand. But the nature of the relation of the Son of God to humanity, whether we contemplate His own personal work in making His soul an offering for sin, making an end of sin, and bringing in everlasting righteousness, or His work in men as putting forth the power in them which is implied in His being their life;--this belongs to the acting of God as God, and to the divinity of the Son of God, in an aspect of the subject which all experience in thinking of our relation to God prepares us not to be able to understand.

Nor is the question of how this can be, or what the manner of the divine acting is, which it implies, the only mystery here. The faith of the divinity of the Saviour, while in one view it affords light and explanation as to the facts which constitute the gospel, in truth involves and deepens all the moral and spiritual mysteries of our existence.

I believe, as I have said, that the faith of the atonement, and the faith that we have eternal life in Christ, is more easy to us when it rests on the faith of the divinity of Christ. Indeed, apart from that previous faith, the faith of what the gospel reveals Christ to be to us, is to me impossible. I cannot believe in one as my life, of whom I am not warranted to think as God; while, remembering that in God I live, and move, and have my being, I seem prepared to be told--I had almost said to understand--that the divine life of sonship is what I am to live in and by the Son of God as my life. The universal relation of men to the one Son of God, as He in whom they all have the life of sonship, accords as perfectly with the divinity of the Son of God, as it contradicts every lower conception of His being; and the Apostle, who preached to the Athenians, in relation to the unknown God whom they ignorantly worshipped, that "in Him they lived, and moved, and had their being," must be regarded as only presenting to our faith another part of the truth of man's mysterious relation to God, when He makes known the mystery hid from ages and generations,--the mystery of "Christ in men the hope of glory." Nay, how closely the one revelation is related to the other, we must see, if we connect the use which the Apostle makes of the recognition of man's relation to God by one of their own poets--"For we are all His offspring," with our relation to Christ in respect to that life of sonship in which alone men can call God Father in spirit and in truth. Surely the parallelism of these relationships to the Father and the Son is a help to our faith in the divinity of the Son, as it also explains the fact that this mystery of the divine existence is made known to us. But still, as I have said, this mystery, apart altogether from what men have felt of its intellectual difficulty, deepens the previous mysteries of reason with which all thoughtful minds have been exercised from the beginning.

LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED, WITH THE EDITIONS FROM WHICH THE QUOTATIONS ARE TAKEN.

Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. By Martin Luther. London: Printed for Mathews and Leigh, Strand; by S. Gosnell, Little Queen Street. 1810.

The Works of John Owen, D.D. Edited by the Rev. William H. Goold, Edinburgh. (Vol. X.) Johnstone and Hunter, London and Edinburgh. 1852.

The Works of President Edwards, in 4 Vols. A Reprint of the Worcester Edition, with valuable Additions, and a copious General Index. New York: Leavitt, Trow, and Co. 194, Broadway; London: Wiley and Putnam. 1844.

Four Discourses on the Sacrifice and Priesthood of Jesus Christ, and the Atonement and Redemption thence accruing. By John Pye Smith, D.D. F.R.S. Third Edition. London: Jackson and Walford. 1847.

Lectures on Divine Sovereignty, Election, the Atonement, Justification, and Regeneration. By George Payne, LL.D. Exeter. Second Edition. London: James Dinnis, 62, Paternoster-row. 1838.

On the Extent of the Atonement, in its Relation to God and the Universe. By the Rev. Thomas W. Jenkyn. Second Edition. London: John Snow, 26, Paternoster-row. 1837.

Discourses on the Nature and Extent of the Atonement of Christ. By Ralph Wardlaw, D.D. Fourth Thousand. Glasgow: James Maclehose, 83, Buchanan Street. 1844.