ENTERED according
to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO.,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States
for the Southern District of New York.
STEREOTYPED BY R H. HOBBS,
Hartford, Conn.
IT will commonly be found that half the merit of an argument lies in the genuineness of its aim, or object. If it is a campaign raised against some principle or doctrine established by the general consent of ages, there will always be a certain lightness in the matter of it that amounts to a doom of failure. If it is, instead, a contribution rather of such help as may forward the settlement of a doctrine never yet fully matured, or at least not supposed to be, the genuineness of the purpose may be taken as a weighty pledge for the solidity of the material. Nothing, meantime, steadies the vigor and fixes the tenacity of an argument, like that real insight which distinguishes accurately the present stage of the question, and the issue that begins already to be dimly foretokened. It quiets, too, in like manner, the confidence of the public addressed, and steadies the patience of their judgments, if they can discover beforehand, that it is no mere innovator that asks their attention, but one who is trying, in good faith, to make up some deficit, more or less consciously felt by every body, and bring on just that stage of progress in the truth, which its own past ages of history have been steadily preparing and asking for. No investigator appears, in this view, to be quite fair to himself, who does not somehow raise the suspicion, beforehand, that a hasty judgment allowed against him may be a real injustice to the truth.
Under impressions like these, I undertook, at first, to pre pare, and actually prepared for the treatise that follows, a long, carefully studied, historical chapter, showing, as accurately as I was able, the precise point of progress at which we have now arrived, as regards the subject of it. In this investigation, I was able, as I believe, to make out these two very important conclusions:
(1.) That no doctrine of the atonement or reconciling work of Christ, has ever yet been developed, that can be said to have received the consent of the Christian world.
(2.) That attempts have been made, in all ages, and continually renewed, in spite of continually successive failures, to assert, in one form or another, what is called “the moral view” of the atonement, and resolve it by the power it wields in human character; and that Christian expectation just now presses in this direction more strongly than ever; raising a clear presumption, that the final doctrine of the subject will emerge at this point and be concluded in this form. Probably it may be so enlarged and qualified as to practically include much that is valued in current modes of belief supposed to be the true orthodoxy, but the grand ruling conception finally established will be, that Christ, by his suffering life and ministry, becomes a reconciling power in character, the power of God unto salvation. Or if it should still be said that he reconciles God to men by his death, that kind of declaration will be taken as being only a more popular, objective way of saying, that God is in him, reconciling men to Himself.
Having shown the steadily converging movement of history on this
point, I was promising myself, as an advantage thus gained, that I should be regarded,
in the treatise that follows, rather as fulfilling the history, than as raising
a conflict with
At the same time it will be so convenient, in the course of my argument, to refer occasionally to Anselm’s really wonderful treatise, Cur Deus Homo, that I am tempted briefly to review the doctrine he gives. This treatise was the first of all the deliberately attempted expositions of the work of Christ. It is the seed view, in a sense, of the almost annual harvest that has followed; and as all choice seedlings are apt to degenerate in their successive propagations, we are obliged to admit that this original, first form of the doctrine was incomparably better than almost any of the revisions, or enlarged expositions of it since given.
It is a great deal better, too, than the multitude of these theologic
revisions and dogmatic expositions ever conceive it to be. No writer was ever more
unfortunate than Anselm is, in the feeble, undiscerning constructions put upon his
argument, by the immense following that has accepted his mastership. They take what
he says of debt, as if it were a matter of book-account that Christ has come
to settle; or what he says of justice, as if he were engaged to even up the
score of
Passing by matters of subordinate consequence, the scheme of his doctrine is briefly this. Considering what sin is, he finds it to be “nothing else than not to render God his due. The will of every rational creature ought to be subject completely to the will of God. This is the debt [debitum] which both angels and men owe to God, and none who pays this debt commits sin. This is justice, [justitia] or rectitude of will, which makes a being just or upright; and this is the sole and total debt of honor which we owe to God, and which God demands of us. He who does not render God this honor due [debitum] robs God of his own, and dishonors him.” —(Lib. i. Cap. xi.)
How then is the grand necessity to be met. Sin has desecrated
God before the world, taken down his public honor as a father and magistrate, weakened
his authority, robbed him of his just reverence. What is wanted, then, is that the
original debt or due of obedience be made good; that some equal compensation be
offered to God or God’s magistracy, for the loss of that honor which has been taken
away. “For God’s mere compassion to let go sins, without any payment of the honor
taken away, does not become Him. Thus to let go sin is the same as not to punish
it. Not to punish is to let it go unsubjected to order, [inordinatum]
and it does not become God to let any thing in his kingdom go unsubjected. Therefore
it is unbecoming for God to let sin go thus unpunished.
Holding this view of the satisfaction needed, no inference follows
that Christ will make the satisfaction by his own punishment or penal suffering.
Nothing is wanted, according to Anselm’s statement, but some fit compensation made
to God’s honor, such as would be obtained by punishment, for punishment, he argues,
honors God as being an assertion, by force, of his violated lordship. “For either
man renders due submission to God of his own will, by avoiding sin or making payment,
or else God subjects him to himself by torments even against man’s will, and thus
shows that he is Lord of man, though man refuses to acknowledge it. * * Deprived
of happiness and every good, on account of his sin, he repays from his own inheritance,
what he has stolen, though he repay it against his will.”—(Lib. i. Cap. xiv.) What
is wanted then is the equivalent of this punishment, or what will yield an equivalent
honor. But it does not follow that it must be by
The word “justice” [justitia] does
indeed recur many times in this connection, but never as denoting retributive justice
under the offended wrath-principle of God’s nature. It means simply right,
or righteousness. As the argument goes, justice comes into view as recalling
the principle of rectitude. It does not speak of what is due to wrong retributively
considered, but of what is due to God as the being wronged, what is needed to restore
his violated honor. Indeed the idea of a penal suffering in Christ, and a satisfaction
made thereby to retributive justice, is expressly rejected as a thing too revolting
to be thought of. “Where is the justice [righteousness] of delivering to death for
a sinner, a man most just of all men? What man would not be condemned himself who
should condemn the innocent to free the guilty?”—(Lib. i. Cap. viii.) It is not
clear that the word justice [justitia] is used by
Anselm in a single instance with a penal significance, or in the sense of retributive
justice. It might seem to be so used, when it is asked—“If he allowed himself to
be slain for the sake of justice, [‘propter’ justitiam]
did he not give his life for the honor of God”—(Lib. ii. Cap. xviii., b.) But he
means here only what he has before expressed, when saying that Christ “suffered
death of his own will, on account of his obedience in maintaining [justitia]
righteousness.”—(Lib. i. Cap. ix.) In the next following chapter, (Cap. x.) he does
once employ
Retributive justice then, or penal suffering, has nothing to do
with the supposed satisfaction. But the satisfaction to God’s honor turns wholly,
we shall see, on the matter of Christ’s obedience—obedience unto death. The conception
is that he comes into the world, not simply to be murdered, or as being commanded
of the Father to die, but that, having a specially right work laid upon him by the
Father, he is able rather to die for it than to renounce it; conferring thus upon
the Father a superlative honor, according to the righteous tenacity of his sacrifice.
The point is stated carefully by Anselm, who says (Lib. i. Cap. ix.) “we must distinguish
between what he did, obedience requiring it, and what he suffered, obedience not
requiring it, because he adhered to obedience”—that is to the principle of right
or well-doing, which is fundamental with God in all things. Hence the great honor
of such obedience. “God did not therefore compel Christ to die, but he suffered
death of his own accord, not yielding up his life as an act of obedience to the
Father, but on account of his obedience [to first principle,] in maintaining right
[justitia;] for he held out so persistently, that
he met death on account of it.”—(Lib. i. Cap. ix.) The immense value then of his
death, or the satisfaction made to God’s honor, consists in the luster of his righteousness,
[justitia]
At points farther on, this very simple and beautiful account of
the supposed satisfaction appears to be a little clouded or obscured. It appears
to be said that the satisfaction turns more on the death, and less on the
obedience. But here it will be seen, he is only saying that simple obedience,
so as to be in God’s will, is not enough; it must be such a volunteering in Christ,
or obedience carried to such a point of sacrifice, that he dies, when nowise subject
to death on his own account. “If we say that he will give himself to God by obedience,
so as, by steadily maintaining right, [justitia] to
render himself subject to His will, this will not be giving what God does not require
of him, for every rational creature owes this obedience to God. Therefore it must
be in some other way that he gives himself, or something from himself to God. Let
us see whether it may not perchance be the laying down of his life, or the delivering
up of himself to death for God’s honor. For this God will not require of him as
a debt, for since he is no sinner he is not bound to die. Let us see how this accords
with reason. If man sinned with sweet facility, is it not fitting that he make satisfaction
with difficulty? If he is so easily vanquished by the devil, that, by sinning, he
robs God of his honor, is it not right that, in satisfying God for his sin, he overcome
the devil for God’s honor, with as great difficulty? Now nothing can be more difficult
for man to do for God’s honor, than to suffer death voluntarily, when not bound
by obligation.”—(Lib. ii. Cap. xi.) Is it then the difficulty, the expense, the
death, that satisfies God’s honor? No; but it is the sublime rectitude of the Son,
displayed and proved by so great pertinacity. Mere difficulties borne do not help
God’s honor, but the principle of devotion for which they are borne
Again, two chapters farther on, where it is considered how great value the satisfaction offered has, he ceases to speak of the death and begins to dwell on the person. No man, he conceives, would knowingly kill that person to preserve the whole creation of God. “He is far more a good, therefore, [since he outweighs the creation of God] than sins are evils. And do you not think that so great a good, in itself so lovely, can avail to pay for the sins of the world? Yes, it has even infinite value.”—(Lib. ii. Cap. xiv.) As if it were the person given up to God that paid for the sins. Whereas he only means, by the so great person, the death of the person, and then again, by the death of the person, that obedience which was proved by his death, and confers the tribute of honor that is needed to resanctify the violated honor of God.
The construction I have given to Anselm’s doctrine, in this general
outline, I am happy to add, has the sanction of a scholar in as high authority as
Neander. He says, “Anselm’s doctrine of satisfaction certainly included in it the
idea of a satisfactio activa, the idea of a perfect
obedience, which was required in order to satisfaction for sin. To the significance
of Christ’s offering in the sight of God, necessarily belongs also the moral worth
of the same. Far from Anselm, however, was the idea of passive obedience, the idea
of a satisfaction by suffering, of an expiation by assuming the punishment
It is certainly most remarkable, and most honorable to the Christian sagacity of this ancient father of the church, that he was able, as a pioneer of doctrine concerning this profoundly difficult subject, to make out an account of it which shocks no moral sentiment, and violates no principle of natural reason, as almost all the doctors and dogmatizing teachers have been doing ever since. We may think what we please of his argument, as a true and sufficient account of the subject matter, but we can not be revolted by it.
It was the principal misfortune of Anselm, that he was too much
afraid of looking on the Gospel of the incarnation as having its value, or saving
efficacy, under laws of expression. The fact-form pictures of the life and suffering
of Christ were good enough symbols to him, doubtless, of God and his love, but the
pictures wanted something more solid back of them, he conceived, to support them—“for
no one paints in water or in air, because no traces of the picture remain in them.
Therefore the rational existence of the truth must first be shown—I mean
the necessity which proves that God ought to, or could have, condescended to those
things which we affirm. Afterwards to make the body of the truth, so to speak, shine
forth more clearly, these portrait figures which are pictures in a sense of truth’s
body, are to be displayed.”—(Lib. i. Cap. iv.) He has no conception that
expression is its own evidence. He must make a “solid foundation” by something
schemed and reasoned, else there is nothing to authenticate the gospel facts,
and show how it is that men’s
For this indeed is the inevitable fruit and doom of all attempts to logically reduce and dogmatize spiritual subjects—the method itself is only a way of finding how great truths may be made small enough to be easily handled. The definitions operate astringently, taking some one incident or quality, for many and various, and so getting the matters defined into such thimbles of meaning as can be confidently managed. Accordingly it will be always seen, that one who leads in a dogmatic, or closely defined exposition of some doctrine, is gathering his mind, as it were, into a precinct within itself, and that, while he is putting every thing, as he conceives, into the solid, scientific form, he is all the while giving indications, in the manner and matter of his argument, of an immense outside wealth of sentiment and perception, nowise reducible under the scheme of his dogma.
Thus, whoever reads the arguments of Athanasius for his doctrine
of Trinity, will see that his mind is touching something, every moment, outside
of his doctrine; some figure,
But the most remarkable instance of all, to illustrate the detaining
and restrictive power of a dogmatizing effort, will be found in the fact that Anselm,
so many times over in the course of his argument, strikes the really grand, all-containing
matter of the gospel and falls directly back as often, into his theory; only half
perceiving, apparently, the immense significance of what he had touched. Thus he
brings out his argument upon the very chilling and meager conclusion, that inasmuch
as Christ has paid to God, in his death, what was not due on his own account, God
must needs give him a reward for the overplus; and then, as he can not do any thing
with his reward personally, by reason of his infinite sufficiency, he may very naturally
ask the reward to be put upon somebody else, and why not upon the sinners of mankind.
“Upon
What a conception of the self-sacrificing love of Christ that, after all, he quite “properly” passes over to sinners “the superfluity” of his rewards! And yet the worthy father was looking at the time distinctly on the way Christ will get hold of transgressors to regenerate their nature, after he has evened their account with God. This mighty something, this all-quickening life, which an apostle calls “the power of God unto salvation,” and evidently thinks to be the very matter of the Gospel—he is feeling after it, we can plainly enough see, but his dogmatizing effort holds him in so stringently that, instead of launching out into the grand, all-significant, moral view of Christ, as being come into the world to be the power of God on souls, and so the Quickener of their life, puts forward only these two very thin, but painfully suggestive words, “example” and “imitation,” and is by these exhausted!
Again, twice before, he had been coasting round this point, as
if some loadstone drew his vessel thither. Thus, when showing how Christ paid God’s
violated “honor,” by his death, because he died as being under no debt of obligation
on his own account, he goes on to add, what has no connection whatever with his
point—“Do you not perceive that, when he bore, with gentle patience, the insults
put upon him, violence and even crucifixion among thieves, that he might
In the other instance referred to, he seems just upon the verge of breaking out through the shell of his dogma and his speculated reasons, into the broad open field of what is called “the moral view” of the subject, to see in Christ what is more than “example,” the transforming efficacy of God. Thus he testifies again—“There are also many other reasons why it is peculiarly fitting for that man [Christ] to enter into the common intercourse of men, and maintain a likeness to them, only without sin. And these things are more easily and clearly manifest in his life and actions than they can possibly be, by mere reason without experience. For who can say how necessary and wise a thing it was for him who was to redeem mankind, and lead them back by his teaching from the way of death and destruction into the path of life and eternal happiness, when he conversed with men, and when he taught them by personal intercourse, to set them an example himself of the way in which they ought to live? But how could he have given this example to weak and dying men, that they should not deviate from holiness because of injuries, or scorn, or tortures, or even death, had they not been able to recognize all these virtues in himself.”—(Lib. ii. Cap. xi.)
It is difficult not to be greatly affected by this almost discovery
of Anselm; for his mind, as we can plainly see, labors here with a suspicion that
there is a practical something “in the life and actions” of Christ that is not comprehensible
by “reason,” or by the logical methods of theory apart from experience; and “who,”
he asks, “can say how necessary” this
It should justly be said for him, however, that there is nothing
very peculiar in the detention he suffers at this point. In one way, or another,
the gospel teachers appear to have been trying every where and in all the past ages,
if not consciously, yet unconsciously, to get beyond their own doctrine, and bring
out some practically moral-power view of the cross, more fruitful and sanctifying,
than by their own particular doctrine, it possibly can be. Occasionally the attempt
has purposely and consciously been to adjust something, or make out some formal
account of Christ, that would turn the whole significance of his incarnate mission
upon the power to be exerted in character; showing directly how, or by what means,
it was to be and is that power. The very coarse, and, to us, wild looking doctrine
that Anselm exploded, and that held the church for so many ages before his time,
representing Christ as dying in a conflict for us with the devil, or as a ransom
paid to the devil, was probably nothing but a running down into literality and effoeteness
of meaning, of those flaming conceptions, under which Christ’s power over evil in
our fallen nature, was originally asserted. Faith began to glory in the casting
down of the devil by the cross. This was gradually converted by repetition into
a doctrine of the understanding. Then, by the unthinkingness of that and reiterations
continued, the dogmatic crudity was consummated and Christ became a ransom paid
to the devil. After Anselm also comes a long roll of teachers, reaching down to
our own time, who have it as their endeavor, more or less distinctly, to
But the most impressive thing of all, in the history of this subject,
is the fact to which I just now alluded; viz., the manifest difficulty experienced
by the adherents of judicial satisfaction under any form, whether of Anselm, or
of the Protestant confessions, or even of the Romish, in keeping themselves practically
in, or under, their doctrine. Maintaining it most stringently, or even with a bigot
zeal, they still can not practically stay in it, but they turn away, as often as
they can, to preach, or fondle themselves in, the dear luxury of texts outside of
their confession; such as “The love of Christ constraineth us,” “God commendeth
his love,” “The serpent lifted up,” “Beholding as in a glass,” “Christ liveth in
me,” and a hundred others; traveling over, in this manner, as it were, another and
really better gospel than that of their confession; quite unconscious of the immense
wealth they are finding that is wholly ignored by it. Even when they preach, in
ruggedest argument, their doctrine of penal sacrifice and satisfaction, asserting
the wrath that burns inextinguishably till it finds a victim, they will not be satisfied
till they have gotten some kind of soul-power either out of their doctrine, or most
likely from beyond it. Tacitly they do all hold to the fact that Christ is here
to be, and ought to be, and can be duly honored only when he is made to be, a softening,
illuminating, convincing, or somehow transforming and sanctifying power.
But why is this? If Christ has simply died to even up a score of penalty, if the total import of his cross is that God’s wrath is satisfied, and the books made square, there is certainly no beauty in that to charm a new feeling into life; on the contrary there is much to revolt the soul, at least in God’s attitude and even to raise a chill of revulsion. It will not pacify the conscience of transgression; first, because there is no justice in such kind of suffering; and next, because, if there were, such a death of such a being would only harrow the guilty soul with a sense of condemnation more awful. It might be imagined that such a transaction would make a strong appeal of gratitude, and exert great power in that manner over character, and yet gratitude is precisely that, which souls under sin are least capable of, and especially when the claim is grounded in reasons so spiritual and so galling, every way, in the form. No, the power which is so continually sought after in the unfolding and preaching of the cross—that which, to every really Christian preacher, is the principal thing—is not in, or of, any consideration of a penal sacrifice, but is wholly extraneous; a Christ outside of the doctrine, dwelling altogether in the sublime facts of his person, his miracles and his passion.
And here precisely is the reason why there is so little content
in the dogmatic solutions of penal atonement; why also the attempts to present the
gospel on its moral side, by a partially defined statement, or theory, seem to fall
short and yield in general so little satisfaction. It is just because the whole
It will be understood, of course, that I do not propose to establish
any article whatever in this treatise, but only to exhibit,
I have called the treatise by a name or title that more nearly
describes it than any other. It conceives the work of Christ as beginning at the
point of sacrifice, “Vicarious Sacrifice;” ending at the same, and being just this
all through—so a power of salvation for the world. And yet it endeavors to bring
this sacrifice only so much closer to our feeling and perception, in the fact that
it makes the sacrifice and cross of Christ his simple duty, and not any superlative,
optional kind of good, outside of all the common principles of virtue. “Grounded,”
I have said, “in principles of duty and right that are universal.” It is not goodness
over good, and yielding a surplus of merit in that manner for us, but it is only
just as good as it ought to be, or the highest law of right required it to be; a
model, in that view for us, and a power, if we can suffer it, of ingenerated life
in us. I probably do not use the term “vicarious sacrifice” in the commonly accepted
meaning of the church confessions, and if any one should blame the
I ought perhaps to say that the view here presented, was sketched, and, for the most part publicly taught, more than ten years ago. It will probably be remembered, by some, that sentiments which I published about fourteen years ago on this subject, raised a good deal of agitation, and a considerable impeachment of heresy. Whether what I now publish agrees, in every particular, with what I published then, I have not inquired and do not care to know. I can only say that I am not aware of any disagreement, and have never been led to regret any thing in the view then presented, except a certain immaturity and partiality of conception, which it can not be amiss to supplement by a doctrine that more sufficiently covers the whole ground of the subject.
IT is a matter of sorrowful indication, that the thing most wanting to be cleared in Christianity is still, as it ever has been, the principal thing; viz., the meaning and method of reconciliation itself, or of what is commonly called the vicarious sacrifice. This fact would even be itself a considerable evidence against the gospel, were it not that the subject matter—so vast in the reach of its complications, and so nearly transcendent in the height of its reasons—yields up easily to faith its practical significance, when refusing to be theoretically mastered, as yet, by the understanding.
There has been a litigation of the sacrifice going on for these
eighteen hundred years, and especially for the last eight hundred; yet still it
remains an open question with many, whether any such thing as vicarious sacrifice
pertains to the work of salvation Christ has accomplished. On one side the fact
is abjured as irrational and revolting. On the other it is affirmed as a principal
fact of the Christian salvation; though I feel obliged to confess that it is too
commonly maintained under definitions and forms of argument that make it revolting.
And which of the two is the greater wrong
Assuming now, for the subject of this treatise, the main question stated, our first point must be to settle What is to be understood by vicarious sacrifice. a just and true conception of vicarious sacrifice, or of what is the real undertaking of Christ in the matter of such sacrifice. For in all such matters, the main issue is commonly decided by adjusting other and better conceptions of the question itself, and not by forcing old ones through into victory, by the artillery practice of better contrived arguments.
This word vicarious, that has made so conspicuous a figure in the debates of theology, it must be admitted is no word of the Scripture. The same is true, however, of free agency, character, theology, and of many other terms which the conveniences of use have made common. If a word appears to be wanted in Christian discussions or teachings, the fact that it is not found in the Scripture is no objection to it; we have only to be sure that we understand what we mean by it. In the case, too, of this particular word vicarious, a special care is needed, lest we enter something into the meaning, from ourselves, which is not included in the large variety of Scripture terms and expressions the word is set to represent.
Thus we have—“made a curse for us”—“bare our sins”—“hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”—“made to be sin for us”—“offered to bear the sins of many”—“borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”—“wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities”—“tasted death for every man.” The whole Gospel is a texture, thus of vicarious conceptions, in which Christ is represented, in one way or another, as coming into our place, substituted in our stead, bearing our burdens, answering for us, and standing in a kind of suffering sponsorship for the race.
Now the word vicarious is chosen to represent, and gather up into itself all these varieties of expression. It is the same word, in the root, as the word vice in vicegerent, viceroy, vicar, vicar-general, vice-president, and the like. It is a word that carries always a face of substitution, indicating that one person comes in place, somehow, of another. Thus a vice-president is one who is to act in certain contingencies, as and for the president; a viceroy, for the king. The ecclesiastical vicar too, was a vicar as being sent to act for the monastic body, whose duties were laid as a charge upon him; and the pope is called the vicar of Christ, in the same way, as being authorized to fill Christ’s place. Any person acts vicariously, in this view, just so far as he comes in place of another. The commercial agent, the trustee, the attorney, are examples of vicarious action at common law.
Then if we speak of “sacrifice,” any person acts in a way of “vicarious
sacrifice,” not when he burns upon an altar in some other’s place, but when he makes
loss
In this sense it is that Christianity or the Christian salvation is a vicarious sacrifice. It does not mean What vicarious sacrifice does not mean. simply that Christ puts himself into the case of man as a helper; one man helps another without any vicarious relationship implied or supposed. Neither does it mean that Christ undertakes for man in a way of influence; one man tries to influence another, without coming at all into his place. Neither does the vicarious sacrifice imply that he simply comes under common liabilities with us, as when every citizen suffers for the wrongs and general misconduct and consequent misgovernment of the community to which he belongs. Nor that he simply comes into the track of those penal retributions which outrun the wrongs they chastise, passing over upon the innocent, as the sins of fathers propagate their evils in the generations of their children coming after. The idea of Christ’s vicarious sacrifice is not matched by any of these lighter examples, though it has something in common with them all, and is therefore just so much likelier to be confounded with them by a lighter and really sophistical interpretation.
On the other hand, we are not to hold the Scripture terms of vicarious sacrifice, as importing a literal substitution of places, by which Christ becomes a sinner for sinners, or penally subject to our deserved penalties. That is a kind of substitution that offends every strongest sentiment of our nature. He can not become guilty for us. Neither, as God is a just being, can he be any how punishable in our place—all God’s moral sentiments would be revolted by that. And if Christ should himself consent to such punishment, he would only ask to have all the most immovable convictions, both of God’s moral nature and our own, confounded, or eternally put by.
Excluding now all these under-stated and over-stated explanations
we come to the true conception, which is that Christ, in what is called his vicarious
The positive conception. sacrifice, simply engages,
at the expense of great suffering and even of death itself, to bring us out of our
sins themselves and so out of their penalties; being himself profoundly identified
with us in our fallen state, and burdened in feeling with our evils. Nor is there
any thing so remote, or difficult, or violent, in this vicarious relation, assumed
by Christ as many appear to suppose. It would rather be a wonder if, being what
he is, he did not assume it. For we are to see and make our due account of this
one fact, that a good being is, by the supposition, ready, just according to his
goodness, to act vicariously in behalf of any bad, or miserable being, whose condition
he is able to restore. For a good being is not simply one who gives bounties
How it was with Christ, and how he bore our sins, we can see exactly,
from a very impressive and remarkable passage in Matthew’s Gospel, where he conceives
that
Christ has been pouring out his sympathies, all day, in acts of
healing, run down, as it were, by the wretched multitudes crowding about him and
imploring his pity. No humblest, most repulsive creature is neglected or fails to
receive his tenderest, most brotherly consideration. His heart accepts each one
as a burden upon its feeling, and by that feeling he is inserted into the lot, the
pain, the sickness, the sorrow of each. And so the evangelist, having, as we see,
no reference whatever to the substitution for sin, says—“That it might be fulfilled,
which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying—‘Himself took our infirmities and
bare our sicknesses.’”
What then does it mean that Christ “bare our sicknesses?” Does
it mean that he literally had our sicknesses transferred to him, and so taken off
from us? Does it mean that he became blind for the blind, lame for the lame, a leper
for the lepers, suffering in himself all the fevers and pains he took away from
others? No one had ever such a thought. How then did he bear our sicknesses, or
in what sense? In the sense that he took them on his feeling, had his heart burdened
by the sense of them, bore the disgusts of their loathsome decays, felt their pains
over again, in the tenderness of his more than human sensibility. Thus manifestly
it was that he bare our sicknesses—his very love to us put him, so far, in a vicarious
relation to them, and made him, so far, a partaker in them.
Here then we have the true law of interpretation, when the vicarious
relation of Christ to our sins comes into view. It does not mean that he takes them
literally upon him, as some of the old theologians and a very few moderns appear
to believe; it does not mean that
See how it is with love in the case of a mother. She loves her
child, and it comes out in that fact, or from it, Motherhood
friendship. Patriotism vicarious. that she watches for the child, bears all
its pains and sicknesses on her own feeling, and when it is wronged, is stung herself,
by the wrong put upon it, more bitterly far than the child. She takes every chance
of sacrifice for it, as her own opportunity. She creates, in fact, imaginary ills
for it, because she has not opportunities enough of sacrifice. In the same manner
a friend that is real and true takes all the sufferings, losses, wrongs, indignities,
of a friend on his own feeling, and will sometimes suffer even more for him than
he does for himself. So also
Thus it is that every sort of love is found twining its feeling always into the feeling, and loss, and want, and woe, of whatever people, or person, or even enemy, it loves; thus that God himself takes our sinning enmity upon his heart, painfully burdened by our broken state, and travailing, in all the deepest feeling of his nature, to recover us to himself. And this it is which the cross and vicarious sacrifice of Jesus signify to us, or outwardly express. Such a God in love, must be such a Saviour in suffering—he could not well be other or less. There is a Gethsemane hid in all love, and when the fit occasion comes, no matter how great and high the subject may be, its heavy groaning will be heard—even as it was in Christ. He was in an agony, exceeding sorrowful even unto death. By that sign it was that God’s love broke into the world, and Christianity was born!
Here, then, as I conceive, is the true seed principle of
How much to be regretted then is it, that Christianity has been
made so great an offense, to so many ingenuous and genuinely thoughtful souls, at
just this point of vicarious The great offense of the cross
a contribution of theology. sacrifice, where it is noblest to thought, and
grandest, and most impressive to feeling. There ought never to be a question over
its reality and truth to nature, more than over a mother’s watch and waiting for
her child. And yet there has been kept up, for centuries, what a strain of logical,
or theological endeavor—shall I call it high, or
At the same time, there have been thrown off into antagonism,
a great many times, whole sects of disciples, who could see no way to escape
No vitality in a Gospel without vicarious sacrifice.
the revolting theories of vicarious sacrifice, but to formally deny the fact; and
then what evidence have they given of the fact, as a distinctive integral element
of Christianity, by their utter inability, in the way of denial, to maintain the
vitality
By this experimental proof, it can be clearly seen how necessary to the living Gospel and church of Christ is the faith, in some true sense, of a vicarious sacrifice. And what that sense may be it is not difficult, I think, to find. We have already found that love itself contains the fact and is the sufficient and easy solution.
But there is an objection to be encountered even here, before
the solution will be satisfactory to some; it is that if love, love in God, and
love in all Objection that God must be unhappy in love.
beings created and uncreated, is an essentially vicarious element or principle;
if it moves to the certain identification of the loving party with evil minds and
their pains, and the assuming of them, to be a burden on its feeling, or even a
possible agony in it; then, as long as there is any such thing as evil and death,
love must be a cause of unhappiness, a lot of suffering and sorrow. In one view
it must, in another it will be joy itself, the fullest, and profoundest, and sublimest
joy conceivable. There was never a being on earth so deep in his peace and so essentially
blessed as Jesus Christ. Even his agony itself is scarcely an exception. There is
no joy so grand as that which
Thus we take our beginning for this great subject, the grace of
the cross, and the Christian salvation. As yet we have scarcely passed the gate,
but the gate is
I should scarcely be justified in concluding this chapter, if
I did not first suggest, for the benefit of some, who may recoil from this profoundly
earnest truth of sacrifice, as one that rather shocks, than approves itself
Let me stop then here, upon the margin of the subject, and without
any thought of preaching to my reader who parts company with me thus early, put
him on a practical experiment that will let him a great way farther into this first
chapter of divine knowledge, than, as yet, he thinks it possible to go. The problem
I would give you is this; viz., that you find how to practically bear an enemy,
or a person whom you dislike, so as to be exactly satisfied and happy in your relationship.
If you can stand off in disgust, or set yourself squarely against him in hatred,
or revenge, then do it and bless yourself in it. If that is impossible, try indifference,
turn your back and say, “let him go and fare as his deserts will help him.” If there
is no sweetness in this, as there certainly is none, then begin to pray for him,
that he may have a better mind and that you may be duly patient with him. This will
be softer, and you may begin to feel that you are a good deal Christian or Christian-like,
towards him. And yet there will be a
IT has been a fatal source of. difficulty and mental confusion,
as regards the vicarious sacrifice and saving work of Christ, that it has been taken
to be a superlative kind of goodness; a matter of sacrifice outside of all the common
terms and principles of duty or holy obligation; an act, or enterprise of self-sacrifice,
not provided for in the universal statutes and standards of moral perfection. The
assumption has been that Christ went out of obligation, out of law and beyond, to
do the sacrifice, and was just so much better than perfect in good, because he would
have been perfect in good, if he had declined the undertaking. Thus it has been
a formally asserted point of theology, that his undertaking was “optional;” that
which he might, or might not assume, and which, if he had chosen to decline, would
have raised no sense of defect before his own standards of excellence. This too
has been taken for a point fundamental, as regards the satisfaction for sins accomplished
in his death, that he raised a superlative merit in it to be set to our account,
only by doing optionally what he was under no obligation, on his own account, to
do. What he ought to do for himself,
Every such attempt to scheme the work of Christ, and put him in
the terms of the understanding, begins, we ought easily to see, by removing
The fiction of a superlative merit. him beyond all terms
of understanding. Hence the painful confusion of ideas, the artificial mock speculations,
the conclusions that are shocking to all natural sentiments of right and justice—the
imputations that are figments, of merits that are inconceivable, accomplishing satisfactions
with God that are as far as possible from satisfying men—all which have infested,
for so many centuries, the history of this great subject. Plainly enough we can
mean nothing, by a merit that is outside of all our standards of merit. If Christ
was consenting, optionally, to what he might as well have declined; if he was just
so much better than he ought to be on his own account; then the surplus over is
any thing, or nothing; we may call it merit, but we do not know what it is; we may
balance it against the sins of the world, but we can not be sure of a grain’s weight
in it. What can we think, or know, of a goodness over and above all standards of
good? We might as well talk of extensions beyond space, or truths beyond the true.
Goodness, holy virtue, is the same in all worlds and beings, measured by the same
universal and eternal standards; else it is nothing to us. Defect is sin; overplus
Here then is our first point, when we attempt the cross and sacrifice of Christ; we must bring every thing back under the common standards of eternal virtue, and we must find Christ doing and suffering just what he ought, or felt that he ought, neither more nor less. That which is to be intelligible must be found within the bounds of intelligence. If we can not find a Saviour under just our laws of good, we shall find him nowhere. Looking for him here, we shall not fail to find him.
Do we then assume that Christ, in his vicarious sacrifice, was under obligation to do and suffer just what he did? Christ fulfilling standard obligations. Exactly this. Not that he was under obligations to another, but to himself. He was God, fulfilling the obligations of God; just those obligations in the eternal fulfillment of which God’s perfections and beatitudes are eternally fashioned. We transgressors had no claims upon him, more than our enemies have upon us; there was none above him to enforce such obligations. All that he endures in feeling under them, he endures freely, and this it is that constitutes both his greatness and joy. There is an eternal cross in his virtue itself, and the cross that he endures in Christ only reveals what is in those common standards of good, which are also eternally his.
I shall discuss this matter more fully, at a more advanced stage in the argument. For the present I prefer to handle the subject in a manner less speculative showing that, as Christ is here discovered All good beings in this law of sacrifice. in vicarious sacrifice, so all good beings, God in the Old Testament before Christ, the Holy Spirit in the times after Christ, and the good created minds both before and after, are and are to be, in one accord with Christ, enduring the same kind of sacrifice. It will seem, it may be, that I am going a long way round in such a canvassing, but the result will be that a platform is gained, where the sacrifice of Christ is at once less peculiar and far more intelligible. Indeed when it is made plain, as a fact of holy Scripture slumbering hitherto in its bosom and hidden from adequate discovery, that vicarious sacrifice is the common property of holy virtue in all minds, uncreated or created, the problem of such sacrifice will be effectually changed, and most of the questions in issue will be superseded, or already settled. This present and the two succeeding chapters will accordingly be occupied with a Scripture review, as in reference to the point stated.
If it be true that love is a principle of vicarious sacrifice,
then it will be so, not in Christ only, but as truly in God the Supreme, or the
God of revelation The Supreme Father in vicarious sacrifice.
previous to Christ’s coming. I say “as truly” it will be observed, not of course
that he will have done, or endured, the same things. Not even Christ did the same
things in his
A great many persons have forced themselves into a false antagonism,
by the contrast they have undertaken to raise between the Old Testament and
God the same in the Old and New Testaments. the New.
And yet even such will agree, returning so far to the just opinion, that God is
God every where, one and the same in all ages and proceedings, instigated by the
same impulses, clothed in the same sympathies, maintaining the same patience, under
the same burdens of love; acting, of course, in the Old Testament history, for the
same ends of goodness that are sought in the New. They will
And yet the false antagonism just referred to remains. After all
such disclaimers, it has power to feed and keep in vogue a whole set of false impressions,
or prejudices, by which the God of the Old Testament becomes another and virtually
different being from the Saviour of the New; a kind of Nemesis that needs to be
propitiated by suffering, and is far as possible, in himself, from being in any
relation of vicarious and burdened feeling for mankind. After the point of difficulty
has been turned in their schemes of atonement, by the protestations referred to,
they go their way, as if said protestations had no meaning at all, giving in to
a kind of partisanship for one Testament against the other, and for one God against
the other God. As some disciples took to Paul, and some to Apollos, so they take
to Christ, and are much less drawn to the God of the law. There is no comfort in
such a prejudice; they are consciously
All such predilections it will easily be seen are without foundation. On first principles they are and must No progress in God. be fictitious; for there is and can be no such thing as internal progress in God, that is in his character; he was never inferior to what he now is, and will never be superior—never worthier, greater, more happy, or more to be admired and loved. And yet there is certainly a considerable contrast in the ways of God, as presented in the Old Testament and in the Gospel of Christ. There he maintains a government more nearly political and earthly; here more spiritual and heavenly. There he calls himself a man of war; here he shows himself a prince of peace. There he is more legal, appealing to interest in the terms of this life; here he moves on the affections and covers the ground of eternity. There he maintains a drill of observances; here he substitutes the inspirations of liberty and the law written on the heart. There he operates oftener by force and by mighty judgments; here by the suffering patience of a cross.
Laying hold of this contrast, and quite willing to
What now shall we say to this? If God is one, a strict unity, always in the same perfect character and feeling, what account shall we make of this contrast? And by what method shall we make it appear that he is still the same, bearing the same relation of feeling to men’s evils and sins, working in the same great principle of love and sacrifice?
The solution is not difficult, if only we make due account of
the fact that, while there is no progress, or improvement, in God, there is and
should But the government of God makes progress. be
a progress in his government of the world. Taken as a plan of redemption and spiritual
restoration, it must be historical and must be unfolded in and by a progressive
revelation. Beginning at a point where men’s ideas are low and their
To simplify the general subject as far as possible, take, for
example, the single point in which the hasty and shallow thinkers of the unbelieving
world Partisanship of the old religion. have been most
commonly scandalized; viz., the exclusiveness of the old religion. God, they insist,
is the Creator, Lord, and Father of all men—not of any one people; but this old
religion holds him forth in promise as the God of a chosen people, taking them as
clients in specialty, apart from, and, in some sense,. against the whole world beside.
How very unlike to the God of Christianity, erecting a kingdom of universal love
and suffering sacrifice. And yet plainly there was no other way to get hold of the
low sentiment of the world and raise it, but to begin thus with a partisan, chosen
people’s mercy, and get himself revealed by light and shade, as between his people
and others; creating a religion that is next thing to a prejudice. He could not
be revealed, as any one may see, in his own measures, but only in such measures
as he found prepared. To bolt himself into men’s thoughts, when they had no thoughts,
was impossible. He could only come into such thoughts and sentiments as there were.
The little, darkened, partisan soul must know him as
If he had announced himself, at the very first, as the God alike and Saviour of all men, if he had been forthwith incarnate and had shown himself in Moses’ day, by the suffering life and death of his Son, the history would have been a barren riddle only. They were not equal to the conceiving of any such disinterested sacrifice; and the fact that it proposed. a salvation for all men would have been enough, by itself, to quite turn away their faith. I verily believe that Jesus, coming, thus and then, would not even have been remembered in history. And yet there was a promise, long before, of which nobody took the meaning, that, in this one people, somehow, all nations should be eventually blessed; and the prophets, too, as the religious sense grew more enlarged, finally began to break out in bold and strong visions of a universal kingdom and glory; in which it may be seen that God was preparing, even from the first, to be finally known as the Lord and Saviour of the whole world.
Does he then, by condescending to the lowness of barbarous mind, and consenting to begin with a religion of prejudice, when there was no higher sentiment to begin with, or be revealed in—does God’s love suffers by detention. he by choosing out one people, in this manner, show that his character is equal to nothing higher? Ah, what struggles of suffering patience had he rather to endure, in these long ages of training, under such narrow and meager possibilities! Nowhere else, it seems to me, not even in the cross of Jesus itself, does he reveal more wonderfully the greatness and self-sacrificing patience of his feeling. And the fact breaks out, all along down the course of the history—appearing and reappearing, by how many affecting declarations—that he is waiting for a better possibility, waiting to open his whole heart’s love, and be known by what he can bear and do for the world of mankind. Nor was there any moment of relief to him so blessed probably, as when he came to Mary with his “all hail,” and broke into the world as God with us; God now come at last, to disburden his heart by sacrifice. The retention before was a greater burden on his feeling, we may well believe, than his glorious outbirth into loss and suffering now.
Taking now this very crowded, God in sacrifice by Scripture testimony. insufficiently stated solution of his relation to the times of the Old Testament, you will find it borne out, in every point, by a careful review of the whole Scripture; and that Christ, in his vicarious sacrifice, only represents the feeling of God in all the preceding ages.
The principle of love, as we have already seen, is itself a principle
of vicarious sacrifice, causing every one that is in it to be entered into the want,
woe, loss, and even ill-desert of every other; bearing even adversaries and enemies,
just as Christ bore his. But God is love and is so declared in every part of the
Scripture; and what have we in this, but the discovery that he is a being, in just
such a relation of sympathy and burdened feeling for men, as Christ was. He did
not show it by the same outward signs, and therefore could not so powerfully and
transformingly impress the fact; and yet he was in the same precise love, waiting,
as we just now said, to find relief in a more adequate expression. Yet how often,
how affectingly, did he express, in words, the painful sympathy and deep burden
of his feeling. As when the prophet says—“In their affliction he was afflicted,
and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and pity, he redeemed them,
and bare and carried them, all the days of old.” How tenderly does he watch the
turning of the ages—“grieved forty years” for his people in the wilderness—“rising
betimes” to send his messengers—protesting that he is “weary”—that he is “broken
with their whorish heart”—“that he is filled with repentings”—calling also to his
people to, see how “the Lord their God bare them as a man doth bear his son”—apostrophizing
them, as it were, in a feeling quite broken, “Oh, that there were such a heart
in them, that they would hear me and keep my commandments”—“How shall I give thee up,
Ephraim, how shall I deliver thee, Israel?”—and
And then, when Christ himself arrives, what does he say but that,
“God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son?”—not that he came to
obtain God’s love, but that God’s love sent him and was here to be magnified, in
the sacrifice of life he would make. And who is Christ but God manifest in the flesh,
reconciling the world unto himself; the express image and word of God; that is God
expressed as he is, so that he that hath seen him hath seen the Father; working
always for, and to declare, the God that sent him. Neither does he conceive, that
he is introducing a new kingdom and order, that is worthier of God, and in better
feeling. He declares that he came not to destroy the old system, or law, but only
to fulfill it and carry it on to the glorious realization of its ends, opening things
that have been kept secret, but have all the time been working, from the foundation
of the world; nay, that his kingdom is a kingdom prepared from the foundation of
the world; prepared that is in God’s love, fixed in his purpose, working in his
counsels. What then was Christ in his vicarious feeling and sacrifice, what in his
Gethsemane, but a revelation in time, of just that love that had been struggling
always in God’s bosom; watching
But there is, after all, some one will say, a something in Christ that is more gentle and better to feeling—less Christ not better, but more adequately expressed. severity, kinder, softer terms of good. There certainly is a fuller, more adequate, expression of God’s love; and so a greater power of attraction, thus of salvation. And yet there are denunciations of future evil in his teachings, that, taken as they stand, are as much more fearful than any which are found in the Old Testament, as they relate to what is more future and of longer duration. I will not here discuss them, I only say that, take what view of them is possible, it does not appear that Christ, in bearing the world’s evil, does at all consent to the possible immunity of transgression. If he might consent to that, then he might well enough consent to the continuance of transgression also, and so be excused from the sacrifice of the cross altogether.
God then is such a being from eternity as must, by the supposition, be entered, even as Christ was, into all God then is just what Christ shows him to be. that belongs to love; entered into patience, long suffering, and sacrifice; burdened in heart for the good of enemies; taking on his feeling the wants and woes of enemies. This is no new thought, no optional, superlative goodness taken up by Christ in the year One, of the Christian era; but the whole deity is in it, in it from eternity. And the short account of all is—“For God so loved the world.”
Holding now this view of God—the same which the Psalmist boasts when he sings, “For God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the Current misconceptions. earth”—we encounter a large body of current misconceptions, mostly under Gospel terms of expression, which require to be modified if we are to hold the truth understandingly.
Thus we speak of Christ as a mediator, and as doing a work of mediation; which is Scriptural, but we often conceive that he is literally a third being, Mediation. coming in between us and God to compose our difficulty with him, by gaining him as it were to softer terms. But he is no such mediator at all, nor any mediator, such as does not leave him to be God manifest in all God’s proper feeling. No, he is a mediator only in the sense that, as being in humanity, he is a medium of God to us; such a medium that, when we cling to him in faith, we take hold of God’s own life and feeling as the Infinite Unseen, and are taken hold of by Him, reconciled, and knit everlastingly to him, by what we receive.
We call Christ our intercessor, too, and conceive that we are
saved by his intercession. Does he then intercede for us in the sense that he goes
before God Intercession. in a plea to gain him over
to us, showing God his wounds, and the print of his nails, to soften him towards
us. Far from that as possible; nothing could be more unworthy. Intercession means
literally intervention, that is a coming between; and it is not God that wants to
be softened, or made better; for Christ
Other modes of speaking, supposed to be understood in their Scriptural
meaning, will not be accommodated by the conception that unites the God of
Pacification. the old time and the Christ of the new,
in the same vicarious feeling, but will require to have their colors softened by
similar explanations. And it will not be difficult, I rejoice to believe, for any
genuinely thoughtful, right-feeling soul, to lay hold of the possibility thus offered,
of a conception of God that does not mock his attributes, or set them at war with
each other. How distracting and painful, how dreadfully appalling is the faith that
we have a God, back of the worlds, whose indignations overtop his mercies, and who
will not be satisfied, save as he is appeased by some other, who is in a better
and milder feeling. We might easily fear him, but how shall we love him; and where,
meantime shall we find that glorious, all-centering unity in the good, which our
sufficiently distracted soul longs for in the God of its worship? What can we do
as sinners, torn already by our own evils, with two Gods, a less good, and a better—this
latter, suffering and even dying
Here then I think we may rest in the full and carefully tested discovery, that whatever we may say, or hold, or believe, concerning the vicarious A cross in God’s perfections from eternity. sacrifice of Christ, we are to affirm in the same manner of God. The whole deity is in it, in it from eternity and will to eternity be. We are not to conceive that our blessed Saviour is some other and better side of deity, a God composing and satisfying God; but that all there is in him expresses God, even as he is, and has been of old—such a being in his love that he must needs take our evils on his feeling, and bear the burden of our sin. Nay, there is a cross in God before the wood is seen upon Calvary; hid in God’s own virtue itself, struggling on heavily in burdened feeling through all the previous ages, and struggling as heavily now even in the throne of the worlds. This, too, exactly, is the cross that our Christ crucified reveals and sets before us. Let us come then not to the wood alone, not to the nails, not to the vinegar and the gall, not to the writhing body of Jesus, but to the very feeling of our God and there take shelter. Seeing how God bears an enemy—has borne or carried enemies all the days of old—we say “Herein is Love,” and in this grand koinonia—this fellowship of the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ—our very unworthy and very distracting preferences are forever merged and lost.
HAVING showed, in my last chapter, that the Creator and God of the former dispensation, sometimes called the Father in that relation, was inserted into our human conditions, in just the same vicarious feeling as Christ was in his incarnate suffering, and bore our sins as truly, and wrestled for us in the same tender burdens of love, I now undertake to show the same in respect to the Holy Spirit after Christ; that he works in love as Christ did, and suffers all the incidents of love—compassion, wounded feeling, sorrow, concern, burdened sympathy, violated patience—taking men upon him, to bear them and their sins, precisely as Christ himself did in his sacrifice. He is, in fact, a Christ continued, in all that distinguishes the offering and priesthood of Christ, and is fitly represented in the same way, under a priestly figure, as our intercessor.
I am well aware how very distant all such conceptions are from
the commonly received impressions of the The Holy Spirit in
personal feeling and character. Holy Spirit. For it is a remarkable fact,
apart from all conceptions of a properly vicarious sacrifice in his ministry,
that even where his personality is much insisted on, almost nothing is left him
commonly in the matter of
1. Of the personality of the Spirit, insisting that, if it be
asserted at all, as it certainly should be, it must be asserted with a meaning and
not without. Personality that makes no true person.
It is very true that the word Spirit [πνευμα,]
is a neuter noun, drawing after it the neuter pronoun it. But this is only
because the natural symbol resorted to, viz., breath, happened to be a neuter
word. Still there are other terms applied to the Spirit, which bear the very highest
character of personality. Thus he is promised as being even Christ himself—“I will
come to you;” and is called, with Christ, Paraclete, Advocate, Comforter, another
Comforter
2. It requires, every one may easily perceive, quite as much suffering
patience, and affliction of feeling, or The work of the Spirit
is in sacrifice. even of what is called passion, to carry on the work of
the Spirit, as it did to fulfill the ministry and bear the cross of Jesus. In the
first place, the work of the Spirit covers the whole ground of human life, broad
as the world is, and continues through all the untold generations of time. And in
this world-wide operation he is enduring, not Pilate, and the soldiers, and a few
Jewish priests, but the contradiction of all sinners that live. He is betrayed by
Neither let us imagine, as too many do, in their superficial haste,
that the principal suffering and sacrifice of Christ consisted in the pains he bore
in his body. The pains of his moral sensibility, the burdens that oppressed his
vicarious feeling, cost him more than his cross, as any one may see who takes the
meaning of his Gethsemane. Indeed this one look down into the depth of his divine
feeling seems to have been permitted us, that our mind might be taken away from
the foolish opinion that his principal sacrifice lay in the pangs of a few hours’ bodily suffering. Indeed these bodily pains of Christ on the cross appear to be
a kind of condescension rather to our coarseness, that he might raise an outward
flag of distress for our dull sensuous nature to look upon; while to him, the principal
woe is that which, as incarnate love, he bore all through his ministry, in his griefs,
disgusts, and wounded sensibilities; that which once or twice he barely speaks of,
as when he says “now is my soul troubled;” that which made him, to his friends,
“a man of sorrows;” that which, in the garden, took hold of him, even as an agony,
the most appalling scene of tragedy ever beheld in our world. In a quiet, silent
hour, when his person is threatened by no appearance of danger, the wail of
3. To that which is to be more decisive than our own thoughts or constructive endeavors, viz., to the direct Scripture representations. exhibitions of the Scripture itself. And here, since I must abridge the review as much as possible, I will pass all the more casual notifications of the Spirit which speak of doing him “despite,” of his being “grieved,” and “vexed,” and “lied unto,” and “resisted;” that show the eminently Christly “gifts of healing” ministered by him, allowing it also to be said of him as of Christ—“Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses;” that call him “Christ,” and “the Spirit of Christ,” and “Christ dwelling in us,” and “Christ living in us”—in all which it is made clear that he has all the sentiment, and sensibility, and even wounded sensibility, of Christ himself—Christ’s equivalent in short, abiding in the heart.
Having merely alluded to these very significant tokens, I go on
to notice three principal conceptions
Thus, first of all, he goes into the ministry of Christ with him and upon him, as the qualifying impulse, in some sense, of his work; resting upon With Christ in his ministry. him as a dove in his baptism; leading him into and through the great soul-struggle of the temptation; bestowed upon him “without measure” in his doctrine; travailing with him, last of all, in his Gethsemane and his cross; so that we may say, when all is done, “who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God.” Instigator thus, and upholder of Jesus, in all his ministry and sacrifice, how strange is the inversion we make, when we allow ourselves to think of him as being only a bare impersonal force or influence!
A second and partly reverse, though really agreeing conception
of the Spirit is met, in his appointed vicarship, or substituted ministry, acting
in Takes Christ’s place and continues his work. the
place of Christ himself. Thus Christ declaring to his disciples, “it is expedient
for you that I go away,” promises the Spirit as “another Comforter” in his place.
And the reason of the substitution is not difficult. Having brought on his outwardly
historic work to a close, Christ perceives that his permanent, or protracted stay
in the flesh and before the senses, would be rather a hindrance than a help to farther
progress. If it were possible for him, as a visible Saviour and resident, to win
disciples all over the world and in all ages, they would yet be disciples
This brings us to a third Scripture conception of the Spirit,
where the vicarious working is even more formally Has his Gethsemane.
displayed
Our translators appear to have looked upon it as a thing quite
unsupposable, that any priestly and vicarious working pertains to the ministry of
the Spirit, and have cast the words of their version accordingly, so as to make
it a great deal less distinctly vicarious than the original. Besides it would be
nearly impossible to so translate the passage as to give it, in English, the full
vicarious typology and substitutive import of the original Greek version. Thus our
English word helpeth—[“helpeth our infirmities”]—represents a long Greek
word compounded of two prepositions and a verb; the preposition with indicating
a conjunction of sympathy, the preposition instead of, indicating substitution,
and the verb taking hold of as in participation;
Again it is to be specially noted that the Holy Spirit is twice
represented in this passage under the priestly
All which he is said to do “with groanings which can not be uttered”—better “with groanings unuttered;” that is, with strivings of concern or burdened feeling, that are the silent Gethsemane of his ministry. The groanings of Christ are audible and so might the groanings of the Spirit be, if he had the vocal organs of a body connected with his feeling. Enough that one, as truly as the other, and both in exact conformity, fulfill the natural pathology of love and sacrifice; Christ when he throws himself upon the ground, groaning aloud for the mere burden he has upon his feeling, and without any other kind of distress; and the Spirit when he enters into the struggles of our disorder and weakness with so great concern, groaning inaudibly in us and heaving out our soul in sighs and prayers.
It is no small confirmation of the view thus given, that when
it is carried forward into the latter of the: two verses, all that awkwardness
which the commentators appear to have felt, in assigning to it any precise
meaning, is completely removed. Omitting the words “will of,” which are not in the original,
we read—“And he that [sought unto by prayer] searcheth the hearts, knoweth what
is the mind of the Spirit [the mind which the Spirit is working in us] because he
[the Spirit] maketh
4. That the reason why the Holy Spirit is regarded so much less
tenderly by us than Christ, or even as having no particular title to our love, is
Only does not meet us in the senses. that we are creatures
in the senses, carnalized also and blinded, as regards all spiritual perceptions,
by the sensuous habit of our sin, and that Christ meeting us in the senses, speaking
to us with a man’s voice, enduring toil and contempt for us, joining himself to
us in all our external adversities, looking on us with a face gloomed by sorrow,
or bathed in the sweat of agony, or stained by the blood of his thorny crown and
cross—meeting us in this way, having a human person for his organ, Christ lays hold
of our feeling, by his address to the senses, and we begin to imagine some special
tenderness and fellow sensibility in him, awakened by his human relationship itself,
and dating after that relationship begun. Whereas he has only come into humanity
because the feeling was in him before, and has taken up the human nature, that he
might have an organ of what before was hid, unexpressed, in his divine feeling.
And so the Holy Spirit,
Perhaps it may be necessary to add, that the Holy Spirit in such
a ministry of sacrifice and burdened feeling, Works in authority
also. holds the magisterial key of divinity still, and makes it none the
less a piercing and strong ministry. He is just like Christ in this respect. The
tenderness and self-sacrificing love of Christ never subsided into softness, or
a look of weakness. Authority goes with him. He lays himself upon the proud, the
plunderers of the poor, the pretenders and hypocrites in religion, in words of fearful
severity. He is kingly even in his passion. And in just the same manner the Spirit
has thunders for guilty consciences,
I can not drop the subject in hand without adverting to a great
and very hurtful misconception of the Gospel plan itself, that connects with this
same misconception of the Holy Spirit which I am here trying to correct. Thus how
very commonly is it given as a true summation of the Gospel, that Christ, by his
death and A mechanical Gospel which is not the true.
sacrifice, prepares a ground of forgiveness or justification, and then that the
Holy Spirit is sent by a kind of immediate, or efficient agency, to renew the soul
in a forgivable state. Christ works before the law, and the Holy Spirit works in
the soul; one to open a gate of mercy, the other to lead into that gate. As if Christ,
in his agony, and cross, and
It results, of course, under such a conception of the Gospel plan,
that we are drawn to no very close personal union either with Christ, or the Spirit,
and just that is missed which, in God’s view, is the principal aim of all; viz.,
the power to be exerted in us by the feeling expressed to us. For if Christ, in
what is called his vicarious sacrifice, is wholly withdrawn from us, and is only
doing a work before justice and the law, in some court of reckoning we know not
where, he is plainly doing nothing to win a place in our consciousness, or to produce
a Christly consciousness in us. He does not move upon us, but upon the books, thinking
only of the credit to be gained for us there by the contribution of his pains. How
then is he going to be
Meantime the Spirit is reduced to an attitude where we are unlikely
as may be, to conceive any such thing as the greatness and blessedness of a conscious,
The Spirit our invisible friend. everlastingly established
friendship with him. He is not here, to reach us, in any sense, by the divine feeling.
He is not Christ taken out of form and locality, to be present everywhere and be
revealed, unseen, as a Christ living in all hearts. But he is thought of more as
an efficient divine operator in souls; doing a work of repair in them, or, at most,
a work of moral suasion before their choices; neither of which is very much related
to our personal sentiments and the engagement of our love to his character. We think
of him as of some impersonal force, some hidden fire, some holy gale, not as a friend
present in sympathy, or wounded feeling, to every throb of our hearts; disgusted
by sensuality and passion, pained by vanity, offended by pride, grieved by neglect,
hurt by unbelief and all worldly inclinings; our eternal counselor, guide, helper,
stay; such a Spirit as, living in us, keeps the sensibilities even of Gethsemane
and the passion in immediate contact with our inmost life. How great value and power
there might be in such a conception is obvious. What mindfulness. what delicate
reverences and exact
IT has been a great hindrance, we have seen, to all right conceptions of what is called the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus Christ, that the attempt has been kept up, so persistently, to solve it as a matter one side of all the common principles of duty—a superlative goodness, too good to be obligatory on Christ, or any one else; an optional sacrifice, when undertaken by him, that overtops all requirement and makes a virtue better than even perfect law can frame a notion of. And so, by a kind of prodigious goodness above his obligation, Christ raises a fund of surplus merit, to even the account of all the world’s wrong doing under obligation. There ought to be some difficulty in getting well through any such kind of solution; for after all the principles of duty, or virtue, have been thrown into confusion, no rule is left to work by, in the settlement of any thing.
In this view, or on this account, I have undertaken to show the
universality of just what we discover most distinctly in the work and sacrifice
of Christ; that every good being, just according to his degree in good, will bear
evil beings and suffer in feeling for them and take,
What I now propose is to carry the same conclusion a degree farther,
or to bring it a step nearer down to All good intelligences
in vicarious sacrifice. us; viz., to show that all holy beings created are
in exactly the same vicarious spirit and suffering way of love as Christ was, only
not doing and suffering exactly the same things. This may seem, in one view, to
signify little as regards the extension of my subject; for if the uncreated three
are in the very same love as Christ from eternity, bearing for love’s sake all the
burdens of all enemies, and suffering a Gethsemane in feeling on their account,
it of course adds nothing as regards authority, to show, that all created subjects,
the glorified men, the angels and seraphim of the heavenly worlds, are also in the
same. But we are looking, it must be observed, not after authority, but after commonness,
or a common platform of principles in vicarious sacrifice; and therefore it signifies
even the more to find all the holy intelligences of God’s empire in it, with Him,
and with Christ; for it brings the Christly sacrifice down just so much closer to
our human ranges of life and character, and our common obligations of duty and sacrifice.
On this point we have several distinct modes of evidence.
1. A negative evidence, created by the impossibility of assuming the contrary. Nothing would more certainly shock our conceptions of glorified Shocking to think otherwise. minds, or of what is proper to their holy character, than to hear it affirmed that they are ignorant of sacrifice, never afflicted for the want, or woe, or fall of others; that, in fact, they would never think of being burdened with concern for an enemy, or of bearing any loss or sacrifice for his sake. Is that the kind of virtue, or character, that distinguishes the glorified state? Is it by such minds, in such a spirit, that Christ is to be appreciated, and is it such that are to have their joy in society with him?
2. It is agreed that angels and all glorified minds are in the
principle and life of love; and love in angels works according to its own nature,
as Their love puts them in a way of sacrifice. truly
as it does in God or in Christ; for it is a power universally that takes hold of
its objects and of all their woes, wants, wrongs and even enmities, to bear them
as a weight on its afflicted sympathies. As certainly, therefore, as the angels
and good minds of the upper world are fixed in the sway of love, they will run out
their sympathies to others
3. It signifies much that they are drawn to Christ with such evident
sympathy, and are with him so Their sympathy with Christ shows
them to be. constantly, at every stage, and in every principal crisis of
his work. The interest they have in him is visibly toned and tempered, by their
common interest with him in his objects. Ages before his coming, they are moved
with mighty expectation, “desiring to look into these things.” “Highly favored!
blessed among women!” is the eager and strongly reverent salutation they bring to
Mary’s mortal womanhood. When the child is born, they break into the sky, filling
it full of heavenly hymn—“Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace.” In his temptation,
they crowd about him to support him by their ministry. In his agony, one comes to
strengthen him. In his trial, he is sure that he can have twelve legions to help
him. They watch by the tomb where he sleeps; they roll away the stone when he wakes;
and sitting there, one at the head and another at the feet, in forms more glorious
than sculptured stones, they mark the now vacant place of his rest. With a delicate
reverence, they tenderly fold the bloody napkin up and the bloody linen clothes,
and lay them apart by themselves; and they say to Mary, with what tenderness,
All these, now, as I readily admit, are rather indications than positive proofs. And yet there is such a zeal in their sympathy as indicates no partial accord, but a thoroughly complete oneness with him. Appearing most punctually when he sinks lowest in sacrifice, flocking to him in his agony and always when his soul is troubled, what can we imagine but that they suffer with him; pained for his enemies even as he is, and bearing the same burdens for them? Otherwise their sympathy itself could be scarcely better than an offense to his feeling. But there is a more direct kind of evidence—
4. In the ministry they maintain themselves; for they have a ministry,
side by side with that of Jesus, in which we may see distinctly what
Their ministry is in Christ’s way of sacrifice. and
how much of sacrifice they are able to bear, and do in fact bear, for mankind. I
am well aware of the general unbelief or practical Sadduceeism, as regards “angel
and spirit,” that is likely to impose a look of myth or hollow fantasy, on any thing
which can be said of the angelic ministries of the Scripture. Any appeal made to
them in a matter of argument is likely to bear a specially unsolid, or even flighty
and visionary character, in the estimation of such as mean to believe in them, and
would even be offended by the intimation that they really do not.
This now we shall find is the exact conception held of them at all points in the representations of Scripture. Some of them we are expressly taught, The Scripture shows them as in sacrifice. and we know not how many, are men, or the spirits of men, once living on earth; just as soundly real as they ever were, or as we ourselves are to day. And what is more they are only acting in character, precisely the same kind of character which they lived in as members of our race. They were men who bore great burdens of toil and suffering for the people of their times, and only learned to bear them in that manner for the people of all times. They found a cross in their virtue itself, even as Christ did, and all that we discover, in their ministries among us now, is that they have not forgotten their cross, or grown tired of it.
Thus we are expressly informed that the angels of the
transfiguration are Moses and Elias; and they spake with him, most naturally, of
his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. By which we are to
understand, not that they informed him of his crucifixion, for that he knew
already, but they joined their feeling to his, and comforted him by their
suffering sympathy, and the assured sympathy of the heavenly worlds. For which,
too, they had been effectually trained by their own former trials and burdens of
love on earth; Moses when he cried, sinking under such burdens, “I can not bear
this people,” and Elias when he groaned underground in his cave, “I have been
very jealous for the Lord of Hosts.” And who was that angel in John’s
Meantime we shall find that, in all which is told us of these angelic ministries, they are set in close analogy with the ministry of Christ himself. They are with Hagar by the fountain of the wilderness, as Christ with the woman at Jacob’s well. They are with Elijah the starving prophet in his sleep under the juniper tree, offering him their cake which they have baked upon the coals, even as Christ prepared his fire of coals, and the fish and the bread, that his hungry friends, on landing from their boats, might receive the token of his divine hospitality. They had such a feeling of tender sympathy for innocent children, coming forth into a rough world of sin and sorrow, that they took hold, every one, of some one child, or more than one, to become their unseen guardians—“Verily I say unto you their angels do always behold the face of my father”—even as the incarnate Lord himself clave to the children everywhere, and laid his hands and his dear blessing on them, saying—“of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”
How deeply their feeling is entered into the great tragedy of sin, and all the lost conditions of the fallen state under sin, we may see, on a large Concerned for sin as God is. scale, when they are shown, before the great salvation promised has arrived; “desiring to look into these things,” and breaking out afterwards when it is complete—ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands—in the song of their own deep, always suffering love, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.” Also in what Christ says himself, testifying—“Verily I say unto you there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.” Which joy he still further explains by showing how it springs up with his own, growing on the same root of care, concern and suffering sympathy; how they rejoice with him, because, with him, they are looking always after lost men, even as a shepherd after his one lost sheep, or a housekeeper looking after her one lost piece of money; and therefore, he and they together, when they have found their lost one, have their burden of sorrow, as he represents, fall off, in a blessed and rebounding joy.
It is worthy, too, of special remark that Christ conceives them
coming to men, in a ministry Concerned for the sick and poor
as Christ was. to the body strikingly correspondent with his own—restrained
by no fastidious disgusts, averted by no disrespect of the humble and dejected lot
of the poor. They do not spurn, they can not even neglect, the dying beggar at the
rich man’s gate. No matter whether it be a story of fact, or only
Thus he fared with men; but there were two classes of beings,
in a different key, who came to his help in their wonted acts of ministry—the dogs,
I mean, and the angels—the dogs from below, esteeming him to be another and superior
kind of creature; the angels from above, rating his significance and dignity as
much higher, as their mind was capable of higher thoughts. Behold them here at hand,
the dogs and the angels together, in a strange companionship of ministry, round
the flinty bed of the poor abject and son of sorrow; they dispensing their low natural
surgery on his ulcerated body, and these, beholding in him an heir of glory
See how it was with Christ, in that most tender, but strangely
compounded and really fearful scene, the raising of Lazarus. Death, who took him
on his way foul days ago, is to be called back and required to let him forth alive.
Jesus struggles, we can see, with great emotions, partly tender, partly painful.
He weeps, he groans in spirit, and is troubled. It is as if his feeling were in
contact all through with death’s foul work, as well as with the griefs of the
friends—glad, for the disciples’
So when the angels of God come to help the poor forlorn beggar off, in his release to life. That fastidious feeling which might torture us, in coming to a fellow mortal in such loathsome plight, they make nothing of; it will not trouble them, for they suffer no false disgusts. But that purity which has put them so far aloof from sin, and from all its foul incidents, their finer tastes, their more delicate, celestial sensibilities—all these are yet present to him, body and soul, not without pain, and lifting, as it were in sympathy with him, to bear him out of his foul cave and start him on his flight. So the beggar dies and is carried up, escorted home to Abraham’s bosom, as the Saviour represents, by their angelic company. Christ bore him in his passion, and they, too, have borne him in their passion, now no longer a burden either on his feeling or on theirs. I will only add—
5. That the Scriptures speak of these angelic ministries, in terms
that indicate an impression of sacrifice Conceived in the priestly
character. in them, and a vicarious engagement of their suffering love. The
very word minister—“ministering spirits sent forth to minister”—has a Christly meaning,
as if they were on a mission of service, and sacrifice, and holy pains-taking, like
that
We have it then as a point established by Scripture evidence,
that the glorified spirits, or angels of God, being in the love of God, are also
in that The vicarious principle to be universal. kind
of sacrifice, or vicarious engagement, which love, in its own nature, supposes.
And so the gulf between sacrifice in uncreated and created minds is effectually
bridged. Make as much as
IN what is called his vicarious sacrifice, Christ, as we have seen, simply fulfills what belongs universally to love; doing neither more nor less than what the common standard of holiness and right requires. And then since there can be no other standard, and no perfect world, or society can be constituted under a different, or lower kind of excellence, it follows incontestably that the restoration of mankind, as a fallen race, must restore them to a love that works vicariously, and conforms, in all respects, to the work and passion of Christ himself. Vicarious sacrifice then will not be a point where he is distinguished from his followers, but the very life to which he restores them, in restoring them to God. What we call his redemption of mankind must bring them to the common standard. Executed by vicarious sacrifice in himself, it must also be issued in vicarious sacrifice in them.
The common impression, I am sorry to believe, is different. It
belongs, indeed, to the staple matter of our theologic teaching on this subject,
that, Vicarious sacrifice belongs to men. while we are
to follow Christ, and copy him, and aspire to be like him, we are never to presume,
and can not without great irreverence imagine, that we
1. That Christ, in all that pertains to his work as vicarious,
acts officially, or fulfills an atoning office Christ atones
not by office, but by character. wholly one side of his character as a perfect
character. He does not execute what belongs to the simple perfection of his love
as a character fulfilling standard obligation, but performs a volunteer office in
our behalf, over and above all that is obligatory on his own account. And so, the
vicarious sacrifice, being a matter pertaining wholly to his office, and not to
his character, we of course can have no part in it, because we have no part in his
office, and can have as little in the official merit by which God’s account is satisfied.
Now the obvious fact, that which we have seen developed in the careful illustrations
of the previous chapters, is that
No further qualification is needed, unless it be to say, that
effects will follow his vicarious sacrifice, that can not follow such kind of sacrifice
in men. Sacrifice in us carries humbler effects. And
the difference will be so great, that he will have accomplished all that can be
fitly included in the redemption of the world, while the same kind of sacrifice,
morally speaking, in men, will accomplish only some very inferior and partial benefits.
A proportion stated between the incarnate Son of God and his infinitely perfect
beauty on the one hand, and the very limited and sadly mixed virtue of a human person
on the other, will represent as accurately as may
2. It is another of the mistakes referred to that, when vicarious
sacrifice is restricted wholly to Christ, and considered The
fellowship of his sufferings. wholly beyond the pale of human virtue, the
restriction supposes a kind of vicarious intervention for sin that is artificial,
and has no root in moral obligation. Either exceeding the law of love, or else falling
short of it, he fulfills a kind of substitution that we can not share, because it
is not in the range of our possible sentiment, or even intelligence. There is no
koinonia for us, no “fellowship in his sufferings,” because he suffers outside
of all known terms of moral obligation. Whereas we may and must have fellowship,
and be conformable even unto his death, because he is himself conformed in it to
the one, universal, common, standard of love. The true and simple account of his
suffering is, that he had such a heart as would not suffer him to be turned away
from us, and that he suffered for us even as love must willingly suffer for its
enemy. The beauty and power of his sacrifice is, that he suffers morally and because
of his simple excellence, and not to fill a contrived place in a scheme of legal
justification. He scarcely minds how much he suffers, or how, if only he can do
love’s work. He does not propose to be over-good, and to suffer optionally a certain
modicum beyond what perfect excellence requires, that it may go to men’s account.
He undertakes to furnish no superlative merit above all standard obligation, which,
for just that reason,
3. Another mistake that follows, when vicarious sacrifice is restricted
to Christ alone, is yet more lamentable because it corrupts the idea of sacrifice
The idea of Christian sacrifice how corrupted. itself,
when imposed as a condition of human discipleship. We insist, abundantly, on the
necessary law of self-denial and self-sacrifice. We quote the Master’s words requiring
us to follow him and bear the cross with him, or after him. There must be sacrifice
we say, every Christian comes into a life of sacrifice—only not into vicarious sacrifice;
that belongs to Christ alone, suffering no participation of mortals. A qualification,
or salvo, that very nearly unchristianizes Christianity itself. What is the sacrifice
that must not be vicarious sacrifice, but a virtue that has even lost connection
with Christian ideas? It is mere self-abnegation, a loss made for the simple sake
of
4. Still another and different kind of misconception is included
in the denial of vicarious sacrifice to men, in the fact that it forbids us. to
think of reciprocating, in any sense, the sacrifice of Christ for us, and takes
In these specifications, or specified corrections, we have seen exactly what and how much is implied in the position, that we, as a race, in being restored to God, are to be perfected in the common, universal standard of goodness, and so to be established with Christ in the same way of sacrifice. We are thus prepared to open the Scriptures, and take their declarations in their true meaning. To them, accordingly, I now appeal; for it is a question resting on their simple authority, and no other.
I begin with the explicit declarations of Jesus himself. Thus, considering his own life as a ransom for sin, in the sacrifice to be made of it, he lays it Christ calls his followers to follow him. on his disciples to follow him and be, if they may, the ransom purchase of others, saying—“even as the Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Again, citing his own cross, when, as yet, nobody understands what it means, least of all that God’s own love supports a cross of patience even from eternity, he says—“And he that taketh not up his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.” He does not mean by this that he is under a cross of abnegation, but only that he is going to be crucified for love’s sake. For love’s sake and work, therefore, they are to suffer with him, and bear a cross after him.
He calls us in the same way to bear his “yoke” and “learn of him” in doing it; for there is a way, as he will teach, to bear love’s burdens joyfully.
They shall not be dry penances or heavy laden drudgeries, he testifies,
His death is to be the crowning fact of his sacrifice, as all agree, and yet, he does not claim any exclusive right to die in this manner, but even lays it down as the universal test of love and discipleship—“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be my disciple.” Obedience unto death is to be a law for them as truly as for him.
He contrives furthermore a scene, at the close of his ministry,
where the great main truth is to be acted and so made visible—I refer to the scene
of washing the disciples’ feet—where his language, most carefully measured, and
his action, most deliberately formal, quite exceed the supposition of many, that
he is only teaching, in this way, tile single grace of humility. Neither, at this
solemn, almost parting hour, can it be imagined, that he is laboring any such limited
and subordinate matter. Rather is he condensing all the matter of his humiliated
suffering life of sacrifice, into a single scene, or picture, or parabolic action,
that he may impress it in a total application on his disciples. And so he says at
the end—“Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say
well, for so I am. If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also
ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example that ye should
do as I have done to you.” In one word, for that is what he means, “as I
Again, if we imagine something official in his mission of sacrifice, we find him consecrating his disciples, in his last prayer, to the same mission and in fact the same office—“As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified through [literally in or upon] the truth.” However true the doctrine for which this is commonly cited as a proof text, nothing could be farther from any thought of his on the present occasion, than to be discoursing on the truth as a means of sanctification. He obviously means to say—“And for their sakes I consecrate myself as an offering, that they also may be consecrated and offered, in like manner, in the service, or upon the dying testimony, of the truth. So he says, “for their sakes,” as if he had come into his sacrifice, in part, that he may put them in the same—so to send them into the world, even as he was sent into the world.
Now the impressive matter, in all these citations, which might be indefinitely extended, is that Christ expects his followers to be with him at the very point of his sacrifice; just where it is even commonly assumed that we can, of course, have no part with him, and where it would even be a kind of insufferable presumption for a mortal to think of it.
We pass now to a different and more interiorly related class of
citations; in which it will be seen, that the whole
Thus it will be noted in the very first discourse of Jesus, his sermon on the mount, that he can not even Sacrifice the economic law of discipleship. get through the beatitudes, and scarcely into them, without opening to view, and turning round for inspection, this grand first principle of devotement and unselfish love. Blessed are the poor in spirit, they that mourn, the meek, the merciful—these to him are the candidates for beatitude; and we see, from his subdued and tender manner, that he is thinking of his own sacrifice and beatitude. And thus it is that he goes directly on, to tell his friends how they will be reviled and persecuted by those whom they serve, and for his sake, adding—“Blessed are ye. Resist not evil. Smitten upon the right cheek turn the left. Robbed of your coat give up your cloak. Love your enemies, bless them which curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you; that (this is the argument, and how high does it reach) ye may be the children of your Father in heaven. Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” There has been much debate over this language. It means simply this; that we are to have one standard even with God, and that, a law of sacrifice and suffering patience—the same which Christ himself fulfills.
What the feeling of Christ is respecting the participation of
his sacrifice by his followers, comes out even more strikingly, on a certain occasion,
from the fact that
His apostles, accordingly, follow after, teaching, all, the same
great law of sacrifice, and presenting a gospel packed with symbols of sacrifice
in The apostles follow their Master. every part. This
word sacrifice they apply to men as freely as to Christ himself; Paul exhorting,
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your
bodies a living sacrifice.” “Let no man seek his own.” “Bear ye one another’s burdens
and so fulfill the law of Christ.” “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ
Jesus, who, being in the form of God, took upon him the form of a servant, and became
obedient unto death, even the death of the cross;” Peter, when he writes, “For what
glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye take it patiently, but
if, when ye do well, ye
In these and other like passages which might be cited, from Christ and his three apostles, it is very commonly not discovered, I admit, that any such thing as a vicarious element is included in the Christian virtue. Every such conception is excluded by the reverently meant, but most injuriously false and really irreverent assumption, that nothing vicarious, whether in spirit or mode of life, is possible to a merely human being. Christ takes this whole field, it is believed, to himself, let no sinning mortal intrude! And yet, when Mock sentiment. this vicarious meaning, or element is excluded from the passages referred to, they become passages of mock sentiment only; words that have a sound, but no deep, earnest meaning. Their real and truly magnificent import is, that it lies in the very scheme and economy of the gospel, to regenerate a Christly virtue in men, a character that bears the type of Gethsemane and the cross.
Again we discover a closer, in some respects even
This now is the true Christian consciousness, in all of the best
and noblest human examples. The gospel of
I have given this large review of the Scripture citations on this subject, that it may be seen how freely, variously, constantly, they consent in the testimony, that Christianity begets, and, is to beget, in human character, the same kind of sacrifice that is found, or revealed in Christ. I have selected only a few of the passages that persist most undivertibly in this kind of testimony. It is not then by any speculation, or undue pressure on. words, that I gain this conclusion. Nothing but a theologic pressure, kept up for ages, has availed to empty the Scripture of a truth that is so plainly taught, under so great a multitude of forms, and is set even in the foreground of the Christian plan.
Arresting my argument here, I still can not close the chapter,
without calling my reader’s attention to the immense loss Christianity has suffered,
and is now suffering,
The effect that follows is such as only can. It is as if the gift
of the incarnation had been half taken back again. A wide hiatus still yawns
Effects of the hiatus between us and Christ. between
even the ideal of our virtue, and that of our Christ. Nor is it any thing to say,
that whatever he does vicariously belongs to his office, and that we have no such
office. It belongs, we have already seen, not to his office, but to his character;
that is to his love, which is the spring of his character; the same, which is the
root of all goodness in all good beings, drawing them as good to such as are evil,
and putting them in a way of tender self-identification, that virtually assumes
and bears the bad and shameful lot it compassionates. Without this vicarious property,
love is not love. Pity there may be, philanthropic benevolence,
Doubtless it will be said, in reply, that such kind of criticism
is unjust. While it is very true that we exclude ourselves from any part with Christ
in what is vicarious, do we not always insist that men are to follow Christ, to
bear the cross, to deny themselves, to suffer wrong, to love and bless even their
enemies? Undoubtedly, but how blurred, how sadly miscolored are all such teachings,
when the huge exception we speak of is added. They are now to follow Christ in just
that limited kind of sacrifice which he knew nothing of. They are to bear the cross
for the discipline, and not for what love sees to be won by a cross. They are to
deny themselves because it is good to put themselves under negation, or self-suppression—even
as the monasteries kill out selfishness by the wearisome and dry torment of ascetic
practices—not to deny themselves in love’s own suffering, but joyful and free ministry.
They are to suffer wrong even as Christ did, only they are to do it in no such feeling
as he did, when he bore the lot of transgression. They are to love and bless enemies,
because it will school them in patience and humility, not as Christ bore enemies
out of pure devotement to them; or they are to exercise themselves in acts of benevolence
towards enemies, towards the impenitent, towards the heathen, in the name of love,
And so it results that our discipleship, so called, is a discipleship fallen half way out of Christianity, even as our theology of the cross becomes a dry, stunted, half conception of it; reducing Christ to a mere book-account factor of compensation by suffering, and making nothing of him as the revelation of vicarious sacrifice in God; that which is the supreme fact and glory of his incarnate mission. Did we see this glory upon him, did we look upon him as sent into the world to beget us in the same character, and enter us into the same kind of life, how different our conceptions of his doctrine, how different the whole manner and power of our discipleship. The scheme, and scale, and meaning, of the gospel, as a grace related to our feeling and life, is no more the same. And the world, having such a grace installed in it, would begin, how soon, to glow, and burn, and tingle with new life in every part.
ALL the perplexed questions growing out of substitutions, imputations, legal satisfactions, and penal equivalents, have thus far been avoided. There has been no delving in our exposition, but we have been moving easily rather, along open ranges of thought, where nothing too abstruse, or difficult to serve a merely practical interest, has come in our way. In this manner, we have gone over a considerable tract of our field, meeting scarcely a point of debate, in the subject as commonly handled. We have discovered a meaning, not difficult, for the vicarious sacrifice, and for all the Scripture phraseology relating to the same. We have seen it to be grounded in principles of universal obligation, acknowledged, or to be acknowledged, by all good minds, uncreated and created, in all worlds and ages of time.
Having reached this point, we now pass to another general department
of the subject; where, continuing still in this rather untrodden, some will think,
too easy level of movement, we undertake to settle a Second
stage of the argument. true conception of what Christ is doing in his sacrifice;
viz., the end he will accomplish, the power by which he will accomplish it, and
the course
When this also is done, as I think it may be with the same facility and avoidance of perplexed questions, we may well enough comfort ourselves in the conclusion, that, if by and by, or from that point onward,’ we are obliged to go to sea in questions more perplexed and laborious, we have a considerable continent already gained behind us, where we shall have large enough room, and ranges wide enough in the truth, to afford a worthy, or even sufficient gospel by itself.
According to a current conception, Christ came into the world
for the very purpose of the sacrifice, and not Christ not here
to die, but dies because he is here. for ends beyond, in which the stress
of his mission lay. The problem being to contribute so much of pain, or judicial
suffering, as may be needed to square the account of sin, the conclusion naturally
follows, when that view is taken, that he is here for the very purpose of the bleeding;
that is to be substituted in our place, and take, or somehow compensate for, the
release of our punishment. This, and not any thing different, is the coarsely conceived,
legally quantitative vicariousness ascribed to him. We, on the other hand, regard
the vicariousness in which he comes, only as the mode, or instinct of his love,
when doing a work in the recovery and reconciliation of men. He was in vicarious
sacrifice before he came into the world, having the world upon his feeling as truly
as now, and only made the fact-form sacrifice, because he had the burden of it on
him already. The
What then is the end or object he is here to accomplish? By the
supposition he is not here to square up
But the farther unfolding of this central idea we shall find
requires us, for convenience sake, to make a fourfold distribution of the field
or subject matter. First, we shall naturally give attention directly to Christ’s
It is by no accident that Christ, not trained as a physician,
and, as far as we can discover, never before exercised in matters of concern for
the No accident that Christ is occupied with healings.
sick, opens out the grand public ministry of his Messiahship directly into an office
of healing, turning the main stress of it, we may almost say, down upon the healing
of bodies, from that time onward. Hence it is the more remarkable, that, when so
much is made, in the formulas, of his threefold function under the titles of
Prophet, Priest, and King, he still makes no figure in them at all as a Physician
or Healer. This latter he is in the literal fact of history, and a great part of
his outward life is in this particular kind of engagement. The others he is, or
is only to be, in some tropical, accommodated sense, where language helps its poverty
by a figure more or less determinate. We discover, meantime, that while he does
not disown, or repel these figures, permitting himself to be called a prophet, accepted
as a priest, and exalted as
I do not call him the Physician, but the Healer, it may be observed;
not because we need scruple to apply that name, but simply to call attention to
the fact that the older designation, Healer, is the one always applied
Disease goes with sin, Healing with salvation. to him
in the New Testament, and has, in strict construction, a quite different meaning.
There appears to be a deep seated, original conviction among men, that diseases
are from God, or the gods—tokens of displeasure on account of sin. The bad consciousness
of sin volunteers this appalling construction of them, and the sufferer hopes to
recover, only by some mitigation of the powers he has offended. Hence the need of
a Healer; one who shall have skill, or faith, or some kind of access to
Why now this very remarkable devotion to the healing of bodies? Coming into the world, as we all agree, His object in the healing of bodies. for ends so intensely spiritual—to be a deliverer of souls, and to become the Head of a universal kingdom gathered in his own glorious likeness and beatitude—why does he strike directly into this low level of labor, and concern himself in this large degree, with the diseases and disabilities of men’s bodies?
It is a very common answer made to this question, that he does it from a wise consideration of the advantage he will gain by it, in men’s prejudices, or the power he will thus obtain over them, in the separate matter of their spiritual choices and affections. On the same principle, we, it will be urged, are to go directly down into the economic struggles and physical pains of men, ministering to their needs and the terrible woes of their vices, taking them, in that manner, at a wise advantage, and not shoving them away from us, by endeavoring to bolt in spiritual lessons upon them, without any care for their bodily wants and ailments.
There can be no doubt of this as far as we are concerned, in
our own human charities. Neither is there any room to doubt, that Christ’s whole
ministry and life change look, because of his healings, and the very systematic
and tender care he has of men’s bodies. Omitting these, or conceiving these very
practical mercies never to have been shown, his teachings would be only lectures,
and the whole work of his ministry, comparatively speaking, flashy and thin. Every
thing
But that Christ really put himself to his works of healing for this purpose, we shall not be satisfied, after all, to believe. He has too much heart in His incarnation connects him with the fortunes of bodies. these works, to permit a thought that he is in them prudentially, or to gain some ulterior and remote advantage. No, there is a deeper reason. He is here as the incarnate Lord of the worlds, and he could not even be thought in that character, if, being flesh, he did not turn himself to all he meets in the flesh. And so much is there in this, that any one having deep enough insight to read such a matter beforehand, would say that if the Word is to be incarnate, then he will assuredly appear to bodies, minister to bodies, claim the kindship of bodies, by a tender sympathy for their pains and a healing touch upon their diseases. Being, in this manner, Son of Man, he is brought close to man, upon his human level. He has come to be with him in that level—touched with the feeling, not of his mental, or more respectable infirmities, but of those which are lowest and most loathsome. What could a fastidious Saviour do here? one who is too delicate and spiritual, to concern himself with the disagreeable and often revolting conditions of bodies?
Besides, he is here in God’s own love, and what shall that love grapple with, when it comes, but precisely that which is deepest in the consciousness of suffering?
No matter if he has come to be a Redeemer of souls. Souls and bodies are not so far apart as many try to Souls and bodies not far apart in their fall. believe. Where are the pains of bodies felt but in their souls? and where go the disorder and breakage of souls but directly into their bodies? How sovereign is the action of souls! how inevitable the reaction of bodies! And how nearly common are the fortunes of both! The fall of sin carries down body and soul together, and the quickening of the Spirit quickens, not the soul only, but the mortal body with it. We sometimes think the body is in health, when the soul is not; and the soul in health, when the body is not; but a great many diseases work latently, a long time, before they break out, and the returning of health is often working latently, a long time, before we discover it. After all, how nearly divine a thing is health, be it in the soul, or in the body; and as the fibres of both are intertwined, with such marvelous cunning, all through, how shall either fall out of God’s order alone, or come back into it alone?
The whole man
quivers in the shock of sin. The crystalline order of soul and body is shivered
by the same blow. Diseases consequent are nothing, after that, but the fact, that
the harmonic condition of health is broken—nothing fitly joined together, nothing
compacted by what every joint supplieth, nothing vitalized by the effectual and measurely working of all parts for each other. Why then should the Great Healer
think to pass by bodies, when he comes for the healing of
Furthermore,
if we are to understand this matter, we must carefully observe what opinion Christ
himself had of men’s diseases and the bad implications whence they come. How large
a part of his cures Discovers in diseases the virus of sin. are wrought on persons whom foul spirits—just now unwontedly
“tormented” and stirred up to a special activity—have taken possession of. How often does he say,
“go in peace, thy sins are forgiven
thee;” though perhaps nothing has been said of their sins before, and possibly nothing
more is meant than that they are cured of their malady. To the simply inoffensive
broken invalid, whom he found at the pool of Siloam and healed, he says—“Sin no
more lest a worse thing befall thee.” Over a poor disabled woman doubled by disease,
he says, in softest pity, “whom Satan has bound these eighteen years.” In this
manner he associates disease, even habitually, with malign causes, and very nearly
identifies the burden of it with the curse and burden of sin itself. Over the young
man, blind from his birth, he does indeed say that “neither he nor his parents
have sinned, that he was born blind,” but he only means in this to repel the odious
and half-superstitious impeachment, that was
If now any one should ask what is the particular import, or importance, of this
healing work of Christ in His healings incompatible with
penal substitution. bodies, that it should even occupy a chapter in the doctrine of his sacrifice, the very simple
and sufficient answer is, that it is a matter quite decisive, in respect to the
nature of that substitutive office, which Christ undertook to fulfill. If we want
to know in what sense, or manner,
Meantime, the agreement between his healing ministry and the kind of vicarious action I have ascribed to Gloriously compatible with the healing of souls. him is complete. Nay, he could not come into the world, in that office, without undertaking one kind of ministry as naturally as the other; or, in fact, without feeling both to be one.
In this connection, therefore, that very important text which we have already cited comes back upon us, to magnify still farther its almost imperial authority—“That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying,’ Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses.’” Here is a passage quoted directly from that stock-fund chapter of vicarious language, the liii of Isaiah. The New Testament expression, “took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses,” represents “hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” in that chapter; where immediately follow words like these—“Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.”
Now
it will be seen that, in this passage, we have the stiffest looking terms of penal
substitution any where to be found, and yet that we have also a clause at the
In this general view, it is hardly possible to overmagnify the importance
of Christ’s healings, taken in Practical value of these
analogies. their spiritual uses, and their connections with the preaching of his gospel afterwards. In them are
provided the finest and most quickening analogies; so that every story of healing
is, in fact, a sermon, yielding its own particular lesson of prayer and importunity,
of holy conviction, of divine sympathy and strength-giving, of trust, of coöperative
Besides, it is another very important office of these
works on the body, that they emphasize the whole manner and working of Christ. We
want, as sinners, a supernatural salvation if any, one that has power to turn back
all the currents and causalities of retributive
After what was said, in the next previous chapter, of the recovery of men
to a participation with Christ in his sacrifice, it may occur to some one to ask,
whether
Hence that remarkable passage in the
close of the
Speaking thus of prayer and of works by prayer accomplished,
not to put down, in connection, the remarkable
THE healings of Christ in bodies, we have just seen, are in fact an outward type of the more radical and sublime cure he undertakes, by his sacrifice, to work in fallen character. In this cure, we have the principal aim and object of his mission. We may sum up thus all that he taught, and did, and suffered, in the industry of his life and the pangs of his cross, and say that the one, comprehensive, all-inclusive aim, that draws him on, is the change he will operate in the spiritual habit and future well-being of souls. In this fact it is, and only in this, that he becomes a Redeemer. He is here in vicarious sacrifice, not for something else, but for this.
In the
unfolding of this general conception, my present chapter will be occupied. It is
very commonly assumed that Christ is here for another and different main object;
viz., to suffer before God’s justice, and prepare, in the satisfying of that, a
way of possible forgiveness for men. From this I must dissent, though without proposing
here any controversy, farther than may be implied in the maintenance and due illustration
of my
That some very great
and wonderful change, or recasting of soul is, in some way, necessary—as well as
to Christ is our Regenerator. provide the forgiveness of sins—is generally admitted
and asserted with abundant emphasis; but it is not as generally perceived that Christ
has any particular agency in it. It is not denied that his teachings have great
value, or that what is called his expiatory suffering for sin is effective in a
degree, on men’s feeling, as well as efficacious in the satisfaction of justice;
and it is continually put to his credit, in this same suffering and satisfaction,
that he has purchased the Holy. Spirit, and sends him forth to work the needed change
in souls. In this way, some compensation is made for the loss that accrues by a
failure to conceive the immediate and really immense agency of Christ in such changes;
still there is a loss. No conception of Christ really meets the true significance
1. There is a want of something done, or shown, to preengage
the feeling, or raise a favoring prejudice in it; so that, when advance is made,
on God’s
Pre-engages
the feeling. part, in a call to repentance, the subject may not be repelled, but
drawn rather. Otherwise it is like to be as it was in the garden, when the culprit
hearing God calling after him, fled and hid himself. No bad soul likes to meet the
Holy one, but recoils painfully, shivers with dread, and turns away. But the foremost
thing we see in Christ is not the infinite holiness, or sovereign purity; he takes
us, first, on the side of our natural feeling; showing his compassions there, passing
before us visaged in sorrow, groaning in
2. It is another point of consequence, in the matter of our recovery, that we have some better, more tender, and so more piercing, conviction of sin, than we get from our natural remorse, or even from the rugged Awakens the conscience. and blunt sentence of law. It is well, indeed, to be shot through with fiery bolts from Sinai, but these hard, dry wounds, these lacerations of truth, want searching and wounding over again, by the gentle surgery of love, before we are in a way to be healed. In this more subduing, and more nearly irresistible convincing, we have, in part, the peculiar efficacy of the cross. We look on him whom we have pierced, and are pierced ourselves. Through the mighty bosom struggle of the agony and death, we look down, softened, into the bosom wars and woes Christ pities and dies for in us. And when we hear him say—“Of sin because ye believe not on me”—we are not chilled, or repelled, as by the icy baptism of fear and remorse, but we welcome the pain. As Simeon himself declared, “he is set for the fall,” as well as “for the rising again;” and we even bless the fall that so tenderly prepares the rising.
In this manner it was, that the conversion of Paul began at the point of that piercing word—“I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou persecutest.” Penetrated and felled by that arrow of the divine love, his “exceedingly mad” feeling dies, and his resistance, from that moment, is gone.
3. There greatly needs to be, and therefore, in Christ, is given, a type of the new feeling and life to be restored. Abstract descriptions given of holiness or holy virtue, do not signify much to those who Stands for the exemplar. never knew them inwardly by their effects. To conceive a really divine character by specification, or receive it by inventory is, in fact, impossible. No language can give the specification, and no mind could take the meaning of it accurately, if it were given. Hence the necessity that we have some exposition that is practical and personal. We want no theologic definition of God’s perfections; but we want a friend, whom we can feel as a man, and whom it will be sufficiently accurate for us to accept and love. Let him come so nigh, if possible, let him be so deeply inserted into our lot and our feeling, that we can bury ourselves in him and the fortunes of his burdened life, and then it will be wonderful, if having God’s own type in his life, we do not catch the true impress from it in ourselves.
In these three points, we perceive, that
the suffering life and death of Jesus are the appropriate and even necessary equipment
of his doing force, in what he undertakes
But instead of this, I will recall,
in this manner, a
This matter of
regeneration is referred also to the Holy Spirit, it is true; but not in any such
exclusive sense that it is not referred with equal None the less a
Regenerator that the Spirit is also. truth to Christ;
for it is even declared to be the office of the Spirit to glorify
Christ in the soul. Christ is a power to the soul before its
thought, and by that which is given to thought in his person. The Spirit is a power
back of thought, opening thought as a receptivity towards him, and, in that manner,
setting the subject under the impression of Christ’s life, and death, and character.
“He shall glorify me,” says the Saviour, “for he shall receive of
Such is the kind of efficacy which
the Scriptures attribute to Christ, and for this kind of efficacy in human character
they conceive him to be sent into the world. And, by this kind of efficacy, too,
we shall see that he The Christed consciousness in all
disciples. is revealed in the consciousness of his disciples. It is not the account of their Christian experience,
and of the gospel as related thereto, that Christ has done something before God’s
throne, and wholly apart from all effect in them, to make their acceptance possible;
and then that the
This is Paul, for example,
a man transformed, all through, by Christ living in him; consciously weak and little
and low in himself, and possible to be lifted only in the hope that, as Christ hath
risen from the dead, he may also rise with him, to walk in newness of life. Not
that he was captivated simply by his life. He was even more profoundly captivated
by his death, and found, in fact, his deepest inspirations there; desiring ever
to be with him in the fellowship of his sufferings, and to be made conformable to
his mighty sacrifice in them. In that sacrifice it was that he most felt his working.
That broke his heart, and there he took the saintly fire that burned so brightly
in him. It is as if the Paul-soul were all wrapped in by the Christ-soul, and he
only speaks aloud what he feels
It is also a singular confirmation of this kind of evidence,
that all living disciples of our own time give the same kind of testimony from their experience,
This same view is virtually accepted by those who deny it. when, by their doctrine, they have no right to it. They have no such view, it may be, of Christ,
as that he is sent to be a regenerative power on character; the lean kine of judicial
satisfaction have devoured the good kine of God’s regenerative bounty, and yet they
cling to Christ for a wonderful and blessed something still, which he puts in their
feeling, and call him lovingly their life. Sometimes they look after a reason why
they are so much bound up in him, and imagine that it is their sense of gratitude
to Christ for the squaring of their account with God, by his sufferings; as if they
could have him in so great endearment for what he has suffered before God, apart
from all that he is and pleads before us. No, this working grace of Jesus goes before
all gratitude, to beget us in a spirit of gratitude, when we have none; it is not
the satisfaction of our debt, but it is the noble sympathy in which he draws himself
to us, the agony of his concern for us, the lifting up of his cross, in which he
proves his faithfulness even unto death—by these it is that he installs himself
in so tender a devotion, in all believers’ hearts. Thus it is that he gets into
their prayers, into their sense of liberty, into their good conscience, bathing
them all
Indeed it will be observed that all effective preachers of Christ under the penal
satisfaction doctrine, quit their base in it instinctively, when they undertake
the capture of the heart—falling, at once, into modes of appeal that make him God’s
Regenerative Argument. They show how he loves the world, and testify “the love
of Christ constraineth us.” They magnify the tenderness of his healing ministry.
They picture the cross to human sensibility, as if they really believed that
Christ was lifted up to draw men to himself. They can not sufficiently praise
the beauty of his wonderful character. If they think of God’s wrath that could
be assuaged only by his blood, no present feeling of consistency forbids their
seeing God’s patience in him, and the sacrifice he will make for his enemies. So
they preach him directly to men’s hearts, in all the most winning, and subduing,
and tenderest things they can say of him; as if he were really incarnated in the
world for that kind of use. Meantime they call it preaching Christ, only when
they preach the satisfaction, and complain, it may be with real sadness, that
now-a-days, there is so little preaching of Christ; understanding in particular,
that kind of preaching. When alas! the poorest, most repelling thing done is
“Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.”
“Who his own self bare our sins, in his own body on the tree, that we, being
dead to sin, might live unto righteousness; by whose stripes ye were healed.”
“For Christ also hath
suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us unto God.”
“Who gave himself for our sins, that he might
deliver us from this present evil world.”
“Christ hath redeemed
us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. That the blessing of Abraham
might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ.”
Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new
“That he might be a merciful and faithful
high priest, in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of
the people. For in that he himself hath suffered, being tempted, he is able to succor
them that are tempted.”
I will not go on to cite other texts that have shared the same hard fortune, but
will only say, in general, that a numerous and very important class, which represent
the lustral figures of the Old Testament, and speak of Christ in one way or another
as having “washed,” or “purged,” or “cleansed,” or “sprinkled,” the soul, are systematically
converted from that natural and easy signification, to denote a clearance before
the law, now satisfied; when there is, in fact, no cleansing wrought in the defilement
that was created by disobedience to it. Whereas it is the very purpose of these
lustral transactions, or rites—that for which they were specially prepared of old—first,
by a kind of implicit force, or power of religious association, to push the mind
of a crude age forward into a cleanness it could not think; and then, afterwards,
to be a symbol under Christ of that spiritual cleansing otherwise difficult to be
expressed. Thus when the argument is, “For if the blood of bulls
If now all these reclamations of Scripture were made, there would be very little left to give a complexion of authority to any other conclusion, than that Christ is here for what he can do in the restoration of character. To prove a negative so wide is difficult, and therefore only do I withhold from saying that nothing will be left. Still, if I am able to show, in the next chapter, that he is represented as having come, first of all, and above all things beside, to be a power on character, which power he became in the vicarious suffering of his life and death, it will amount, as nearly as possible to the same thing.
IN ordinary cases where a work is undertaken, it signifies nothing more to say that
the doer undertakes to be a power to that effect; for whatever is to be done, by
action, supposes, of course, a power acting. But where there is something to be
done, not by action, but by quality of being, or by the worth, and beauty, and divine
greatness of a character, the action is nothing and the power to be effective thus,
in simply being what it is, every thing. Therefore, when we say, and show that Christ
is here to new-create, or regenerate, fallen character, it is not insignificant
to add that he is here to be, or become, so great a power. For the new creation
we speak of is not a work to be carried by any kind of doing, or efficient activity,
or even by the fiat-force of omnipotence itself, but only by such higher kind of
potency, as can do so great a thing, through our consent, and without infringing
our liberty; do it, that is, Two kinds of power. by the felt quality of being, or holy impulsion of worth and beauty it embodies. How far it may be the way of
the Holy Spirit to operate in the regeneration of character by action, or the doing
method, we do not know; doubtless God will
My present chapter, accordingly, will be occupied with the fact that Christ’s saving mission turns upon his having become such a power. And then my next will show how he becomes such a power in the facts of his personal history.
In pursuing the subject assigned, a first matter will
Is it then that Christ is to be such a kind of power as we mean when we speak of example? Certainly not, His moral power is not the power of example. if we take the word example, in its most proper and common signification. An example, we conceive, is a model that we copy, and set ourselves, by our own will, to reproduce in ourselves. Many teachers have been rising up, in all the past ages, and propounding it as the true theory of the gospel, that Christ came forth to be a Redeemer, in the way of being an example. But no theory of the kind has ever been able, under the very meager and restricted word example, to get any show of general acceptance. For the truth is that we consciously want something better than a model to be copied; some vehicle of God to the soul, that is able to copy God into it. Something is wanted that shall go before and beget, in us, the disposition to copy an example.
Sometimes the example theory has been
stated broadly enough to include the demonstration of the divine love in Christ’s
life. Sometimes, Not by the revelation merely of God’s
love. also, this demonstration of the
divine love, apart from any thing said of example, has been put forward
as the object of his mission; love being regarded as the sufficient reconciling
power of God on human character. But no such view has ever gained a wide acceptance;
not for the reason, I must think, that God’s love is not a great power on the feeling
of mankind, or that, when it is revealed in
By the moral power of
God, or of Christ as the manifested reality of God, we understand, comprehensively
It would even be a kind
of irreverence, not to assume that God is mightiest, and capable of doing the most
difficult things, even as great men are, by his moral power. Alexander, for example,
leads the tramp of force and victory across resisting empires, finally to be vanquished,
in turn, by the fascinations of a woman, and to die, a second time vanquished by
his appetites, in a fit of debauch. But those great souls of his countrymen who
rose into power by their virtues, and died for their virtue’s sake, such as Aristides
and Socrates—why they keep on vanquishing the world and binding it to the sway of
their character, and will as long as it exists. The power of Napoleon is, in the
same way, force; that of Washington, character. One is the terror of his time, and
when his time is over, is no more any thing but a prodigy of force remembered. The
other holds the spell of a morally great, ever-increasing name, felt by all rulers
of men both good and bad, penetrating more and more resistlessly the revolutions,
and laws, and legislations of all proudest empires, and newest commonwealths of
the globe; more to be felt than now, just in proportion as the world grows older,
and is
It comes to very nearly the same thing when he says—“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” The supposition is, we perceive, that he is going to the cross for men, and that by that powerful argument he will draw them, as by new-born affinities, away from their sin, to a lasting and fixed unity with his person.
We distinguish the same thing under a different version, where he gives it so expressly as the meaning of his errand, that he is come to be the king of truth, and sway men’s hearts by the truth-power of his life. “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” In a very important sense, he is to be the truth; for all that is most quickening in God’s feeling and beauty, all that is most powerful to sway the convictions and constrain the free allegiance of souls, is to be shown, not in his doctrine only, but more mightily far in his healing ministry and death of sorrow. And so he is to gain subjects for his kingdom, not so much by any direct doing in them, or action upon them, but by the sublime royalties of his character.
Beginning thus at the conception Christ has of himself we should naturally look to find expectations going before, and impressions of witnesses coming after, holding a perceptible agreement The ancient Scriptures have this conception of the Messiah. with him. Thus we have a picture given of his coming in the stately Messianic Psalm—“He shall come down, like rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water the earth. In his days shall the righteous flourish, and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth. He shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the rivers to the ends of the earth.” Being thus like rain, or like showers, he will quicken men’s hearts by absorption, as it were, of his fertilizing properties, and so take “dominion” from within.
So the famous
vicarious prophecy of Isaiah is a prophecy, in fact, of power. He shall heal by
the “stripes” of his patience. He shall even be a great conqueror—not by his prowess,
but by his suffering death. “Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great,
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul
unto death.” To the same general effect is the prophet’s word, when he writes—“Who
is this that cometh from Edom, and with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is
glorious in his apparel traveling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak
in righteousness mighty to save.” There is a mixture of suffering and power, crowding
each the other, as it were, all through the picture. His apparel is “red” with stains
of blood, and yet it is “glorious
It is generally understood that Ezekiel’s rill, flowing out from under the threshhold of the temple, widening into a river in its flow, and pouring on through desert regions, “healing the fishes,” and causing “every thing to live, where it cometh,” fringing also its border all the way with trees whose “fruit shall be for meat and leaf for medicine,” is a picture of that originally despised but ever increasing power, by which Christ will renovate and restore the world. It will be that kind of power which is at once silent and sovereign, moving by no shock, but only as health, when it creeps in after, and along the subtle paths of disease.
With these more ancient prophecies and expectations the contemporaneous impressions of John correspond. He announces a great king at hand, who shall be so transcendent in dignity, that he himself shall not be worthy even to untie his sandals—“He must increase, but I must decrease.” Some of the imagery he employs is energetic and almost violent; but when the Great Expected appears, what but this is the greeting he offers—“Behold the Lamb of God!”
In this manner we are prepared,
when we come to the apostles and first preachers after Christ, to hear them break
into expression, by some word more adequate and thought more definite. And therefore
we are
Of these three several testimonies, the first is connected with the fact of the resurrection. “Declared to be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection from the dead;” with which another expression corresponds; viz., “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection.” The impression is not that there is any such renewing power in Christ’s resurrection itself, but that in the fact of his resurrection comes out the real height of his person, and that so the moral wonder of his sacrifice is there, for the first time, discovered. Before in his death he was but a man, a defeated and prostrate man, covered with unutterable ignominy; but when he rises, the fact of some transcendent nature is discovered in him, and a great revision follows in the impressions had of his person. He becomes, at once, a wholly different being, whose life and death take, both, a wholly different meaning. In respect of the flesh, he was the seed of David; now he is the Son of God with power, according to the higher divine Spirit working in his person.
In
the second passage cited, the preaching of the
Again, in the third passage, the apostle is
giving his deliberate account of the gospel, that which constitutes the essential
meaning and operative value of the gift—“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ;
for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” Therefore
he was always sighing—“that the power of Christ may rest on me.” I know not how
it is, but this word power appears to pass for nothing in common use, and the passage
is apparently understood as if it read only—“the way of God unto salvation”—the
understanding had of it being, that Christ has purchased forgiveness for us and
made salvation possible and nothing more. Whereas it was the particular intent of
the apostle to give his deliberate summation of the gospel in this very word power,
and to magnify Christ in it, as being the new-creating life of God in souls—in that
sense and no other a salvation. And if any one still doubts, whether he has any
so stringent and decisive meaning in this word, imagining that he does not think,
after all, of asserting any thing in that
Thus far we appeal to Paul. Peter also expresses the same conception of the gospel, only less vigorously, when he says—“According as his divine power hath given us all things pertaining to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him [Christ] that hath called us by glory and virtue;” that is, by the manifested glory and excellence of his life. The English translation, “called us to glory and virtue” it is generally agreed is mistaken.
John again expresses the same thing
in many ways, as when he says—“the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth
us from all sin;” or again when he says—“Ye know that he was manifested to take away our
sins.” To cleanse us from all sin, to take it away, by
I will not go on to multiply citations, but, lest it should seem that we are obliged to glean for them, I will simply say that this moral power of God in Christ bears The apostles make use of all most violent figures when they speak of it. such immense sway, in the feeling of all the New Testament writers, that they are continually seizing on this or that image, or fact of physical power in the world, to give their impression. Even the most forcefully violent and terrible images are laid hold of—any thing to represent the all-subduing, all- transforming, inwardly renewing, outwardly dominating, efficacy of Christ and the kingdom of God, revealed in his Messiahship.
They conceive him as a wondrously detergent power in souls, “washing and making white,” “cleansing from sin,” “purging the conscience.”
They conceive him going through the sick, disordered mind, even as some healing medicine, or miracle, goes through the hidden maladies of bodies, to search out and expel disease.
They call him a power of leaven, brought into the world to work; heaving in the general mass and willful stupor of it, till all is leavened.
They call him the day-star, because he heralds the mind’s
day and the expulsion of its dreadful night; and the light, because the instant
flash of that element strikes farthest into God’s physical empire, and changes most
the face of it; and the sun, because the exhaustless heat
They call him Life itself, because the quickening spell of it, among the world’s dead atoms, carpets the ground with beauty and fills the air itself with hovering motion.
They conceive him as a fire that is already kindled, in the rubbish of the world’s prescriptive falsities and wrongs, whose burning nothing can stop.
His kingdom and the resistless moral power of his gospel, they resemble to lightning, darting from east to west, and flashing across all boundaries.
His word they compare to the swing of an earthquake, “shaking
not the earth only but also heaven”—shaking down, that is, all stoutest fabrics
of error and prescriptive wrong, and leaving nothing to stand, but that immortal
truth and good that can not be shaken.
They describe him in his cross as an immense, world-compelling attraction, moving such control in the once dead feelings and convictions of sin as will “draw all men unto him,” even as the whirlpool draws all drifting objects and even passing ships into its vortex.
He is even to be a chariot of thunder in the clouds—“coming in
the clouds of heaven in power and great
It is, in short, as if some new, great power had broken, or was breaking into the world, in the life and cross of Jesus, which all the known causations of the land, and sea, and air, and sky, can but feebly represent. The difficulty appears to be that no force-figures can be forcible enough, to express the wondrously divine, all-renovating, all-revolutionizing, moral power of God in the gospel of his Son.
I have only to
add, as a considerable argument for the moral view of Christ and his sacrifice,
in distinction The day of his coming coincides. from all others, that the time of his coming coincides with this only. Had he come, having it for his principal object
to satisfy God’s justice and be substituted, in that manner, for the release of
transgression, there appears to be no reason why he should have delayed his coming
for so many ages. If the effect was to be on God, God was just as capable, at the
very first, of feeling the worth of his sacrifice, as at any time afterward; and,
if this was to be the salvation, why should the salvation be delayed? But if lie
came to be the moral power of God on men, nothing is so difficult as the due development
of any such moral power; because the capacity, or necessary receptivity for it,
has itself to be prepared. Thus, if Christ had come to the monster age before the
flood, when raw force was every thing, and moral greatness nothing, his death and
passion, all the
Indeed, so very slow is the world in getting ready for the due
impression of what lies in moral power, that only a very partial opening to it is
prepared even now. The world is still too coarse, too deep in sense and the force-principle,
to feel, in any but a very small degree, the moral power of God in the Christian
history. Slowly and sluggishly this higher sense is unfolding,
IN his descent to the
flesh, we might naturally expect that Christ would bring all deific perfections
with him, and have them expressed in his person. And this, indeed, is true; but
with the large qualification that they will be expressed only by degrees, and under
conditions of time; that is, under such laws of expression as pertain to humanity.
In one view, God is emptied of his perfections in becoming incarnate, and has them
all to acquire and bring into evidence, by the same process of right living that
obtains character and weight for men. Otherwise the incarnation would be no real
fact. It must be with Christ as with men, and moral power, as we commonly use the
term, among men, is the power that a man finally gets, by the courses and achievements
of a great and worthy life, to impress and sway other men. The subject may be
dead, or he may be still alive; his name awakens homage, inspires, becomes an
argument in itself, by which opposition is concluded, or assent determined; all
because of some great virtue, or victory, or championship of right and
beneficence, accomplished in his life. It is a power cumulative in its very
nature. Once the man had it
And this, exactly, is what
we are to understand by the moral power of God in the gospel of his Son. It
Attribute
power is different. is a new kind of power—the greatest and most sovereign power
we know—which God undertakes to have by obtaining it, under the human laws and
methods. Hence the incarnation. God had a certain kind of power before; viz., that
which
This result had been mitigated, somewhat, by his works and word and Providence, before the coming of Christ. But the tendency still was to carry back all the more genial impressions thus unfolded, and merge them in the attribute-power, by which, as an unseen, infinite being, we had before contrived to think and to Christ incarnated to obtain moral power. measure his character. Till, finally, in the fullness of time, he is constrained to institute a new movement on the world, in the incarnation of his Son. The undertaking is to obtain, through him, and the facts and processes of his life, a new kind of power; viz., moral power; the same that is obtained by human conduct under human methods. It will be divine power still, only it will not be attribute power. That is the power of his idea. This new power is to be the power cumulative, gained by Him among men, as truly as they gain it with each other. Only it will turn out, in the end, to be the grandest, closest to feeling, most impressive, most soul-renovating, and spiritually sublime power that was ever obtained in this or any other world.
Hence that peculiar and continually recurring set of expressions in the New Testament which appear, in one form or another, to attribute so much to the name of Jesus. For if we can rightly distinguish between a name and a fame, if we can exclude the airy fictions of repute and coveted applause, conceiving that the name obtained by Jesus signifies the condensed reality of all that he is, no power will be so genuine, or vital, or so like a sun-rising on transgression.
There will, accordingly, be distinguished, more or less clearly, in all the varied uses referred to, some notion or associated impression of power; The “name” of Jesus is the power he obtains. as if there were embodied, somehow, in this name Jesus, a fund of universal soul-help; or as if, being in this name were the same as to be in a really divine element of good. This too, for the manifest reason, that the whole personal life-history of Jesus, all that he was, felt, suffered, and did, is gathered into it, and was originally designed to be, that he might be the new moral power of God. Thus, to glorify this name and make it such a power is seen to be God’s purpose from the first. Which purpose glimmers dimly in the direction, “they shall call his name Jesus;” for it is to be a saving name. And again it appears more visibly afterwards, when he answers the prayer of Jesus, “Father glorify [in me] thy name,” by a voice out of heaven, saying—“I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.” And again, at a still later period, when his work is complete, and he gives it to his apostle to say, magnifying both the power and the name together—“showing us the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe, by setting him [in our mortal apprehension] above all principalities, and powers, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but in that which is to come.”
Christ, also, we can easily perceive, has a like impression of
God’s purpose in his life; as when speaking of, or to, or before, his disciples,
he says—“gathered in my name;” “ask in my name;” “cast out devils
in
The apostles coming after are even more explicit, as we should expect them to be. They even dare to How the apostles do every thing in this name. speak of this great name as a name obtained—“Being made so much better in this name. than the angels, as he hath, for his heritage, obtained a more excellent name than they.” They are “baptized” in it. They are “justified in” it. They “do all for” it. They “are reproached for” it. They “teach in his name.” They “preach it boldly.” They promise salvation to such as “believe in it.” They “have life through” it. They work miracles and say, “by the name of Jesus this man is made whole.” Having it consciously upon them, in their inmost feeling, they “hold it fast,” and are “hated of all men for” it. Every one “that nameth it” they conceive must “depart from all iniquity.” And, last of all, they read this name “in the forehead” of the glorified. How could it be otherwise when God Himself comes into human life, and makes himself a name there, by human acts, in human molds of conduct, that represents even the pleroma of his divine perfections?
Accordingly when, Peter, another apostle,
declares that “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we
can be saved,” we shall not take the “name whereby” as a cold, theoretic, far-off
method of reference, to some theologic matter of judicial satisfaction, but as meaning
just what the language implies; viz., power—the power of God unto salvation.
Assuming, now, this view of Christ and his gospel, it remains to go forward and trace the process of his life; showing how, and by what methods, and stages, this grand, cumulative, power is rolled up into the requisite body and volume.
Of course, it will be understood,
that Christ is not aiming directly at the. obtaining of such a name, or such a power
of impression. He can not, How he obtains the name. of course, be ignorant of the result to
be perfected thus in his life. Not even a man of ordinary intelligence
will be ignorant of the respect and homage that must be obtained, by what is morally
great and good in action. But that is not the motive for such action. It was not
with Christ. As some great hero thinks of his country, when he takes the field to
serve his country, so Christ thought of the world to be saved, when he came to save
the world. He came with the lost world upon his feeling, gave himself to it in sacrifice,
bore it in vicarious sacrifice, plead with it, suffered for it, made himself of
no reputation, took upon him the form of a servant and a servant’s labor; whereupon
God hath highly exalted him and given him a name
How then does it come?—let us see if we can trace the process. When the holy child is born, he has no Nothing in his name at the first. moral power at all. The halo which the painters show about his head is not there. He is simply the child of two very humble people, in a very mean provincial town. There was a good deal more circumstance and prospect in Washington’s infancy than in his; and yet the moral power of that little one’s name, George, had nothing of the ring that a great life and history will afterwards give it. Nor is it any thing if the name is called Immanuel; nobody will see any meaning in that, at present. The meaning itself is yet to be obtained.
There had been some remarkable prophecies over the child, not
much regarded, of course, till afterwards. A few very pleasant facts are given concerning
his childhood and youth, which will signify a great deal more, as recollections,
than they do to present observation. His look and manner, as he grows up, are winning
to every body. He is subject to his parents and a model of filial duty. His custom
is to be always at the synagogue worship. On a certain occasion, when he is but
twelve years old, he astonishes the doctors of the temple, by his wonderful questions;
and there it is that he drops the remarkable intimation, specially noted by his
mother, that he “must be about his Father’s business;” in which, as we can see,
he already
On the whole, it does not appear that, previous to entering on his public ministry, when he was thirty years old, he has done any thing more The name is not obtained before his ministry. than to beautifully and exactly fulfill his duties. His name is good, true, lovely; but as far as possible from being a name above every name. A certain moral power is felt in him, of course, by those who are with him, but. what he is to be, in this respect, is, as yet, quite hidden from discovery.
But the time has now come for his great ministry to begin. The dim presentiment
of his work, which he called his “Father’s business” opens into a
definite, settled, consciousness of his call. As it were by the revelation of
the Spirit, he clearly perceives what he is to do, and what to suffer; that he
is to go down into the hell of the world’s corporate evil, to be wounded and
galled by the world’s malice, and bear the burden of the world’s undoing as a
charge upon his love; and so, by agonies of sacrifice, including a most bitter
death, to reconcile men to God and establish the eternal kingdom
No man of the race, it is quite safe to say, ever went to the calling of his life against impediments of natural sensibility so appalling. Men do often make great and heroic sacrifices in a cause already undertaken, but he undertakes the forlornest, most appalling sacrifice, fully perceiving what it is to be beforehand. Men have the brave will raised in them afterwards, by the heat of encounter; he has his victory at the beginning, alone, in a desert, where only love and God, in the moods of silence, come to his aid. In this simple beginning of Christ, there is character enough to create a moral power never before conceived, never since realized. But it does not appear that even the facts of his temptation were made known, till some time after—when, or how, we can only guess. He goes into his work, therefore, as a merely common man, a Nazarene carpenter, respected for nothing, save as he compels respect by ]his works and his words.
Meantime John has been testifying, as a prophet, of another,
who is to come, or is even now at hand, whose
But he goes on with his ministry for three years; traveling on foot, sleeping in desert places and upon the mountain tops, associating mostly with How the ministry goes on. the poor and humble, who have scarcely cultivation enough to yield him any fit return of sympathy, or even to be duly impressed by his miracles. The learned and select are alienated from him, partly for this reason. They deny his miracles, or they charge them openly to his conspiracy with devils.
His doctrine is wonderful
to every body—what can be more wonderful than his sermon on the mount? The
people were astonished and rightly; for there was
A few persons of a specially honest and fair temperament were so wrought upon, by
his miracles, and manners, and words, as to feel the impression of some very strange,
or even sacred power in his life; Mary and Martha, for example, and the centurion,
and the two senators Nicodemus and Joseph, and probably all his apostles—not excluding
even Pilate, who was evidently shaken out of all confidence, by the sense he had
of some strange quality, in the manner and bearing of the victim he is compelled
to sacrifice. And yet there was a certain wavering, probably, in all these minds,
as if they could not imagine him, or guess, after all, how he might turn out. Their
misgivings half took away what
And the reason plainly enough is, that no point of view, as respects his person, has yet been attained to, that will verify the facts and impressions of his life. His friends think he is the Messiah, but they have only the faintest notions who the Messiah is, or is to be. His person is not conceived, and so it results that his doings make a seemingly rough compound of strange things, jumbled together in a kind of moral confusion that has really no right to be very impressive.
As we go back to inventory the matter
of his life, we find some things that are wonderfully sublime, some that are deep
in the spirit of wisdom, Sublime and wise, and so far
impressive. some that repel and hold aloof, some that bear a grotesque
look, some that are attractive and subduing to feeling as nothing else ever was,
and some that even discourage confidence. The sublime things are such as these;
the virtue that went out of him, when faith touched the hem of his garment; the
raising of the widow’s son; the healing of the lepers; the voice out of heaven;
the stilling of the sea; the transfiguration, and all the matter of his last
discourses and prayer as given by John. In these
The wise things, such as indicated even a marvelous diplomatic talent, in the good sense of the term, were his answer to the Pharisees, who came to entangle him with the government—“Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s;” the confusion he brought upon the chief priests and elders, coming with a like artful design, when he answered their question—“By what authority,” by another question—“The baptism of John, whence was it;” his reply to the puzzle or catch of the Sadducees—“Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife shall she be,” by his Scripture citation and his inference from it—“I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob; God is not the God of the dead, but of the living;” and more than all by his fearfully impressive reserve, and the brief, but immensely significant intimations he gave to Pilate about his kingship, as the king of truth; taking, in fact, all courage out of the man, by the superstitious dread awakened in his feeling. No teacher, prophet, or champion of truth, ever evinced such complete insight of men, or was ever able to reduce them to utter confusion so easily, by his mastery of their motives and points of weakness. His profoundly artful enemies in fact, were all in sunlight before him.
The points in which he repelled and set aloof multitudes
Some few of the facts of his life bore a grotesque look, at the time, and could
easily be turned to ridicule,
The facts, in which he drew on human feeling by the loving and subduing energy of
his own, compose the staple, we may almost say, of his life.
His tenderness. All
his healings, raised in dignity by the manifestly divine power in which they are
wrought, display such assiduity of kindness and devotion to the forlornest conditions
and bitterest pains of a world under sin, as to make up a kind of gospel in the
plane of bodily treatment; engaging most tenderly just those fallen sensibilities
that must be engaged, and yet could not, by mere demonstrations of spiritual excellence.
His union to the poor in their sad lot, and his beautiful tenderness to their wants
and troubles, attract their personal sympathy and gratitude in the same manner.
His call, “come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden”—it is as if heaven’s
love to the world were going forth to its weary, sin-burdened millions, from a heart
large enough to contain them all, and strong enough to give them rest. His love
to little children takes the feeling, not of children, but of every body. His domestic,
home-like feeling when with Mary and Martha, and his yet more intensely human sensibility,
when he weeps and groans at the grave-side of their brother—what a spell of more
than mortal majesty is there in
And yet, over against all these affecting and subduing
demonstrations in his life, there were a great many Baffled expectation. things, we
know, which, at the time, seemed even to discourage confidence in him. For
example he was baffling always the expectations of his friends; they could hardly
name an expectation, and they had abundance of them, which he did not forthwith
take away, by the notification of some loss, or cross of dejection, which to them
wore a look totally opposite to every feeling they had respecting the
In this manner Jesus goes to his cross; and the manner of his trial and death, though
supported with a His death takes away all confidence.
transcendent dignity on his part, that makes him even the chief figure in the scene, are yet so thoroughly
contemptuous and ignominious, that the poor disciples are obliged to confess to
themselves, if not to others, that their much loved Messiah is now stamped as another
exploded pretender! A great reaction begins however, to be visible in the minds
of the multitude. As the Roman governor himself, before whom he was dragged to a
mock trial for sedition, was quite shaken out of self-possession, by the dignity
of his manner under the questioning—quailing visibly in the sense of a mysterious
something in the man, justifying, equivocating, consenting, condemning, giving him
up to his accusers, and washing his hands to be clear of the innocent blood—so in
the death-scene of the cross, slave’s death though
Where now is the power? We have been exploring a large field, hunting down
along the whole course of Christ’s life, expecting, looking to see,
The power is
not yet. the great name rolled up into volume and majesty, but that any
thing we have found should have
Christ only differs
here from such mysterious, peculiar men, in the fact that he dies before the clue
is The resurrection is the crisis of his glory. given. It is only the resurrection and ascension back into glory, that bring us out the true point of understanding.
Now his most extraordinary nature and mission, for the first time, come distinctly
into thought. Now, since he
We begin back now at the point of his infancy and we follow him
onward again, going over all the points we have named, but with results how different!
Every thing falls into place, and every step onward is the unfolding of power. The
wonderful authority becomes more wonderful; in the right of a superior nature to
give it sanction, the severity becomes majesty; knowing who the teacher is, what
before was truth brightens into a glorious wisdom; the soft-looking innocence of
the life becomes a kind of general transfiguration; the agony, that seemed to be
wanting in magnanimity, becomes the love-groan, as it were, of his mysterious nature;
the crushing defeat of the death breaks into immortal victory. Whatever, in a word,
seemed weak, distracted, contrarious, takes on a look of progressive order, and
falls into chime, as a necessary factor in his divinely great character. And so
the merely human beginning grows into what is more and more visibly superhuman,
dying into boundlessness and glory, as the sun when it sets in the sea. The rising
and the ascension put us on the revision, and helped us to conceive
When we conceive the glorification of Christ, and the completion of his great name,
as a revision or revised How revisions of character affect
our impressions. impression, to which we are incited by
his resurrection and ascension, we are not without
many illustrations. I send these sheets to the press, when our great nation is dissolving,
as it were, in its tears of mourning, for the great and true Father whom the assassins
of law and liberty have sent on his way to the grave. What now do we see in him,
but all that is wisest, and most faithful, and worthiest of his perilous magistracy.
A halo rests upon his character, and we find no longer any thing to blame, scarcely
any thing not to admire, in the measures and counsels of his gloriously upright,
impartial, passionless, undiscourageable rule. But we did not always see him in
that figure. When, already three full years of his time were gone by, many of us
were doubtful whether most to blame or to praise, and many who most wanted to praise,
had well nigh lost their confidence in him, and even retained their respect with
difficulty. But the successes he deserved began, at last, to come, and the merit
of his rule to appear. We only doubted still whether wholly to approve and praise.
A certain grotesqueness and over-simplicity, in spite of all our favoring judgments,
kept off still the just impression of his dignity, and suffered us to only half
believe. But the tragic close of his life added a new element, and
If then so great a power has been obtained by
Christ, in the matter of his life, we shall expect, of course, to see it in effects
on human life and character The power is proved by its
effects. that correspond. And we have not far to go before we find them. A few
weeks after, when the disciples are waiting to be endued with power from on
high, even for the promised
The result was that thousands in the immense assembly,
overwhelmed and utterly broken down, by the sense of their guilt, turned themselves,
by faith, as the apostles exhorted, to the now ascended victim of their malice,
for the remission of their sins. And how mightily are they changed! It is as if
some irruption of heaven’s love had broken into them; as it verily has, in the person
of the just now hated and murdered Nazarene.
This now is the power; first a convincing power, next a power of love begetting love —how great a power it is and is to be, we may perceive in these its first effects. By this power it was that the apostles and first Christians gained their rapid victories over the learning and philosophy, and finally the military empire of the heathen world. They went every where preaching Christ and his resurrection, testified every where the great name Jesus, saying—“there is none other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved.”
And this name is a greater power now than
it was then, and has a greater hold of the world. It penetrates more and more visibly
our sentiments, The power increases still. opinions, laws, sciences, inventions,
modes of commerce, modes of society, advancing, as it were, by the slow measured
step of centuries, to a complete dominion over the race. So the power is working
and so it will till it reigns. Not that Christ grows better, but that he is more
and more competently apprehended, as he becomes more widely incarnated among men,
and obtains a fitter representation to
I can not better close this exposition, than by citing a single passage of Scripture, that contains and sums up Glorious affirmation of the power. all we have been trying to show, in the briefest and most pregnant testimony possible, every syllable of which deserves to be profoundly meditated by itself—“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus; who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and, being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross; wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name that is above every name; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
The historical
exposition of the moral power of Christ, or of the process by which it is obtained,
is now
Christ I just said is not a form of thought. He is no proposition.
He is given, neither by nor to, logical The reality of
Christ is what he expresses. definition. He is no quantitative matter, like a credit set in a book, or a punishment
graduated by satisfaction. His reality is what he expresses, under laws of expression;
the power, the great name, he thus obtains under forms of human conduct that make
their address to reason, conviction, feeling, passion, sympathy, imagination, faith,
and the receptivities generally of the moral nature. What rational person ever imagined
that he could state, in a defined formula, the import of any great character; Moses,
for example, Plato, Scipio, Washington. Hence the necessary poverty, and almost
mockery, of all attempts to put the work of Christ in formula, or to dogmatize it
in a proposition, or church article. The Iliad, or Paradise Lost could as well be
formulized in that manner as his gospel. We can give the “Argument” of these, in
so many headings for so many books; but the epic power will be wholly in the acts
and incidents that fill the books, never in their “Argument.” So we can say of
Christ’s work, and of the sublime art-mystery of his incarnate life, what is not
absurd, what may even be of use—we do so when we call it God’s method of obtaining
power over fallen character—still it must be left us to feel, that just nothing
of the power, that is of the whole living truth, is in the account we have given.
Nothing we can say of
In this manner, four points, in particular, may yet be made, in regard to the process and effect of his life, that will render the power of it still more intelligible, and so far more impressive.
1. That the kind of moral power obtained by Christ is different from any which had been obtained by men, more difficult, deeper, and holier. He No similar power among men. founds no school of philosophy, heads no revolution, fights no great battle, achieves no title to honor, such as the world’s great men have achieved. Men consciously feel, that a strong power is somehow gathering about his person, but will only know, by and by, what it is. It is the power, in great part, of sorrow, suffering, sacrifice, death, a paradox of ignominy and grandeur not easily solved. Honor, in the common sense of that term, can make nothing of it. Fame will not lift her airy trumpet, to publish it, and would only mock it if she did. If we call him a hero, as some are trying to do, then all other heroes appear to be scarcely more than mock heroes in the comparison.
There is no wrong or impropriety in calling Christ a hero, if we do
not assume that, having found him in the class of heroes, we have thus accounted
for his wonderful
He plainly does not think himself
that he is in the passive key, even when he suffers most; but he calmly asserts
the power he has to keep his life unharmed against all enemies—“No man taketh it
from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down and I have power
to take it again.” Nothing compels him to die, but the grandly heroic motive supplied
by his love to his enemies. All true martyrs we conceive to be God’s heroes; but
what martyr ever bore witness to the truth, whose death had not some reference to
the original, transcendent martyrdom of the Son of God? Heroes throw their life
upon their cause, by inspiration from it; he had meat and drink and home for his
houseless body, in the work he had taken upon him, and knowing that he must die
for his cause, he could say “how am I straitened till it be accomplished.” Heroes
are men who go above all the low resentments; he could even pray the prayer of pity
and apology for his enemies, when dying under their hands. Great souls are not flurried
and disconcerted by the irruption of great dangers; behold the solid majesty of
this man’s silence, this provincial man, this country mechanic, when so many fierce
accusations, by so many fierce conspirators in high life, are hurled against him.
Heroes that die, and bear themselves nobly in the terrible hour of their conflict,
are commonly caught without much warning, and are fortified by the tremendous excitement
of the hour; Christ was facing death for at least three whole years, and waiting
for his time to come; yet never weakened, or swerved, by the doom that he knew
to be on
The example most nearly correspondent, among men is that
of Socrates, and yet the superficial, almost flashy merit of his power, heroic as
he certainly was, is about
2. It is a very great
point, as regards the kind of power, Christ is obtaining, that he humanizes God
to God humanized to us. men. I have already spoken of the necessary distance and
coldness of a mere attribute power, such as we ourselves generate, when trying to
think God as the Absolute Being. The incarnate life and history of Jesus meet us
here, at the point of our weakness. God is in Christ, consenting to obtain the power,
by which he will regain us to him. self, under our own human conditions. He is in
our plane, acting with us and for us, interpreted to our sympathies by what he does
and is, in social relationship with us. His perfections meet us in our own measures,
not in the impossible measures of infinity; and so he becomes a world-king in the
world, and not above it and far away from it. We know him, in just the same way
as we know one another. He becomes the
3. It is another great article of his power, that he is able
to raise, at once, the sense of guilt and attract the confidence of the guilty.
By his purity of life, by the
4. To another and last point, where the moral power obtained by Christ gets even its principal weight of impression; viz., to the fact made evident, The culminating fact is God’s affliction for sin. by his vicarious sacrifice, that God suffers on account of evil, or with and for created beings under evil—a fact very commonly disallowed and rejected, I am sorry to add, even by Christian theology itself, as being rationally irreconcilable with God’s greatness and sufficiency.
It was very natural that the coarse, crude mind of the world, blunted to greater
coarseness and crudity by the chill of guilt in its feeling, should be overmuch
occupied in conceiving God’s infinity and the merely dynamic energies and magnitudes
of his nature; the sovereignty of his will, his omnipotent force, his necessary
impassibility to force external to himself, his essential beatitude as excluding
all inflictions of pain or loss. Hence it has been very generally held, even to
this day, as a matter of necessary inference, that God is superior, in every sense,
to suffering. Our theologians are commonly
The principal suffering of any really great
being and especially of God is because of his moral sensibility,
God’s perfections even require him to suffer.
nay, because of his moral perfection. He would not be perfect,
if he did not feel appropriately to what is bad, base, wrong, destructive,
cruel, and to every thing opposite to perfection. If the sight of wrong were to
meet the discovery of God, only as a disgusting spectacle meets a glass eye, his
perfection would be the perfection of a glass eye and nothing more. None of us conceive
Him in this manner, but we conceive him as having a right sensibility to every thing.
We say that he is displeased, and what is displeasure but an experience opposite
to pleasure? so far a kind of suffering. We say that he “loathes” all baseness
and impurity, and what is closer to a pain than loathing? We say that he “hates”
But we must not omit, in this connection, to notice a fact,
as regards the moral suffering of God, that is not commonly admitted, or even observed,
God’s beatitude not diminished by the suffering of is
love. like the others just referred to. Thus we conceive,
that God is a being whose moral nature is pervaded and charactered, all through, by love. Some teachers even go so far as to insist that
the Scripture declaration—“God is love”—is no rhetorical figure, but a logical
and literal teaching; that God’s very substance, or essence, is love. And yet love
is an element, or principle, whether substance or not, so essentially vicarious,
that it even mortgages the subject to suffering, in all cases where there is no
ground of complacency.
Now it is this moral suffering of God, the very fact which our human thinking is so slow to receive, that Christ unfolds and works into a character Christ’s moral power consummated in the agony and the cross. and a power, in his human life. His compassions burdened for guilty men, his patient sensibilities, sorrows, sacrifices, the intense fellow-feeling of his ministry, his rejected sympathies, wrongs, ignominies—under and by all these it is that he verifies, and builds into a character, the moral suffering of the divine love.
Hence what is called the agony, which gives, in a
sense, the key-note of his ministry; because it is pure
In his cross there is also a physical suffering, of
which something is made by the Scriptures, and a great deal more by theology; for
multitudes conceive that this physical suffering is the pain God takes for satisfaction,
when he releases the pains that are due under the just liabilities of sin. I will
not undertake to solve the mystery of these physical pains; for it must be admitted
that God is a being physically impassible. But it is something to observe that there
is nothing peculiar in them, as distinct from the mystery of the incarnation. God
is not finite, or subject, any more than he is impassible, and yet he is, in some
sense, uninvestigable by us, both finite and subject. Enough for us, as regards
the subject state of Christ, that he is able to express so much of the glory of
the Father. So of the pains or physical sufferings. Their importance to us lies
probably, not in what they are, but in what they express, or morally signify. They
are the symbol of God’s moral suffering. The moral tragedy of the garden is supplemented
by the physical tragedy of the cross; where Jesus, by not shrinking from so great
bodily pains, which the coarse and sensuous mind of the world will more easily appreciate,
shows the moral suffering of God for sinners more affectingly, because he does it
in the lower plane of natural sensibility. And yet even the suffering of the cross
appears to be principally moral suffering; for the struggle and tension of his feeling
is so great that he dies, it is discovered,
But there
is a much harsher and sharper meaning frequently given to the agony and the cross,
as if Jesus were in the lot of sin a great deal more Nothing penal
in the agony and the cross. literally than
I have conceived him to be, and God were giving him a cup of judicial anger to drink, from which his soul recoils This conception is supposed
to be specially justified by his exclamation from the cross—“My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me;” where it is imagined that God is dealing with him in severity,
hiding his face behind a cloud of ire, and leaving him to bear the penal woe of
transgression; or, if not this, so far withdrawing from him as to drape the scene
of his death in a felt darkness of soul, that shall somehow express the divine abhorrence
to sin. The assumption, whether in one form or the other, appears to be gratuitous.
That the soul of Jesus, just reeling into death, should utter such a cry was most
natural, and it should be printed with a point of exclamation, as being a cry of
distress, not with a point of interrogation, as if he were raising a question of
remonstrance about a matter of fact. When will theologic dogmatism understand the
language of passion? Besides an angel is sent to him in his agony to strengthen
him-an angel sent to support him in the desertion of God? Does he not also
protest that he can have twelve legions of angels to help him, by simply asking
for them? And in what does he close the scene of his suffering, just after his
Here then it is, in the revelation of a suffering God, that the great name of Jesus becomes the embodied glory and the Great Moral Power of God. In it, as in a sun, the divine feeling henceforth shines; so that whoever believes in his name takes the power of it, and is transformed radically, even at the deepest center of life, by it—born of God.
THUS far we have been ranging in a field, we may almost say, unobstructed by matters of difficulty and debate; we have reached, in fact, the middle of our journey, and have encountered none of the great battle points of the champions, but have only seen the smoke from afar. We seem, indeed, to have been occupied only in such kind of exploration, as could well be made for the benefit of it, and to simply bathe our feeling in that love which God has revealed in his Son. But we are now, at last, come to the borders of the Amalekites, where there is no way to get a passage, but to make one. All the questions that have troubled others are in our path also, from this point onward—questions of law, penalty, justice, righteousness, and their connections with mercy, forgiveness, and the justification of life.
A suspicion is often suggested, by those who are
looking after the truth among these difficulties, that there must be some hidden
ambiguity, The political analogies suspected. or confusion of meaning, in the words
here employed. What is said of law and justice, under the analogies of human
government does not appear to
And it is in this view that I now propose a distinction, which, as far as it goes, takes the subject quite away from all the governmental figures, allowing us to speak, or to reason of law and justification, without being dominated by such figures—the distinction, I mean, between law before government, and law by government; uninstituted, necessary law, and law enacted and supported by instituted government. If I am successful in the statement and development of this distinction, a considerable part of the confusion which has been felt, in these much debated matters of atonement, will, I think, disappear.
It is very obvious to any thoughtful person, that, in order of reason, whatever
may be true as respects order
The grand, primal fact then is, that God’s own nature was in law, or crystallizing in eternal obligation, before he became a lawgiver, and that he became a lawgiver only because he was already in the power of law. Not that he was in obligation to any governing force above him, or back of him; for he was himself the only being, and the container of all forces to be. The law was ideal, and not governmental, a simple thought, which to think was to be in everlasting, necessary, obligation to it. There was no command upon God, no penalty hovered by to threaten; but, thinking right, His whole nature answered in sublime, self-prompted, allegiance. And this allegiance to an idea, viz., right, was his righteousness—the sum of all his perfections, and the root and spring, in that manner, of all he governs for, or by instituted government maintains.
How it is with him, in this law before government, we shall find by a simple reference to ourselves, and Conception of the law absolute. the methods of our own moral nature; for we exist in His image. I think of space, for example, and this eternal, necessary idea of space goes with me, compelling me to see all outward extensions, or distances in it. I think of cause, and this necessary idea compels me, or qualifies me, to see all goings on of change, under terms of causation. These ideas are, in fact, forms of the mind; forms to which it adverts in all thinking, and without which it could not think at all. The same is true of the ideas of time, and number, and quantity. Being in the form of time, I am put on thinking when; of number, on thinking how many; of quantity on thinking how much. So I think of truth, in general idea, and having that form of thought developed, I begin to think what particular things are true. In the same way is developed the grand, all-regulative, Moral Idea of Right; which to simply think, is to be put in everlasting obligation. For it is the distinction of this idea, that it is the Monarch Principle of the soul. It puts all moral natures under an immediate, indefeasible bond of sovereignty. They become moral natures because they are set before this idea of right. Animals think no such thought, and are never set before this idea. They probably have the ideas of space, and cause, and number, but right is of a higher range; else if they could think it, they would be moral natures in common with us.
Here then, as being simply existent with a moral nature,
Let us not forget, or overlook, at
this point, the distinction between the eternal, one idea which contains all law,
as regards the principle—being Applications doubtful, the
law, never. a simple, universal, always present,
never doubtful idea—and those questions of right or wrong, so called, which relate to particular actions. Here we have abundance of doubt,
and debate, and perplexed casuistry, bringing us here to one conclusion, here to
another, and sometimes to none at all. To settle these questions we make appeal
to custom, to Scripture usage and precept, to what is useful, to what is beautiful,
setting our critical judgments at work, and our memory, and our tastes, and mental
associations. But these subordinate and particular questions of duty are only executory,
it will be observed, as regards the general principle, and it matters
There is then a law before government, which is common to all moral natures, and
in which all moral distinctions have their root. It is, in fact, the law of the
conscience; for though it is common to speak of the conscience as a throne of government
inserted, by the creative and constructive purpose of God, it does not appear to
be true that God ever contrived a conscience, in any other sense than that he has
appointed a moral nature for us, in distinction from one that is not. The conscience
of God is only the fact itself of his moral nature, and our conscience is but the
fact of our kinship with him, in the central idea that contains the mold and law
of his perfections. If we use the term conscience to cover the ground, not merely
of that central idea, but of all particular actions under it, the conscience would,
in that case, be a really infallible oracle for infinite questions in us, apart
from all helps of judgment and discriminations of reason; only it is plain as need
be, and can not well escape our discovery, that we certainly have no such oracle
in us; for if we
On this point of a law before government, and a conscience
that enthrones it, we require no better exposition than that which is- given by
the apostle, when he declares,
Let us now conceive it
possible, that God and all moral natures exist, for a time, under this ideal, necessary
law, or law of laws, having no The Law Absolute supposed to
rule for a time by itself. other; that government is not yet undertaken, God having not come forth as yet, to be the maintainer of this law, or to assume it as the charge of his voluntary
administration. The moral natures, in this view, simply exist upon a common footing
of necessary obligation—bound, all alike and together, as a matter of inmost
conviction,
Having thus all moral natures upon this common footing of ideal, necessary law,
and no personal authority, Obedience makes complete
society. or will-force embarked, as yet, in the
purpose to govern for it and be its vindicator, one of two things
will be the result; either that the grand impersonal law will be accepted and obeyed,
or else that it will not. God, we know, will receive it in everlasting honor; for
exactly that he has done from eternity; and his being thus united to the right,
fixedly and totally, is his righteousness—the sum, in that manner, of all his perfections.
If created minds and orders cleave also to right, in the same way, they will be
instated also in the same righteousness, and so in the same perfections with God.
All moral beings, united thus in their homages to right, will be united also in
love; love to each other, and love to the law, by which they are set in society
and everlasting chime together, as in ways of mutual right-doing. Indeed the necessary
and absolute law of right, thus accepted, is very nearly answered by the relational
law of love; so that any realm of being, compacted in
But there is another alternative; viz., that some one or many races of moral natures, in the state of impersonal law we have described, will throw Consequences if any disobey. off the law, and break loose in a condition of unsubjection; and here it becomes a very important matter, as regards the great questions we have now in hand, to note the consequences that will follow, and the new kinds of work and office that will be undertaken.
First of all, the internal state of the disobedient race, or
races of moral natures, will be immensely changed. As certainly as they are
broken loose from right, they will be chafing in the bitter consciousness of
wrong, doing wrong to each other, feeling wrong, contriving wrong, writhing in
the pains of wrong. Their whole internal state will be under a nimbus of
confusion. For though nothing is contrived in them and the world to
Secondly, as another sad consequence, the law so much loved by all the obedient natures, including God, is diminished in its honor, desecrated, trampled, and mocked, and their minds are filled with deepest concern for it. It is as if the very law of their own beatitude were dying under its wounds. Asserting itself unhelped, and vindicated by no force but its own, it seems to be even going down, or vanishing away.
These two painful and disastrous
consequences having arrived under the law before government; viz., the fall of multitudes
beyond any power of God will institute government and
redemption together. self-redemption; and the law itself trampled in dishonor; is there any thing that God
will certainly undertake? His infinite righteousness contains the answer; for by
that he is ever
Nor is it a matter very widely different, that he will
undertake the redemption, or restoration, of the fallen race, or races; for he
can hardly do for the law broken down all that he would, without recovering the
disobedient to their full homage and allegiance. Besides, they are
fellow-natures with Himself, and the righteous love he bears them will unite him
to their fallen state, in acts of tenderest sacrifice. And so the instituted
government and the redeeming sacrifice will begin together, at the same date and
point, and work together, for very nearly the same purpose. In the largest and
most proper view, the instituted government will include redemption;
A beginning will probably be made much like that of the Christian history, in the establishment of sacrifices, the sending of prophets, the strong discipline of Providential judgments, the long drilling and milling times of observances, defeats, and captivities. And then, when the fullness of time is come, we may look for an act of incarnation, provided ally thing can be so accomplished; for the love of God will bring him down to the fallen, and a life in the flesh among them, just as it has done in Christ. He will come in the very spirit of the law rejected, and they will see, in him, how good and beautiful it is, and what burdens of suffering it will put upon him to bear for their benefit. I am not authorized to say that, in the peculiar case supposed, he will do just every thing which he has done by Christ and his cross, I only say that he will shrink from no sacrifice, or sorrow, or cross, that he may regain the erring ones to their law, and have them reestablished in everlasting righteousness. And there appears to be no reason for doubting, that he will go. through a historic chapter of vicarious sacrifice, closely correspondent with that which is transacted in Christ.
Thus far onward we are brought, in the lead of a supposition. Let me not
be understood as resting any thing on the deductions made, beyond what the certain
fact of a law before government will justify. There is really no such precedence
in time, but only a precedence
The distinctions of idea referred to are such as these; which any one will see to be legitimated Conceptions legitimated. in the exposition now traced—legitimated, that is, as conceptions, though not established as existing facts.
1. That there might be a scheme of cross, and sacrifice, and restoring power, every way like that which is executed in Christ, which has nothing to do with justice proper; being related only to that quasi justice which is the blind effect, in moral natures, of a violation of their necessary law.
2. That instituted law is no necessary precondition of redemption.
3. That the righteousness of God is not by any means identical with his justice, but includes all the perfections of God in his relation to the law before government, and never requires him to execute justice under political analogies, save as it first requires him to institute an administrative government in the same.
4. That law and justice might be instituted as co-factors of redemption, having it for their object to simply work with redemption, and serve the same ends of spiritual renovation—if there was a prior fall, under the law before government, they naturally would be.
5. That justification need not have any reference to God’s justice, and probably has not, but only to a reconnection, by faith, with the righteousness of God, and a consciously new confidence, in the sense of that connection.
It will probably have occurred to some readers, in conjunction with what has here been said of the law How related to the story of the Fall. before government, to inquire how far, and in what manner, it coincides with the Scripture representation of the original trial-state of man? Here, to the human race at least begins the instituted government of God. It comes in as no after thought, to supplement the insufficiency of an ideal law which is older. In the breathing of the first breath, this also arrives, and the living soul is not complete in its moral equipment, sooner than it is put in authority by God’s paternal keeping and commandment. Still it will be more convenient and rational, not to regard the fall as literally beginning at the breach of a merely instituted, almost arbitrary, apparently trivial statute, such as by the common understanding we have in the statute of the tree, but to regard the real breach as beginning at the everlasting law-principle hid in that statute, and violated in the violation of it.
This third chapter of Genesis is taken, by many scholars who are not given, at all, to the mythical interpretations, as being, in some proper sense, a myth. They discover a mythologic air in the story, and note a plain distinction of manner between it and the historic chapters that follow, or indeed between it and all other Scripture beside. Nor is it any just offense that such a conception is admitted; for a myth may as well be the vehicle of truth as any other form of language—be it epic, or ode, or parable, or fable. The sin of imputing a myth is when it is done against the fact of history, and not when it is the proper organ of history. And it may be that a myth occurs in revelation, just because there is, at the time, no culture of thought, and philosophy, and reflective reason, deep enough to express, or conceive the matter given, in a way of didactic statement. It is, in fact, historic, because it is the form of story for a matter profoundly abstruse in its nature, and possible to be conceived, as yet, in no other form.
It comes out accordingly, laboring under such limitations of thought and culture, that the eternal law of right is a tree, and the knowledge of good and evil a fruit that hangs on it, and the declared threatenings of death, notifications of the consequences otherwise unknown. Temptation figures in the story as a serpent, and the new-begun race are summoned to a conflict with him, and an assured triumph over him. Then pass out the sad pair, excluded from all possible self-recovery, as if fenced away by the flashing swords of cherubim, to work and suffer, and conquer, as God and his Son will help them.
Now there seems to be a peculiar fitness in conceiving the first sin to be thus specially concerned with the original law of duty—the law before The Fall specially related to the Law before government. government—because that law is really pronounced in the simple fact of being a moral nature. Existing as a moral nature, a man, Adam was already in that law, and the issuing of any command or prohibition, regarding a matter of action, would bind him, only as an executory application of that law. Not even killing, under the statute “thou shalt not kill,” becomes a crime of murder, save as the perpetrator is found to have connected the statute with the prior law of laws, and done the deed as a wrong, by “malice aforethought.” No particular act is sinful, save as the prior law of right is implicitly violated in it. It makes no difference, therefore, whether the forbidden tree be taken as a mythic conception of the law before government, or as an arbitrary, outward test of obedience in particular action; for no such test could touch the sense of obligation, save as it implicitly came under, and carried along with it, the already felt obligation of right. All the statutes we speak of are executory of this law, else they are nothing. Any fall must be transacted really before this law; for the guilt of breaking any law creates a fall, only as this grand, all-inclusive law is cast off, and the regulative principle of the life is changed. Be it touching a tree, or tasting a fruit, the sin has all its meaning in the fact that everlasting right is cast away, and the golden harmony of right dissolved.
This being true, I see not any way of describing a fact so deep, and, for ages, so far beyond the possible conception of men, that could be at all equal to this paradise, and tree, and fruit, and fall, and final expulsion, and flashing sword of cherubim. The profound reality of the fall must, in any view, have been passed before the eternal, inborn law of right, and the death and the curse that followed, signify a great deal more as declaratives of natural consequence, in such a breaking out of law, than they can, as penal sentences of desert, in the matter of tasting a fruit.
Here then is the want and true place of redemption. It must have some primary and even principal reference to the law before government, and not to any instituted law, or statute, or judicial penalty existing under that. Every thing God does in his legislations, and punishments, and Providential governings of the world, is done to fortify and glorify the Law before Government. All that he will do, in redemptive suffering and sacrifice, revolves about this prior Everlasting Law, in the same manner. In this law his supreme last ends are gathered; out of this law all his beatitudes and perfections have their spring. No so great thing as redemption can have principal respect to any thing else.
WHAT is to be understood by God’s
instituted government has been already indicated in a general way;
Instituted Government—what it is.
if we are to conceive it more accurately, we must first of all,
distinguish what is included in a moral nature as being necessary to it; and
then all that we find superadded, or conjoined to it, will be the administrative
matter God has instituted, as a religious polity for the world. A moral nature,
in the closest sense of the term, appears to be no matter of divine contrivance,
more than the circles are in which the heavens are set—it must be a nature that
can think the everlasting law, and has liberty of will to reject, or embrace it.
God is not obliged to create this moral nature, but if such a nature is to be created,
it can not, as far as the necessary idea is concerned, be either less or different.
But there is room outside of this, for a large creative outfit and providential
management, where contrivance, and counsel, and statute, and judgment, and all that
belongs to an administrative polity may get ample range of opportunity. And here
we find the instituted government of God. In this government, counsel and will
Inasmuch, too, as the government he institutes looks beyond mere ideas of legal enforcement, comprehending, or at least associating, purposes Comprehends law, penalty, Providence, and grace. of recovery, he will incorporate a grand machinery of discipline, and also of reconciliation, working by all the g secret griefs of persons, and public woes of society—by the migrations of conquered peoples, by the persecutions of religion, by the oppressions of governments, by the wars and rebellions overruled. And then to these he will add, for the same final end, what is more effective than all discipline, the incarnate mission of Christ, and all Christly causes, the mission also of the Holy Spirit, with all Spirit-causes threading the world’s bosom; the church also, the word, life, death, resurrection, and eternal judgment. The matter is large, but solidly compacted in God’s eternal counsel, not intelligible always to us, but intelligible to Him—good as intelligible; because it is the solemn ordering of his will, for the one good end of right.
That we may conceive the nature and offices of this instituted
government more exactly, let us note a few points that will require to be
observed, in the right
1. Let it be observed that law and obligation do not begin with God’s will, and are not created by his will. Law exists before God’s will. It appears to be the supposition of many, that God creates all law by his will, and can make any thing right, or obligatory, by his enactment. Contrary to this he makes nothing obligatory which is not right, or somehow helpful to right, enacting nothing in which he is not first commanded, as, regards the principle, by that everlasting, ideal law, in which even his goodness itself is fashioned. In one view, all the statutes he enacts are explicatory, simply, of the law before government. In another view, they are only vindicatory of the same. So that the one fundamental precept of right contains, or demands, in a way of organic enforcement, all the statutes ordained; having these for its complete explication, or fulfillment, and being fitly vindicated by the executive energy of these. The law before government measures, in this manner, all the law declared by government, only it obtains an immense accession of authority by the specifications in which it is drawn out, and the sanctions of God’s infinite will superadded for its enforcement.
It is a great
mistake of multitudes, and one that amounts well nigh to a superstition, that they
take the Decalogue not fundamental. decalogue, or ten commandments, for the fundamental
law of duty and religion, back of which there is no first principle more radical,
2. The instituted government differs
from the law before government, in the fact that it inaugurates justice and penal
sanctions. There is no Justice pertains to Instituted
Government. express sanction to vindicate the law absolute, and no definitely understood sanction. Certain
effects of disorder and pain would follow disobedience, but that they would follow
in any scale of desert, we do not know. The justice they will execute, therefore,
is only a blind quasi justice, if it be any thing which deserves the name. But the
instituted government of God is fast anchored in the terms of justice, declaring
definite penalties, and maintaining them with: impartial exactness. It rules by
the majestic
In one view, it was the beauty and dignity of the impersonal law, that it spoke only by its own excellence, with no adventitious, or external compulsions to help it. It would rule by what it is, and not by what will be done for it when violated. In this manner it would most fitly address righteous minds; speaking to them even as it does to God. No sanctions appealing to interest, or fear, would be at all appropriate to them, but would even be a mockery rather of their liberty; for to be in the right is already their choice, and they love it, even as God does, because it is right. Enforcements are wholly out of place, till such time as they are sunk away from right into the lower ranges of motivity, where the smart of justice and its penal sanctions becomes fit argument for them. To arrest them now and turn them back, on such kind of consideration as prepares them to be taken with the love of goodness and right for their own sake, is the first thing wanted. Nothing will answer for them, in a way of being recovered, but to have their collision with a government fortified by sanctions penally threatened and judically executed. And this brings me to say—
3. That instituted government, if not taken in the large
view as containing, is the necessary co-factor of, redemption. By it the law before
government is reënacted,
There is also still another point of view, in which the instituted
government of God works redemptively. All the previous history of the world,
Includes world-government as co-factor with redemption. from the creation downward, till the fullness
of time for Christ is come; all the migrations, deliverances, captivities;
all the callings, and covenants, and prophetic inspirations, have been managed to
bring on the fit day, and get the preparations ready. And, besides all this, the
people have had a religion organized by statute, and been drilling in rites and
observances, divinely ordered—all profoundly related to the grand vicarious sacrifice
to come. In this manner, the religious mind has been cast in the mold of Christian
ideas, and a language has been provided, otherwise impossible, on artificial roots,
for the reception and perpetual publication of the new gospel. God’s instituted
law therefore,
4. It is important,
at this early point, to notice a distinction which will often be recurring in the
future stages of the argument; viz., the distinction Righteousness
and Justice distinguished. between righteousness and justice. Thus the righteousness of God is the rightness
of God, before the eternal, self-existent law of right; and the justice of God is
the vindicatory firmness of God, in maintaining his own instituted law. One is by
obedience to a law before God’s will; the other is by the retributive vindication
of a law that is under and by God’s will itself. One is without option, before immutable,
unconditioned, everlasting law; the other is what God wills and does, in the world
of conditions, that is of means and measures. God must be righteous; God will be
just. That he must be, because it is right; this he will be, because he has undertaken
to maintain the right and govern for it. There is the character from which he rules;
here is the reason of polity by which he rules. Without that, he could not be himself;
without this he can not administer a government that will command his subjects.
Righteousness is necessary to the endowment of his person; justice is necessary
for a wholly different reason; one for the
The justice of God is grounded in the wants of his government; being that which enforces it, that which creates respect for it, and for the ruler, and gives the emphasis of immovable authority to his word and will. He must govern by no fast and loose method, surrender nothing to chance, or caprice, or the inability to inflict pain. And so he must command a character of justice for his government, even as he has a character of righteousness for himself, in the everlasting, immovable adhesion of his nature to right.
5. It is another distinction of God’s instituted government,
that, while the law before government is impersonal, Instituted Government
is personal; virtually a person. this is intensely
personal, and finally becomes a person, or scarcely different from a person. I have already spoken of the fact that, being
from the will of God, it takes on, so far, a personal character. What I would now
say is more; viz., that we commonly do not go back of God, when we think of his
government—never do it, in fact, save when we are occupied reflectively on its grounds
and reasons—but we practically take God for his government, and his government for
God. It is now a wholly concrete affair, and no
It is sufficiently
obvious, from these specifications, that the instituted government of God is a matter
of no secondary interest, compared with Absolute necessity
of instituted government. the law before government in which
it is grounded. It is the mental habit of some, to
be specially pleased with that which is back in
But there comes in here from an opposite direction, or from within the fold of the gospel itself, a class of Dangers apprehended from the remission of sins without compensation. theological objectors, who apprehend a complete sweeping away of God’s instituted law and justice, by the free remission of sins. I propose no argument just here with their objections, I will only state them that they may not seem to be overlooked.
Thus they insist that, if Christ does not bear the penalties of sins
himself, and yet takes them away from Law becomes only
advice. the guilty, he thereby also takes
away all due enforcements of law, and leaves the precept to be mere
advice. Where go the laws of God, when the penalties of transgression are remitted
gratis, by universal proclamation, and the promise given to every transgressor that
he shall even be justified? What could any civil state, or government hope, from
a law punishing assassination by death, and promulgating,
In confirmation of their argument, they also remind us that when certain teachers, claiming a more than common illumination, toss all such objections aside, extolling it as one of the fine things in Christ, that he finds government enough in God’s love and paternity, and is willing to let go what are called the Jewish rigors, the effects are such as to show most convincingly the essential lightness of the doctrine. A proper insight of human nature, saying nothing of the gospel, ought, they contend, to open our eyes to a discovery of what is more competent; for to make a government of mere love and paternity is, in fact, to make just no government at all, but is, simply to throw the whole matter of duty and character loose upon the chances of a coaxing process, where the subject, living in a lower plane, has too little care for the goodness shown him, to get any thing out of it, but a license of impunity for whatever he likes best. In such doctrine there is no ring of conviction. God and religion die out of it, and a certain modishness of philanthropy is all that can long remain.
The objectors also vary their argument,
alleging that when God forgives sin, without some penal satisfaction, his rectoral
honor and character are God’s rectoral honor
surrendered. made equivocal, if not fatally diminished. Sin they say, and truly, tramples the honor of God. If then
he farther consents to let it do so, what becomes of his authority and respect as
a ruler? To
Again the righteousness of God appears, they say, to be made equivocal, in the same manner. He commands His Righteousness made equivocal. what is right to be done, because it is right, and because right is an everlasting and absolute law in its own nature—necessary to all created mind, necessary even to himself. About this grand ideal of right he builds the whole fabric of his government; all his laws assert and interpret this; all his penalties enforce this; all his judgments are the discipline he wields for this. What then does it signify that he freely remits all the possible wrongs of wrong-doing, as against his great central principle of right, or righteousness? The principle, indeed, is none the less right; it is only deserted; that too by Him who undertook to be its vindicator and defender. The enforcement is now gone, and with it, what was more impressive, the solid majesty of that greatness, which itself was built up in the principle of it, and stood in sacred awe before the eyes of all creatures, as the unchangeable Righteousness.
It is another variation also of the damage or loss they discover in God’s rectoral
character, that the supposed
In arguments like these, showing the probability of damage to the integrity and authority of God’s government, from a free remission of sins, coupled with no penal satisfaction of justice, there is, it must be admitted, an appearance of reason. How far it is an appearance deduced from political analogies, that will disappear when such analogies are duly qualified, will be hereafter seen.
CERTAIN points were stated, in the close of the last chapter, where the integrity of law and justice appears to be involved in necessary damage from the introduction of forgiveness, or a free justification. Under the various schemes of judical satisfaction, it is accordingly assumed, that Christ, by his suffering life and death, made the compensation necessary, and prepared, whether by this method, or by that, what is called the ground of justification. In this manner, God has two dispensations, one coming after, and the other going before, and related to each other as mercy to justice, forgiveness to punishment, justification to condemnation. Having begun to govern by mere law, enforced by rewards and penalties, and by that having failed to secure his proposed ends of character and eternal felicity, he brings in a second dispensation, by Christ, to rescue the guilty from the deserved penalties of justice; which it does, by means of his suffering offered as a satisfaction to justice. And so the law, it is conceived, maintains its integrity still, when otherwise it would be quite broken down, or even virtually given up.
Here then
is the great contested matter of the Christian
As regards this question, two kinds of answer may be given that are quite distinct and independent of each other; one that turns upon a due qualification Two modes of argument. of the antagonism between justice and mercy—which will occupy the present chapter; and another which considers specifically the several kinds of damage that are supposed to follow, when sins are forgiven without compensation—which will occupy the next three chapters. The present chapter is not necessary to my general argument, but is a kind of interpolation, and is introduced, not because it is required by my doctrine, but because a revision of our impressions concerning the supposed antagonism, appears to be due to the general subject, and even to the honors of divine justice itself.
Undertaking this revision, I put forward two points, where we seem to fall into misconceptions, that increase the antagonism between justice and mercy, and make it wider and more complete than it really is.
1.
Having much to say about justice, as an exact doing upon wrong of what
it deserves, we begin to imagine that justice goes by desert, both in
its rules
In a certain popular sense, this language and all the scripture citations referred to are good—nothing could be more forcible or impressive—but, when we ask precisely what we mean by it, we shall be more at a loss than we expected. Is it any fit conception of God’s justice, that he will put evil upon a wrong-doer, just because he is bad and according to his badness, apart from all uses to the man himself, or to others, or to the government he violates? Is it the divine justice to fly at evil doing and make it feel just as much evil as it practices? Is there no counsel in God’s justice, no consideration of ends, or uses?
We can hardly be satisfied, I think, with this. Indeed we could not approve ourselves in putting on a wrong doer the evil he deserves to suffer, without finding some reason for it besides his desert. And yet we could not be satisfied, in reducing God’s justice to a mere consideration of public ends, or reasons of beneficence. We feel that there is, and ought to be something more fiery and fateful in his justice than that. What then is the conception that meets our feeling, and what, exactly, do we mean, when we say that justice and desert are ideas that go thus fitly together?
We mean, first of
all, that there is a deep wrath-principle in God, as in all moral natures,
that puts him down upon wrong, and girds him in The wrath-principle
of justice no law to God. avenging
majesty for the infliction of suffering
upon wrong. Just as we speak of our felt indignations, and tell how
we are made to burn against the person, or even the life of the wrong
doer, so God has his heavier indignations, and burns with his more consuming
fire. But this combustion of right anger, this wrath-impulse so fearfully
moved, is no law to God certainly, requiring him to execute just what
will exhaust the passion. It is only that girding power of justice that
puts him on the work of redress, and that armature of strength upon
his feeling, that enables him to inflict pain without shrinking. And
then, at just this point, comes in another function, equally necessary;
viz., wisdom, counsel, administrative reason, which directs the aim, tempers the
degree, and regulates the measures and times, of the
There is, then,
no such thing in God, or any other being, as a kind of justice which
goes by the law of desert, and ceases to be justice when ill desert
is not exactly matched by suffering. God’s ends, and objects, and public
reasons, have as much to do with his justice as the wrath-principle
has, which arms and impels his justice. It is no breach of justice therefore,
and no real fault of proceeding, that God tempers justice by mercy,
and mercy by justice, whenever he can most advance the solid interests
of character and society by so doing. There is no principle which any
human being can state, or even think, that obliges him, on pain of losing
character, to do by the disobedient exactly as they deserve. The rule,
taken as a measure, has no moral signification. God therefore need not
give Himself up to wrath, in order to be just; he can have the right
of counsel still. Perfect liberty is left him to do by the wrong doer
better than he deserves, and yet without any fault of justice—better
that is, considering his own condemning judgment of him, and the man’s
condemning judgment of himself, than he might
2. It is another misconception, just now stated in the introduction of this chapter, that we assume the essential priority of law and justice, as related Another misconception as respects the priority of justice. to mercy; as if it were another dispensation having a right, in its own precedence, to be undisturbed and qualified by no different kind of proceeding. Was not every thing put upon the footing of law, and since we have broken through the law, how can God bring us into justification without overturning the law Himself? Will He mock his law, because we have mocked it? and will he give it up, because we have turned away from it? What remains then for Him, but to do justice upon us? How can he justify, in this view, unless there be some satisfaction, or compensation of justice provided?
There does not after all appear to be any solid merit in this
kind of argument. It matters not whether we say that we have two dispensations,
or Justice and mercy co-ordinate and co-operative.
one; in some sense we have two, viz., justice and mercy; but it does not appear that there
is any priority of time in one as related to the other, or that both
are not introduced to work together for one common result. Then, whether
we understand the mythic tree, or test-tree of the garden, to be the
law before government, or to be some instituted precept in which it
is presented more specifically, the sin of the sin is, in either case,
the casting off of
There is
a certain antagonism, it is true, in the modes of action observed by
the law-power of God’s statutes and the justifying power of Christ;
even as there is between the two great forces of nature just referred
to. But the antagonism is formal, not real; partial, not absolute. They
are to be co-factors in the operation of a government that undertakes,
for its object, the reconciliation of fallen men to God—a state of beatific
Thus by the retributive principle
running through all our natural and Providential experience, the self-sacrificing,
vicarious, love-principle is How the two co-operate in
redemption itself. so tempered as to make our time of grace a thoroughly rugged and stern holiday; while by the love-principle, gently interfused, all the retributions
of our experience are held back and qualified, to be only fomentations
of thoughtfulness and holy conviction. Indeed we may go farther and
have it as a fact discovered, that these partially contesting agencies
only press us yet more effectively, because they seem to be in a race
for us with each other. The
How far then is it conceived by God, in the appointments
of justice and mercy, that they really infringe upon each other; how
far that the rugged and rough power of justice is like to be injured
and borne down
Or suppose that in the race of contestation just now described, it should happen, as one or the other gets exclusive and final dominion of the soul, that the excluded party suffers a real infringement. Then, by the supposition, justice may have taken away the chances and infringed the rights of mercy, as truly as mercy can have violated the rights of justice; when if compensations are to be made, the mercy-impulse of God’s feeling has as good a right to compensation from his justice, as that from his mercy. For his mercy is as old as his justice, and began as soon, and is a character certainly not less dear or sacred. Justice, too, may as fitly groan for the pacification of mercy, as mercy for the pacification of justice.
On this point of infringement and rightful
compensation, I have looked intently for some declaration of Scripture,
and am only surprised that I do not find what
It would be difficult, on the other hand, to represent
all the figures of community and close conjunction held by these words
in the Scripture. Sometimes it is conceived
We shall find
also, both in the old Testament and the New, declarations made of God
and of his Son that represent both in the same general combination
The old
and new dispensations, how related. of attribute; asserting themselves,
at once, both in all the rigors of justice, and all the tender
concern of a forgiving sacrifice and sympathy. Thus we have from the Old—“The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and
abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving
iniquity, transgression, and sin, and that will by no means clear the
guilty, [that is the incorrigible.]
Does any one ask what, in this view, becomes of the superior
grace, or graciousness of the New Testament? I see no room for a superior grace,
that requires a superior and better kind of God. The two dispensations are not
two, in the sense of being opposite, but only in the sense of being one of them
more full and complete than the other at once could be. The New Testament is
only
But while the offices of justice and mercy
are so plainly in a close relationship, and are brought along
God dispenses justice in a right of discretion. so
cordially together in the Scripture, intertwining
both as forces of good in the government and governmental
character of God, I most freely admit the necessity that God’s justice
should be maintained in the highest possible
We shall conceive this subject most worthily, I think, if we revert a moment to first principles in the Justice dispensed by natural law. universal order. Saying nothing here by of justice, as regarding its necessities, or ends, or the vindicatory character, or the vindicatory function it discharges in the matter of government, let us look directly at the single point of executive certainty and firmness, in the way of dispensing justice. And here we shall very soon convince ourselves, it appears to me, that God has not undertaken to dispense justice by direct infliction, but by a law of natural consequence. He has connected thus, with our moral and physical nature, a law of reaction, by which any wrong of thought, feeling, disposition, or act, provokes a retribution exactly fitted to it and, with qualifications already given, to the desert of it. And this law is just like every law of natural order inviolable, not subject to suspension, or discontinuance, even by miracle itself. And justice is, in this view, a fixed principle of order, as truly as the laws of the heavenly bodies.
This, too, seems to be the prevailing representation
of the Scriptures; as when they testify that “the wages of sin is death;” “that whatever a man soweth, that shall he also reap;” that the rust
of gold and silver, cankered in the hoards of covetousness, “shall eat
the flesh as it were fire;” that by the law of the judgment itself,
we “shall receive the things done in the body”—having them come back
as tormentors; that talents
And yet, as we have been saying,
these same ordinances of justice are to go along with mercy and in some
possible way of conjunction are to The natural law of
justice never infringed by mercy. work out, with her, even redemption itself. But how is this? where is the
possibility of this, without even a subverting, by
mercy, of the retributive laws just described? Do I then subvert the
law of gravity, when I lift a weight from the ground? or by kindling
a fire, cause the smoke to ascend in spite of gravity? Or, when I forbid
the simples of gunpowder to unite in the touch of fire, by throwing
a water-bath on them, do I therefore overthrow, because I so decisively
dominate in, the chemical affinities concerned? Were not all these laws
and affinities intended to be just so far submitted to my will? If then,
by my will, acting in among them, they are brought to act in serviceable
ways, as they otherwise would not, or not to act at all, is their nature
therefore violated, or their law discontinued?
No more are the ordinances of justice
overturned, when mercy comes to them and blends her action with
Mercy
only interacts supernaturally with justice. theirs. The executive laws of justice are
natural; the person of Christ, his character, all
the moral power he obtains in human feeling by his action, his beautiful
life, his death of sacrifice, is supernatural. This kind of power too,
working in men’s hearts and dispositions, any one can see does not stop
the causative forces of retribution working in the same. It only works
in with them, as a qualifying agency. The same of course will be true,
when the Holy Spirit takes the things of Christ—the same things—and,
showing them inwardly, brings them into such highest power as they may
exercise. Accordingly, when the mercy of the sacrifice, working in thus
with and among the retributive causes of justice, issues a result which
neither she nor they could issue alone, it no more follows that the
order of justice is violated, than that nature’s law of gravity, or
chemical affinity is violated, in the examples just given. Still the
justice-law goes on, doing exactly what was given it to do, only so
far co-working or working in with mercy, as it was originally meant
to do. Even as Christ came to nature in miracle, as a higher first term,
doing all his mighty works without stopping, or suspending any law,
Let us turn our thoughts then, for a moment, upon the relative working
of these two forces, so generally considered to be wholly contrary and
In their relative working they magnify each other.
mutually destructive of each other, and see how they both get honor and sublimity together, when
God has his liberty in them and wields them as in counsel; for he does
it in a way to confirm and magnify both, never to diminish or weaken
either. Thus, when we go out into life, the retributive causes of nature
roll out their heavy caisson with us, and drag it down the road, making
no stop, and turning never aside more than do the stars; and mercy comes
out also in her soft gait and tender look of sorrow to go with us, in
like faithful company. She looks upon the dread machine, goes before
it, goes behind it, blesses nature’s inflexible order in it; only putting
on the soul itself her secret, supernatural touch, and the soft inward
baptism of her feeling—even that which she has unfolded so powerfully
in the facts of the cross—and dewing it thus with her tender mitigations,
keeps it in the possibility of good; while the retributive causes go
their way, and do their work, not arrested in their action, but only
qualified resultantly, by
If it be the first, then, as he is born of God—partly by the quickening power of mercy, and partly by the Conversion by their joint action. slaying power of justice—the retributive causes begin to have a kind of action qualified by the now sovereign action of mercy. Instead of bearing every thing along in their own way, they consent, as it were, to roll under, giving now their much needed help to the dear co-factor whose triumph they have helped already, by continuing on, to do as in discipline, what before they were doing as in penal enforcement, and thundering as sublimely still below the horizon, as then they did above. The new born disciple is imperfect, and they now fall in to have a chastening agency, for the correcting of such imperfections. And how dreadful, in severity sometimes, are these after-storms of discipline, that cross the track of the justified. It is even as if some mighty Nimrod, hunting in the shepherd’s field, were setting his fierce dogs upon the straying ones, to chase them back to his fold.
Another stage
arrives. Made ready for the change, they die and so at last go clear
both of penalty and Salvation glorifies justice. discipline together; only with such a
sense, made fast in them, of the eminent majesty
and immovable worth and truth of God’s justice, that they would even
feel it less profoundly, under
Go back
now to the point of crisis and conceive it to be turned the other way,—that
the transgressor growing penally hardened under the retributive
Judgment vindicates mercy. causes of his nature, pushes finally bye his day of
rescue. Still the mercy clings to him, whispering still its “come,”
to mitigate the natural hardness and bitterness of his now incorrigible
transgression. In due time comes the last change also here. Christ,
who was the Saviour, is now the Judge, and he makes not the law simply,
but the very principle of his cross and sacrifice too the standard of
his judgment sentence. Every thing is included in this—“Ye did it not
to me;” did it not, that is, in doing acts of mercy to “the least of
these” little ones of their Master. And so the justice, working in God’s
causes, becomes itself the lictor and everlasting vindicator of mercy—not of legal statutes only, but of all Christly possibility and example;
piling on additions of penalty, as much more severe, as the ill desert
of wrong is now become more aggravated and appalling. Not that justice
now has forever extirpated mercy by its judicial ascendancy. Rather
is it become the body guard of mercy forever—fencing not away any soul
from it that will come to it for life, but maintaining the inviolable
order of that pure society it
Now if any one imagines that God’s eternal justice will be more effectually magnified, by running its career of penalty straight through, punishing the jot and tittle of wrong, by the jot and tittle of penalty, and even exacting the jot and tittle of satisfaction, before it can suffer forgiveness itself to forgive; I confess it does not so appear to me. I see no honor accruing to God’s justice when it mortgages his whole nature beside; rather is it greatest, when he maintains it in a certain liberty, counseling for it and working his great ends of counsel by it. Nay it will be greatest, when it is closest in companionship with mercy, thundering strong help in the wars of her subduing ministry, and then avenging her rejected goodness at the close.
In just the same way it might be shown, going
over the ground again, that mercy never bears so grand a Both most honorable
when working together.
look, or moves so majestically, as when she takes
counsel of justice. No man is ever so magnificently just
as he that can be even tenderly merciful, no man so truly merciful
In this
exposition of the antagonism between justice, and mercy, I have said
nothing of what may even be taken as being, in a certain view, their
They even coalesce at the root. radical union. It is a little remarkable
how near many writers will come to this conclusion, when treating of the harmony
of God’s attributes, who will yet, when treating of atonement, represent God’s
justice and mercy in a thoroughly grim aspect of collision. Take the following
very respectable example:—“Wherefore we must so conceive of them as that, in all
respects, they may be consistent and harmonious; as that his wisdom may not
clash with his goodness, nor his goodness with his wisdom; as that his mercy may
not jostle with his justice, nor his justice with his mercy; that is we must
conceive of him to be as wise as he can be with infinite goodness, as good as he
can be with infinite wisdom, as just as he can be with infinite mercy, as
merciful as he can be with infinite
In our own human judgments,
we strike into this conception readily, however difficult it may be
to find how the two are compatible. A distinguished A fact for illustration.
English preacher, traveling in the country, is stopped by a
highwayman demanding his purse. He descends composedly from his horse, and
falling on his knees, offers a prayer for the guilty man, that he may be
regained to a better mode of life. Rising he says—“Now go home with me and take
the place I will give you in my family, never to be exposed, always to be cared
for, there to win a character and be known from this time forth, God helping
you, as a Christian man.” The offer is accepted, the promise fulfilled, and the
man is known from that time forth, as an example of fidelity and true piety
towards God; only giving the story himself many years after, on the death of his
benefactor. Has it ever occurred to any one that, in such benefaction, he was
not a righteous man? Had he ever a scruple himself that he was not? Was he not
also a man who, in a different case, where no such opportunity of mercy was
left, would stand
Practically
then, however we may speculate on the subject, we have no difficulty
in allowing the compatibility Analogy in the correlation of
forces. of justice and mercy, and regarding them rather as complementary than contrary,
one to the other. May we not even suspect that it is with them, much
as it is in what is now called “the correlation of forces?” They seem
indeed to be, and in fact really are, very different one from the other—what
can be more unlike in one view, than the severities of God’s justice,
and the benignities of his mercy?—and yet, as we are shown that motion
is heat or convertible into it, and heat into motion, and both into
light, and all into chemical affinity, and as all these forces, externally
viewed so very unlike, are even radically one and the same, it should
not be difficult to allow that the antagonism of these coordinate factors
in religion, so greatly magnified hitherto, is after all a case of identity
rather—not of identity in the experience, but of identity in the root
and causative force in which they spring. Is there not as good reason
On the whole
this matter of a contrived compensation to justice, which so many take
for a gospel, appears to me to contain about the worst reflection
Compensation theories issued in mock truths. upon God’s justice that could be stated, without some great offense against reverence; for
in whatever manner the compensation, or judical satisfaction, is conceived to be
made, in the suffering of Christ, we shall find every thing pushed off the basis
of truth. The justice satisfied is satisfied with injustice! the forgiveness
prepared is forgiveness on the score of pay! the judgment-day award disclaims
the fact of forgiveness after payment made, and even refuses to be satisfied,
taking payment again! What meantime has become of the penalties threatened, and
where is the truth of the law? The penalties threatened, as against wrong doers,
are not to be executed on them, because they have been executed on a right doer!
viz., Christ. And it is only in some logically formal, or theologically
fictitious, sense, that they are executed even on him. Many of the best
teachers, it is true, have maintained that God’s threatenings do
If it should be objected that as much defect of truth is
implied in the mitigations of law and justice, under the plan I have sketched,
it is enough to answer that no mitigations are made which were not implicitly
understood in the verbal threatenings themselves. These threatenings only
declared in general what the grand causalities of justice were bringing to pass,
acting by themselves; and the specific variations to be issued by the
interactions of mercy show no abandonment of justice, and support no charge of
discrepancy, as long as the retributive causalities continue under their
naturally immutable laws. First there is a natural order of justice, then there
is a supernatural order of mercy interacting with it. And the working of the two
is so difficult to be traced, so complex in its modes and issues, that no
judicial sanction could be verbally stated, that
THE doctrine of the chapter just concluded supersedes, it will be observed, all those compensational contrivances for the saving of God’s justice, which have been the labor of theology under this head of atonement; showing how justice and mercy are factors in God’s plan working safely together, and are complementary in part to each other by reason of the antagonism of their functions; showing also how, by this same qualified antagonism, the order of God’s plan is made sure, and his ends of government accomplished. This I believe to be the doctrine of scripture and, of course, to be true. Still it is a kind of truth that requires time and reflection, and is not likely to approve itself generally at once. Having therefore given it forth to work suggestively, and finally to approve itself, I consent to waive it, and go on with my argument, by another course that is separate and is no way dependent on it.
Holding now in view the same particular apprehensions
of damage, from the introduction of forgiveness and free justification,
that were mentioned in the close of the third chapter, I propose, in
this and the two following
We shall be discussing, in these chapters, what many take for
the whole subject; viz., the ground of forgiveness; but as this, in
the view I am giving, is no real subject at all, I do not propose the
matter to be investigated in that form. I propose rather to inquire
what is the working of forgiveness itself, as accomplished by the Moral
Power of Christ in his Sacrifice? It appears to be supposed that forgiveness
is a mere letting go of the guilty, just as a man who has been injured
by another lets him go, consentingly, without further blame. But there
is this very immense difference, if we will not be deceived by the most
superficial notion possible, between our letting go of an adversary
and God’s, that, while our adversary is wholly quit of our impeachment,
God’s is really bound fast in the chains of justice and penal causation,
and held as fixedly in their fires, after he is let go, as before. Merely
telling him that he is forgiven signifies nothing, even though it be
by a voice from heaven. He must be forgiven, the forgiveness must be
executed, by an inward change that takes him out of his bondages, and
the hell of penal causations loosed by his sin, and brings him forth
into the liberties of
The first named ground of apprehension is, that the law precept may seem to be loosely held and fall into practical dishonor. Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid; yea we establish the law.
I turn the question here, as regards the precept
of the law, upon the particular word honor; partly because it is historical,
being a favorite word of The sacrifice saves the honors of
the law precept. Anselm for such
uses; and partly because there is no other word so appropriate. Sin dishonors the law, breaks it down, tramples it in customary
contempt, raises a feeling of disrespect in mankind strong enough to
be itself called the law of this world. Hence the necessity of punishment,
which is that self-asserting act of God, in its behalf, by which he
invests it with honor. For it must be remembered here, that we are not
looking for some scheme of penal substitution, compensation, satisfaction,
but are, in fact, discussing the great question how it is that God forgives;
or, what is the same, accomplishes the restoration of fallen character?
Where it is coming out, that he gets a great part of this power, not
by his
To make this very important fact apparent, attention is called to four distinct points of view, in which Christ, by his sacrifice, magnifies, if I should not rather say glorifies, the precept of the law.
I. He restores men to the precept. If there were
no instituted law, none but the law before government, there would be
no doubt of this. But the instituted Christ restores to the
precept. law goes by
enforcement, and is honored because of the enforcement;
how then can it be honored in a loss of the same, that is in forgiveness?
Because, I answer, the subject forgiven is restored to all precept;
not to the Right or Precept Absolute only, but impliedly to all the
statutes of God’s instituted government, for the application and the
enforced sanction of that. No matter then if the forgiven soul is taken
clean by the sanctions, to think only of precept. All the more and not
the less does he honor it, that he is brought into a love of it, and
of God by whom it is enforced, such that his obedience becomes an inspiration.
We may even say that he is released from the law wherein he was held;
but we only mean
On the whole, there appears to be no single point where any loss of honor can be imagined, as far as the precept is concerned. Christ beholds it from the first moment onward, doing nothing and wanting nothing, in all the immense travail of his incarnate ministry and death, but to commend the Righteousness and Beauty of it, and regain lost men to that homage which is at once their own blessedness and its everlasting honor.
II. Christ honors the precept, not only in what he does for our
sake, in restoring us to it and forgiving us in it, but quite as much
in what he does Christ reasserts and establishes the law
itself. for its sake, to restore
and save it also. For how shall he so magnify the
law, as by setting it on high, enthroning it in love, organizing
in it a kingdom worthy of its breadth, beneficence, dignity, and all-encompassing
order? We
What meaning there may be in this ought, henceforth, to be
never a secret to our American people. In our four years of dreadful civil war,
what immense sacrifices of blood and treasure have we made; refusing to be
weakened by sorrow, or shaken by discouragement, or even to be slackened by
unexpected years of delay. Failure was prophesied on every hand; compositions
were proposed without number. Yet nothing could meet our feeling but to save the
integrity of our institutions, and forever establish the broken order of the
law. All the stress of our gigantic effort hinged on this and this alone. No
composition could be endured, or even thought of, that did not settle us in
obedience, and pacify us in the sovereignty of law; and, to the more rational of
us, nothing appeared to lay a sufficiently firm basis of order, but the
clearance somehow
What now do we see in the sacrifice of Christ, but that he, only in a vastly higher and more grandly heroic devotion of his life, is doing all for the violated honor and broken sovereignty of law. He proposes, indeed, to be a Saviour to men; but the gist of the salvation, both to us and to him, is that heaven’s original order is to be restored in us, and made solid and glorious, in the crowning of God’s instituted government forever. Every thing that we see therefore, in the incarnate life and suffering death, is God magnifying the honors of his law by the stress of his own stupendous sacrifice. Such an amount of feeling, put into the governmental order, commends it to our feeling; and also turns our feeling into awe before it. The law is raised as precept, in this manner, to a new pitch of honor, and the power of impression given to it, by the vicarious sacrifice and more than mortal heroism of Jesus, is the principal cause of that immense progress in moral sensibility and opinion, that distinguishes the Christian populations of the world. What they so much feel and have coming in upon their moral sensibility, in ways so piercing, is the law of duty, glorified by suffering and the visibly divine sacrifice of the cross.
III. Christ adds authority and honor
to the law-precept, as being, in his own person, the incarnation of
it. In itself, what we call law is impersonal, He is himself the
incarnation of the precept. a cold
mandatory of abstraction. Its authority, as such,
is the conviction it is able to produce of its own imperative
right. An additional honor and authority is given it also, when God
reaffirms it, and from the point of his invisible majesty, assumes the
maintenance of it. A certain authority is gained for it also by impressive
circumstance, when it is delivered from the thundering and smoking mountain
top. By the cold intimidation of such a pronouncement, it even becomes
appalling; it makes the people quake and shiver. Still the coldness
and the stern decretive majesty partly benumb conviction. To have its
full authority felt, it must be brought nigh in its true geniality and
warmth, as a gift to the higher nature of souls; exactly as it is, when
it is incarnated and made personal in Christ, addressing human conviction
by his human voice. For Christ is not, as many seem to fancy, a mere
half-character of God incarnate, a kind of incarnate weakness in the
figure of a love-principle, separated from every thing else in God’s
greatness, necessary to the tonic vigor of love. Being the incarnation
of God, the full round character of God as he is must be included—authority,
justice, purity, truth, forgiveness, gentleness, suffering love, all
excellence. All these, in fact, belong to God’s character, and they
are here brought nigh, brought into concrete expression, thus to be
entered, by Christ, as a complete moral
IV. The almost inconceivable honor Christ confers on the law precept, in the fact that his incarnation, life, and death upon the cross—all that I have His life and death are his obedience to law. included in his vicarious sacrifice—are the fruit of his own free homage and eternally acknowledged obligation to the law; in one word his deific obedience.
I have spoken of the law before government, the eternal absolute law
of right. Under it, and by it, as existing in logical order before God’s
perfections, even they, as we found reason to believe, have their spring.
It was not necessary here to go into any very elaborate argument; for
it can not escape the discovery of any one, that if God has moral perfections
of any kind, they must have a standard law, and obtain their quality
of merit, by their fulfillment of that law. Of course there is no precedence
of time in the law, as compared with the date of God’s perfections,
but there must be a precedence of order, and the law must be obligatory in that
precedence. But we come now to a matter which, to most minds, will be more
remote and more difficult; viz., to the fact, that God has not only a character
ever
Consider and make due account then, of the fact, that the eternal law
of right, which we can not well deny is the basis of God’s perfections,
and of all The Law is Love and Love is Vicarious Sacrifice. law human and divine, is only another
conception of the law of love; and that, as
the righteousness of God fulfills the Right, so it is declared that “God is Love,” as being another equally valid conception of his eternal
perfections. The two principles, right and love, appear to exactly measure
each other. One is the law absolute, or ideal, commanding the soul,
even if it were to exist in solitude; the other is the law relational,
grounded on the sense of relationship to other beings, who may be socially
affected by our acts. Thus every one who will be and do right, in the
large and complete sense of the principle, will as certainly love all
beings, whether God or men, whether friends or enemies, whether deserving
or unworthy, with whom he finds himself in relation. The law of love
appears to be, in some sense, a law of. revelation, as the law of right
is not. And yet the
But this will not be the manner of God. Love
to him is Right and Right to him is Love. And, as certainly as he is
in this law of love, he Christ fulfills eternal obligation. will suffer the pains of love,
he will go beyond all terms of mere justice or desert,
yield up resentments, pass by wrongs already suffered, put himself in
a way to receive the wrongs and bear the violence even of personal enemies,
if he can hope to do
God then does not make the law of love, or impose it upon us by his
own mere will. It is with him as an eternal, necessary, immutable, law, existing in logical order before his will, and commanding, in the right
of its own excellence, his will and life. This being given, all his
plans, decrees, creations, and executory statutes
In this manner we are prepared for the
conclusion and even brought down close upon it, that Christ came into
the world, as the incarnate Word The cross not optional but
obligatory. and Saviour of sinners, just because the eternal, necessary law of love made
it obligatory in him to be such a Saviour. It is with him even
as the apostle represents, when he says—“Bear ye one another’s burdens,
and so fulfill the law of Christ.” It is not commandment that he speaks
of, but it is law, that same which rested on the divine nature and which
Christ fulfilled in his sacrifice; that same in which he gave himself,
for love’s sake, even to death for malefactors and enemies. The essentially
vicarious action of the love-principle and the manner in which it makes
the want, or woe, or even sin, of others its own personal concern, I
have sufficiently shown already,
There was no constraint in the obligation, it is true; the
more wonderful therefore is the grace of the obedience that is yielded so
freely. And of course the obligation, when we thus speak, is not any obligation
due to us. We had no claims to lay upon him, any more than our enemy has a claim
upon us, that we shall sacrifice our peace, or life, to his benefit. It was
simply obligation to the grand, everlasting, essentially vicarious principle of
love, an obligation to be gracious, and
The conception of some such obligation, or obedience
to obligation, in the work and sacrifice of Christ, has been more or
less nearly approached Anselm and Bellamy. by many.
Thus Anselm, while conceiving that Christ undertakes the work at his option, still imagines
a kind of obligation post requiring it of God himself. “Does not the reason why
God ought to do the things we speak of seem absolute enough, when we consider
that the human race, that work of his so very precious, was wholly ruined, and
that it was not seemly that the purpose which God had in man should fall to the
ground?”
But there is another version of the obedience of Christ—the same which is indicated in these last words—which requires our
attention. Thus The obedience of Christ to the Father, his
obedience to law. many, giving to certain
words of scripture a meaning favored by their most
superficial acceptation, look upon it never as the obedience
of God himself to the eternal, necessary law, but as being that of a certain
second person, who is somehow other and not God, contributed by him to God for
sinners. Obtaining thus a peculiar merit by his suffering obedience, the second
person, they conceive, is able to pay the first for the letting go of their
punishment. And they quote, as authority for this, all the texts that speak of
Christ as being sent, or commanded by the Father, as doing his will, as obedient
unto death, for the Father’s reward. As if one person of the Trinity, putting
another under command, and sending him into the world to suffer and die for sin,
were any permissible account either of the Trinity, or of the suffering. Why
must we take hold of words in this manner, without considering at all the
conditions of the subject matter? The Father is above, representing the eternal
government; the Son is a man below, acting, so far, under and obeying that
government. But in another, wholly consistent view, he is, in his human person,
the express image and outward type of
In this manner, Christ is always contriving to carry men’s
thoughts above, or up through, his humanity, and forbid their coming to a period
of stunted measurement in his human person. He takes the subject state,
It is obvious enough that, in such a way of obedience, Christ makes
a contribution of honor to the law he obeys, that will do more to enthrone
The immense honor paid to the Law by Christ’s obedience. it in our reverence, than all the desecrations of sin have done to pluck it down—more
too, than all conceivable punishments, to make it felt and keep it in
respect. The grand evil of sin is that it tramples law and brings it
into contempt. Many, too, apprehend danger from the full remission of
sin, lest it should leave the law trampled and without vindication,
and reveal a kind of indifference to it in God, that will be fatal to
all due impressions of its authority and sanctity. Here then,
Now I do not undertake to show, be it observed, that Christ came into
the world, in a plan to set his obedience over against the damages and
Compensation enough were compensation wanted. debts
of sins; or that he came to fill out any scheme of satisfaction, or compensation. If
any thing is wanting to compensate the loss of punishment, it will be
enough that the very things suffered and done to make the forgiveness
an executed fact, give back greater honors to the law than are lost
by the loss of punishment. No, Christ came just because the law he had
been in from eternity sent him, and his incarnate appearing was but
the necessary outcoming in time of God’s eternal Love. He descended
to the lot of men just because he had them in his heart. His object
was only to minister. His compassions, even before he came, were tinged
all through with sorrowing tenderness. His emotional nature was stung
and wounded every day, after he came, by the scenes of wrong and cruelty
he was compelled to look upon, the sicknesses, and pains, and deaths,
and torments of spiritual disorder to which he ministered.
Grant that
here is no contrived compensation to
As regards the degree of honor
thus conferred by his obedience on the law, two points need especially
to be observed. First, that the law fulfilled The very law
dishonored organizes the redemption. by his vicarious love and ministry, was exactly the same that our sin
had cast off and desecrated—this it was that put the lost world upon his
feeling, proved its goodness in his goodness, shaped the beauty of his beauty,
travailed for us in his agony, and held him to the obedience even unto death. So
the violated law comes back upon us to overwhelm us, by showing us, in Christ,
just what goodness was in it. Secondly that,
But there are two objections to be noticed.
The first is that which is actually, yet accidentally, stated by Mr
Burge, without any conception of its Objected that the
obedience was nothing new. applicability to
the case here occurring. He says
The second objection referred to is that in such use of the
obedience of Christ, conceived to be a simple fulfillment of his obligation, we
get no surplus merit to be our righteousness. By a very strange, almost
incredible
Reviewing now the ground over which we have passed, I think it will be seen that Christ has set the law precept in a position of great honor and power, enduing it with such life and majesty, in men’s convictions, as it otherwise never could have had. (1.) He proposes, we have seen, no remission of sins which does not include a full recovery to the law. (2.) All that he does and suffers in his sacrifice, he as truly does for the resanctification of the law as for-our recovery. (3.) In his incarnation, he incarnates the same, and brings it nigh to men’s feelings and convictions, by the personal footing he gains for it in humanity. (4.) He honors it again by his obedience, which is, in fact, a revelation of God’s own everlasting obedience, before the eyes of mankind; the grandest fact of human knowledge. With great confidence then I state the conclusion, that the law precept is safe, established in power, crowned with invincible honor. Whatever may be thought, or apprehended, in respect to the possible damage accruing to God’s law, as regards the matter of enforcement, when the remission of penalty is proclaimed, there can be no misgiving, in respect to the integrity and sanctity of the requirement. Whether there is any proper ground of concern for the loss of the penal enforcements, will be considered in the next chapter.
THE common assumption,
that law is absurd or impossible without penal enforcements, is not
quite true, Legal penal enforcements necessary for bad
minds. or is only true in a given case or condition. God himself acknowledges law even from eternity, though it has to Him no sanction over and above
its own excellence. All upright beings do the same. Indeed a law propounded
with a penalty, to a realm in perfect holiness, would even be an impropriety,
or blamable offense to their feeling. Not so, when propounded to minds
no longer capable of being swayed by the authority of beauty and excellence
in their own right. For it is the misery and shame of bad minds under
sin, that excellence and beauty, powerful as they still are over the
sentiments of their higher nature not yet extirpated, are no longer
sufficient, by themselves, to recover and restore the broken homage
of their fall. They move on a point, too far above the plane of motivity
occupied by sin, to control and subdue it. They are likely indeed, when
embodied in Christ, to be felt more as a disturbance, than as an attraction.
What is wanted therefore, in connection with his new salvation, is some
To be more exact, we have proposed for us, at this point, two distinct schemes of motivity, neither of which is properly and fully Christian; first the scheme that makes nothing of fear, and the lower motives addressed to prudence, counting wholly on such as lie in the ideal goodness and beauty of holiness itself; and secondly the scheme which, finding natural causes arranged for the penal chastisement of wrong, counts the arrangement a complete moral government in itself, beside which no other is wanted, or in fact exists.
The former scheme assumes that goodness and right are their own argument,
able to rule by their own simple excellence. What is good for
False assumption that goodness is government enough. angels
in their height of virtue, is declared
to be good also for men in their sin. At
any rate, as the argument goes, nothing less, or lower, is permissible
any where; for
Thus it is that Christ, recognizing the fears as an original and profoundly rational function of souls, makes no scruple of appeal to them, even when his object is to consummate a character wholly superior to their active sway. He believes, we shall see, in strong penal enforcements, and puts them forward, clear of all delicate misgiving, to be the advance guard of his mercies.
The second scheme referred to holds a humbler
key; it is wholly in the plane of prudence and natural retribution;
delighting in the discovery that, False assumption that
retribution is government enough. according to the original
outfit of life, the moral law, or law of responsible conduct, has a whole system
or economy of causes put in company with it, to be its avengers and redress its
violations. And this, it is conceived, is the complete account, or whole, of
God’s moral government.
Now it is
the merit, I conceive, of Christianity, that, of these two schemes of motivity, it holds exactly neither; or perhaps I should rather say
Christ combines both kinds of motivity. that it comprises both together; viz., a
standard of divine excellence and beauty, drawing men to goodness
by the moral attractions of goodness itself; and a grand economy of
penal causations in nature, by which evil done is confronted with evil
to be suffered, and is thus forced back, on the consideration of that
blessed authority which ought to be loved for its own excellence Only
it is a matter of the highest consequence to add that, in comprising
these
First, that the moral power of good, as expressed by the law, is to get an accession of moral power, in Christ, beyond that which naturally belongs to First, by his moral power, he re-enforces the law. it as impersonal precept; for it is to be glorified and raised in power, by the miracle of the incarnation, and the sacrifice and supernatural ministry of Jesus. The moral power it gets in this way is to be itself a kind of supernatural person, invested with such life and feeling, by the methods of the cross, that, entering into natures disordered and broken by the penal retributions of sin, it may recompose them in heaven’s order and harmony; so to be a true redemption. For it will redeem, in this manner, from the natural laws and causations arranged to serve as enforcements, and prevent these enforcements from issuing in results of eternal disability; as they otherwise would, in the manner just now stated. They were never intended, as retributions, to maintain a mere scheme of obedience by force—which is no obedience at all—but to work in with and toward this other and higher power, that is relatively supernatural, and brings the soul up finally out of their compulsions into a complete liberty in good.
Secondly,
this being true, Christianity is able to press the enforcements on that
side, with the greatest emphasis, and even to increase the responsibilities
enforced. Taken as a scheme of retributive causations in nature,
For there is no hardship now in severity; the hardest and sorest defect is really in the want of it. Taken by themselves, the penal sanctions of nature would be only a ministry of condemnation; they would kill and nothing more; now they condemn and slay to make ready for life; lifting their ominous flag of warning on the shoals of future wreck, to beckon the transgressor back on a revised consideration of his courses. Would it be a kindness if this flag were taken down?
It has been convenient, thus far, to
speak of penal enforcements simply as compelling motives, or as warnings
and intimidations addressed to prudential The immense moral power of
judicial severities. consideration. But they have a much deeper and more
nearly basal office, which is commonly not observed. They have even
a certain moral power in themselves, which is of a wholly different
cast from that of Christ in the sacrifice, but which he contrives to
unite with his own, by the sturdy severities of his doctrine. In our
discussions, for example, of punishments in the civil state, and particularly
of capital punishments, it appears to be taken for granted, that these
two, the intimidation of crime, and the reclamation of the criminals
themselves, are the only objects of penalty. Whereas the grandest, and
most real, and deep-working office of punishment is the fearfully sharp
sense it wakens of crime itself, by such tremendous severities or thunderclaps
of extermination—wherein even the good, protective law can so utter
itself and must, against the deeds of wrong that shake society. The
moral conviction roused is the main benefit—that sensibility to order,
and law, and right, that runs quivering through the bosom of all citizens,
when the almost sacrilegious violence of justice turns upon the felon’s
life, commanding the scaffold and the rope to stop his breath! And precisely
in the same way it is to be conceived, that strong and terrible retributions,
not only serve as motive powers of interest in the government of souls,
but have another and weightier office, in creating moral
It appears then that Christ, coming to
us in his sacrifice,
I. To the specially Christian declaration of future punishment, sometimes called eternal, or endless punishment.
I am well aware of the disappointment I may inflict
on certain progressives, or disciples of the new gospel, that, in so
free a handling of what is held by authority, I still give in to a doctrine
of the future punishment that is so revolting to reason, and, as they
will say, to thoughtful minds already so nearly outgrown. If they can
allow any reason for the fact that does not imply a subserviency to
prudential motives, let it be that I am thoroughly fixed in the purpose,
and that on grounds of reason, never to make a gospel—either to have
no gospel at all, or else to accept the gospel that is given me. I have
been through all the questions, taken all the turns of doubt, suffered
all the struggles of feeling in respect to this confessedly hard looking
doctrine of future punishment; I have even learned, in these struggles,
to pity the meagerness of any soul that has encountered no troubles
and painful misgivings concerning it. Neither is this pity at all diminished
but increased, rather, by the fact, that I am brought back finally to
acquiesce in it myself, and even to look upon it as being probably a
necessary factor of the Christian salvation. What else can we infer,
when we find, as we shall by a little search, that our merciful Christ,
he
But, before proceeding to show this fact, let us attend to some considerations in which the doctrine may be duly qualified and cleared of the severities, by which it is made unnecessarily shocking to many.
We could well enough allow that the epithet “eternal” [αὶωνὶος] need not mean eternal, in the exact, The word “eternal” not very decisive. speculative sense. It is of no great consequence, that we insist on it as a term of duration logically infinite. Enough that we receive it practically, as giving that finality to thought, beyond which there is, for us, nothing to be meditated farther. It is very true that the same epithet is used respecting the duration both of punishment and of blessedness—“These shall go away into everlasting punishment, and the righteous into life eternal”—but it is surmised by some, without any great violence, that as we get only the slenderest impressions any way of the state of suffering called eternal, the intent of Christ may only be to shove our thought over on that sea, and let us get the measures of it by our long, long voyage afterward; that the punishment is called eternal as the life, because it is the punishment of the eternal state, and is best apprehended here, when taken as a practical finality for the mind.
I make this concession, partly because I have no care to press
the matter so far as to make a bad eternity
Rejecting,
however, this annihilation theory as, plainly enough, not being the
doctrine of Scripture, we still do observe, as a matter of fact,
The
certain reduction of the soul by sin. in this present life, that souls under sin are not amplified by their experience in it, as they are
by their experience in good. Gaining vigor, it may be, for a little
while, they finally begin to shrink in quantity, losing out capacity
for both character and the higher kinds of suffering; a fact in which
But while this diminution
of quantity in souls under sin is fatal, as it certainly is, to any
hope of purgatorial The higher powers extinguished, but not
the soul. recovery, it does not go the length
of proving their extinction, but gives exactly the point of view that yields the least exaggerated and
truest impression of the Scripture view of punishment. Thus we observe
that, for a little while, the human faculties appear to be invigorated
by the struggles of passion, or selfish ambition; but that shortly they
begin to be inevitably wasted in quantity, narrowed in volume and capacity,
so as finally to produce the impression, that their intensity—as in
cunning, hatred, envy, policy, and avarice—is getting to be a kind of
intensified littleness; a fire still hot, but running low in fuel, and
sure to be as much less considerable in its energy, as the substantive
quantities of
Holding this conception, we go clear, it will be seen, of that very shocking extravagance, which maintains Infinite punishment denied. the infinity of future punishment. Mere infinity of duration does not make the quantity infinite, as many so hastily assume; for, if there be a diminution of degree as there is an extension of time, the quantity will never exceed a given amount. So too, if the continuance be endless, not on the score of old sins long ago committed—the sins of the previous lifetime—but as being ordered to match, and measure, and punish, the continuance of new sins, freely committed and persistently adhered to, the eternal punishment so-called, may be only a stream of temporal retributions, appointed to match the stream of eternally recurring transgressions. As regards this matter of amount, or quantity, we can really have no very definite conceptions; for though the state of punishment be endless, we have no gauges of intensity that we can apply, and do not even know how far the continuance rests on the continuance of transgression.
At the same time, we do perfectly know, that the arguments often used
to show that the punishment of sin
The sober and rational fact, then, as regards the matter of endless punishment, is, that it is a finite retribution, The retribution finite but naturally endless. laid upon the head of finite sin, and graduated in a general way by the demerit of it. The suffering state which it produces is described in figures that raise an impression of great severity; and there is no reason to believe that, take them as we may, we shall, at all, exceed the just realization of their degree. They will profoundly shock us, indeed, if we take them literally, and yet, so very slow are we to imagine a condition of unseen spiritual suffering, that we shall not, even then, raise a conception of the real misery that is at all adequate. All the greater and more reasonably conceived misery will it be, if we make no doubt that God is ready, at any future point in the run of it, to embrace, in everlasting reconciliation, any truly repenting soul. I say not any regretful soul, but any soul that is heartily turned to a new and eternally righteous life. For this will be the keen, all-devouring misery, that, with so many regrets, there is so little repentance, or even power of it; that the nature, now but half a nature, halting, as it were, on its clumsy and paralytic members, finds not how to rise any more forever. Strong enough to suffer, and wicked enough to sin, the tendrils of adhesion to God are dead, and it can not fasten itself practically to his friendship. Goodness it remembers but can not sufficiently feel. All its struggles are but heavings of the lower nature—pains of defeat that are only proving, by experiment, their own perpetuity.
Assuming all these qualifications of measure and degree, there is nothing left in the matter of endless punishment, by which we can fitly be disturbed, except that it does not bring out the kingdom of God, in that one state of realized unity, and complete order, which we most naturally desire, and think to be worthiest of his greatness and sovereignty. It certainly would be more agreeable, if we could have this hope; and many are resolved to have it without Christ’s permission, if they can not have it with. They even make it a point of merit, to seize this honor bravely for God, on their own responsibility, and for it, if they must, defy the Scripture. I think otherwise, and could even count it a much braver thing, to willingly be less brave, and despite of our natural longings for some issue of God’s plan that is different, follow still the lead of the Master.
We come back now from this rather long excursion, where we have been trying to settle our conceptions of the nature of the future punishment, and of the qualifications that may save it from a look of excess, to consider the relation Christ assumes towards it, in his vicarious sacrifice, and the free justification of sins. Observe then—
1. That while he undertakes, in this manner, a universal
remission of sin, or even to freely justify every penitent transgressor before
God, he has never yet thought, as far as we can discover, that he is putting
God’s law and justice in jeopardy, or raising any kind of theologic objection,
such as now disturbs the concern
Christ, then,
brought forth into bold assertion, for the first time, the doctrine
of eternal punishment; not
2. That Christ, in these declarations of
eternal punishment, never betrays one symptom of doubt, or delicacy,
Has no
apparent scruple in the doctrine. as if there might be some injustice,
or over severity in them, such as needs to be carefully qualified.
He plainly enough has no such struggles of mind on the subject, as we
have. His most delicate, tenderly sensitive humanity gives no single
token of being, either offended, or tried, by the fact of so great severities.
It can not be that he is untroubled by questions on this
He uses, it must be admitted, the most appalling figures—“outer darkness,”
“great gulf fixed,”
His appalling figures. “thirst,” “torment,” “wailing,”
“weeping,” “a worm that dieth not,” “a fire that is
not figures. quenched”—but he has no misgiving; probably because
words of any kind are so impotent, in giving the due impression of any
state unrealized, and need to be even violently overdrawn to answer
their object. However this may be, it is quite evident that the tough
questions of our modern philanthropism have either not
3. It
is a remarkable fact that one of the strongest evidences of the strictly
superhuman character of Who is he, that he is endured in
such teachings. Christ is contributed, or experimentally
brought out, by the singular command he has over such, even now, as passionately abjure his doctrine. I make
no assumption here that goes beyond the fact of their abjuration itself
and the manner of it. They will deny that he asserted any such doctrine
of punishment. But they will also admit that he testified, again and
again, in all most varied and most pungent words of warning, to what
sounds very much like it, and which being qualified. by no process of
interpretation, are the very ipsissima verba of the doctrine; that he
was the first decisive teacher in this strain; that he insisted much
on the point and often recurred to it; and, whatever else may be true,
is the practical promulgator and first founder, in that sense, of a
something which has gotten footing as the doctrine, or has come to
be the doctrine, of eternal punishment; Suppose now that I who write
this treatise—a man in my common human figure—had done exactly the same thing,
in the same way of precedence, and that, making many speeches on religious
subjects, I sprinkle them, all through, as the four gospels are sprinkled, with
these fiery denunciations of punishment;
They do not perceive, that they have done the difficult thing,
and rejected the easy. How much easier, when they were detained by a reverence
so profound for the manifestly superhuman character of Christ,
4. A true
Christian inquirer, struggling with a burdened feeling, under the huge
difficulties of this question, Where eternal punishment is
denied, shown to be a moral want. will be very apt to meet
with such kind of results, or effects, falling under his notice, in the case of those who deny
the fact of eternal punishment, as to start a certain spiritual revulsion in him
and persuade him that Christ had some sufficient, profoundly deep and true
reason for his doctrine, whether we can find it or not. There is plainly enough
no object in preaching this kind of salvation
(which is no salvation, because there can be no destruction,) but to
find a place of impunity in sin, or at least to loosen the yoke of obligation
and make it comfortable. And that, when it is a fact, is about the most
contemptible, lowest occupation a mortal can be in. And the fruit will
correspond with
I draw this
picture not for any purpose of odium, but simply because it suggests
and so nearly justifies the Punishment an intrinsic element
of the gospel. suspicion, that Christ had
a reason for his doctrine of eternal punishment, in the necessary and, to him, perceived wants of character
itself. We can see, at a glance, that if there were no such future peril,
and God were such a being that no fact of destruction were possible
under him, then there could, of course, be no salvation, or Saviour.
So far it was a point, intrinsically, of Christianity, to assert the
doctrine of future punishment; for upon that basis only it stands, as
a real salvation. But there seems to have been a deeper and more subtle
reason, both for the fact of such punishment originally instituted,
and for the assertion of it by Christ; viz., that, by these tremendous
severities alone of God, could men be made to feel the cutting edge
of principle enough to have it really get into their love, and makes
it a principled love. Otherwise it would have no
However this may be, it is not difficult to see how far the success and saving power of the gospel of Christ depend on these appeals to fear, and these cogent motivities of interest, by which he so unsparingly presses the world; for by these it is, and only by these, that he takes men at the point where they have any sufficient sensibility. By this appalling law-work he breaks their security, startles their negligence, rouses their guiltiness into a ferment, and calls out the question, what shall we do? Never, it is very true, does any one of these motivities enter into the staple of piety—they are spent when piety begins, or at least passed by accordingly as it advances. And yet these terrible severities—not too terrible, or appalling for the sturdy composure and hardness of sin—are just that fire in the rear, by which, as a more rugged constraint upon nature, the guilty are gathered to the spiritual drawing, or all-constraining loveliness and love, of the cross.
But Christ also adds enforcement, as we have said, to the law—
II. In the fact that he declares himself
to be the final judge of the world. Having shown the divine nature travailing
in sacrifice and suffering love for the world, and having proclaimed
a universal end of God’s penalties,
I do not undertake to settle, in this connection, precisely what is meant by the judgment of the world; whether it is to be literally a trial had The judgment made necessary by the supernatural salvation. in public assembly, or before the grand convocation of the worlds, or whether such representations given are only figures impressively drawn, to give, in the general, or by means of one general scene, what is passing and to pass in the innumerable and particular cases of souls, when they arrive, or come in to receive their personal awards and enter on their everlasting state. This, however, will be obvious that, if there were no work of grace or mercy on foot, no supernatural salvation, there would scarcely need to be any judge of the world. The transgressors would go to their exact lot of punishment just as stones under gravity fall to the ground. The grand penal order of nature would be at once judge and executioner, and they would sink to their true level, by inevitable laws, that find them out as exactly even, as God himself can know them.
But the judgment of the world under Christianity is made
necessary, by the fact that, in a mixed experience under law and grace, where
the penal order of nature is restricted, tempered, mitigated, by the
supernatural
The Christian gospel requires, in this
manner, a judgment-seat, and in this office Christ himself asserts the
authority that is given him. The subject is adverted
Furthermore how entirely
compatible his love and suffering patience are, with all severest rigors
of justice, will be seen in the impressions of his judgment office and
day that are held by his followers. They call it the dies irae, the
great day of his wrath, not refusing to magnify the day as a day of
great majesty and revelation, even “the revelation of the righteous
judgment of
It is certainly most remarkable, considering how Christ himself is the
first promulgator of eternal punishment, and is to be himself the judge
of the world—revealing the terrible wrath-power of his kingdom, in so
many ways and terms so appalling—that he should be conceived to have
almost overturned God’s law by his terms of mercy, and only not to have
done it, by consenting to be an offering before the offended wrath of
the law! So he compensated the law by the contribution
I assume it then, with confidence, to be a conclusion firmly
established, that Christ, in preparing the free remission of sins, has not taken
from God’s The enforcements
then are all kept good without a satisfaction. law, or at all weakened,
its necessary enforcements. Author himself and first adequate promulgator of the
doctrine of eternal punishment, invested with all the honors and
authoritative rights of the Supreme Judge of men; armed, in such capacity,
with indignations equal to the lamb-like patience of his sacrifice—it
is not by him, that men have the pressure of God’s penal enforcements
taken off. On the contrary, when before had the law such a pressure
of enforcement in the plane of interest, as it has under Christ himself?
When before were
No, if there be any
thing in the gospel of Christ least of all to be apprehended, it is
a discontinuance, or weakening of law. The law-power not only remains
uninjured, to do its work of enforcement in souls, but it is brought
closer to them and is made weightier and more imminent in its pressure,
than ever before. Not only temporal motives but all the powers, in fact,
of the world to come, are now crowded into its sanctions. And so little
apprehension is there accordingly, in the New Testament, of any possible
damage to God’s law, or justice, that the immense theologic concern
for it, which puts us to a strain of contrivance so pressing, is even
most innocently overlooked. I do not even recall
But
there is a possible objection that requires to be noticed. Thus if natural
causes, or causes in the scheme of nature, have been so arranged as
to chastise and duly punish all sin, and Retributive causes not abolished
by deliverance from them. then Christ
intervenes by a movement supernatural,
to work a release from these causes in the redemption
of souls, and does actually deliver them, it appears, after all, that
the enforcement of law is so far, at least, given up, or put bye. To
this I answer, first, that the enforcement is no more given up than
the law of gravity is given up when I sustain, by
Besides the personal moral power of Christ, that which he obtains by his suffering ministry of love and sacrifice, gets a tonic efficacy how majestic, by the tremendous moral emphasis of his denouncements, and the energy he shows in being able to use force enough for his purposes; even as every great general gets the moral power to carry his will by a word, in the fact that he has been able to carry it by his previous championship of force, in fields more impressive than words.
In advancing this doctrine of punishment,
I am well aware that some will call it the doctrine of Radamanthus,
and that perhaps without concern This rugged,
unphilantropizing gospel will stand. to settle the question,
whether Christ had any better title to respect than
he. They have had a thought of God’s beneficence, they
So far we accept the unquestionable future of revelation. As regards that ideal kosmos, in which our philanthropic friends propose to confer so much greater honor upon God, I will simply suggest, that they might less dishonor him, if they could allow that our present state is, in some true sense, a kosmos. God never made any state that was not. Inasmuch, therefore, as his future kosmos must, like the present, make room for the fact of liberty, who can be sure that there will not be in it jars and thunders of dissent, impossible to be excluded—shocks that will stir the tragic movement in feeling, and keep off the tameness of any such total elysium, or general Peace-Society state, as our speculative seers are wont to promise—even as the kosmos of matter rests in the perilous equilibrium and lively play of antagonistic forces?
TO maintain the precept and enforce the sanctions of law, are not the only matters of concern to be provided for, in the promulgation of forgiveness; a third matter, much insisted on, is that the magistrate himself keep good his Rectoral Honor and the Legal Justice of his magistracy. Regarded as the administrator of instituted government, he is practically the government himself, and is looked upon as being the government. Hence if it should happen that, in the introduction of a free justification, God’s magisterial character—his Rectoral Honor and Justice—is let down, or loses the necessary impressiveness, the damage incurred will be fatal. And this, it will be remembered, was one of the alleged forms of detriment, or damage, to be apprehended, unless some kind of satisfaction is made to God’s justice. All the compensation theories have a principal respect to this supposed necessity. For how shall God be just, and have respect in the character of justice, unless he executes justice? or unless he somehow has his justice satisfied, by volunteer pains contributed for that purpose?
Hence the many, variously turned contrivances of
Our New England teachers, for nearly
a century past, have commonly taken a form of representation that has
not as yet obtained general currency, The New England
scheme of substitution. any where else. Pressed
by the difficulty of any scheme that supposes
a literal satisfaction of God’s justice, or the release of the guilty
obtained by the penal suffering of the innocent—because it so profoundly
shocks the most immovable, and most nearly innate convictions of our
moral nature—also by the new-sprung inference of universal salvation
that inevitably follows; viz., that, if Christ has borne the punishment
of the world, no principle of justice in God will allow him to inflict
that punishment again upon the transgressors themselves—pressed by these
difficulties they began to conceive that Christ, in his cross, maintained the
righteousness of God without punishment, by what was expressed, to the same
effect as in punishment, of God’s abhorrence to sin. Christ, they conceived, has
simply shown, by
Of this latter and later mode of doctrine I will speak first and briefly, recurring afterwards to the older, which turns on the penal suffering of Christ, and the maintenance and satisfaction thereby of God’s justice.
There is no room for scruple in affirming, that every thing done by Christ gets its value, under laws of expression, No fault that it turns on what is expressed. or, as in modern phrase, under terms of esthetic representation; christianity as a power on the world, is expression. Nay, the incarnation itself is what is expressed, and not what is contained, or suffered quantitatively as a compensation to justice, in the incarnate person. Punishment itself, apart from the matter of penal enforcement, considered in the last previous chapter, has besides a most sacred and noble efficacy in what it expresses of God—the determination of his will, his righteousness, in a word his rectoral fidelity to the law. This expression, too, is wanted as being the equivalent of a like impression; for nothing is expressed to us, save as it is impressed in us, in the same degree. And in just this way the gospel itself is resolvable into expression, because it is wanted in a way of impression; which is the real effect and mode of its value.
Thus far we have no difficulty; but
the question still
And here it occurs to us, at the outset, as a very obvious fact, that
abhorrence to sin expresses almost nothing that would be expressed by
punishment. Abhorrence to sin no fit equivalent of justice.
Abhorrence is a word of recoil simply and not a word of majesty. There is no
enforcement, no judicial vigor in it. I may abhor what I am only too
weak, or too much in the way of false pity, to handle with the due severity.
It does not even require a perfect being to abhor sin, especially in
the wicked forms of it—that is to draw back from it, as being disgusted
and shocked by it. But there is no such drawing back in justice. Justice
moves on in the positive vigor of the wrath-principle, girded with inflexible
majesty, for the doing upon wrong of what wrong deserves. To put forward
an expression therefore of God’s abhorrence to sin, as a substitute
for justice, is to give it the weakest possible
But this abhorrence theory encounters
another objection equally fatal, in the fact that really no abhorrence
No abhorrence expressed in Christ’s death. at all to sin is expressed in the suffering death of Christ. All manifestations of goodness and purity are implicit evidences of such abhorrence, but beyond
that we discover no evidence more direct. To what in the transaction
of the cross can God’s abhorrence, by any possibility, fasten itself?
Does God abhor the person of Jesus? No. His character? No. His redeeming
office? No. The sins of the world that are upon him? They are not upon
him, save in a figure, as the burden that his love so divinely assumes.
His standing in the place of transgressors? He stands not in that place
at all, as having their moral desert upon him—only in their place as
a good man stands in the place of his enemy, to bear his wrongs and
make his own violated feeling the argument of pity and patience with
him. Where then does the abhorrence of God take
It will be found accordingly, if the language of those who take
up this abhorrence theory is carefully watched, that they have a latent
reference back Latent resumption still of the penal
suffering. always to Christ, as being in some penal
condition, without which our sin is no way concerned with his suffering, or his suffering with it. The object
was to get away from the very repulsive idea of a penal character in
Christ’s suffering, and so from the appalling objections that seemed
to be incurred by it; but when the point of difficulty is once turned
by the softer word “abhorrence,” we look back and find the penal suffering
held mentally in reserve, in order to get the Divine Sufferer into an
attitude, where God’s abhorrences can be imagined to adhere to him,
or find expression through him. Thus it will be said
I conclude,
on the whole, that this New England expedient of conceiving the substitution
of Christ, as being only God’s way of showing his repugnances to sin
by the suffering of Christ, instead of doing it by the punishment of
the guilty, has in fact, no base of reality, even to those who resort
to it, save as it reverts to the older scheme of penal suffering and
resumes all the methods of that scheme. Indeed it will even be found,
that Dr. Edwards, having taken the ground
To pursue this particular scheme or doctrine farther appears to be unnecessary, after we have found it lapsing always in the older doctrine it undertook to qualify, or displace. To this older doctrine we accordingly return.
Here it is
conceived that God, as a ruler, must execute justice because he is just—if
not upon the guilty, then upon Christ their substitute. Justice
Immutable
Justice only not sufficiently just. he must have, the inexorable, everlasting
wrath [οργη] of his judicial nature must be satisfied;
and as it was to be satisfied by the penal suffering of transgressors,
so it can only be satisfied, in case of their release, by a full compensation
of penal suffering offered by their deliverer. Now if it were simply
conceived that God, by a necessary, everlasting charge upon his moral
nature, is fated to be the absolute Nemesis of wrong,—unable therefore
to avert himself, or be averted, till every iota and least speck of
it has gotten its full desert—there would, at least, be a certain sublimity
in the conception. But there is no such thought as that; the inexorable
justice [wrath] wants only suffering it is conceived for its satisfaction,
and the suffering of innocence will be just as good as the suffering
of guilt, if only there is enough of it;
I ought perhaps to say
that, under the general phraseology of this doctrine, there appears
to be some variety Softened or varied forms of the
doctrine. of impression indicated by a softening, or modified definition of terms. Many do
not understand by God’s justice any vindictive attribute or instinct
that must have satisfaction, but only a character of public justice,
or general justice, that is necessary to be maintained, by a firm and
exact distribution of penalty, in order to keep the instituted government
in respect and authority. These only want the character of public justice
made good, by some other expression—commonly by that of abhorrence—when
that which is made by punishment is taken away. Some can not satisfy
themselves in what manner the needed compensative expression is made,
and not finding how to explain the difficulties met, take refuge at
last in mystery—not observing that where confessedly nothing is known,
there can be nothing
I could hardly trust myself to state the argument, or vindication, by which this more adequate and deeper doctrine is supposed to be maintained; and therefore I am constrained to cite the language of two late writers of distinction, that they may accurately represent themselves and their view of the subject. I do it for no purpose of controversy, but only to obtain, for the great matter in question, the easiest and surest mode of settlement.
Thus it is formally argued by a teacher in great
authority,
Now it is very true that, in one view, there is and can be nothing
out of God, and that, in the same, he can act for nothing out of Himself.
It is also true that his acts and purposes are not for things, or creatures
taken up as ends, after their creation; but these things and creatures,
present eternally to God’s thought as possibilities, in Himself, were
as truly his ends, before they began to exist externally, as they could
be afterward. They were, in fact, as truly other and not himself,
as they came to be afterward. For them and their benefit accordingly
he has eternally acted. To say otherwise, denying that he can have ends
out of himself, under the supposed Calvinistic pretext of doing honor
to his sovereignty, is to make him Allah and not God. He is even radically
unchristianized in his God is not Allah nevertheless.. perfections. For it is the glory
of God, the summit even of his glory, that, being
sovereign, he knows, not justice only, but self-sacrifice, and is so
sublimely given to ends out of Himself, that he can even be a suffering
God in his feeling, for the recovery and salvation of his enemies. Doubtless
he does all things, in’ a sense, for his own glory; which is only saying,
if we speak with intelligence, that he does all things to make the luster
of his greatness and moral
Another attempt has also been made, in quite another quarter, to maintain
what is virtually the same ground, only it is done by a more ingenious
Another conception of Absolute Justice. and plausible way of argument. Consenting virtually to the principle, as every intelligent thinker
must, that we can properly conceive God only by drawing on material
included in our own human consciousness, the writer finds, in all “ethical
natures,” whether it be the nature of God, or of man, a certain prime
element that he calls “Justice,” and which is instinctively arrayed,
roused to vindictive energy, against all wrong, or transgression. This
“A fundamental attribute of Deity is justice. This comes first into view and continues in sight to the very last, in all inquiries into the Divine Nature. No attribute can be conceived that is more ultimate and central than this one. This is proved by the fact that the operation of all the other divine attributes, love not excepted, is conditioned and limited by justice. For whatever else God may be, or may not be, he must be just. It is not optional with him to exercise this attribute, or not to exercise it, as it is in the exercise of that class of attributes which are antithetic to it. We can say—‘God may be merciful, or not, as he pleases,’ but we can not say, ‘God may be just or not as he pleases.’ It can not be asserted that God is inexorably obligated to show pity; but it can be categorically affirmed that God is inexorably obligated to do justly.”
His all-conditioning, first attribute of justice therefore
must have “plenary satisfaction” he maintains, else there can be no
deliverance. The conditionated grace of love must wait on the unconditionated,
absolute impulse of justice, and drink the cup of its indignations dry.
Thus it is conceived that, “In the incarnate Son, God voluntarily endures
the weight of his own judicial displeasure, in order that the real criminal
may be
I have stated thus at large and carefully this newly elaborated scheme of satisfaction, partly because it has a certain point of merit, and partly because it is a failure where a sufficiently strong failure was wanted. The point of merit is that it has the ingenuousness to put entirely by the doubling, battledooring art commonly practiced in discussions of this subject; it does not make Christ other than God, that he may offer something to God’s justice; and then a divine person [God] that he may be able to offer what is sufficient; and then again human that the divine may not suffer; but it takes the ground and faithfully adheres to it, that the satisfaction made is wholly ab intra, or within the divine nature itself. The point of failure is equally important, because it brings the doctrine of penal suffering and judicial satisfaction, to just that issue, where its failure is likely to be final and conclusive.
First of all, the ingenuous admission, here made, that the justice of God is satisfied from within Himself, or by punishment dispensed upon Himself, A very weak justice that God exacts of himself. is even admirably fatal. What kind of power any Ruler must hold, in the impressions of his subjects who, to make sure of justice, takes all his punishments out of himself, it is not difficult to see. There plainly could not be a weaker figure in the name of government.
Besides the justice gotten, in this manner, must be as insipid to Him, as it is useless for the purposes of government. Justice wants what is just if And the justice is not just beside. it wants any thing, and here it is found feeding itself out of that which is exactly not just—what vestige of justice can there be in any punishment which a righteous God gets out of Himself? Is it so then, after all, that this inexorable, undivertible, Nemesis of God’s ethical nature, this judicial sentiment which must be satisfied first and before every thing else, will be just as well satisfied with a punishment not just, as with one that is?
There also appears to be a remarkable oversight here, in the
scheme of satisfaction proposed, as regards the God suffers—not
his compassions. penal suffering
itself. “The Divine compassion itself bears the infliction
of the Divine indignation in the place of the transgressor.”
Why the divine compassion, more than the divine justice? Does the justice
punish the compassion? For aught that appears there is no suffering
in the compassion more than in the justice. By supposition,
Besides, if it were conceivable that the being took so much suffering wholly on his love, or on account of his love, did it never occur to the writer that Withheld from suffering would have suffered more. if He had refused, for love’s sake, to encounter so much suffering he would certainly have suffered infinitely more? Nay, that such a refusal would even have turned the Divine bosom itself into a hell of suffering forever? Given the fact of God’s Infinite Love, he suffers demonstrably, not more, but less, in consenting to be the deliverer of men—by suffering however great.
But the scheme breaks down
most fatally of all in the confusion of meaning, or the covering up
of a double meaning, in the word justice. A The Justice conceived
is ambiguous. sufficient
discrimination here would have shown that the absolute
justice pertaining to ethical natures is a fiction, without any
shadow of reality. It is almost incredible, that a really intelligent
writer should throw himself upon the axiom, “God must be just,” “God
is inexorably obligated to do justly,” without perceiving that we assent
to it for
First, the distinction
between righteousness and justice; righteousness, being a character
grounded in the Righteousness and Justice, Wrath and
Justice. absolute, unconditioned law of right existing before government; and justice,
being a rectoral, politico-judicial character, maintained by the firm
vindication of government; conditioned of course by the wants of government.
Second, the distinction between the wrath-principle and justice; the
wrath-principle being only that moral sensibility, or passion, that
impels a moral nature to the infliction of evil in redress of wrong,
and steels it against the restraints of false pity; and justice being,
in the administration, a due infliction of such evil, according to the
ill desert of the wrong. By the first distinction, righteousness is
seen to be absolute, and justice to be a matter only of means to ends,
and
It will occur to almost any one, that this very huge mistake respecting
the absolute nature of justice, originates in a confounding of righteousness
and justice. That is absolute, unconditioned, unconditional, a law to
all moral natures and even to God; a law, as we have
And yet we can easily see
that any such kind of concern is theologic with us, and not practical.
We do not practically feel, after all, that in After all, have
no such concern for God’s justice. the universal
free remission published by Christ, God’s rectoral authority
is at all weakened, or requires any new buttress
of support to be added. And the probable reason is that the immense
Passing now into another field, let us consider, in a way more positive, what Christ has really done that affects, or may be seen to affect, the interests of justice. The remainder of the chapter will be occupied with matter that I could well enough put forward as a way of compensation; suffering no doubt whatever that it would be more satisfactory, closer to the problem of compensation itself, and more genuine than the others of which I have been speaking. But I shall offer it, instead, simply as proof, how closely God adheres to law and justice still in the very matter of vicarious sacrifice. And I let go, in this way, what might be a considerable relief, or commendation to many, just because I have too little respect for the compensations, to be accessory, in any way, to this kind of wrong against the simplicity of the gospel. These compensations have a too contrived look, and suggest too easily the ingenious littleness and tumid poverty of man’s invention. I would rather have the gospel in God’s way of dignity without them, than to have it in a guise so artificial and meager without the dignity.
It lies in the very conception of vicarious suffering, I am giving in this treatise, that Christ is entered practically into the condition of evil and made Christ is incarnated into the curse. subject to it. This condition, too, of evil, we shall find is, in some very important sense, a penal condition. It is what is called, in one of the epistles, “the curse;” an epithet which has reference, I suppose, indirectly, if not formally, to the expulsion from paradise set forth in the third chapter of Genesis. Not that the sentence there passed on the guilty pair, and on the world for their sake, was any positive infliction. The scriptures very commonly represent what occurs retributively under fixed laws of nature in that way; because the true moral idea of God’s dealings with evil is best conceived in that way, by minds in the earlier stages of development. But to us the effects of sin are its curse, and the laws of retribution, set in deep and firm in the economy of nature itself, are God’s appointed ministers of justice. In this manner we conceive that every thing up to the stars—the whole realm of causes—is arranged to be, in some sense, the executive organ of God’s moral retributions.
Accordingly, the moment any sin breaks out, all the causes set
against it fall to being curses upon it. As the sin itself must be against the
will of God, and every thing created centers in that will, a shock of discord
runs through the general frame-work of life and experience. Order itself utters
a groan of disorder. The crystalline whole of things is shattered, as it were by
some hard blow, and the fragments begin to grind
Now this state of
corporate evil is what the scriptures call the curse; and it is directly
into this that Suffers the corporate evil with us. Christ is entered by his incarnation. In this taking of the flesh, he becomes a true
member of the race, subject to all the corporate liabilities of his
bad relationship. The world is now to him just what it is to us; save
that the retributive causations reach him only in a public way, and
never as a sufferer on his own account. He is even depravated or damaged
in his human constitution
It is even so upon the cross, where he
dies, physically speaking, before his time, because of the more dreadful
moral suffering or revulsion that was on him, in his felt contact with
the curse and the judicial horrors of evil.
Thus it was that he came into the curse and bore it for us. Not that he endures so much of suffering as having it penally upon him—he has no such thought—and yet he is in it, as being under all the corporate liabilities of the race. He had never undertaken to bear God’s punishments for us, but had come down simply as in love, to the great river of retributive causes where we were drowning, to pluck us out; and instead of asking the river to stop for him, he bids it still flow on, descending directly into the elemental rage and tumult, to bring us away.
Let us not fail now to observe the deliberate respect
he pays to God’s instituted government and law in this matter. First,
that having all miraculous Observe what honor he pays to
justice. power, and using that power continually for the removing of diseases, and sometimes even for the quickening of the dead, he steadily refuses to
use it for the rescue of his person when arrested; or the confounding
of his adversaries, when arraigned; or even to so much as hurl aside
the cross and his crucifiers. “No, let sin be just as evil and wild as it
will; society just as cruel to all that are in it, me included; just as visibly
accursed, as the retributive order of God’s causes requires it to be.” And
again, secondly, observe that, when he has all power to stop the retributive
causes, and strip away the whole instituted
Whoever then is pressed with the necessity, that some ground of forgiveness
should be prepared by Compensations enough, were
compensations wanted. Christ, in order to make forgiveness
safe—some compensation made to law and justice for the loss they must suffer, in the release of their penalties—has
not far to go to find the matter of a compensation that is more than
sufficient. Let him remember, first, the tremendous artillery sanctions.
added by Christ, in his two really new doctrines, that of eternal punishment
and that of his coming in glory to judge the world; and then again let
him consider Christ in his whole lifetime,
As I have
made much, in this treatise, of the suffering element in Christ’s sacrifice,
regarding mainly his moral suffering, and that as an expression of the
suffering sensibility of God towards his enemies; and as I have just
now magnified, in like manner, the suffering of Christ under the retributive
and corporate evils of the curse, I ought perhaps to make some reference
to a
We seem to be coming out here upon a scheme of compensation, which, at least, involves no offense to our. natural sentiments of right; but the prospect vanishes too sow to allow us any space for congratulation. The little clause “on account of his law,” will be observed in the language cited; and the implication is that Christ must needs suffer, on account of the law, in order that God’s suffering for him and with him should go to the same account with the suffering He would undergo in punishment. And then, regarding the suffering of Christ as being somehow on account of the law, the argument goes off upon the revealing of God’s “opposition to sin,” and his “displeasure against sinners,” ending virtually, after all, in a way of compensation by abhorrence as it is commonly held. If Mr. Burge, perceiving the full import and merit of the conception he began with, could have had the firmness not to be swerved from his point by deference to existing opinions, his new base of compensation, by which one kind of moral suffering in God is substituted by another, would have allowed him to erect a complete superstructure of his own, and one that should be nowise revolting to right. But he seems to have not conceived the fine possibility it gave him.
In the general view I have thus given of the compensations, and especially in taking the position that God’s law and justice are sufficiently vindicated in Christ, saying nothing of compensations at all, I anticipate two objections—
1st Obj. That the christian world is unanimous in the belief that Christ has offered a compensation to the Christian world unanimous for compensation. justice of God, and that such compensation is necessary, as a ground for the forgiveness of sins. There is some truth in this, and I have no pleasure in a raising a conflict with any so generally accepted faith or opinion. But I have (1.) made up as large an account of compensations as any one can desire, if a compensation must be provided; and (2.) I have it to say, that whatever agreement there may be in respect to the need of a compensation, there is no agreement as to the mode; and (3.) that, for the first thousand years of the church, there was nothing said of any compensation at all, except that the suffering death of Christ was a compensation paid to the devil; and (4.) that Anselm, at whom this notion of a compensation to God begins, only makes up an argument in which God’s violated honor is compensated by the obedience unto death of his incarnate Son, conceiving the fact of no compensation at all to God’s justice or the want of any—much as, in the previous chapter, I have shown what honor God has put upon the law-precept, by Christ’s obedience, and here upon the penalty, by his incarnate submission to the curse or the natural retributions of God. How much is left of the objection after a specification like this, I am not anxious to inquire.
2d Obj. That the view here advanced
will not satisfy the strong substitutional, or imputational phrases
applied to Christ in the scripture. Exactly contrary to
The case is one we can not parallel, but suppose—no matter if the like
was never heard of—that some state, An illustration of the
substitutive language. the Roman for example,
has contrived a prison for the punishment of public
malefactors, on the plan of an ordeal by Providence. The prison
is placed in the region of some deadly miasma, that we will say of the campagna; the design being to let every convict go free, after some
given numbers of years are passed; on the ground that, being still alive,
he must have learned to govern himself for so long a time, and is also
marked for life and liberty by the acceptance of Providence. The fell
poison of the atmosphere decimates, of course, the number of the prisoners,
almost every week. Finally it comes to the knowledge of a certain good
monk of the city, who has learned to follow his Master, that a notable
prisoner who, a long time ago, was his bitter private enemy,. begins
to show the working of the poison, and is giving way to the incipient
burnings of the fever. Whereupon the godly servant says “this man was
my enemy, and for Christ’s sake I must go to him, trying, if I can,
to save him.” Becoming thus the prisoner’s faithful nurse and attendant,
he is recovered and goes free, and the benefactor takes the infection
and dies. And now the rescued man throws out his soul on words, trying
vainly to express the inexpressible tenderness of his obligation. He
writes, and
If now we take the material of this and the two previous chapters, apart from any thought or proposed These law factors necessary, in the moral-power construction of the gospel. scheme of compensation for the release of punishment, we can not fail to see the immense importance and absolute integral necessity of it, in a gospel that proposes to quicken and spiritually restore the world. Not even the transcendent moral power over mankind, which Christ has obtained by his incarnate life and sacrifice, can have any sufficient sway, save as it is complemented, authenticated, and sharpened into cogency, by the sturdy law-work of these three chapters.
It is one of
the most remarkable facts in the history of christian doctrine, that
what the critical historians call the “moral view” of the atonement,
in distinction from the expiatory, has been so persistently attempted,
and so uniformly unsuccessful. The discouragements of failure appear
to signify nothing; still the attempt is renewed, age after age, as
if pushed on by some sublime fatality that can not be resisted. And
what shall we see in this sublime fatality, but the felt pressure of
truth, thrusting on attempts to issue the truth in some right form?
What also shall we see in so great persistency under failure, but a
pledge of final success? And we are the more confident of this, in the
revision of these three chapters, that we are able so
The one fatal defect that vitiates all such
conceptions and puts them under a doom of failure is that they make
up a gospel which has no law side of authority, penal enforcement,
rectoral justice; nothing to take hold of an evil mind at the point
of its indifference or averseness to good, nothing to impress conviction,
or shake the confidence, or stop the boldness of transgression. Doubtless
it is something great, a wonderful and chief
In all
which we have, according to the conception of Christ himself, what exactly
corresponds to the matter of these three rugged chapters of government.
Expecting, as he does, to draw all men, by the captivating love and
grace of his sacrifice, he has no such thought as that the moral power
of his life will do any thing by itself. There must be law, conviction,
judgment, fear, taking hold of natures dead to love, and by this necessary
first effect, preparing a way for love. No effective and firm hold of
the world as world, does he even hope to get, save as he breaks the
shell of the world’s audacity and blunted feeling, by these piercing
rigors of conviction—doing visibly and suffering all that he does and suffers,
in a way to honor the precept, enforce the penalty, and sanctify the justice of
law; the precept as right, the penalty as righteous, the justice as the
AND yet the great Moral Power obtained
by Christ for the reconciliation of men to God, fortified and buttressed
by these vigorous law-factors of which I have been speaking, is obviously
still no absolute or complete power, as regards the result proposed.
No moral power ever goes to its mark in that way. The force or fiat-power
of God strikes directly through, by its own cogency, but his moral power
works only by inducement; that is, by impressions, or attractions that
may be resisted; for it is not one of the possibilities, Moral power
supposes the consent of faith. that character should be struck out, by any exterior
action that does not act through choice or faith, in
the subject. That would be not only a miracle, but a morally absurd
miracle. Moral power therefore, acting by itself, always falls inevitably
short of the result proposed, appearing thus, in one view, to be scarcely
any real power at all. The grandest, most ineffable kind of power—in
Christ a glory most visibly divine or deific—it still bears a look of
insufficiency, whenever it moves on a moral nature that will not suffer
it to be sufficient. But where it wins consent, or faith, it is not
so; there it is visibly,
And this, if I am right, is the very greatest thing done below the stars, evincing the greatest power. The subject is reconnected herein with the divine nature, atoned, reconciled with God, transformed by the inward touch of God’s feeling and character. This, if any thing, is power, the power of God unto salvation. Only it is by the supposition a salvation by faith. Winning faith, it works by the faith it wins; and so, being trusted in, it makes the trust a new footing of life and character.
Now it is this new footing of faith,
or salvation by faith, which the New Testament Scriptures call Justification
by Faith. Not that men Justification by faith is the result
proposed. were never
justified by faith before—they were never justified in any
other way, never saved on any other footing. The Old Testament saints,
and as truly the outside saints, of whom I believe there have been many
besides Jethro and Job and Cornelius, were all justified by faith. They
were such as, not knowing Christ, trusted themselves practically
Holding this view of Christ
and his gospel, we can see beforehand, that justification by faith will
even be a principal matter of Christianity; and Practical faith
and church opinion may not wholly coincide. then it will not be strange,
if some should glorify it more
as an idol of dogmatic opinion, and others
more as a footing of grace and divine liberty. It will be dear to many,
living in their heads and supervising the gospel as thinkers, because
it is the articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae; but a great deal
more dear, to a much greater number, as the point where Jesus practically
meets their want, and becomes a new celestial confidence in their faith.
What however it means, may not be very exactly understood or agreed,
between those who prize it as a church article, and those who value
it as the new
The single text of Scripture at which the
doctrine begins, and in which, we may almost say that it ends,
The principal text discussed. though hundreds of other passages bring in their consenting
evidence, is the much debated testimony of Paul
The first clause of the passage, relating to propitiation, will be considered more properly in another chapter. At present, our concern is to settle the true meaning of the remaining part, relating to the righteousness of God, and the dispensation of his justifying mercy.
The mere English
reader will not know, that the three words here occurring, righteousness,
just, and justifier of—The three words all of
one family.noun, adjective, and participle—are all words of the same root in the original,
and, of course, are as closely related in meaning,
Still no very great detriment will be suffered, if due care is taken always to understand the words just and justify as having, like the word righteousness that precedes them, a purely moral significance—that God is just, as being righteous, and justifies, simply as communicating his own character and becoming a righteousness upon us. Unhappily this caution is not observed by theologians, and these two words are construed very commonly by them, under the judicial analogies; as if there were a fixed attribute in God called his justice, which is immutably set for the vindication of right, and the redress of wrong, by deserved punishments. “That he might be just” therefore “and the justifier,” is taken as if there were some adversative relation between the clauses, or as if it read “just and yet the justifier” &c.—Christ having so exactly satisfied the immutable justice, by his sufferings, that God appears to be just as ever, even though he justifies, or passes judgment in favor of, those who deserve nothing but punishment.
It will be seen accordingly that a right view of Christian justification will depend, to a great extent, on a proper and true understanding of the three staple words referred to. I propose therefore at the outset, and before offering any construction of the passage in question, to pause on the words themselves, and show, by a sufficiently careful investigation, what is their true meaning.
The Old Testament has two words, one a moral and
It may readily be seen that,
out of this causative or Hiphil use, there will be a sliding naturally
into the idea of passing as righteous; because, in that, we only make
righteous to ourselves; and then this passing as righteous will have
a certain look of justifying judicially, in the sense of acquittal. “He is near
that justifieth me, who will contend with me?”
We come now to the Greek word of the New
Testament, the same which is translated righteousness, just, and justify,
in the particular passage I How they stand in the New
Testament. am debating. Here we find the noun [δικαιοσυνη]
always translated righteousness, never justice; for justice is a word which does not once occur
in the New Testament; the adjective [δικαιος,] translated about fifty
times righteous, and just in the moral sense (“condemned and killed
the just”)
I
ought perhaps to note, in this connection, the very intensely, mysteriously
moral impression held by such Uses and conceptions of
Plato. a writer as Plato, when
he speaks of right, or righteousness; or, if so he
is translated, of the just, or justice. “Justice,” he says, “is the
virtue of the soul, injustice its vice. The just
We come back thus upon the apostle’s great text of justification, to settle, if we can, the true construction of its meaning. And it could hardly The three words then, are moral not judicial. be more clear, I think, that none of the words here grouped together, righteousness, just, justifier of, are to receive a judicial, or judicially vindicative meaning; which, again, is but another form of the conclusion that, in Christian justification, there is no reference of thought whatever to the satisfaction of God’s retributive justice, or to any acquittal passed on guilty men, because the score of their account with God’s justice has been made even by the sufferings of Christ. The justification spoken of is a moral affair, related only to faith in the subject, and the righteousness of God, operative in or through his faith. In this conviction we shall be farther confirmed, if we take up each of the three co-relative words and follow them into their relational uses.
1. The righteousness of God. Many teachers appear to understand
this expression, in the particular case now in hand, as meaning, in
fact, the vindicatory justice of God. God declares his justice, they
conceive, in the penal sufferings of Christ, so that he can remit the
sins
2. That he might be just. Here it is often
conceived, that God must needs keep himself just, in men’s convictions;
The being
just not judicially meant. that is just in the judicial and vindicatory
sense, as the avenger of transgression, else he can not forgive,
or justify. The English word just occurs only twice in the New Testament,
in this retributive and judicial sense, where it translates, not δικαιος,
the moral word, but ενδικος, a word always retributive.
3. And the justifier of. Here we have
the causative mood of the Old Testament word reappearing in the
The justifying not judicial. New. And there is no example, that I know,
where it carries a judicial meaning though there is, of course, a large
variety of meaning in the uses. When it is declared that men shall “justify
God,” it certainly does not mean the same thing as when God is said “to justify the ungodly;” and yet there is a closer approach of meaning,
in the two cases, than might, at first, be supposed. When men justify
God, they pass him righteous, and when God justifies the ungodly, he
passes them righteous—only he becomes, besides, the righteousness upon
them that makes it true. The justification is purely moral in the first
case, because no justification but a moral one is here possible; and
that, in the second, there is no thought of a judicial acquittal, on
account of penal compensations paid by Christ, will be most conclusively
shown from the fact that the common uses of the word so plainly relate
to what is moral only. Thus it is declared, by our apostle, in the very
discussion we are having in review, that Abraham “believed God and it was
counted unto him for righteousness;”
Having now these three
main points of the apostle’s language made out and established, in a
manner that leaves no room for dispute, we need also The “declaring” and the
“remission” explained. to notice, in a very brief manner, two or three of
the subordinate points which affect the general meaning. The expression “to declare,”
is rather insufficient. The original, very forcible expression is, “for the in-showing”
[ενδειξιν,] that is,
“for producing an effective impression of, the righteousness of God.”
For every thing, as regards a justifying effect depends, it will be
seen, on the powerful demonstration made of God’s righteousness, in
the incarnate life and death of Christ. It appears to be a matter of
doubt, with the commentators, whether the phrase, “through the forbearance
of God,” is to be connected with the participial clause, “that are past,”
or with the clause, “for the remission.” But the participle, “that are
past,” does not mean “that are passed by,” but only “that took place
in past time.” To conceive, therefore, that the sins took place, by
the forbearance of God, is too weak to be a true conjunction. Say, instead, “for the remission, by God’s forbearance, of sins in the ages
We read the whole passage then as follows—“To declare [that is, demonstrate, inwardly impress] his righteousness, for the remission, by God’s forbearance, The true version. of sins heretofore committed; to declare [demonstrate,] I say, for this present time, his righteousness, that he might be righteous [stand full before us in the evident glory of his righteousness] and the justifier [righteousser] of him that believeth in Jesus.”
If any apology is necessary for using again this very
ungrammatical, mock-English substitute for the word “justifier,” it must be that, without some
Catholic and Protestant versions both considered.
such device, I do not see in what way I can steer
my exposition exactly enough, through the close and perilous
strait between the Catholic doctrine on one hand, and the Protestant
on the other, to avoid an appearance of lapsing in this or that—when
both, in fact, are only unsuccessful attempts to exhibit the true gospel
idea. The Catholic says, “making righteous;” the Protestant says, “declaring to
be righteous;” neither of which is the exact conception of Christian
justification. The Christian is not a man made righteous in himself, or in his
own habit; neither is he a man held to be righteous, when he is not, by what is
called a “declaratio pro justo;” for
In this careful exposition of what may be called the charter text of Christian justification, two points have been held in reserve for separate consideration; viz.. the righteousness of God as related to justification; and the relation we ourselves have to God’s righteousness, in the faith by which we are justified.
I. The righteousness of God as related to justification. The apostle, as we have already observed, makes much of the in-showing, or felt impression produced, of the righteousness of God; The Righteousness of God as related to justification. repeating, for the sake of emphasis—“to declare”—“to declare, I say, the righteousness of God”—first “for the remission of sins,” and next “for the justifying,” or righteoussing of sinners; evidently conceiving that, in the declaration, or impression made [ενδειξιν] of God’s righteousness, lies all the principal value of his work.
According to the common conception, his declaration of the righteousness of God prepares a ground of remission, or a ground of justification; and in Christ not a ground, but a power, of justification. that sense Christ obtains, by his death, the grace of remission, or of justification. Perhaps we shall find reason to believe, that Christ is a great deal more to us than a ground; viz., a power of the same things—in such sense a power that, if they were not wrought by him, they would never, in fact, be, at whatever cost of grounding they obtain a right to be.
The very light notions prevalent concerning remission,
or forgiveness, and especially in connection with the idea that Christ
is concerned to prepare Light notions of remission. a ground of remission, make
it necessary to revise our impressions at this point. It
is a rather common question, whether God could forgive sins on the ground
of our mere repentance, without any ground of compensation made to his
justice? But if he
What then is remission more sufficiently conceived?
The word, both in Greek and English, is a popular word, which signifies,
in common speech, a letting go; that is, a letting go of blame, a consenting
to raise no impeachment farther and to have all wounded feeling dismissed.
But though God accommodates our understanding, in the use of this rather
superficial word, we can easily see, as I have already intimated in
another place, that his relations to a sinning soul under his government,
taken hold of, as it is already, by the retributive causes arrayed in
nature itself for the punishment of transgression, are so different
from those of a man to a wrong doing fellow man, that a mere letting
go, or consenting no longer to blame, really accomplishes nothing as
regards the practical release of sin. It is only a kind of formality,
or verbal discharge, that carries practically no discharge at all. It
says “go” but leaves the prison doors shut.
We ought to be sure beforehand, that the Scripture will not leave the matter here, but will somehow man age to strike a deeper key. And we find, Three conceptions held by the Scripture. as we go into the inquiry, that we have, at least, three distinct forms of expression given us, to accommodate our uses, according to the particular mode of thought by which we are, or are to be, exercised.
Thus, if we are thinking of God’s displeasure, or his feeling of blame, we have the word “remission,” that speaks of releasing the blame; and we often use the much deeper word forgiveness in the same superficial sense.
If, again, we think of our sin as a state of moral incapacity
and corruption, fastened upon us by the retributive causes which our
sin has provoked, we are allowed to speak of “forgiveness” as the “taking away” of our sin; just as we may of being
“healed,” “washed,” “reconciled,” “delivered,” “turned away,” “made free.” Here we conceive
that God is able, in the declaration of his righteousness, to get such
a hold of the souls that are sweltering in disorder, under the natural
effects of transgression, as to bring them out of their disorder into
righteousness. By his moral power, which
If, again,
we think of something higher and more sovereign, even than this executed
release; if we want to get above all the condemnations of statutes,
and the severe motivities or enforcements of instituted government itself;
if we raise our thought, with a certain divine envy, to God, longing
to be as little hampered as He, by fears and requirements and bad liabilities;
then it is given us to know that we are “justified”—made and kept righteous,
by the righteousness of God upon us, and reigning as a Divine Moral
Power in us. And
Christian justification
has, in this view, no reference whatever to justice under the political
analogies, or to any compensation of justice. As respects Justification has
no reference to justice. the full, round conception of it, an immense
advantage is gained by the distinction I have drawn, between the
law before government, and the instituted government by which God undertakes
the maintenance of it, and our final restoration to it. The righteousness
of God is what God was, before the eternal, necessary law of his own
nature,
This is justification with a meaning, and it is only
But if justifying faith has no respect to the fact that justice is satisfied, then it will be objected that the liabilities of justice still remain. Undoubtedly Objected that the liabilities of justice still remain. they do, if by liabilities we mean the dues of justice; and our dues would be exactly the same if a ground of release were provided in the pains of another. That ground provided would not make the dues of penalty any the less due, in justice, from us. The objection here is created by an assumption that there is no deliverance from the claims of justice, save as they are legally compensated. What has been said of justice and penalty, in the four previous chapters, will sufficiently show the contrary. Besides, no soul that has felt the righteoussing power of God, and been raised to a conscious participation of his righteousness—set in His confidence, let forth unto His liberty—will assuredly want any other evidence.
Another kind of objection will occur to many; viz., that the righteousness of God is too severe and stern to have, when declared, any such attractive Another objection that righteousness condemns and repels. power over souls that are in wrong, and is most of all unfitted to become a new-creating force in their life. Such persons have been somehow accustomed to think of God’s righteousness, as being one and the same thing with his justice, and their associations correspond. Instead of blessing themselves, and counting all souls blessed, in the fact that God is everlastingly right, having all the benignities, fidelities, integrities, and supreme glories of a perfect righteousness, they speak of it as being an appalling character, one that creates inevitable dread and revulsion; setting it forth in terrorem, not seldom, as a hard and fateful rigor opposite to love. Whereas righteousness, translated into a word of the affections, is love, and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness. We associate a more fixed exactness, it may be, and a stronger thunder of majesty with righteousness, but there is no repugnance between it and the very love itself of Christ. When Christ thinking of his death and resurrection, says that he will convince the world, in that manner, of righteousness, does he mean that he will not also draw the world by love? or does he rather mean that, raising the conviction of righteousness, he will draw the more powerfully? Nowhere, in fact, do we feel such a sense of the righteousness of God, as we do in the dying scene of Christ—“Certainly this was a righteous man”—and we only feel the more powerfully that God is a forgiving God.
Indeed we have just the same opinion of righteousness in men—we only expect the more confidently to be forgiven, because the man we have injured is a righteous man. If I have an enemy who has done me a great personal wrong; if I can bring him to justice and make an example of him that will do much to honor the laws; if, too, I have a fire of natural indignation that, apart from all revenge, arms me against him and prepares me to see him suffer; shall I be false, therefore, to my own virtue, if I do not make him suffer? Calling this my instinct of justice, is it therefore a finality with me, beyond the control of reason and right? Is there no justice above justice, in which, as a righteous man, I am even bound to subordinate the lower ranges of vindictive impulse, and give myself tenderly to courses of patience and suffering sacrifice, that I may gain my enemy? Nay, if my vindicatory impulse should indeed assume to be my law, what can I do but call it a temptation of the devil, and betake myself to fasting if need be to subdue it?
Dismissing then all such false impressions,
and taking the righteousness of God no more as a preventive to mercy,
but as a ground of mercy rather, Justification restores the normal
state of being. we begin to see how
much it means that Christ, in becoming the moral
power of God in his sacrifice, becomes, in another,
but nowise contrary view, the righteousness of God declared. For in
the original normal state of being, the righteousness of God was to
be a power all diffusive, a central, self radiating orb—Sun itself of
Righteousness, shining
Hence the dismal incapacity of sin; because it separates the soul from God’s life-giving character and inspirations. Having Him no more, as the fontal source, of righteousness, it falls off into an abnormal, self-centered state, where it comes under fears, and legal enforcements, and judicial wrath, and struggles vainly, if at all, to keep its account even, or recover itself to its own ideals. Works of the law, dead works carefully piled, will-works, works of supererogation, penances, alms, austerities of self-mortification—none of these, nor all of them, make out the needed righteousness. Still there is a felt deficiency, which the apostle calls “a coming short of the glory of God.” Nothing will suffice for this, but to come back, finite to infinite, creature to Creator, and take derivatively what, in its nature, must be derivative; viz., the righteousness that was normally and forever to be, unto, and upon, all them that believe.
Here then is the grand
renewing office and aim of the gospel of Christ. He comes to men groping
in a state
When I speak
thus of the connection with God as being restored, by the sacrifice
of Christ, let me not be understood as meaning, by the sacrifice, only
what is tenderly sympathetic and submissive in Christ’s death. I include
all that is energetic, strong, and piercing; his warnings, his doctrines
of punishment and judgment, all that is done for the law before government,
by his powerful ministry and doctrine. His sacrifice is no mere suit
or plaint of weakness, for the righteousness of God is in it. When the
metallic ring of principle, or everlasting right, is heard in the agonies
and quakings of the cross, the sacrifice becomes itself a sword of conviction,
piercing irresistibly through the subject, and causing him to quiver, as it
were, on the point by which he is fastened. Mere sympathy, as we commonly speak,
II. The relation of faith to justification. Though the righteousness of God is declared and made to shine Faith how related to justification. with its true divine luster and glory by Christ, still the justification is not conceived to be an accomplished fact, as indeed it never can be, prior to faith in the subject. It is justification by faith and not without—“and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.” What is this faith, and why is it necessary?
It is not the belief that Christ has come to even our account with justice; neither is it the belief that he has obtained a surplus merit, which is offered, over and above, as a positive righteousness and set to our credit, if we will have it. Neither of the two is a fact, or at all credible any way. Neither would both, if believed as mere facts, do any thing more for us than a belief in any other facts. Our sins do not fly away because we believe in a fact of any kind. We can even believe in all the historic facts of Christianity, as thousands do, with. out being any the more truly justified.
No, the
real faith is this, and very little intelligence is required to see
the necessity of it; viz., the trusting of one’s self over, sinner to
Saviour, to be in him, and of him, and new charactered by him; because
it is only
Here it was that Luther broke into heaven, as it were, and a bewilderment of change that he could not, for the Luther’s great discovery of justification. time, understand. He had been trying to be justified by works; that is, by fastings, penances, alms, vigils, wearing down the body under the load of his sins, and crying to God in his cell, day and night, for some deliverance that should ease the torment of his still and always self-condemning soul. A right word from Staupitz let him see the fool that he was—that Christ would take him because he was guilty; having died for him because he was guilty, and not because he was righteous. At that point broke in, what light and confidence! His emancipated soul burst off all its chains in a moment, and took, as it were, the range of heaven in its liberty. He was new himself, the world was new, the gospel was new. It had not entered into his heart to conceive the things that were freely given him of God, but now he has them all at once. Justification by faith, justification by faith—his great soul is full of it; he must preach it, he must fight for it, die for it, know nothing else.
In the inspiration of this truth it was, that his great
But this is not the first time, that the head of a great man has not
been equal even to the. understanding, or true interpretation, of his
heart. Indeed, nothing is more common, as a matter of fact, than for
men of real or even the highest intelligence, to so far misinterpret
their own experience in matters of religion, as to ascribe it to and
find it springing radically out of, that which has no sound verity,
and could never have produced such an experience. Let no one be surprised,
then, that Luther’s justification by faith, that which puts his soul
ringing with such an exultant and really sublime liberty, makes a plunge
so bewildering into bathos and general unreason, when it comes to be
affirmed theologically in his doctrine. As he had it in his Christian
consciousness, the soul of his joy, the rest of his confidence, the
enlargement of his gracious liberty,
I am well aware how insufficient this exposition of the great Christian truth, justification by faith, will be to many—to some, because it is a truth that can be sufficiently expounded, by nothing but a living experience of its power; to others, because they have already learned to find their experience in words and forms of doctrine, by which it is poorly, or even falsely represented. What questions the view presented will encounter, especially from this latter class, I very well know, and will therefore bring the subject to a conclusion by answering a few of them.
Do we not then, by holding
a view of justification so
There is indeed no objection to saying that, in a certain general way, they are one—just as faith is one with love, and love with regeneration, and this with genuine repentance, and all good states with all others. The same divine life or quickening of God is: supposed in every sort of holy exercise, and the different names we give it represent real and important differences of meaning, accordingly as we consider the new life quickened’ in relation to our own agency, or to God’s, or to means accepted, trusts reposed, or effects wrought. In the same way, justification is sanctification, and both are faith; and yet their difference is by no means annihilated.
Another question
likely to be raised in the way of
The theologic
fiction more fully stated appears to have been something like this:
that Christ, taken simply as a man, was under. all the obligations that
belong to a man; therefore that he was only righteous as he should be
in fulfilling those obligations, and had no righteousness to spare;
but that, as being the God-man, he was under no such obligations; whence
it resulted that, by his twofold obedience, passive and active, he gained
two kinds of surplus righteousness; a passive to stand in the place
of our punishment and be a complete satisfaction for it, and an active
to be set to our account as being our positive obedience—both received
by imputation. And so we are justified and saved by a double imputed
righteousness, one to be our suffered penalty, the other to be such
an obedience for us as will put us even with the precept of the law.
It is even a sad office to recite the scholastic jingle of such a scheme,
The experimental, never-to-be antiquated, Scripture truth of imputed
righteousness, on the other hand, is this:—That the soul, when it is
gained to faith, is
We have this imputation also in another form that
is equally natural and practical. Thus, instead of having our faith
imputed unto us for righteousness, We also to have our
righteousness putatively in God. we ourselves teach our faith to locate all our righteousness putatively
in God; saying “The Lord our righteousness,” “Christ
who is our life,” “made unto us righteousness;” as if the stock of our
virtue, or holiness, were laid up for us in God. All the hope of our character
that is to be we place, not in the inherent good we are to work out, or become
in ourselves, but in the capital: stock that is funded for us in Him. And then
the character, the righteousness, is the more dear to us, because it is to have
so high a spring; and God is the more dear to us,
It is no fault then of our doctrine of justification by faith, that it favors a notion of imputed righteousness; for in just this fact it is, that the gospel takes us out of the bondage of works into a really new divine liberty. Here, in fact, is the grand triumph of Christianity; viz., in the new style of righteousness inaugurated, which makes the footing even of a sinner good, and helps the striving bondman of duty to be free; even the righteousness of God that is by faith of Jesus Christ, unto all, and upon all them that believe. When this is anti. quated, just then also will salvation be.
BY the previous exposition, Christ is shown to be a Saviour, not as being a ground of justification, but as being the Moral Power of God upon us, so a power of salvation. His work terminates, not in the release of penalties by due compensation, but in the transformation of character, and the rescue, in that manner, of guilty men from the retributive causations provoked by their sin. He does not prepare the remission of sins in the sense of a mere letting go, but he executes the remission, by taking away the sins, and dispensing the justification of life. This one word Life is the condensed import of all that he is, or undertakes to be.
In the unfolding of this view, I have not overlooked, or at
all neglected, the representations of Scripture; every thing advanced has been
carefully supported and fortified by ample citations, fairly and reverently, but
not always traditionally interpreted. Some, however, may be disappointed, or
perhaps offended, by the slight attention I have paid thus far to a large class
of phrases and figures derived from the ceremonial law and the uses of the
altar, and brought over, by a second application, to express the practical
verities of the cross.
I propose therefore, in this and the next following chapter, to ascertain, if possible, their precise Christian The sacrificial terms and their interpretation. meaning, and exhibit their true relation to the doctrine of Christ, as expounded in the preceding pages. I undertake this inquiry, not with a view to getting sanction for the opinions expressed, but in the conviction rather, that a great part of the misconceptions and doctrinal crudities that have been the world’s affliction, in this greatest of all matters given to knowledge, have been due to certain hasty, half-investigated impressions, and a kind of traditional charlatanry of dogmatism that have thrown these ritual terms and figures out their proper and rightful meaning. Reserving to the next following chapter terms and questions more secondary in their import, I shall occupy the present chapter with a discussion of the primary terms sacrifice, and blood, and the lustral figures of cleansing and purifying—with which the secondary terms are blended, and by which, to a certain extent, they must be explicated.
The whole ground to be
covered is well represented, in a single passage from the Epistle to
the Hebrews—
If we speak thus of a “divinely
appointed relationship,” we impliedly assume that the sacrifices were
divinely appointed. There has been The Hebrew sacrifices,
how related to that of the gospel. much debate on this
question, even among Christian teachers themselves. The great Hebrew scholar, Spencer, maintains
the opinion that the Jewish sacrifices were established by Moses, in
a way of accommodation to the heathen sacrifices, in which his people
had been trained. Archbishop Tillotson goes still beyond him, admitting that
even the Christian sacrifice is an act of accommodation to the prejudices and
superstitions of the pagan nations. It will not be denied, or should not be,
that pagan nations, all pagan nations, have been ready somehow to erect altars
and make suit to their gods by sacrifices. This standing confession of guilt and
apostasy from God is about as nearly universal as dress, or food, or society.
But the remarkable
By a most learned and thorough canvassing of proofs, Dr.
Magee
But supposing the Hebrew sacrifices not to have
Sacrifices then are not the mere spontaneous contrivances of men,
but the contrivances of men whose contrivings are impelled and guided
and fashioned by God—just as truly appointed by God, as if they were
ordered by some vocal utterance from heaven. They relate, in fact, to
all God’s future in the kingdom of his Son, and are as truly necessary,
it may be, to that future as the incarnation itself. Nay, they are themselves
a kind of incarnation before the time. Assuming thus a clearly divine
origin for them, we go on to consider
Thus it is maintained extensively, that we are to get our conceptions of the old sacrifices from the sacrifice of Christ, taking them as shadows cast Not to be interpreted by the sacrifice of Christ. backward from the sun. But this is very much like assuming, that we are to get our notions of the heart, as a physical organ, from our understanding of the heart as the seat of spiritual life; or to get our notions of a straight line from our understanding of right, or rectitude. We invert the order of nature in this manner, and reverse the whole process of language. The maxim, “first that which is natural, afterwards that is spiritual,” we turn quite about, and instead of conceiving that physical things are given to be the bases of words, or word-figures representing spiritual truths, we say that the physical objects were fashioned after the ideas, after the figures, to be coarser substances correspondent with the spiritual realities represented by them. If we know any thing, we know that the whole process of generation in language runs the other way, and that the figures come after the facts, the higher spiritual meanings after, and out of, the physical roots on which they grow.
It
is very true that God, in creating the outward forms of things, has
a reference of forecast to the uses they will serve as forms of thought
and spirit; a reference,
Clearly no such method of interpretation is admissible. We can not
construe meanings backward, but we must follow them out in that progressive
way, in which they are prepared. If we are to understand the sacrifices,
we must take them in their outward forms, and in the meaning they had
to the people that used them, just as we take all the physical roots
of language; and then, having found what they were in that first stage
of use, we must go on to conceive what Christ
We have another inversion of
time and order equally mistaken, when it is maintained that the sacrifices
were given to be types, to the worshipers that used them, of Christ
and his death Not given to the worshipers to be types to
them of Christ. as a ground of forgiveness for sins. They are certainly
“types,” “shadows,” when
looked back upon by us, of good things that were to come; but it does
not follow that they were either types, or shadows, or any thing but
simple facts of knowledge and practical observance, to the people who
were in them. Nor is there any the least probability that, in using
them, they were taking a gospel by forecast. There is no lisp of any
such impression in the sentiments they express, either at, or about,
their sacrificial worship. The prophets themselves could as little understand “what,” as
“what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ that was in them did
signify,” when testifying of the Messiah to come. Not even Christ’s own
disciples, instructed by his teachings for three whole years, had any conception
at all, or even suspicion, of the appointed correspondence between his suffering
life and death and the sacrifices of the law, until the descent of the Spirit,
after his death, gave them discernment of such a correspondence. Is it then to
be conceived, that these sensuous, simple-minded, first men of the world
outreached all their prophets, and even the carefully taught hearers of Jesus,
and got their salvation at the sacrifice of lambs and bullocks, by embracing a
Christ
This also was too nearly true of all the immense type-learning that once figured so conspicuously in the Scripture interpretations of this and And yet even necessary as types of Christian language. other subjects. It is very true that the ancient sacrifices were, and were given to be, types of the higher sacrifice of Christ. Not, however, in the sense that they were such to the worshipers in them, but in that common, widely general, always rational sense, that all physical objects and relations, taken up as roots of language, are types and are designed to be, of the spiritual meanings to be figured by them, or built into spiritual words upon them—the physical heart to be the radical image and name of the spiritual disposition, good or bad; the straight line [rectus, right] to be the natural word-type of duty and righteousness. A type is, in this view, a natural analogon, or figure, of some mental, or spiritual idea; a thing in form, to represent, and be the name of, what is out of all physical conditions, and therefore has no form. And the outward world itself is a grand natural furniture of typology, out of which the matters of thought, feeling, unseen being, unseen states and worlds of being, are always getting, and to get, their nomenclature.
In this sense the ancient sacrifices
were, no doubt, appointed to be types of the higher sacrifice; visible
forms, or analogies that, when the time is come, will serve as figures,
or bases of words, to express and bring into familiar use, the sublime
facts and world-renewing mysteries of the incarnate life and suffering
death of Jesus. There were no types in nature, out of which, as roots,
the words could grow, that. would signify a matter so entirely supernatural,
as the gracious work and the incarnate mystery of Christ. The only way,
therefore, to get a language for him at all, was to prepare it artificially;
and the ancient ritual of sacrifice appears to have been appointed,
partly for this purpose. It had other uses for the men who were in it,
but the analogical relation between it and the supernatural grace of
Christ, hereafter to be represented in the terms it is preparing, is
one that reveals a positive contrivance. We discover in it, both the
strictly divine origin of the sacrifices, and that they were appointed,
quite as much for the ulterior, higher uses to be made of them, (which
no man would even conceive for ages to come,) as for the particular,
immediate, benefit of the worshipers in them. An apostle speaks of them,
it is true, as “the example and shadow of heavenly things,”
There is, then, we perceive, an inherent appointed relationship between the ancient sacrifices and the sacrifice What meaning had they to the worshipers? of Christ, such that we shall come into the true sense of what is meant by his sacrifice, offering, blood, only by an accurate and careful discovery of the meaning, and use, and power, and historic associations of the ancient sacrifices. What then did these sacrifices signify? what were they appointed to do, for the persons who accepted and observed them as the cultus of their religion?
When we set ourselves
to answer this question, we are met by two very common assumptions,
or teachings, They made nothing of the pain of the victims. that only misdirect our search, and throw us out of the true line of discovery.
Thus a great deal is made, by many, of the fact that the animal is slain
for the sacrifice—thrust down into death, it is conceived, in the worshiper’s
place. Quite as much also is made, or even more, of the fact that the
animal suffers pain in dying; and thus is an offering of so much pain
to God,
As to the latter, the pain of dying, it is no light and trivial way of answer, to say that, if the pain of the animal was any such principal thing, then there was no need of any thing farther. To burn the flesh and sprinkle the blood were of no consequence, if the sacrifice was already complete. Offering the flesh in smoke was nothing, if only the pain was offered; for there was no pain in the dead victim. Even supposing the pain to be valuable to the worshiper in a way of expression, the expression is complete, as soon as the victim is dead. What is wanted therefore is the killing of the animal, which requires no special ceremony.
Furthermore
it is, to say the least, a very singular thing, if so much of the power
and significance of the sacrifices lies in the death and the dying pains
of the animals, that no single worshiper of the old -dispensation, ever
has a word to say of these animal dyings and pains of dying, drops no word of
sympathy for the victims, or of sympathetic relenting for sin on their account,
testifies no sorrow, witnesses to no sense of compunction, because of the
impressions made on him, by the hard fortune they are compelled to suffer. I
recollect no single instance in the whole Scripture, where the faintest
intimation of this kind appears; and yet, by
Besides, it is also another fault in all such representations of the mode of what is called atonement by sacrifice, Had no tender sympathy for the victims. that they suppose a tenderness of feeling, as regards the death and suffering of animals, which this people had as little of as every pastoral people must; that is, very nearly none at all. They lived, every day of their lives, on the animals killed in the morning at the tent door. Every woman, every child, looked on at the butchering and grew up in the most familiar habit of seeing life taken; nor was any thing more common than for women, or even for quite young children, to kill and dress a lamb, or a kid, with their own hands. And yet their sacrifice of atonement, it is conceived, is going to have its effect, by the impressions of death and dying pain it wakens in their delicate sensibilities! The fictitiousness of such conceptions is quite too evident.
Moreover it is a great point in the observance of these rites that the animal shall be the first born of its The choice quality of the animal signified more. dam; a male without spot or blemish. But why, on what principle, if the chief value of the sacrifice depends on the death and dying pains of the animal? Would not any other, a third born, a female, or a lame or blemished animal, die as convulsively and suffer as much?
It is also
a very significant objection to these constructions of sacrifice, that,
when two goats are brought
Excluding now these unsupported and really forced constructions of the sacrifices, the question returns, what, in positive reality, were they? Ordained to be a liturgy. wherein lay their use and value? They were appointed, I answer, to be the liturgy of their religion; or, more exactly, of their guilt and repentance before God as a reconciling God—not a verbal liturgy, but a transactional, having its power and value, not in any thing said, taught, reasoned, but in what is done by the worshiper, and before and for him, in the transaction of the rite.
The people, it must be conceived, have not
yet come to the age of reflection. They know nothing about piety, or
religious experience, as reflectively defined, preached,
This transactional liturgy, taken as a divine institute, is a contrivance of wonderful skill. Considered as in Their fine adaptation as a transactional liturgy. reference to the capacities of the worshipers, and also to results of repentance for sin and newness of life, it displays a wisdom really divine. It begins at a point or base note of action, that, so far as I can recollect, is wholly unknown to the cultus, or the sacrifices, of any heathen religion. Moving on results of purity, or purification from sin, it supposes impurity, and lays this down as a fundamental figure, in what may be called the footing of ceremonial uncleanness. Then the problem is to cleanse, or hallow the unclean.
There is no definition of the uncleanness; for the time of definition has not come. Every thing stands, thus far, on the basis of positive institution. Implicit meaning of the unclean state. Every priest is unclean, till he is cleansed; every place, till it is hallowed. On the great day of atonement, every body is unclean, and the general mass of the people go up thus every year to Jerusalem in caravans, at the greatest inconvenience and with much expense, to be cleansed of their defilement by sacrifice. How far they distinguish in idea this moral kind of uncleanness, from that of their legal appointments, we do not know. Perhaps they do not very soon raise the question of such a distinction. This only they know, that whoever touches a dead body is unclean, and the house in which he dies; that the leper is unclean; that whoever has any suppurative issue is unclean; that whoever touches, or eats an unclean animal, is unclean; that every vessel, dress, oven, defiled by such animals, makes unclean by the use. The specification is too long to be completed, and I only add that every person touching an unclean person is ipso facto unclean. Add also that, as the unholy can not approach unto God, so every unclean person is shut away from the temple, from society and house and table, put under quarantine as regards every body else, and every body else under embargo as regards him, producing a state of revulsion and of general torment that is, in the highest degree, uncomfortable.
Upon this now as a basis,
is erected the liturgy of sacrifice and blood as a positive institution.
It terminates
So it was with
these men of the first, most unreflective ages, exercised in this kind
of worship. By and by, as a reflective habit gets to be a little
Conceptions
more and more spiritual thus matured. unfolded, a kind of chiding, or rebuke of heartlessness begins to be heard in certain quarters, as if
men could think to carry God’s favor by bullocks and goats and blood!
Still farther on, one, or another will be heard crying out in the depth
of his guiltiness, and quitting all sacrifice in despair of it, “Create
in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Then
the prophets will begin to rebuke the multitude of sacrifices, as a
wretched imposture and offense to God, and to prophesy the complete
ending of this old covenant of forms, and the establishment of God’s
new covenant, by the
Having sketched
this outline of the sacrificial history, in its stages of progress and
its final culmination, we go back now to the simple first stage of
How
the sacrifices get their power. the liturgy, and look into the scheme of it,
inquiring how it is to get its power? Not by the death of the
victim, we have seen; there is nothing said of the death as having any
significance, and there is really not care enough felt for it to give
it any. Not by the pain of the victim; nothing is made of that, and
nothing is farther off from the worshiper’s thought, than to have so
much as a serious feeling about it. Not by the satisfaction for sin,
or the satisfaction of God’s justice; nothing is said either of satisfaction,
or of justice, as there could not be when nothing is made either of
the pain, or the dying. Not by the substitution made of the victim,
given up to suffer in the worshiper’s place; for if nothing is made
of the suffering of the victim, nothing could be made of a substitution
of that suffering. A certain symbolic substitution, or substitution
for significance’s sake, is made, when sins are confessed on the head
of the offering, and just the same is made on the head of the scape-goat,
even more formally, when he is driven off alive, to signify
Excluding now these negatives, the question returns,
whence comes the liturgic value and power of the sacrifice on the feeling
of the worshiper? First of all there is a certain expense and pains-taking
incurred by him, in providing the victim and in making a journey, commonly
toilsome, and consuming many days’ time to get his offering duly made.
Secondly, it is another matter which enters the more deeply into his
feeling, that he chooses reverently a fine, fair, first-born animal,
that he may give his best to God and that which he most values. Thirdly,
when he comes to the altar, before that mysteriously veiled, invisible
recess where Jehovah dwells, he puts his hands on the head of the victim,
or the priest does it for him, and confesses his sin; going away absolved,
as one made clean. Fourthly, it contributes immensely to the power and
impressiveness of the transaction, that the blood which figures so largely
in it, sprinkled and poured and touched upon this and that place to
sanctify the altar and the priest, has been previously invested with
an artificial sacredness for this very purpose. No one, even from the
earliest beginnings of sacrifice, has been permitted to eat blood, and
Moses reenacts the law, under which he makes it even a capital offense,
like blasphemy or sacrilege—“For the life of the flesh is in the blood,
and I have given it to you upon the altar, to make an atonement for
your souls; for it is the blood that maketh
Here then is the grand terminal of all sacrifice; taken as a
liturgy, it is issued in a making clean; it purges, washes, sprinkles, purifies,
sanctifies, The effect is to be lustral only.
carries away pollution, in that sense, absolves the guilty. Calling it a making
of atonement for this, or that place, or person, it is in the result a making
clean—“the priest shall make atonement for her and she shall be clean;”
In what sense a sacrifice?—this now is the principal question whose answer we seek, and are ready to give. In what sense Christ is a sacrifice. Here, of course, all the exclusions just made are to be repeated—his pains have no value as pains, or his dying as death; he does not satisfy God’s justice; he is not legally substituted in our place. There was nothing of this nature in the sacrifices and, when he becomes a sacrifice for sin, there should not be in his.
A good
proximate and general answer to the question, in what sense a sacrifice?
is this: that he fulfilled Not a literal sacrifice but
more. the analogy of the ancient sacrifice; serving like uses, only in a highe key,
and in a more perfect manner, with a more complete lustral effect. It
has been a question, much discussed, whether Christ is a literal, or
figurative sacrifice, and the latter conception has been repelled, with
Here, accordingly, it was that God displayed his skill, in adjusting the forms of the altar, and all the solemn A nomenclature for the gospel. externalities of the ritual service. They were not only to be a liturgy for the time then present, but they were to prepare new bases of words not existing in nature, and so a new nomenclature of figures for the sacrifice of his Son. And it took even many centuries to get the figures ready, clothed with fit associations, wrought into fit impressions, worn into use and finally almost into disuse, by the weary, unsatisfied feeling that is half ready and longing for something beyond them—all this it required, to get a language made that was at all competent to express the perfectly transcendental, supernatural, otherwise never imagined or conceived fact of divine suffering and vicarious sacrifice in God. Now the central figure, in this new language for the cross, is sacrifice; a word as much more significant when applied to Christ, than when applied to the altar ceremony, as the Lamb of God signifies more than a lamb. Other words and images come along in the same train, which also belong to the altar and the old transactional liturgy of the temple, and. Christ emerges on the world through them all, as by a kind of Epistle to the Hebrews, himself the full discovered love and vicariously burdened sorrow—the cross that was hid in God’s nature even from eternal ages. In this view he does not begin to be the real and true sacrifice, till he goes above all the literalities of sacrifice, and becomes the fulfillment of their meaning as figures.
However this may be, it is sufficiently plain that he
In this exposition a certain discoverable
analogy is supposed, between what was done, or suffered by Christ, and
the offering of victims at the altar. No external correspondence
in the analogy, unless in the sacred blood. But there is no
shadow of resemblance in the external facts of Christ’s
death, unless it be in some slight
finger-marks of correspondence, such as the evangelist notes, when he
says, “that the Scripture should be fulfilled—A bone of him shall not
be broken.” And yet there is such a deep-set, grandly real, and wide-reaching
correspondence, that no man, fresh in the sentiments of the altar, could
well miss of it, or fail to be strangely impressed by it. Here is the
first-born, the unblemished beauty, the chaste Lamb of God—never came to mortal
eyes any such perfect one before. And the expense he makes, under his great
love-struggle and heavy burden
And so it comes to pass that Christ is continually set forth in the gospels and epistles of the New Testament, in the terms of sacrifice, because there is Christ called a sacrifice because of his lustral power. so great power in it for the soul; also in the fact, otherwise never conceived or brought down to mortal experience, that God’s eternal character has a cross in it, a sorrowing, heavily burdened mercy for his enemies, a winning and transforming power, which it is even their new-creation to feel. I can not go over all the sacrificial terms and expressions of the New Testament, or even the very deliberate exposition of whole chapters in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the correspondence, or analogy, between Christ and the ancient sacrifices, is carefully traced. I will only say, in general, that a very important oversight, in respect to all the altar phrases of the gospel, needs to be corrected. They are cited to prove atonement in the sense of satisfaction, or of an offering made to reconcile God. Hence there is nothing made of the lustral figures, that almost always go along with them; which, if they had any meaning given them, would conduct the mind straight in upon the conclusion, that Christ is offered, not to satisfy God, but to take away sin, to cleanse, purify, make alive and holy, the moral state of sinners.
Sometimes and not seldom the lustral
figures themselves, the very object of which, under the old ritual,
was to conduct the worshiper’s mind Abuses of Scripture
texts. the into a fit conception
of the result preparing in his sacrifice are taken
just as if they only meant
Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.
In this was manifested the love of God toward
us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world that
we might live through him.
The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth
us from all sin.
Who his own self bare our sins, in his own body on
the tree, that we, being dead to sin, should live unto righteousness;
by whose stripes ye are healed.
How much more shall the blood of Christ,
who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself, without spot, to God,
purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
Having
therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood
of Jesus, * * * Let us draw near, with a true heart, in full assurance
of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our
bodies washed with pure water.
And having made peace, through the blood
of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him I
say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven. And you that
were sometime alienated and enemies in your minds by wicked works, yet
now hath he reconciled, in the body of his flesh through death, to present
you holy, unblamable, and unreprovable in his sight.”
Unto him that loved us and washed us from our sins in his own
blood.
The charlatanism of interpretation—it is really one of the saddest chapters of our Christian history! And what a revelation of it have these poor texts to give, when released from their long captivity, and allowed to simply speak for themselves!—testifying, all, with glad consent, that Christ is our sacrifice, for the taking away of our sin, our quickening unto life. our cleansing and spiritual reconciliation with God.
There is still another class of figures generated casually, outside of the ritual; partly judicial, partly political and historical, partly commercial, and partly natural. The footing already gained by what we have shown respecting the divinely contrived symbols of the altar, makes it unnecessary to devote a distinct chapter to their consideration. It will be sufficient to give them a brief supplementary notice here.
The first class, the judicial, or seemingly
judicial, appears abundantly in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah—The
judicial figures. “stricken, smitten of God and afflicted;” 4t wounded
for our transgressions;” “bruised for our iniquities;” “the chastisement of our
peace was upon him;” “by his stripes we are healed;” “for the transgression of
my people was he stricken;” “it pleased the Lord to bruise
him.” These are all figures that refer, more or less clearly, to judicial and
penal processes; as if Christ, the subject, were somehow
Besides we have, here and there, a mark put in, which
indicates moral effect, and turns the meaning quite away from the understanding
of a literal punishment; as for example in the “peace” that follows
chastisement, and the healing that follows the stripes—“with his stripes
we are healed.” Furthermore, it would be a plain abuse of Scripture
to set one class of figures, in regard to a given subject, clashing
with another; and still more to set the mere chance symbols of a subject
directly against the deliberately contrived symbols prepared for it.
If, then, we find the altar symbols looking systematically,
And there is still less reason for this, in the fact that Christ, doing all for moral effect, did actually bear, as we have fully shown, the corporate curse and penal disorder of the world, in a way of renewing it; a fact in which all such judicial figures. are sufficiently met, though the curse was in no sense penal as against him.
The political and historical figures are such as grew out of the release of captives taken in war. Thus we Political and historic figures. have “redemption,” as a figure derived from the buying back of captives; and “ransom,” as the sum advanced for that object. Thus Christ, in offering himself for our deliverance, became our redemption, gave himself a ransom for us, or more briefly gave himself for us. Where, of course, the main idea signified, is our moral and spiritual emancipation from the bondage of evil; a result in the nature of moral effect, wholly coincident with the lustral figures of the ritual.
The commercial figures are to the same effect—“bought with a
price;” “purchased with his blood;”
The commercial figures. “forgive us our debts.” Whole theories of atonement
have been based on each of these analogies, and all the other symbols
of the New Testament have been compelled, how often, to submit themselves
to the regulative force of these analogies, taken virtually as the literalities
of the question.
The natural figures are such as death and life, “reconciled by the death;” “saved by his life;” “tasted death for every man;” “Christ who is The naturally significant figures. our life.” In all these figures, which are multiplied in a hundred shapes, and set in a hundred diverse combinations, moral effect is the always present and, in fact, only constant matter intended.
I will not pursue this exposition farther; for the reason that there is plainly no necessity for it. The general conclusion is, that all the Scripture symbols coincide, as nearly as may be, in the one ruling conception, that Christ is here in the world to be a power on character—to cleanse, to wash, to purify, to regenerate, new-create, make free, invest in the righteousness of God, the guilty souls of mankind. Beyond that nothing plainly is wanted, and therefore there is nothing to be found.
IN the previous chapter, a careful investigation was made of the use or purpose of the ancient sacrifices and rites of blood, and the endeavor was, to find by what means, or in what sense, Christ is called a sacrifice, and is represented as accomplishing so much by his blood. In this investigation I passed over certain much disputed points in the institution and the Christian doctrine of sacrifice, that, in settling first the more positive questions of practical use and meaning, we might not be distracted, or confused, by multiplicities too numerous to allow the distinct settlement of any thing. We come now to the much debated and difficult questions that range under the words atonement, expiation, propitiation. These are words pertaining secondarily to sacrifice, or to the effects of sacrifice, and are commonly set in such prominence, as to be words of principal figure, not only in the doctrine, but also in the preaching of the cross. Our investigation therefore of sacrifices and the Christian sacrifice will not be complete, or satisfactory, till these ruling words and ideas are ventilated by a careful discussion.
As regards the words themselves, it may
be well to note, in the first place, that the English word atonement
is entirely an Old Testament word, not Two ruling conceptions.
Atonement and Propitiation. occurring at all
in the translation of the New, except in a single instance;
But the subject thus atoned is not only covered or cleansed in himself, but he is figured as being put in a new relation with God, and God with him; and it is as if God were somehow changed towards him—newly inclined, mitigated, propitiated or made propitious. It resulted accordingly, that the Hebrew word to cover was very frequently translated in the Greek Septuagint, by a word that signifies to propitiate or make propitiation. And the same word occurs, in six instances in the New Testament, and under three grammatic forms; where it is translated, three times, “propitiation;” once, “to make reconciliation;” once, “be merciful;” and once, “mercy-seat;” the three latter examples having, of course, their fair equivalents, in the phrases, “make propitiation,” “be propitious,” and “seat of propitiation.”
We have then, two ruling conceptions of sacrifice, connected with, or resulting from, the figure of a sin Both conceptions miscolored by expiation. cover; one representing the effect in us, and the other an effect in God as related to us—reconciliation [at-one-ment,] and propitiation. I shall recur to them again, at the close of the chapter, to settle more exactly their relative import, when applied to the Christian sacrifice. Meantime, another very weighty matter demands our careful attention; viz., the question of expiation.
Both these terms, atonement
and propitiation, are turned from their true meaning, in our common
uses, by the false idea of expiation associated with them, or
The word expiation does not once occur in the Scripture. The idea is classical, not scriptural at all, but the word has been sliding into use by the Expiation not a word of the Scriptures but of the classics. christian disciples and teachers, and getting itself accepted interchangeably for such as belong to the Scripture, till it has come to be even a considerable test of orthodoxy. I do not object to it, however, because of its origin, but because of its incurable falsity. A new word applied to christian subjects is not, of course, to be condemned, because it is new. Neither is a pagan word to be always cast out. But a word both new and pagan, made staple as in application to an old, divinely ordered, staple institution of Scripture, like that of sacrifice, must be admitted, I think, to wear a suspicious look. It should certainly have been carefully questioned, before it was baptized, into the faith, as I very much fear it was not.
But the baptism is passed and we have the word upon us. The only matter left us for inquiry therefore, relates to ideas themselves, and I propose, that I may cover the whole ground of the subject, three questions,—
I. What is expiation?
II. Is it credible as a fact under the divine government?
III. Is there any such thing as expiation supposed in the Scripture sacrifices?
I. What
is expiation? It does not, I answer, simply signify the fact that
God is propitiated, but it brings in the pagan, or Latin idea (for it
is a Expiation is an evil given to buy the release of an
evil. Latin word,) that the sacrifice
offered softens God, or assuages the anger of God,
as being an evil, or pain, contributed to his offended feeling. That
Christ has fulfilled a mission of sacrifice, and become a reconciling
power on human character, has been abundantly shown. And this change
thus wrought in men, we shall also see, is the condition of a different
relationship on the part of God. But an expiatory sacrifice proposes
a settlement with God on a different footing; viz., that God is to be
propitiated, or gained over to a new relationship, by very different
means. The distinctive idea of expiation is that God is to have an evil
given him by consent, for an evil due by retribution. It throws in before
God or the gods some deprecatory evil, in the expectation that the wrath
may be softened or averted by it. The power of the expiation depends
not on the
Now it is in this particular idea of expiation, the giving an evil to
the gods, to obtain a release for other evils apprehended or actually
felt, that A pagan corruption of the Jewish
cultus. the sacrifices of all the heathen nations were radically distinguished from the Jewish or
Scripture sacrifices. And the pagan religions were corruptions plainly
enough, in this view, of the original, ante-Mosaic, ante-Jewish
cultus—superstitions
of degenerate brood, such as guilt, and fear, and the spurious motherhood
of ignorance, have it for their law to propagate. As repentance settles
into penance under this regimen of superstition, so the sacrifices settled
into expiations under the same. And the process only went a little farther,
when they fell, as they did the pagan world over, into the practice
of human sacrifices; for since the gods were to be gained by expiatory
evils, the greater the evil the more sure the favor; and therefore they
sometimes offered their captives, sometimes their sons and daughters,
sometimes their kings’ sons, and sometimes even their kings and queens
themselves; believing that in no other manner could they sufficiently
placate their envious and bloody deities.
It is a matter of justice I gladly admit, and, for the honor of the
gospel, I should even like to make the Expiation not so defined, yet
so understood. concession broader
still, that the advocates of Christian expiation do
not define it in the terms I have given. They do not seem
to have drawn their thoughts to any point close enough to yield a definition,
but only understand, in general, that when they speak of expiation,
they mean a bloody sacrifice. And yet they do mean, if we take their
whole mental content, something more; viz., just what I have described.
How we commonly use the term in other matters than religion, may be
seen, for example, when we say of a murderer who has been executed,
that he has expiated his crime; or of any
Having distinguished in this manner, what an expiation is, we proceed to inquire—
II. Whether expiations for sins, taken as defined, are admissible under the divine government?
And here I do not undertake to say that nothing can be asserted
under the word, which is worthy of respect and acceptance. Thus if a
sinner of mankind, oppressed with a sense of inward ill-desert and shame,
should seek out voluntarily some mode of expense, or pains taking,
If it is a mere feeling
in God which is to be placated by an expiatory sacrifice, then we have
to ask, is God such a being that, having a good mortgage title to pain
or suffering as against an offender, he will never let go the title
till he gets the pain-if not from him, then from some other? Such a
conception of God is simply shocking.
But the title to pain, as against offenders, it will be said is simply what is demanded of them by justice, Not demanded by justice or consistent with it. and what he, as the eternal guardian of justice, is as truly bound to inflict, as they to suffer. God therefore has no option, he can not release the foredoomed evils, or pains, save as they are substituted by compensative evils. But suppose it to be so, and that God, as ruler of the world, is bound to do by every man just as he deserves. What means this inflexible adherence to the point of 4esert, when, by the supposition, he is going to accept, in expiation, an evil not deserved? He is going, in fact, to overturn all relations of desert, by taking pains not deserved, to release pains that are. Is this justice? or is it the most complete and solemn abnegation possible of justice? To get a pain out of somebody, is not justice; nothing answers to that name, but the inexorable, undivertible, straight-aimed process of execution against the person of the wrong doer himself.
So
of punishment, regarded as the penalty ordained for the enforcement
of law, necessary to be enforced for the honor and due authority of
law. Doubtless if something better can be done, in given circumstances,
than to literally execute the penalty, something that will keep the
law on foot, clothe it with still higher authority, and make the dread
of its penalty felt as being
In the story of Zaleucus often referred to as an illustration, nothing is shown but a very sorry fraud practiced on the law. The father finding his Story of Zaleucus. son guilty of a crime, whose prescribed penalty in the law is that the malefactor shall have his eyes put out, contrives to get off his son with the loss of one eye, by consenting, in a most fond paternity, to lose one of his own eyes, in substitution for the other. But the law did not require, for its penalty, the loss of two eyes; it required the putting out of the two eyes of the transgressor; that is that he be reduced to blindness for the rest of his life. After all, this old historic myth, so often celebrated as an example of rigid and impartial justice, is only an example of bad law, or of a very tenderly parental sophistry enacted for the evasion of law.
Much better and more solidly true to law is Cromwell’s
It might also be urged
that, if expiation were a more feasible and better element than it is,
not derogatory Trinity rightly held, excludes expiation.
to the character of God, not incompatible with first principles of justice, not
a way of compensating law that takes away its most essential, highest moral
attribute as law; viz., the unalterable personality of its distributions—if, in
all these respects, it were a morally admissible and even wholesome conception,
still there is a difficulty in it, as far as the sacrifice of Christ is
concerned, which is insurmountable. If the gist of that sacrifice consists in
the fact, that Christ in atoning, or expiating sin by his death, offers the
simple endurance of so much evil or pain, we can not but ask who is Christ, in
all that gives significance to his life, but the incarnate Word of God’s
Holding now these very sufficient objections to the matter of expiation, or expiatory sacrifice, we should not expect to find it recognized in the Scriptures. Passing then to the question that remains, we inquire:
III. Is there any such thing as expiation contained, or supposed to be wrought in the Scripture sacrifices?
The common assumption is that the sin offerings of
I am able, after a most thorough and complete examination of the Scriptures to affirm with confidence, No trace of expiation in the Scriptures. that they exhibit no trace of expiation. I had supposed that the impression so generally prevalent must be well grounded, but my suspicions were awakened by observing one or two points where the impression failed, and was tempted thus to push the inquiry to its limit. That such an opinion has been so long and generally held of the Scripture sacrifices, I can only account for, in the manner already suggested; viz., that there is a natural tendency in all worthy ideas of religion to lapse into such as are unworthy—repentance, for example, into doing penance—that the sacrifices could easily be corrupted in this manner, and, in fact, were by all the pagan religions; and then that there was imported back into the constructions of holy Scripture, a notion of expiation, as pertaining to sacrifice, under the plausible but unsuspected sanction of classic uses and associations. Nothing could be more natural and it appears to be actually true. Indeed it is a common thing, even now, to illustrate the manner and supposed necessity of expiation for sin, by citations from Hesiod, Homer and other classic writers.
It is impossible, of course, in a discussion
of this nature, to go over a complete review of the whole series of
Scripture instances and uses, but the argument will
1. That Nothing made of the victim’s pains. nothing was made of the victim’s death, or pain of dying, in the ancient sacrifices, was sufficiently shown in the last previous chapter.
2. Expiations are always conspicuous in their meaning. No man could even raise a doubt of the expiatory object of the pagan sacrifices; no such Expiations ought to be palpable, and are not. doubt was ever entertained. In this view, if the scripture sacrifices do not show an expiatory meaning on their face and declare themselves unmistakably in that character, if it is a matter of rational doubt or debate, such doubt is a clear presumptive evidence that their object is somehow different.
3. The original of the word atone, or make atonement, In the Hebrew
scripture, carries no such idea of expiation. It simply speaks of covering,
or The atonements not expiations. making cover for sin, and is sufficiently answered by any thing which removes it, hides it from the sight, brings
into a state of reconciliation, where the impeachment of it is gone.
Accordingly it is sometimes translated to reconcile or make reconciliation;
4. Atonements are accordingly said to be made, where the very idea of
expiation is excluded; and Atonements that exclude
expiation. sometimes where there is,
in fact, no sacrifice at all. Thus atonements were
made for the sanctifying of the altar; that is, for sanctifying it in
men’s feeling; for as it was necessary to the liturgic power of the
sacrifice on the sentiment of the worshipers, that the blood of their
offering should be made to be a sacred thing, so it was necessary that
the altar itself should be invested with a real and felt sanctity. Thus
we read,
5. It is a great point that expiations,
or expiatory sacrifices, are certainly not offered where we should expect
them to be, if they are offered at all. Expiations not
offered where we should expect them. Thus in the case
just referred to of the sin of the golden calf, where
the sottish convictions of the people have been roused,
and their fears raised into a panic by the terrible judgment of God
upon them, Moses himself speaks of the “atonement” they need for their
sin; but instead of a great and solemn sacrifice of expiation, where,
if ever, it was to be expected, he undertakes their case for them himself,
in his own personal intercession before God. So again, in the great
mutiny of the people that followed the judgment of Korah, where a deadly plague
is falling upon them for their sin, Moses orders
6. The requirement of the heart, as a condition necessary to
acceptance in the sacrifices, is a very strong presumptive evidence that no idea
of expiation The requirement of the heart, against
expiation. belonged to sacrifice. At
first, nothing appears to be said of the spirit in which the offering is to be made, though it is not to
be supposed that it was ever accepted, in any but a merely ritual and
ceremonial sense, unless coupled unconsciously, or implicitly, with
a true feeling of repentance. As already observed, there was at first,
almost no capacity of receiving truths and being exercised in states,
by reflection. Spiritual impressions and results of character were to
be operated for a time transactionally only, under liturgical forms
of sacrifice. And a beginning made in this way, connected with a continued
drill under miraculous Providences, was to operate a course of development,
and prepare a more reflective capacity. By and by this will so far be
accomplished, that the prophets and other teachers of the people will
begin to put them in a consideration of their sentiments,
Now that any such religious progress could have been accomplished under a training of expiatory sacrifice appears to be quite impossible. The giving of evils to God to obtain the release of evils, is a practice so nearly akin to superstition, so barren of all right sentiment, so little likely to stimulate habits of personal conviction, that we rather look for a lapse into fetichism under it. Such a kind of sacrifice requires nothing obviously but the placation of God by a contribution of the necessary evils, and they may as well be contributed in one feeling as another. Enough that they are forthcoming, no matter in what feeling, if only the due penance be made.. Under a plan of sacrifice contrived to work on the sentiments of the worshipers, and quicken germs of holy feeling in them, a different result might be effected,—never under sacrifices of expiation.
To bear out these strictures, and show that
they are verified by facts, I will refer to only a few of the many scripture
citations that might be offered. Thus, taking
The same sentiment is reiterated
many times by David,
When the
Prophets, who are the preachers of
7. The uses of blood in sacrifice have no such connection with an expiatory
office, as appears to be supposed in the common modes of speaking
Uses
of blood not expiatory. concerning it. Something we say, must bleed,
sin must draw blood before it can be forgiven—“without shedding of blood
there is no remission.” The blood is spoken of, and the bloody rites, and the
bloody sweat, and the cross dripping blood, as if some dreadful inquest were
gone forth against the world, and nothing could sate the divine anger but to see
blood flow for a ransom. Now all such impressions are un.. historic and exactly
contrary to the scripture ideas of blood; they carry, in fact, a strong scent of
superstition. There is no vindictive figure in the scripture uses of blood. It
is not death, but life, that is in it. Hedged about by walls of prohibition, as
regards all common uses, it is made to be a holy element to men’s feeling, that
when it is applied, in the offering, it may seem to purify and quicken every
thing it touches. As the blood is the life, so it is to be life-giving; a symbol
of God’s inward purifying and regenerating baptism in the remission of sins. The
associations of blood are to have no such appalling, fateful hue as expiation
supposes,
8. It is a fact worthy of distinct attention, that the
passover sacrifice has certainly nothing of expiation in it.
The passover not
expiatory. This is the sacrifice that Christ is celebrating when he institutes his supper, and the blessing of the
bread and wine in this first observance of the supper is probably the
closing scene of the passover observance itself. Here it is that Christ,
taking the cup, says,—“This is my blood of the new testament, which
is shed, for many, for the remission of sins.” And again, when it is
mentioned at the crucifixion, as another point of correspondence, “that
it might be fulfilled, a bone of him shall not be broken,” the reference
made is to the passover lamb.
9. Observe in, this connection how these rites of blood, or
bloody sacrifice, are connected habitually with all the most joyous and grandest
religious The festivities of sacrifices against expiation.
festivities. All the pomps, jubilees, historic commemorations, public
reformations, national deliverances, are celebrated
in rivers of blood, and lift their joy, by the smoke of burnt offerings,
coupled with processions of music and shouts of praise. In this way,
the sacrifices get invested with associations that make the phrase “sacrifices
of joy” synonymous with sacrifice itself. Thus David celebrates the
preparation made for the building of the temple, in the sacrifice of
a thousand bullocks, and a thousand rams, and a thousand lambs, and
the people eat and drink “before the Lord on that day, with joy and
gladness.”
10. It is important, as a final
consideration, to notice that, where the rite of sacrifice bears a look
of expiation, and the instances are taken as facts of expiation, a closer
examination shows, in every case, that the impression is not supported
by the transaction. The The sacrifice of Job. sacrifice of Job for his sons
may be taken as an example. As they are feasting, and as it would
seem roistering in excess from day to day, he is afflicted with concern
for them, and goes before God with his daily offering on their account,
saying” It may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.”
Besides this sacrifice of Job, I find no other historic instance or example, where there is even so much as a semblance of the expiatory character. But there is a complete day’s-work of sacrifice circumstantially prescribed, a great day of atonement, sometimes called The great called day of expiation without expiation. “the great day of expiation,” sometimes the day, where the remembrance of sins, once a year, is religiously observed, and where, as it is commonly believed, expiation is the simple and sole office of the observance. Here, if any where, the fact of an expiatory sacrifice will be found. I shall therefore conclude my investigation of this very important question, by a careful review of the solemnities of the day referred to, as they are detailed in the record of its institution.
It is a day specially
devoted, we shall see, to the guilty and bad state of sin end the sublime
need it creates of a reconciliation with God. The intention plainly
is to make it the most serious and impressive day of the year; a day
of strong conviction and, if possible, of hearty repentance and true
turning unto God. A whole chapter and a long one,
Having the day fenced about in this manner, and devoted to
such purposes, all the rites of the day are contrived to give it effect.
A kind of fundamental conception which lies back of all and colors every
thing in the feeling, is that there is a universal, overspreading uncleanness
to be removed,—“because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel,
and because of their transgressions in all their sins.” It is as if
every thing handled, touched, breathed upon, or even looked upon by
them, had taken some defilement from them; “the holy sanctuary,” “the
tabernacle of the congregation,”
The high priest forbidden, on pain of death to enter the holy of
holies, the sacred recess of the temple where God dwells, on any other
day of the year, is this day to go in and be accepted there for himself
and the people. This he is to do, putting the people back even from
the tabernacle of the congregation, that they may not come too nigh,
while their sin is upon them. He is to be anointed and sanctified for
this, with a particular ointment, not to be made or used for any other
purpose on pain of death.h.
And the conclusion of all is, not that certain penalties for sin are satisfied, or removed by expiation, but that the sin itself is covered, or taken away. “For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the Lord.”
I do not, of course,
affirm that every worshiper concerned in the rites of the day is
ipso
facto justified, born of God. In all such rites of the altar, two results
are concerned, going along, or designed to go, together, but under very
different conditions. First there is to be a ceremonial cleansing, which
is wrought absolutely, every person concerned being made ceremonially
clean. And secondly, there is or is designed to
There is then I conclude, for that is the result to which we are brought
by this very careful inquiry, no such thing as expiation in the sacrifices
Result, how honorable to the Hebrew Scriptures. of the Old Testament religion. And I
hardly need say how great a satisfaction it is, and what
strength it contributes to the evidences of this ancient, or ante-christian
dispensation of God, to find that it is clear of a notion so abhorrent
to all right feeling, and so essentially dishonorable to God. And the
discovery is the more satisfactory, that it puts so wide a gulf of distance
between this ancient, divine institute, and the crudities of barbarism
and superstition that infest the sacrifices of all the contemporary
and even subsequently developed religions of paganism; proving, at once,
the immense superiority
It is scarcely necessary, after this extended exposition
of the Old Testament sacrifices, to show, by a distinct No expiation, of
course, in the sacrifice of Christ.
argument, that there is no such thing as expiation,
in the proper and defined sense of the term, in the
sacrifice of Christ. Only two or three passages occur to me in the New
Testament, that even appear to allow such a construction, without a
look of violence. Thus when Caiaphas
Sometimes it is imagined, that there is a peculiar and most sacred impression
of God and his law made upon us, by the assertion of expiation, or penal
The
supposed effects of expiation remain without expiation. satisfaction; as for example, in this text. There stands, it is said, the inexorable, awe-inspiring
fidelity of God, and the conscience-piercing word that tells
of the immovable necessity by which he is holden, wakens an impression
of too great power and benefit to be willingly lost. A theologic friend,
whose opinions I much respect, can not break loose from the dogma of
expiation, or penal satisfaction, though it confessedly infringes somewhat
on his rational convictions and even his moral sentiments, because he
imagines, in the impression just referred to, that it must have some
transcendental virtue, which, without knowing exactly whence
We are brought on thus, finally, to the conclusion, that expiation is no Christian idea, and is not contained in the Christian Scriptures. Excluding Atonement resumed and shown to be at-one-ment. it then, as a false third meaning given to the Hebrew word cover, we return to the two others, assigned for it in our English translation, atonement and propitiation, and resume the discussion of these, at the point where we left them, in the beginning of the chapter.
To atone, or make atonement then, is to remove transgression itself, or reconcile the transgressor. It fulfills, in a figure, the original physical sense of the word to cover; as when, for example, the ark was covered with pitch. It is such a working on the bad mind of sin as at-ones it, reconciles it to God, covers up and hides forever the wrong of transgression, assures and justifies the transgressor. In one word, constantly applied to it in the atonements of the old ritual, it makes clean. The effect is wholly subjective, being a change wrought in all the principles of life and characters and dispositions of the soul.
A passage from the Epistle
to the Romans
Atonement then,
as applied to Christ, is just what is figured so carefully in the atonement
of the ancient sacrifice. For as every thing about the temple was reconsecrated
and made clean, by the sacred things offered in the sacrifice—the sacred
incense burned before the mercy-seat, and the sacred blood sprinkled
on whatever had taken the defilement of our sin—so the sprinkling of
the far more sacred blood of Jesus, dying as the Lamb of God, in the
volunteer obedience of his vicarious sacrifice, reconsecrates the law
broken by our sin, dishonored
The true Christian idea of propitiation is
not far hence. The pagan color of the word is taken off; Propitiation
and prevailing prayer. there is no such thought as that God is placated
or satisfied, by the expiatory pains offered him. It supposes, first,
a subjective atoning, or reconciliation in us; and then, as a farther
result, that God is objectively propitiated, or set in a new relation
of welcome and peace. Before he could not embrace us, even in his love.
His love was the love of compassion; now it is the love of complacency
and permitted friendship. This objective propitiation of God answers
exactly to another objective conception, commonly held without any thought
of correspondence. Thus we have a way of saying, as regards successful
prayer, that it prevails with God. Is it then our meaning
God then is propitiated by a change of relationship, that
permits him to greet the souls whom Christ has
The apostle, in this manner, takes
away from the Greek word he uses, which it must be confessed is commonly
used by the pagan writers in a way that implies expiation, any possibility
of such a meaning; for they have never a thought of any such thing
as an expiation through faith; and, what is more, expiation itself excludes
the supposition, that any kind of moral condition is necessary in the
subject for whom it is offered; the very idea being, that it avails,
as being a contribution of evils to obtain the release of evils; not
as having now a state of faith prepared, as a new receptivity for good.
I know not how often this language of the apostle is, quoted, as if
it asserted a propitiation
Atonement then is a change wrought in us, a change by which we are reconciled to God. Propitiation is an objective conception, by which that change, taking place in us, is spoken of as occurring representatively in God. Just as guilty minds, thrown off from God, glass their feeling representatively in God, imagining that God is thrown off from them; or just as we say that the sun rises, instead of saying, what would be so very awkward to us, and yet is the real truth, that we ourselves rise to the sun. The necessity and uses of this objective language will be considered more at large, in the remaining chapter, and therefore need not be insisted on here, as in reference to the single word propitiation.
AFTER we have gone over the whole ground of the gospel as a work of vicarious sacrifice,
settled the doctrine, found the meaning of the Scripture symbols, there
still remain some very important practical questions respecting the
modes of preaching and use. Neither can these questions be dispatched,
by what may seem to be the ready and simple conclusion, that we are
to preach and apply to our own lives just what we have found to be true,
neither more nor less. For to preach what is true concerning a matter,
and to preach the matter itself Truth concerning
Christ not Christ. may be very different
things. So if we speak of use, or application to our
own spiritual state, we may only fool ourselves in the endeavor
to get our benefit out of what is true concerning the gospel, when all
true benefit lies in a right appropriation of the gospel itself. As
concerning Christ, we have made up our account of his work, in the conclusion
that he is in the world to be the moral power of God upon it; but it
does not follow that we shall preach him, or receive him, in the most
effectual way, by contriving always how to be in the power, and muster
the power upon us. His truth may be most
The gospel will of course be preached and applied to use in modes
that have some agreement with what it is conceived to be. Thus if Christ
be accepted Various kinds of preaching. only as a great moral teacher and reformer, the preaching over of his preaching, as recorded in the
four gospels, will be the main thing, and almost nothing will be made
of his personal life and death, and the reconciling purpose of his mission.
Preaching will be teaching as the Master taught, even as the pupils
of the Academy, the Porch, or the Peripatetic order, followed the school
of their master. The after developments of his mission and the significance
If the gospel is conceived to be merely an array of legal motives addressed to interest, and so contrived as to cast a preponderating balance always on the side of right choices, then there will be cogent appeals to the conscience, and the fears, and the: love of happiness, and so, to the will-power of the; subjects addressed. And then, for such as choose rightly, Christ will be shown to have prepared a ground of forgiveness; and beyond that as the principal account of his mission, will be conceived to have no particular agency in the transformations to be wrought. This kind of preaching will take on a strenuous air, and will sometimes stir great commotions where only motions would be better. The piety thus resulting will be legal; a kind of will-work, too little freshened by the graceful affections, too little enriched by great sentiments, lifted by no inspirations, save when slipping, by chance, the legal detentions, it seizes the forbidden fruit of liberty.
Another characteristic mode of preaching is produced
by preaching a formula, supposed. to be the very equivalent and substantial
import of the gospel. And we have abundance of complaints, -from such
as mean to be faithful in this way, that Christ is now so little preached.
They mean that Christ is not preached as an expiation, or a satisfaction
to God’s justice, or an
The very idea of preaching Christ by formula, even if the true formula were developed, is a great mistake; for whatever mind, goes into limitation or incrustation under formula becomes sterile, and the gospel on which it perpetually hammers will be meager, and weak, and dry. All the ten thousand flaming truths that are crowding in, as troops of glory, on the thoughts of a soul in liberty, asking as it were to be uttered faster than the Sundays will let them, are suppressed, or shut back, by that inevitable little sentence of wisdom, which has concluded every thing. I will not deny that some general account or scheme of the gospel plan may be convenient, for the mind to fall back upon and gather itself into, for the minting and: due authentication of its issues. But a formula to be preached, and maintained as a gospel, is a very different matter—all the worse, if it has only been received pedagogically, and been set as the hand-organ tune which the school is engaged to play. Any formula is a necessary abortion, which is not the formulization of Christ discovered by the heart, and verified by a deep working Christian experience.
Let us see if we can arrive at
some better and more
I think we shall best conceive the subject matter of preaching and in
that sense the mode, if we specify three
1. There must be a
descent to human nature in its lower plane of self-love and interested
motive, and a beginning made with the conscience, the God’s law and
justice to be preached. fears, and the boding expectations of guiltiness. To convince,
intimidate, waken out of stupor, shake defiant wrong out
of its confidences, must be deliberately undertaken and, if possible,
effectively done. There must be no delicacy here; as if God’s love and
the vicarious ministry of Jesus were too softly good, to do any so rugged
and severe thing as to punish. Christ’s own doctrine of future punishment,
Christ as the judge of the world, all that belongs to God’s law, all
that will be done by God’s justice, the very dies irae of the wrath
to come, must be faithfully declared, and that in a manner that indicates
conviction. Of course there must be no violence, under pretext of suffering
no delicacy, but a manner of tenderness that indicates due sensibility
in a matter so appalling. The true conception is, that as God’s justice
is a co-factor with his mercy, it is to be set forth and magnified and
made real in the same way, and for the same purpose. And no better model
can be taken for this than Christ himself. Nor is any thing more certain,
than that whoever gives in to the feeling that Christ is outgrown in
this matter, has really no gospel to preach—his vocation is gone. For
if Christ did not understand himself here, what reason is there to believe
that he understood himself at all? In this dilemma one may think he has a
2. That a very great and principal office of preaching will consist in a due exhibition of the Christian facts. The facts of Christ’s life to be magnified. The power is to be personal, and will therefore lie in the facts of the personal life. These facts therefore are preëminently the good news that composes the gospel; requiring heralds, or preachers [precones,] to go abroad and publish it. Apart from these facts, the great subjects we have spoken of are nothing. They spring out of the facts and have no basis of reality beside. Hence also it is that in the Apostles’ creed, or first recorded confession of Christ, nothing is included but the simple outline facts of his life; no other and better formula being yet conceived or attempted. Here accordingly is the original and truly grand office of preaching; viz., in the setting forth and fit representation of these gospel facts.
They begin with the grand primal
fact of the incarnation; for it is only in that, and by that mystery,
that the person arrives whose history is to be entered into the world.
Viewed in this light, the person arriving is not merely a man, but,
as we must believe, a veritable God-man. Taken as being simply a man,
the facts of his life would certainly be remarkable and valuable, he
would only be a much greater and more incredible mystery, considering
the morally perfect, and therefore superhuman character he is in, than
he is when conceived as an abnormal, extra-mundane person, let into
the world from above it, to fulfill a specially divine mission. All
the after facts change color and consequence, accordingly, as they are
viewed in one mode or the other. Considered as the God-man, there is
not a single fact, or scene, in the history which, fitly conceived,
does not yield some lesson of power; the infancy; the thirty years of
silent preparation; the recoil of the poor human nature, called the
temptation, when the work begins; every healing, every miracle, every
friendship, every commendation, every denunciation, the lot of poverty,
the hour of oppressed feeling, the weariness and sleep, the miraculous
hem of his garment, the transfiguration, the prayers, the amazing assumptions
of a common glory and right with the Father, the agony, the trial, the
crucifixion, the resurrection, the appearings and tender teachings afterwards,
and last of all the ascension, followed by the descent of the Spirit
to represent and be himself, according to his promise, a Christ every
where present, every where accessible—no
Here has been one of the great faults or deficiencies
in the preaching of Christ. Too little, by a thousand fold, A great fault
of preaching has been here. has been made of the facts of his life.
By some they are almost never dwelt upon, with the exception,
perhaps, of two or three that could not be utterly passed over; the
rest are as if they were not. Commonly the feeling is not brought close
enough to them to find the life that is in them—what can they signify
of importance, after the main doctrine of all has been decocted? How
much easier to preach the decoction and let the dried herbs of the story
go. It might be so, if they were really dry; but since they are all
alive, fresh and fragrant as a bank of roses, how much better to go
and breathe among them and catch the quickening odors. How little indeed
does any preacher know of the true gospel, who only finds a dull, stale
matter, in the wonderful, morally sublime record of such a character!
No good news will ever go forth out of him. He thinks he has exhausted
the gospel and gotten the whole matter of it in his head, just because
he has gotten nothing, and knows not that there is any thing to get,
besides
I think it would be hardly possible for a preacher of Christ to be too much in the facts of his life. Only they must be so handled as to raise great subjects, and kindle the heat of a true fire, as they always may. The mere doling of these facts, or the setting them off in a garnish of scene-painting or mock sentiment, or frothy laudation, does not fulfill the idea of such preaching. Something worthy of God’s love, something deifically great must be found in them, and the feeling must be raised, that he is personally nigh, rich in his gifts, strong in his majesty, terrible in his beauty, heavyhearted and tender in the suffering concern of his love. We come next—
3. To another and more difficult matter, as regards
the power of the gospel in its uses, and the due impression of it, as
a way of salvation; viz., No sufficient gospel without the altar forms. the right conception and fit
presentation of it, under the altar forms provided for it. For, besides the
outward figure of the facts, occurring under conditions of space and time, and
And so much is there in this that, without these forms of the altar, we should be utterly at a loss in making any use of the Christian facts, that would set us in a condition of practical reconciliation with God. Christ is good, beautiful, wonderful, his disinterested love is a picture by itself, his forgiving patience melts into my feeling, his passion rends open my heart, but what is he for, and how shall he be made unto me the salvation I want? One word—he is my sacrifice—opens all to me and beholding him, with all my sin upon him, I count him my offering, I come unto God by him and enter into the holiest by his blood.
But
the principal reason for setting forth the matter of Christ’s life and
death as an oblation remains to be stated; viz., the necessity of somehow
Wanted to produce an attitude of objectivity. preventing an over-conscious state in the receiver. It was going to be a great fault in the
use, that the disciple, looking for a power on his character, would
keep himself too entirely in the attitude of consciousness, or voluntary
self-application. He would be hanging round each fact and scene, to
get some eloquent moving effect from it. And he would not only study
how to get impressions, but, almost ere he is aware of it, to make them.
Just here accordingly it was that the Scripture symbols, and especially
In this manner coming unto Christ, or to God through Christ, in the
symbols of sacrifice, we make an escape, as it were, from ourselves
and that state of consciousness which is the bane of religion; an escape,
I must frankly admit, which is none the less necessary, when we conceive
that Christ has come into the world, not to expiate sin, but to be a
power upon it; furthermore, an escape which God has provided, to make
him more completely a power. For it is in these symbols that God contrives
to get us out of ourselves into the free state of faith, and love, and
to become the new inspiration of life in our hearts. And accordingly
we
“My soul looks back to see The burdens thou didst bear, When hanging on the accursed tree, And hopes her guilt was there.”
We want, in short, to use these altar terms, just
as freely as they are used by those who accept the formula of expiation,
or judicial satisfaction for sin; in just their manner too, when they
are using them most practically. Indeed, it is one of the enviable advantages
of their scheme that they are able to use them freely; for, when they
are so used, they will not always keep themselves close in the dogmatic
misconstructions
Nor is there any thing so peculiar in this need of an
objective form for the gospel. We need what is like it
Objective terms a first want of language. every where, and human language
is full of it. A very great part of the terms
and expressions of language, and those that are liveliest and freshest,
are such as put into things and facts meanings which are really not
there, but in ourselves. We say that a thing is painful because we suffer
pain from it; putting the pain into the thing, which is really in ourselves.
We say, in the very palpable and common matters of color, that things
are red, blue, white, and the like, when, as we all know, the colors
are in us and not in the things. Subjectively speaking, we should have
to say, awkwardly and pedantically, that we have sensations of redness,
blueness, whiteness, before the things. We say that a thing has a sweet
taste, when the sweet taste is not in the thing at all, but wholly in
ourselves. The language of Christ, which is about as nearly perfect
as it can be, abounds in these objective representations of subjective
facts and ideas. Glance along the sermon on the mount, looking go farther,
and we get examples like these, “If thy right eye offend thee”—“if
thine eye be evil;” where
To carry these illustrations of the genius
of language, and especially of Scripture language a little farther,
and show, on how large a scale, the forms Hence the Devil,
or bad king. of truth
are affected by the instinct of objective representation,
I will refer to the devil, or ὀ διαβολος, of the Old and New Testament.
Here we have a kind of bad God, over against the good, who leads the
powers of darkness and manages the interest of evil. But there is no
more reason to suppose that God has created any such being, or that
any such really exists, than there is to suppose that there is a real
Only two days previous to the writing of this paragraph I was conversing with a very intelligent and, withal, a truly liberal Christian friend, who said, as arguing for the existence of the devil, that he liked to think of such a being, in distinction from thinking always of his sins, about which he knew very little, and then to hang his faith on Christ as warring with him, and able to pluck him down; for this takes in every thing and makes a clean issue, when we do it, in the simplest manner possible. To which the very obvious reply was, that for this very purpose God has given us the objective devil of Scripture to be hated, and conspired against, and by faith cast down, when the real, multitudinous, inconceivable matter to be thus hated, conspired against, and by faith cast down, is working subjectively in ourselves. And, what is more, there is no other conception of the devil of Scripture that makes him so profoundly real as this; partly because there is no other that has any look of credibility.
We find then, as we look at language, whether out of the
Scriptures or in, that objective representations are always best for us, most
sought after, and prepared on a very large scale, because they take us away from
mere self-management, and carry us out to rest our hope and faith in God. If we
represented every thing subjectively which is subjective, we could do it only by
using
Any strictly subjective style of religion is vicious. It is moral self-culture,
in fact, and not religion. We The outgoing state is thus
secured. think of ourselves abundantly
in the selfishness of our sins. What we need, above all, is to be taken off the self-center and centered in God. Ceasing
to go by contrivance, we must learn to go by inspiration; that is, by
the free impulse of God in our faith. Hence the profound importance
of the altar symbols, divinely prepared and fashioned, to be the form
of the Christian grace. They compose for us even a kind of objective
religion; that is, a religion operated for us and before us. In one
view they are not true, just as the ten thousand objective expressions
of language referred to are not, and yet there is nothing so sublimely,
healthfully true, in the practical and free uses of faith, because we
are so simple in them, and so completely carried out of ourselves. Of
course we shall be conscious beings still; we must be conscious always
and in every thing we do; but how much does it signify that we can have
an altar and an offering, once for all, where we can go with our confession,
and pay our tender worship, without thinking, for the time, of any thing
but what is before us and is done for us. Here it is that we drop out
self most easily, and come away to God, in
But we encounter, at this point,
a very great difficulty, in the fact that all these Scripture symbols
have been so long and dreadfully misapplied, A great difficulty
met. by the
dogmatic schemes of expiation, penal suffering, and judicial satisfaction.
Thus, if we attempt to use them, we are disturbed by the feeling, that
neither we, nor they, will be understood, in any sense that is true.
How shall we venture to speak of Christ as a sacrifice for sin, when
even the ritual sacrifice, on which the figure is based, has been made
to signify, not a confessional offering, or offering of pious devotion,
in which the worshiper is turned to God, but the offering of a substituted
victim, to even the penal account with God, or reconcile God to him?
So of all the other symbols; the lamb is the victim, in the sense that
he suffers; the slaying of the victim is death for death, and the dying
of the victim is pain for pain; when truly nothing was made, either
of the death, or the pain, but only of the offering of some choicest
animal, as a reverently careful act of homage and repentance for sin.
The blood sprinkled here and there is no more the life, that sacred
element which pacifies every thing it touches, but it is the blood of
slaughter, signifying that God is reconciled only when sin draws blood.
What then shall we do with
these forms of the altar, when they have come to be thus sadly disfigured
and turned from their true meaning? Shall we use them freely and rightly,
and let such impressions be taken as certainly will be? Shall we use
them with salvos and parentheses of explanation? That would be awkward
and troublesome and besides would despoil them of all right effect.
Shall we then give them up entirely and let them go? Many, alas, are
doing it, contriving how to find a sufficient gospel in the forms of
the facts themselves, described in the terms of common speech. And the
result is, that they preach a philosophy of Christ instead of the Christian
oblation, a Christ who is to work on souls under the natural laws of
effect, and not a Christ to be our sacrifice before God. We can not
No, these much abused symbols are indispensable and must
be recovered. It may be a task of some difficulty, yet of much less
difficulty than How to get back the lost symbols. many suppose. It only requires a little
resolute courage here, as always, to retake a battery that is lost. Let the
preacher go before, in one or two
I could
not excuse myself, in the closing of this last chapter, if I did not
call attention directly to the very Our doctrine ends where
the first age began. instructive and somewhat
humbling fact, that we are ending here, just where Christianity began. After passing round the circuit of more
than eighteen centuries, occupied
And what if we shall seem to have proved something
else that is more positive still; viz., that the formulizing
God’s true formula in place of all others. industry, in which we have so long been
occupied, was anticipated by God from the first, and that he
Himself, to save us from a task so far above our powers, provided us
in fact a formula of his own. Perhaps I do not mean by this exactly
what we commonly mean by the word, and yet perhaps I do. A formula is
a little form, a condensed representation, by figure, of some spiritual
truth; for every spiritual truth comes into figure and form of necessity,
when it comes into language, or a statement in words. We commonly understand
by a formula what is really never true of it, or is true only to the
apprehensions of ignorance; viz., a propositional statement that conveys
the spiritual truth or doctrine of a subject by words of exact notation.
In this latter impossible sense of formula, there is none, of the Christian
gospel, and what is more there never will be or can be any. But in the
former and true sense, or only possible sense, the altar, with its offerings
and rites of blood, is the very form and formula that God has provided
for the gospel; provided, I may say, by long centuries of drill, in
a liturgy of rites contrived, in fact, to serve this very purpose. After
we have tried our own hand long enough, in the absurd endeavor to get
up a
O, thou God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, into what strange places, and how far away, hath
our foolish We return to God. conceit been leading us. We thought we must needs make out for thy dear Son—dear also to us because he hath
come to bring us life—some wisely framed doctrine, bearing the stamp
of our own wise thought and science—not so familiar and so merely practical
as thy choice words of sacrifice. But we have wearied ourselves in the
greatness of our way. We have raised long controversies, and held learned
councils, and contrived exact articles; and though we have seemed to
settle many things wisely, yet nothing is either settled or wise; but
whatever we devise turns dry, looks empty, disappoints the craving of
our wants, creating after all only such consent as consists in a common
discord. Commanded by thee to build our altar of “whole stones” and “lift up no tool of iron upon them,” we have thought to improve its
look, and make it stronger, by squaring them carefully and hewing them
into shapes more scientifically exact; and now that we have done it,
we. perceive that we have only cut them into our own stale forms, and
made them “stones of emptiness.” Mortified in our conceit we return,
O God, to thee, and to thy free word in Christ. We are ashamed that
we could go so far to find so little,
Coming back then to thy own
formulary, O God, and having it for our sufficient confession, let our
Christ himself be the mold of our doctrine, the medium of our prayers,
the soul of our liberty, the informing grace and music of our hymns—wisdom,
righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Be thy saints gathered
speedily.
Genesis
Exodus
12:46 13:7-8 23:7 29:36-30:10 29:37 30:30-33 30:34-38 32:30 34:6-7
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
1 Samuel
1 Kings
1 Chronicles
2 Chronicles
7:5 29:1-36 29:24 30:1-27 30:18 34:1-33
Ezra
Job
Psalms
40:1-17 50:1-23 51:1-19 62:12 85:10
Proverbs
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Ezekiel
Daniel
Amos
Micah
Haggai
Matthew
John
1:29 1:29 5:27 6:51 11:50 12:32 16:8
Romans
2:9 2:12 2:12-15 2:16 3:22 3:22 3:22 3:25-26 3:28 4:3 4:20-22 4:25 5:10 5:11 5:18 5:18 7:11 8:26-27 10:3 11:22
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Colossians
1 Timothy
Titus
Hebrews
2:17-18 6:10 8:6 9:9 9:13-14 9:14 9:14 9:22 10:6-9 10:19-21 12:36-37
James
1 Peter
1 John
Revelation
i ii iii 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497 498 499 500 501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508 509 510 511 512 513 514 515 516 517 518 519 520 521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 531 532 533 534 535 536 537 538 539 540 541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 550 551 552