“NEITHER IS THERE SALVATION IN ANY OTHER; FOR THERE IS NONE OTHER NAME UNDER HEAVEN GIVEN AMONG MEN, WHEREBY WE MUST BE SAVED.”—Acts iv. 12.

The scene which we have this evening to visit and explore, is separated from us by the space of eighteen centuries; yet of nothing on this earth has Providence left, within the shadows of the past, so vivid and divine an image. Gently rising above the mighty “field of the world,” Calvary’s mournful hill appears, covered with silence now, but distinctly showing the heavenly light that struggled there through the stormiest elements of guilt. Nor need we only gaze, as on a motionless picture that closes the vista of Christian ages. Permitting history to take us by the hand, we may pace back in pilgrimage to the hour, till its groups stand around us, and pass by us, and its voices of passion and of grief mock and wail upon our ear. As we mingle with the crowd which, amid noise and dust, follows the condemned prisoners to the place of execution, and fix our eye on the faint and panting figure of one that bears his cross, could we but whisper to the sleek priests close by, how might we startle them, by telling them the future fate of this brief tragedy,—brief in act, in blessing everlasting; that this Galilean convict shall be the world’s confessed deliverer, while they that have brought him to this, shall be the scorn and by-word of the nations; that that vile instrument of torture, now so abject that it makes the dying slave more servile, shall be made, by this victim and this hour, the symbol of whatever is holy and sublime; the emblem of hope and love; pressed to the lips of ages; consecrated by a veneration which makes the sceptre seem trivial as an infant’s toy. Meanwhile the sacerdotal hypocrites, unconscious of the part they play, watch to the end the public murder which they have privately suborned; stealing a phrase from Scripture, that they may mock with holy lips; and leaving to the plebeian soldiers the mutual jest and brutal laugh, that serve to beguile the hired but hated work of agony, and that draw forth from the sufferer that burst of forgiving prayer, which sunk at least into their centurion’s heart. One there is, who should have been spared the hearing of these scoffs; and perhaps she heard them not; for before his nature was exhausted more, his eye detects and his voice addresses her, and twines round her the filial arm of that disciple who had been ever the most loving as well as most beloved. She at least lost the religion of that hour in its humanity, and beheld not the prophet but the son:—had not her own hands wrought that seamless robe for which the soldiers’ lot is cast; and her own lips taught him that strain of sacred poetry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” but never had she thought to hear it thus. As the cries became fainter and fainter, scarcely do they reach Peter standing afar off. The last notice of him had been the rebuking look that sent him to weep bitterly; and now the voice that can alone tell him his forgiveness, will soon be gone! Broken hardly less, though without remorse, is the youthful John, to see that head, lately resting on his bosom, drooping passively in death; and to hear the involuntary shriek of Mary, as the spear struck upon the lifeless body, moving now only as it is moved;—whence he alone, on whom she leaned, records the fact. Well might the Galilean friends stand at a distance gazing; unable to depart, yet not daring to approach; well might the multitudes that had cried “crucify him” in the morning, shudder at the thought of that clamour ere night; “beholding the things that had come to pass, they smote their breasts and returned.”

This is the scene of which we have to seek the interpretation. Our first natural impression is, that it requires no interpretation, but speaks for itself; that it has no mystery, except that which belongs to the triumphs of deep guilt, and the sanctities of disinterested love. To raise our eye to that serene countenance, to listen to that submissive voice, to note the subjects of its utterance, would give us no idea of any mystic horror concealed behind the human features of the scene; of any invisible contortions, as from the lash of demons, in the soul of that holy victim; of any sympathetic connection of that cross with the bottomless pit on the one hand, and the highest Heaven on the other; of any moral revolution throughout our portion of the universe, of which this public execution is but the outward signal. The historians drop no hint that its sufferings, its affections, its relations, were more than human,—raised indeed to distinction by miraculous accompaniments; but intrinsically, however signally, human. They mention, as if bearing some appreciable proportion to the whole series of incidents, particulars so slight, as to vanish before any other than the obvious historical view of the transaction; the thirst, the sponge, the rent clothes, the mingled drink. They ascribe no sentiment to the crucified, except such as might be expressed by one of like nature with ourselves, in the consciousness of a finished work of duty, and a fidelity never broken under the strain of heaviest trial. The narrative is clearly the production of minds filled, not with theological anticipations, but with historical recollections.

With this view of Christ’s death, which is such as might be entertained by any of the primitive Churches, having one of the gospels only, without any of the epistles, we are content. I conceive of it, then, as manifesting the last degree of moral perfection in the Holy One of God; and believe that in thus being an expression of character, it has its primary and everlasting value. I conceive of it as the needful preliminary to his resurrection and ascension, by which the severest difficulties in the theory of Providence, life, and duty, are alleviated or solved. I conceive of it as immediately procuring the universality and spirituality of the Gospel; by dissolving those corporeal ties which give nationality to Jesus, and making him, in his heavenly and immortal form, the Messiah of humanity; blessing, sanctifying, regenerating, not a people from the centre of Jerusalem, but a world from his station in the Heavens. And these views, under unimportant modifications, I submit, are the only ones of which Scripture contains a trace.

All this, however, we are assured, is the mere outside aspect of the crucifixion; and wholly insignificant compared with the invisible character and relations of the scene; which, localized only on earth, has its chief effect in Hell; and though presenting itself among the occurrences of time, is a repeal of the decretals of Eternity. The being who hangs upon that cross is not man alone; but also the everlasting God, who created and upholds all things, even the sun that now darkens its face upon him, and the murderers who are waiting for his expiring cry. The anguish he endures is not chiefly that which falls so poignantly on the eye and ear of the spectator; the injured human affections, the dreadful momentary doubt; the pulses of physical torture, doubling on him with full and broken wave, till driven back by the overwhelming power of love disinterested and divine. But he is judicially abandoned by the Infinite Father; who expends on him the immeasurable wrath due to an apostate race, gathers up into an hour the lightnings of Eternity, and lets them loose upon that bended head. It is the moment of retributive justice; the expiation of all human guilt; that open brow hides beneath it the despair of millions of men; and to the intensity of agony there, no human wail could give expression. Meanwhile, the future brightens on the Elect; the tempests that hung over their horizon are spent. The vengeance of the lawgiver having had its way, the sunshine of a Father’s grace breaks forth, and lights up, with hope and beauty, the earth, which had been a desert of despair and sin. According to this theory, Christ, in his death, was a proper expiatory sacrifice; he turned aside, by enduring it for them, the infinite punishment of sin from all past or future believers in this efficacy of the cross; and transferred to them the natural rewards of his own righteousness. An acceptance of this doctrine is declared to be the prime condition of the divine forgiveness; for no one who does not see the pardon, can have it. And this pardon again, this clear score for the past, is a necessary preliminary to all sanctification; to all practical opening of a disinterested heart towards our Creator and man. Pardon, and the perception of it, are the needful preludes to that conforming love to God and men, which is the true Christian salvation.

The evidence in support of this theory is derived partly from natural appearances, partly from scriptural announcements. Involving, as it does, statements respecting the actual condition of human nature, and the world in which we live, some appeal to experience, and to the rational interpretation of life and Providence, is inevitable; and hence certain propositions, affecting to be of a philosophical character, are laid down as fundamental by the advocates of this system. Yet it is admitted, that direct revelation only could have acquainted us, either with our lost condition, or our vicarious recovery; and that all we can expect to accomplish with nature, is to harmonize what we observe there, with what we read in the written records of God’s will; so that the main stress of the argument rests on the interpretation of Scripture. The principles deduced from the nature of things, and laid down as a basis for this doctrine, may be thus represented:

That man needs a Redeemer; having obviously fallen, by some disaster, into a state of misery and guilt, from which the worst penal consequences must be apprehended; and were it not for the probability of such lapse from the condition in which it was fashioned, it would be impossible to reconcile the phenomena of the world with the justice and benevolence of its Creator.

That Deity only can redeem; since, to preserve veracity, the penalty of sin must be inflicted; and the diversion only, not the annihilation, of it, is possible. To let it fall on angels, would fail of the desired end; because human sin, having been directed against an infinite Being, has incurred an infinitude of punishment; which, on no created beings, could be exhausted in any period short of eternity. Only a nature strictly infinite can compress within itself, in the compass of an hour, the woes distributed over the immortality of mankind. Hence, were God personally One, like man, no redemption could be effected; for there would be no Deity to suffer, except the very One who must punish. But the triplicity of the Godhead relieves all difficulty; for, while one Infinite inflicts, another Infinite endures; and resources are furnished for the atonement.

Amid a great variety of forms in which the theory of atonement exists, I have selected the foregoing; which, if I understand aright, is that which is vindicated in the present controversy. I am not aware that I have added anything to the language in which it is stated by its powerful advocate, unless it be a few phrases, leaving its essential meaning the same, but needful to render it compact and clear.

The scriptural evidence is found principally in certain of the apostolical epistles; and this circumstance will render it necessary to conduct a separate search into the historical writings of the New Testament, that we may ascertain how they express the corresponding set of ideas. Taking up successively these two branches of the subject, the natural and the biblical, I propose to show, first, that this doctrine is inconsistent with itself; secondly, that it is inconsistent with the Christian idea of Salvation.

I. It is inconsistent with itself.

(1.) In its manner of treating the principles of natural religion.

Our faith in the infinite benevolence of God is represented as destitute of adequate support from the testimony of nature.^[295] It requires, we are assured, the suppression of a mass of appearances, that would scare it away in an instant, were it to venture into their presence; and is a dream of sickly and effeminate minds, whose belief is the inward growth of amiable sentimentality, rather than a genuine production from God’s own facts. The appeal to the order and magnificence of creation, to the structures and relations of the inorganic, the vegetable, the animal, the spiritual forms, that fill the ascending ranks of this visible and conscious universe;—to the arrangements which make it a blessing to be born, far more than a suffering to die,—which enable us to extract the relish of life from its toils, the affections of our nature from its sufferings, the triumphs of goodness from its temptations;—to the seeming plan of general progress, which elicits truth by the self-destruction of error, and by the extinction of generations gives perpetual rejuveniscence to the world; this appeal, which is another name for the scheme of natural religion, is dismissed with scorn; and sin and sorrow and death are flung in defiance across our path;—barriers which we must remove, ere we can reach the presence of a benignant God. Come with us, it is said, and listen to the wail of the sick infant; look into the dingy haunts where poverty moans its life away; bend down your ear to the accursed hum that strays from the busy hives of guilt; spy into the hold of the slave-ship; from the factory follow the wasted child to the gin-shop first, and then to the cellar called its home; or look even at your own tempted and sin-bound souls, and your own perishing race, snatched off into the dark by handfuls through the activity of a destroying God; and tell us, did our benevolent Creator make a creature and a world like this? A Calvinist who puts this question is playing with fire. But I answer the question explicitly: all these things we have met steadily and face to face; in full view of them, we have taken up our faith in the goodness of God; and in full view of them we will hold fast that faith. Nor is it just or true to affirm, that our system hides these evils, or that our practice refuses to grapple with them. And if you confess, that these ills of life would be too much for your natural piety; if you declare, that these rugged foundations and tempestuous elements of Providence would starve and crush your confidence in God, while ours strikes its roots in the rock, and throws out its branches to brave the storm, are you entitled to taunt us with a faith of puny growth? Meanwhile, we willingly assent to the principle which this appeal to evil is designed to establish; that, with much apparent order, there is some apparent disorder in the phenomena of the world; that from the latter, by itself, we should be unable to infer any goodness and benevolence in God; and that were not the former clearly the predominant result of natural laws, the character of the Great Cause of all things would be involved in agonizing gloom. The mass of physical and moral evil we do not profess fully to explain; we think that in no system whatever is there any approach to an explanation; and we are accustomed to touch on that dread subject with the humility of filial trust, not with the confidence of dogmatic elucidation.

Surely the fall of our first parents, I shall be reminded, gives the requisite solution. The disaster which then befell the human race, has changed the primeval constitution of things; introduced mortality, and all the infirmities of which it is the result; introduced sin, and all the seeds of vile affections which it compels us to inherit; introduced also the penalties of sin, visible in part on this scene of life, and developing themselves in another in anguish everlasting. Fresh from the hand of his Creator, man was innocent, happy and holy; and he it is, not God, who has deformed the world with guilt and grief.

Now, as a statement of fact, all this may or may not be true. Of this I say nothing. But who does not see that, as an explanation, it is inconsistent with itself, partial in its application, and leaves matters incomparably worse than it found them? It is inconsistent with itself; for Adam, perfectly pure and holy as he is reputed to have been, gave the only proof that could exist of his being neither, by succumbing to the first temptation that came in his way; and though finding no enjoyment but in the contemplation of God, gave himself up to the first advances of the devil. Never surely was a reputation for sanctity so cheaply won. The canonizations of the Romish Calendar have been curiously bestowed, on beings sufficiently remote from just ideas of excellence; but, usually, there is something to be affirmed of them, legendary or otherwise, which, if true, might justify a momentary admiration. But our first parent was not laid even under this necessity, to obtain a glory greater than canonization; he had simply to do nothing, except to fall, in order to be esteemed the most perfectly holy of created minds. Most partial, too, is this theory in its application; for disease and hardship, and death unmerited as the infant’s, afflict the lower animal creation. Is this, too, the result of the fall? If so, it is an unredeemed effect; if not, it presses on the benevolence of the Maker; and by the physical analogies which connect man with the inferior creatures, force on us the impression, that his corporeal sufferings have an original source not dissimilar from theirs. And again, this explanation only serves to make matters worse than before. For how puerile is it to suppose, that men will rest satisfied with tracing back their ills to Adam, and refrain from asking, who was Adam’s cause! And then comes upon us at once the ancient dilemma about evil; was it mistake, or was it malignity, that created so poor a creature as our progenitor, and staked on so precarious a will the blessedness of a race and the well-being of a world? So far, this theory, falsely and injuriously ascribed to Christianity, would leave us where we were: but it carries us into deeper and gratuitous difficulties, of which natural religion knows nothing, by appending eternal consequences to Adam’s transgression; a large portion of which, after the most sanguine extension of the efficacy of the atonement, must remain unredeemed. So that if, under the eye of naturalism, the world, with its generations dropping into the grave, must appear (as we heard it recently described)^[296] like the populous precincts of some castle, whose governor called his servants, after a brief indulgence of liberty and peace, into a dark and inscrutable dungeon, never to return or be seen again: the only new feature which this theory introduces into the prospect is this; that the interior of that cavernous prison-house is disclosed; and while a few of the departed are seen to have emerged into a fairer light, and to be traversing greener fields, and sharing a more blessed liberty than they knew before, the vast multitude are discerned in the gripe of everlasting chains, and the twist of unimaginable torture. And all this infliction is a penal consequence of a first ancestor’s transgression! Singular spectacle to be offered in vindication of the character of God!

We are warned, however, not to start back from this representation, or to indulge in any rash expression at the view which it gives of the justice of the Most High; for that, beyond all doubt, parallel instances occur in the operations of nature; and that if the system deduced from Scripture accords with that which is in action in the creation, there arises a strong presumption that both are from the same Author. The arrangement which is the prime subject of objection in the foregoing theory, viz., the vicarious transmission of consequences from acts of vice and virtue, is said to be familiar to our observation as a fact; and ought, therefore, to present no difficulties in the way of the admission of a doctrine. Is it not obvious, for example, that the guilt of a parent may entail disease and premature death on his child, or even remoter descendants? And if it be consistent with the divine perfections, that the innocent should suffer for others’ sins at the distance of one generation, why not at the distance of a thousand? The guiltless victim is not more completely severed from identity with Adam, than he is from identity with his own father. My reply is brief: I admit both the fact and the analogy; but the fact is of the exceptional kind, from which, by itself, I could not infer the justice or the benevolence of the Creator; and which, were it of large and prevalent amount, I could not even reconcile with these perfections. If then you take it out of the list of exceptions and difficulties, and erect it into a cardinal rule, if you interpret by it the whole invisible portion of God’s government, you turn the scale at once against the character of the Supreme, and plant creation under a tyrant’s sway. And this is the fatal principle pervading all analogical arguments in defence of Trinitarian Christianity. No resemblances to the system can be found in the universe, except in those anomalies and seeming deformities which perplex the student of Providence, and which would undermine his faith, were they not lost in the vast spectacle of beauty and of good. These disorders are selected and spread out to view, as specimens of the divine government of nature; the mysteries and horrors which offend us in the popular theology are extended by their side; the comparison is made, point by point, till the similitude is undeniably made out; and when the argument is closed, it amounts to this: do you doubt whether God could break mens’ limbs? You mistake his strength of character; only see how he puts out their eyes! What kind of impression this reasoning may have, seems to me doubtful even to agony. Both Trinitarian theology and nature, it is triumphantly urged, must proceed from the same Author; aye, but what sort of Author is that? You have led me in your quest after analogies, through the great infirmary of God’s creation! and so haunted am I by the sights and sounds of the lazar-house, that scarce can I believe in anything but pestilence; so sick of soul have I become, that the mountain breeze has lost its scent of health; and you say, it is all the same in the other world, and wherever the same rule extends: then I know my fate, that in this Universe Justice has no throne. And thus, my friends, it comes to pass, that these reasoners often gain indeed their victory; but it is known only to the Searcher of Hearts, whether it is a victory against natural religion, or in favour of revealed. For this reason, I consider the “Analogy” of Bishop Butler (one of the profoundest of thinkers, and on purely moral subjects one of the justest too,) as containing, with a design directly contrary, the most terrible persuasives to Atheism that have ever been produced. The essential error consists in selecting the difficulties,—which are the rare, exceptional phenomena of nature,—as the basis of analogy and argument. In the comprehensive and generous study of Providence, the mind may, indeed, already have overcome the difficulties, and with the lights recently gained from the harmony, design, and order of creation, have made those shadows pass imperceptibly away; but when forced again into their very centre, compelled to adopt them as a fixed station and point of mental vision, they deepen round the heart again, and, instead of illustrating anything, become solid darkness themselves.

I cannot quit this topic without observing, however, that there appears to be nothing in nature and life, at all analogous to the vicarious principle attributed to God in the Trinitarian scheme of redemption. There is nowhere to be found any proper transfer or exchange, either of the qualities, or of the consequences, of vice and virtue. The good and evil acts of men do indeed affect others as well as themselves; the innocent suffer with the guilty, as in the case before adduced, of a child suffering in health by the excesses of a parent. But there is here no endurance for another, similar to Christ’s alleged endurance in the place of men; the infliction on the child is not deducted from the parent; it does nothing to lighten his load, or make it less than it would have been, had he been without descendants; nor does any one suppose his guilt alleviated by the existence of this innocent fellow-sufferer. There is a nearer approach to analogy in those cases of crime where the perpetrator seems to escape, and to leave the consequences of his act to descend on others; as when the successful cheat eludes pursuit, and from the stolen gains of neighbours constructs a life of luxury for himself; or when a spendthrift government, forgetful of its high trust, turning the professions of patriotism into a lie, is permitted to run a prosperous career for one generation, and is personally gone before the popular retribution falls, in the next, on innocent successors. Here no doubt the harmless suffer by the guilty, in a certain sense in the place of the guilty; but not in the sense which the analogy requires. For there is still no substitution; the distress of the unoffending party is not struck out of the offender’s punishment; does not lessen, but rather aggravates his guilt; and instead of fitting him for pardon, tempts the natural sentiments of justice to follow him with severer condemnation. Nor does the scheme receive any better illustration from the fact, that whoever attempts the cure of misery must himself suffer; must have the shadows of ill cast upon his spirit from every sadness he alleviates; and interpose himself to stay the plague which, in a world diseased, threatens to pass to the living from the dead. The parallel fails, because there is still no transference: the appropriate sufferings of sin are not given to the philanthropist; and the noble pains of goodness in him, the glorious strife of his self-sacrifice, are no part of the penal consequences of others’ guilt; they do not cancel one iota of those consequences, or make the crimes which have demanded them, in any way, more ready for forgiveness. Indeed, it is not in the good man’s sufferings, considered as such, that any efficacy resides; but in his efforts, which may be made with great sacrifice or without it, as the case may be. Nor, at best, is there any proper annihilation of consequences at all, accruing from his toils; the past acts of wrong which call up his resisting energies, are irrevocable, the guilt incurred, the penalty indestructible; the series of effects, foreign to the mind of the perpetrator, may be abbreviated; prevention may be applied to new ills which threaten to arise; but, by all this, the personal fitness of the delinquent for forgiveness is wholly unaffected; the volition of sin has gone forth; and on it, flies, as surely as sound on a vibration of the air, the verdict of judgment.

Those who are affected by slight and failing analogies like these, would do well to consider one, sufficiently obvious, which seems to throw doubt upon their scheme. The atonement is thought to be, in respect to all believers, a reversal of the fall: the effects of the fall are partly visible and temporal, partly invisible and eternal; linked, however, together as inseparable portions of the same penal system. Now it is evident, that the supposed redemption on the cross has left precisely where they were, all the visible effects of the first transgression: sorrow and toil are the lot of all, as they have been from of old; the baptized infant utters a cry as sad as the unbaptized; and between the holiness of the true believer and the worth of the devout heretic, there is not discernible such a difference as there must have been between Adam pure and perfect, and Adam lapsed and lost. And is it presumptuous to reason from the seen to the unseen, from the part which we experience to that which we can only conceive? If the known effects are unredeemed, the suspicion is not unnatural, that so are the unknown.

I sum up, then, this part of my subject by observing, that besides many inconclusive appeals to nature, the advocates of the vicarious scheme are chargeable with this fundamental inconsistency. They appear to deny that the justice and benevolence of God can be reconciled with the phenomena of nature; and say that the evidence must be helped out by resort to their interpretation of scripture. When, having heard this auxiliary system, we protest that it renders the case sadder than before, they assure us that it is all benevolent and just, because it has its parallel in creation. They renounce and adopt, in the same breath, the religious appeal to the universe of God.

(2.) Another inconsistency appears, in the view which this theory gives of the character of God.

It is assumed that, at the Æra of creation, the Maker of mankind had announced the infinite penalties which must follow the violation of his law; and that their amount did not exceed the measure which his abhorrence of wrong required. “And that which he saith, he would not be God if he did not perform: that which he perceived right, he would be unworthy of our trust, did he not fulfil. His veracity and justice, therefore, were pledged to adhere to the word that had gone forth: and excluded the possibility of any free and unconditional forgiveness.” Now I would note in passing, that this announcement to Adam of an eternal punishment impending over his first sin, is simply a fiction; for the warning to him is stated thus; “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die;”^[297] from which our progenitor must have been as ingenious as a theologian, to extract the idea of endless life in Hell. But to say no more of this, what notions of veracity have we here? When a sentence is proclaimed against crime, is it indifferent to judicial truth, upon whom it falls? Personally addressed to the guilty, may it descend without a lie upon the guiltless? Provided there is the suffering, is it no matter where? Is this the sense in which God is no respecter of persons? Oh! what deplorable reflection of human artifice is this, that Heaven is too veracious to abandon its proclamation of menace against transgressors; yet is content to vent it on goodness the most perfect. No darker deed can be imagined, than is thus ascribed to the Source of all perfection, under the insulted names of truth and holiness. What reliance could we have on the faithfulness of such a Being? If it be consistent with his nature to punish by substitution, what security is there that he will not reward vicariously? All must be loose and unsettled, the sentiments of reverence confused, the perceptions of conscience indistinct, where the terms expressive of those great moral qualities which render God himself most venerable, are thus sported with and profaned.

The same extraordinary departure from all intelligible meaning of words is apparent, when our charge of vindictiveness against the doctrine of sacrifice is repelled as a slander. If the rigorous refusal of pardon, till the whole penalty has been inflicted (when, indeed, it is no pardon at all) be not vindictive, we may ask to be furnished with some better definition. And though it is said, that God’s love was manifested to us by the gift of his Son, this does but change the object on which this quality is exercised, without removing the quality itself; putting us indeed into the sunshine of his grace, but the Saviour into the tempest of his wrath. Did we desire to sketch the most dreadful form of character, what more emphatic combination could we invent than this; rigour in the exaction of penal suffering; and indifference as to the person on whom it falls?

But in truth this system, in its delineations of the Great Ruler of creation, bids defiance to all the analogies by which Christ and the Christian heart have delighted to illustrate his nature. A God who could accept the spontaneously returning sinner, and restore him by corrective discipline, is pronounced not worth serving, and an object of contempt.^[298] If so, Jesus sketched an object of contempt when he drew the father of the prodigal son, opening his arms to the poor penitent, and needing only the sight of his misery to fall on his neck with the kiss of welcome home. Let the assertions be true, that sacrifice and satisfaction are needful preliminaries to pardon, that to pay any attention to repentance without these is mere weakness, and that it is a perilous deception to teach the doctrine of mercy apart from the atonement; and this parable of our Saviour’s becomes the most pernicious instrument of delusion; a statement, absolute and unqualified, of a feeble and sentimental heresy. Who does not see what follows from this scornful exclusion of corrective punishment? Suppose the infliction not to be corrective, that is, not to be designed for any good, what then remains as the cause of the Divine retribution? The sense of insult offered to a law. And thus we are virtually told, that God must be regarded with a mixture of contempt, unless he be susceptible of personal affront.^[299]

(3.) The last inconsistency with itself which I shall point out in this doctrine, will be found in the view which it gives of the work of Christ. Sin, we are assured, is necessarily infinite. Its infinitude arises from its reference to an Infinite Being; and involves as a consequence the necessity of redemption by Deity himself.

The position, that guilt be estimated not by its amount or its motive, but by the dignity of the being against whom it is directed, is illustrated by the case of an insubordinate soldier, whose punishment is increased, according as his rebellion assails an equal, or any of the many grades amongst his superiors. It is evident, however, that it is not the dignity of the person, but the magnitude of the effect, which determines the severity of the sanction by which, in such an instance, law enforces order. Insult to a monarch is more sternly treated than injury to a subject, because it incurs the risk of wider and more disastrous consequences, and superadds to the personal injury a peril to an official power which, not resting on individual superiority, but on conventional arrangement, is always precarious. It is not indeed easy to form a distinct notion of an infinite act in a finite agent; and still less is it easy to evade the inference, that if an immoral deed against God be an infinite demerit, a moral deed towards him must be an infinite merit.

Passing by an assertion so unmeaning, and conceding it for the sake of progress in our argument, I would inquire what is intended by that other statement, that only Deity can redeem, and that by Deity the sacrifice was made? The union of the divine and human natures in Christ is said to have made his sufferings meritorious in an infinite degree. Yet we are repeatedly assured, that it was in his manhood only that he endured and died. If the divine nature in our Lord had a joint consciousness with the human, then did God suffer and perish; if not, then did the man only die, Deity being no more affected by his anguish, than by that of the malefactors on either side. In the one case the perfections of God, in the other the reality of the atonement, must be relinquished. No doubt, the popular belief is, that the Creator literally expired; the hymns in common use declare it; the language of pulpits sanctions it; the consistency of creeds requires it; but professed theologians repudiate the idea with indignation. Yet by silence or ambiguous speech, they encourage, in those whom they are bound to enlighten, this degrading humanization of Deity; which renders it impossible for common minds to avoid ascribing to him emotions and infirmities, totally irreconcileable with the serene perfections of the Universal Mind. In his influence on the worshipper, He is no Spirit, who can be invoked by his agony and bloody sweat, his cross and passion. And the piety that is thus taught to bring its incense, however sincere, before the mental image of a being with convulsed features and expiring cry, has little left of that which makes Christian devotion characteristically venerable.

II. I proceed to notice the inconsistency of the doctrine under review with the Christian idea of salvation.

There is one significant scriptural fact, which suggests to us the best mode of treating this part of our subject. It is this; that the language supposed to teach the atoning efficacy of the cross, does not appear in the New Testament till the Gentile controversy commences, nor ever occurs apart from the treatment of that subject, under some of its relations. The cause of this phenomenon will presently appear; meanwhile I state it, in the place of an assertion sometimes incorrectly made, viz., that the phraseology in question is confined to the epistles. Even this mechanical limitation of sacrificial passages is indeed nearly true, as not above three or four have strayed beyond the epistolary boundary, into the Gospels and the book of Acts: but the restriction in respect of subject, which I have stated, will be found, I believe, to be absolutely exact, and to furnish the real interpretation to the whole system of language.

(1.) Let us then first test the vicarious scheme by reference to the sentiments of Scripture generally, and of our Lord and his apostles especially, where this controversy is out of the way. Are their ideas respecting human character, the forgiveness of sins, the terms of everlasting life, accordant with the cardinal notions of a believer in the atonement? Do they, or do they not, insist on the necessity of a sacrifice for human sin, as a preliminary to pardon, to sanctification, to the love of God? Do they, or do they not, direct a marked and almost exclusive attention to the cross, as the object to which, far more than to the life and resurrection of our Lord, all faithful eyes should be directed?

(a.) Now to the fundamental assertion of the vicarious system, that the Deity cannot, without inconsistency and imperfection, pardon on simple repentance, the whole tenor of the Bible is one protracted and unequivocal contradiction. So copious is its testimony on this head, that if the passages containing it were removed, scarcely a shred of Scripture relating to the subject would remain. “Pardon, I beseech thee,” said Moses, pleading for the Israelites, “the iniquity of this people, according to the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now; and the Lord said, I have pardoned according to thy word.”^[300] Will it be affirmed, that this chosen people had their eyes perpetually fixed in faith on the great propitiation, which was to close their dispensation, and of which their own ceremonial was a type?—that whenever penitence and pardon are named amongst them, this reference is implied, and that as this faith was called to mind and expressed in the shedding of blood at the altar, such sacrificial offerings take the place, in Judaism, of the atoning trust in Christianity? Well then, let us quit the chosen nation altogether, and go to a heathen people, who were aliens to their laws, their blood, their hopes, and their religion; to whom no sacrifice was appointed, and no Messiah promised. If we can discover the dealings of God with such a people, the case, I presume, must be deemed conclusive. Hear then, what happened on the banks of the Tigris. “Jonah began to enter into the city,” (Nineveh,) “and he cried and said, yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even unto the least of them.” “Who can tell,” (said the decree of the king ordaining the fast), “if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said he would do unto them; and he did it not.”^[301] And when the prophet was offended, first at this clemency to Nineveh, and afterwards that the canker was sent to destroy his own favourite plant, beneath whose shadow he sat, what did Jehovah say? “Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night and perished in a night; and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six-score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand?”^[302] —and who are not likely, one would think, to have discerned the future merits of the Redeemer.

In truth, if even the Israelites had any such prospective views to Calvary, if their sacrifices conveyed the idea of the cross erected there, and were established for this purpose, the fact must have been privately revealed to modern theologians; for not a trace of it can be found in the Hebrew writings. It must be thought strange, that a prophetic reference so habitual, should be always a secret reference; that a faith so fundamental should be so mysteriously suppressed; that the uppermost idea of a nation’s mind should never have found its way to lips or pen. “But if it were not so,” we are reminded, “if the Jewish ritual prefigured nothing ulterior, it was revolting, trifling, savage; its worship a butchery, and the temple courts no better than a slaughter house.” And were they not equally so, though the theory of types be true? If neither priest nor people could see at the time the very thing which the ceremonial was constructed to reveal, what advantage is it that divines can see it now? And even if the notion was conveyed to the Jewish mind, (which the whole history shows not to have been the fact,) was it necessary that hecatombs should be slain, age after age, to intimate obscurely an idea, which one brief sentence might have lucidly expressed? The idea, however, it is evident, slipped through after all; for when Messiah actually came, the one great thing which the Jews did not know and believe about him was, that he could die at all. So much for the preparatory discipline of fifteen centuries!

There is no reason then why anything should be supplied in our thoughts, to alter the plain meaning of the announcements of prophets and holy men, of God’s unconditional forgiveness on repentance. “Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it; thou delightest not in burnt offering; the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”^[303] “Wash you, make you clean,” says the prophet Isaiah in the name of the Lord; “put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”^[304] Once more, “When I say unto the wicked, thou shalt surely die; if he turn from his sin, and do that which is lawful and right; if the wicked restore the pledge, give again that he had robbed, walk in the statutes of life without committing iniquity; he shall surely live, he shall not die.”^[305] Nor are the teachings of the Gospel at all less explicit. Our Lord treats largely and expressly on the doctrine of forgiveness in several parables, and especially that of the prodigal son; and omits all allusion to the propitiation for the past. He furnishes an express definition of the terms of eternal life; “Good master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, why callest thou me good; there is none good save one, that is God; but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” And Jesus adds, “if thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”^[306] This silence on the prime condition of pardon cannot be explained by the fact, that the crucifixion had not yet taken place, and could not safely be alluded to, before the course of events had brought it into prominent notice. For we have the preaching of the Apostles, after the ascension, recorded at great length, and under very various circumstances, in the book of Acts. We have the very “words whereby,” according to the testimony of an angel, “Cornelius and all his house shall be saved;” these, one would think, would be worth hearing in this cause: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost, and with power; who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil, for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all things which he did, both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree; him God raised up the third day, and showed openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify, that it is he who was ordained of God to be the judge of quick and dead. To him give all the prophets witness, that, through his name, whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.”^[307] Did an Evangelical missionary dare to preach in this style now, he would be immediately disowned by his employers, and dismissed as a disguised Socinian, who kept back all the “peculiar doctrines of the Gospel.”

(b.) The emphatic mention of the resurrection by the apostle Peter in this address, is only a particular instance of a system which pervades the whole preaching of the first missionaries of Christ. This, and not the cross, with its supposed effects, is the grand object to which they call the attention and the faith of their hearers. I cannot quote to you the whole book of Acts; but every reader knows, that “Jesus and the resurrection” constitutes the leading theme, the central combination of ideas in all its discourses. This truth was shed, from Peter’s tongue of fire, on the multitudes that heard amazed the inspiration of the day of Pentecost.^[308] Again, it was his text, when passing beneath the beautiful gate, he made the cripple leap for joy; and then, with the flush of this deed still fresh upon him, leaned against a pillar in Solomon’s porch, and spake in explanation to the awe-struck people, thronging in at the hour of prayer.^[309] Before priests and rulers, before Sanhedrim and populace, the same tale is told again, to the utter exclusion, be it observed, of the essential doctrine of the cross.^[310] The authorities of the temple, we are told, were galled and terrified at the apostle’s preaching; “naturally enough,” it will be said, “since, the real sacrifice having been offered, their vocation, which was to make the prefatory and typical oblation, was threatened with destruction.” But no, this is not the reason given: “They were grieved because they preached, through Jesus, the resurrection from the dead.”^[311] Paul, too, while his preaching was spontaneous and free, and until he had to argue certain controversies which have long ago become obselete, manifested a no less remarkable predilection for this topic. Before Felix, he declares what was the grand indictment of his countrymen against him; “touching the resurrection of the dead, I am called in question of you this day.”^[312] Follow him far away from his own land; and, with foreigners, he harps upon the same subject, as if he were a man of one idea; which, indeed, according to our opponents’ scheme, he ought to have been, only it should have been another idea. Seldom, however, can we meet with a more exuberant mind than Paul’s; yet the resurrection obviously haunts him wherever he goes: in the synagogue of Antioch, you hear him dwelling on it with all the energy of his inspiration;^[313] and, at Athens, it was this on which the scepticism of Epicureans and Stoics fastened for a scoff.^[314] In his epistles, too, where he enlarges so much on justification by faith, when we inquire what precisely is this faith, and what the object it is to contemplate and embrace, this remarkable fact presents itself: that the one only important thing respecting Christ, which is never once mentioned as the object of justifying faith is his death, and blood, and cross. “Faith” by itself, the “faith of Jesus Christ,” “faith of the Gospel,” “faith of the Son of God,” are expressions of constant occurrence; and wherever this general description is replaced by a more specific account of this justifying state of mind, it is faith in the resurrection on which attention is fastened. “It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again.”^[315] “He was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification.”^[316] “Faith shall be imputed to us for righteousness, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead.”^[317] Hear too, the Apostle’s definition of saving faith: “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thy heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”^[318] The only instance, in which the writings of St. Paul appear to associate the word faith with the death of Christ, is the following text: “whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood;”^[319] and in this case the Apostle’s meaning would, I conceive, be more faithfully given by destroying this conjunction, and disposing the words thus: “whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation by his blood, through faith.” The idea of his blood, or death, belongs to the word ‘propitiation,’ not to the word ‘faith.’ To this translation no Trinitarian scholar, I am persuaded, can object;^[320] and when the true meaning of the writer’s sacrificial language is explained, the distinction will appear to be not unimportant. At present I am concerned only with the defence of my position, that the death of Christ is never mentioned as the object of saving faith; but that his resurrection unquestionably is. This phenomenon in Scripture phraseology is so extraordinary, so utterly repugnant to everything which a hearer of orthodox preaching would expect, that I hardly expect my affirmation of it to be believed. The two ideas of faith, and of our Lord’s death, are so naturally and perpetually united in the mind of every believer in the atonement, that it must appear to him incredible, that they should never fall together in the writings of the Apostles. However, I have stated my fact; and it is for you to bring it to the test of Scripture.

(c.) Independently of all written testimony, moral reasons, we are assured, exist, which render an absolute remission for the past essential to a regenerated life for the future. Our human nature is said to be so constituted, that the burden of sin, on the conscience once awakened, is intolerable: our spirit cries aloud for mercy; yet is so straitened by the bands of sin, so conscious of the sad alliance lingering still, so full of hesitancy and shame when seeking the relief of prayer, so blinded by its tears when scanning the heavens for an opening of light and hope, that there is no freedom, no unrestrained and happy love to God; but a pinched and anxious mind, bereft of power, striving to work with bandaged or paralytic will, instead of trusting itself to loosened and self-oblivious affections. Hence it is thought, that the sin of the past must be cancelled, before the holiness of the future can be commenced; that it is a false order to represent repentance as leading to pardon; because to be forgiven is the pre-requisite to love. We cannot forget, however, how distinctly and emphatically he who, after God, best knew what is in man, has contradicted this sentiment; for when that sinful woman, whose presence in the house shocked the sanctimonious Pharisee, stood at his feet as he reclined, washing them with her tears, and kissing them with reverential lips; Jesus turned to her and said, “her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.”^[321] From him, then, we learn what our own hearts would almost teach, that love may be the prelude to forgiveness, as well as forgiveness the preparative for love.

At the same time let me acknowledge, that this statement respecting the moral effects of conscious pardon, to which I have invoked Jesus to reply, is by no means an unmixed error. It touches upon a very profound and important truth; and I can never bring myself to regard that assurance of divine forgiveness, which the doctrine of atonement imparts, as a demoralizing state of mind, encouraging laxity of conscience and a continuance in sin. The sense of pardon doubtless reaches the secret springs of gratitude, presents the soul with an object, strange before, of new and divine affection; and binds the child of redemption, by all generous and filial obligations, to serve with free and willing heart the God who hath gone forth to meet him. That the motives of self-interest are diminished in such a case, is a trifle that need occasion small anxiety. For the human heart is no labourer for hire; and, where there is opportunity afforded for true and noble love, will thrust away the proffered wages, and toil rather in a free and thankful spirit. If we are to compare, as a source of duty, the grateful with the merely prudential temper, rather may we trust the first, as not the worthier only, but the stronger too; and till we obtain emancipation from the latter,—forget the computations of hope and fear, and precipitate ourselves for better for worse on some object of divine love and trust,—our nature will be puny and weak, our wills will turn in sickness from their duty, and our affections shrink in aversion from their heaven. But though personal gratitude is better than prudence, there is a higher service still. A more disinterested love may spring from the contemplation of what God is in himself, than from the recollection of what he has done for us; and when this mingles most largely as an element among our springs of action; when, humbled indeed by a knowledge of dangers that await us, and thankful, too, for the blessings spread around us, we yet desire chiefly to be fitting children of the everlasting Father and the holy God; when we venerate him for the graciousness and purity and majesty of his spirit, impersonated in Jesus; and resolve to serve him truly, before he has granted the desire of our heart, and because he is of a nature so sublime and merciful and good; then are we in the condition of her who bent over the feet of Christ; and we are forgiven, because we have loved much.

(2.) Let us now, in conclusion, turn our attention to those portions of the New Testament, which speak of the death of Christ as the means of redemption.

I have said, that these are to be found exclusively in passages of the sacred writings which treat of the Gentile controversy, or of topics immediately connected with it. This controversy arose naturally out of the design of Providence to make the narrow, exclusive, ceremonial system of Judaism, give birth to the universal and spiritual religion of the Gospel; from God’s method of expanding the Hebrew Messiah into the Saviour of humanity. For this the nation was not prepared; to this even the Hebrew Christians could not easily conform their faith; and in the achievement of this, or in persuading the world that it was achieved, did Paul spend his noble life, and write his astonishing epistles. The Jews knew that the Deliverer was to be of their peculiar stock, and their royal lineage; they believed that he would gather upon himself all the singularities of their race, and be a Hebrew to intensity; that he would literally restore the kingdom to Israel; aye, and extend it too, immeasurably beyond the bounds of its former greatness; till, in fact, it swallowed up all existing principalities and powers, and thrones, and dominions, and became co-extensive with the earth. Then in Jerusalem, as the centre of the vanquished nations,—before the temple, as the altar of a humbled world, did they expect the Messiah to erect his throne; and when he had taken the seat of judgment, to summon all the tribes before his tribunal, and pass on the Gentiles, excepting the few who might submit to the law, a sentence of perpetual exclusion from his realm; while his own people would be invited to the seats of honour, occupy the place of authority and sit down with him (the greatest at his right hand and his left) at his table in his kingdom. The holy men of old were to come on earth again to see this day. And many thought that every part of the realm thus constituted, and all its inhabitants, would never die: but like the Messiah himself, and the patriarchs whom he was to call to life, would be invested with immortality. None were to be admitted to these golden days except themselves; all else to be left in outer darkness from this region of light, and there to perish and be seen no more. The grand title to admission was conformity with the Mosaic law; the most ritually scrupulous were the most secure; and the careless Israelite, who forgot or omitted an offering, a tithe, a Sabbath duty, might incur the penalty of exclusion and death: the law prescribed such mortal punishment for the smallest offence; and no one, therefore, could feel himself ready with his claim, if he had not yielded a perfect obedience. If God were to admit him on any other plea, it would be of pure grace and goodness, and not in fulfilment of any promise.

The Jews, being scattered over the civilized world, and having synagogues in every city, came into perpetual contact with other people. Nor was it possible that the Gentiles, among whom they lived, should notice the singular purity and simplicity of the Israelitish Theism, without some of them being struck with its spirit, attracted by its sublime principles, and disposed to place themselves in religious relations with that singular people. Having been led into admiration and even profession of the nation’s theology, they could not but desire to share their hopes; which indeed were an integral part of their religion, and, at the Christian era, the one element in it to which they were most passionately attached. But this was a stretch of charity too great for any Hebrew; or, at all events, if such admission were ever to be thought of, it must only be on condition of absolute submission to the requirements of the law. The Gentile would naturally plead, that as God had not made him of the chosen nation, he had given him no law, except that of conscience; that, being without the law, he must be a law unto himself; and that if he had lived according to his light, he could not be justly excluded on the ground of accidental disqualification. Possibly, in the provocation of dispute, the Gentile might sometimes become froward and insolent in his assertion of claim; and, in the pride of his heart, demand as a right that which, at most, could only be humbly hoped for as a privilege and a free gift.

Thus were the parties mutually placed to whom the Deliverer came. Thus dense and complicated was the web of prejudice which clung round the early steps of the Gospel; and which must be burst or disentangled ere the glad tidings could have free course and be glorified. How did Providence develop from such elements the divine and everlasting truth? Not by neglecting them, and speaking to mankind as if they had no such ideas; not by forbidding his messengers and teachers to have any patience with them; but, on the contrary, by using these very notions as temporary means to his everlasting ends; by touching this and that with light before the eyes of apostles, as if to say, there are good capabilities in these; the truth may be educed from them so gently and so wisely, that the world will find itself in light, without perceiving how it has been quitting the darkness.

So long as Christ remained on earth, he necessarily confined his ministry to his nation. He would not have been the Messiah had he done otherwise. By birth, by lineage, by locality, by habit, he was altogether theirs. Whoever then, of his own people, during his mortal life, believed in him and followed him, became a subject of the Messiah; ready, it was supposed even by the apostles themselves, to enter the glory of his kingdom, whenever it should please him to assume it; qualified at once, by the combination of pedigree and of belief, to enter into life, to become a member of the kingdom of God, to take a place among the elect; for, by all these phrases, was described the admission to the expected realm. If, then, Jesus had never suffered and died, if he had never retired from this world, but stayed to fulfil the anticipations of his first followers, his Messianic kingdom might have included all the converts of the Israelitish stock. From the exclusion which fell on others, they would have obtained salvation. Hence, it is never in connection with the first Jewish Christians that the death of Christ is mentioned.

It was otherwise, however, with the Gentiles. They could not become his followers in his mortal lifetime; and had a Messianic reign then been set up, they must have been excluded; no missionary would have been justified in addressing them with invitation; they could not, as it was said, have entered into life. The Messiah must cease to be Jewish, before he could become universal; and this implied his death by which alone the personal relations, which made him the property of a nation, could be annihilated. To this he submitted; he disrobed himself of his corporeality, he became an immortal spirit; thereby instantly burst his religion open to the dimensions of the world; and, as he ascended to the skies, sent it forth to scatter the seeds of blessing over the field of the world, long ploughed with cares, and moist with griefs, and softened now to nourish in its bosom the tree of Life.

Now, how would the effect of this great revolution be described to the proselyte Gentiles, so long vainly praying for admission to the Israelitish hope. At once it destroyed their exclusion; put away as valueless the Jewish claims of circumcision and law; nailed the hand-writing of ordinances to the cross; reconciled them that had been afar off; redeemed them to God by his blood, out of every tongue, and kindred, and people, and nation; washed them in his blood; justified them by his resurrection and ascension; an expression, I would remark, unmeaning on any other explanation.

Even during our Lord’s personal ministry, his approaching death is mentioned, as the means of introducing the Gentiles into his Messianic kingdom. He adverts repeatedly to his cross, as designed to widen, by their admission, the extent of his sway: and according to Scripture phrase, to yield to him “much fruit.” He was already on his last fatal visit to Jerusalem, when, taking the hint from the visit of some Greeks to him, he exclaimed: “The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” He adds, in allusion to the death he should die; “and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”^[322] It is for this end that he resigns for awhile his life,—that he may bring in the wanderers who are not of the commonwealth of Israel: “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold and one shepherd: therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again.”^[323] Many a parable did Jesus utter, proclaiming his Father’s intended mercy to the uncovenanted nations: but for himself personally he declared, “I am not sent, but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”^[324] His advent was a promise of their economy; his office, the traditionary hope of their fathers; his birth, his life, his person, were under the Law, and excluded him from relations to those who were beyond its obligations. On the cross, all the connate peculiarities of the Nazarene ceased to exist: when, the seal of the sepulchre gave way, the seal of the law was broken too; the nationality of his person passed away; for how can an immortal be a Jew? This then was the time to open wide the scope of his mission, and to invite to God’s acceptance those that fear him in every nation. Though, before, the disciple might “have known Christ after the flesh,” and followed his steps as the Hebrew Messiah, “yet now henceforth was he to know him so no more;” these “old things had passed away,” since he had “died for all,”—died to become universal,—to drop all exclusive relations, and “reconcile the world,” the Gentile world, to God.^[325] Observe to whom this “ministry of reconciliation” is especially confided. As if to show that it is exclusively the risen Christ who belongs to all men, and that his death was the instrument of the Gentiles’ admission, their great Apostle was one Paul, who had not known the Saviour in his mortal life; who never listened to his voice, till it spake from heaven; who himself was the convert of his ascension; and bore to him the relation, not of subject to the person of a Hebrew king, but of spirit to spirit, unembarrassed by anything earthly, legal, or historical. Well did Paul understand the freedom and the sanctity of this relation; and around the idea of the Heavenly Messiah gathered all his conceptions of the spirituality of the gospel, of its power over the unconscious affections, rather than a reluctant will. His believing countrymen were afraid to disregard the observances of the law, lest it should be a disloyalty to God, and disqualify them for the Messiah’s welcome, when he came to take his power and reign. Paul tells them, that while their Lord remained in this mortal state, they were right; as representative of the law, and filling an office created by the religion of Judaism, he could not but have held them then to its obligations; nor could they, without infidelity, have neglected its claims, any more than a wife can innocently separate herself from a living husband. But as the death of the man sets the woman free, and makes null the law of their union, so the decease of Christ’s body emancipates his followers from all legal relations to him; and they are at liberty to wed themselves anew to the risen Christ, who dwells where no ordinance is needful, no tie permitted but of the spirit, and all are as the angels of God.^[326] Surely, then, this mode of conception explains, why the death of Jesus constitutes a great date in the Christian economy, especially as expounded by the friend and apostle of those who were not “Jews by nature, but sinners of the Gentiles.”^[327] Had he never died, they must have remained aliens from his sway; the enemies against whom his power must be directed; without hope in the day of his might; strangers to God and his vicegerent.

But, while thus they “were yet without strength, Christ died for” these “ungodly;”^[328] died to put himself into connection with them, else impossible; and rising from death drew them after him into spiritual existence on earth, analogous to that which he passed in heaven. “You,” says their Apostle, “being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him;” giving you, as “risen with him,” a life above the world and its law of exclusion,—a life not “subject to ordinances,” but of secret love and heavenly faith, “hid with Christ in God;” “blotting out the hand-writing of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and taking it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.”^[329] God had never intended to perpetuate the division between Israel and the world, receiving the one as the sons, and shutting out the other as the slaves of his household. If there had been an appearance of such partiality, he had always designed to set these bondmen free, and to make them “heirs of God through Christ;”^[330] “in whom they had redemption through his blood” from their servile state, the forgiveness of disqualifying sins, according to the riches of his grace.^[331] Though the Hebrews boasted that “theirs was the adoption,”^[332] and till Messiah’s death had boasted truly; yet in that event, God “before the foundation of the world,” had “blessed us” (Gentiles) “with all spiritual blessings, in heavenly places;” “having predestinated us unto the adoption of children, by Jesus Christ, according” (not indeed to any right or promise, but) “to the good pleasure of his will,”^[333] “and when we were enemies, having reconciled us, by the death of his son;”^[334] “that in the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ;”^[335] “by whom we” (Gentiles) “have now received this atonement” (reconciliation);^[336] that he might have no partial empire, but that “in him might all fulness dwell.”^[337] “Wherefore,” says their Apostle, “remember that ye, Gentiles in the flesh, were in time past without Messiah, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenant of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world; but now in Christ Jesus, ye, who sometime were afar off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us” (not between God and man, but between Jew and Gentile); “having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments, contained in ordinances; for to make in himself, of twain, one new man, so making peace; and that he might reconcile both unto God, in one body, by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and came and preached peace to you who were afar off, as well as to them that were nigh. For through him we both have access by one spirit unto the Father.”^[338]

The way, then, is clear and intelligible, in which the death and ascension of the Messiah rendered him universal, by giving spirituality to his rule; and, on the simple condition of faith, added the uncovenanted nations to his dominion, so far as they were willing to receive him. This idea, and this only, will be found in almost every passage of the New Testament (excepting the Epistle to the Hebrews) usually adduced to prove the doctrine of the Atonement. Some of the strongest of these I have already quoted; and my readers must judge whether they have received a satisfactory meaning. There are others, in which the Gentiles are not so distinctly stated to be the sole objects of the redemption of the cross: but with scarcely an exception, so far as I can discover, this limitation is implied; and either creeps out through some adjacent expression in the context; or betrays itself, when we recur to the general course of the Apostle’s argument, or to the character and circumstances of his correspondents. Thus Paul says, that Christ “gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time;” the next verse shows what is in his mind, when he adds, “whereunto I am ordained a preacher, and an apostle, a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity:” and the whole sentiment of the context is the Universality of the Gospel, and the duty of praying for Gentile kings and people, as not abandoned to a foreign God and another Mediator; for since Messiah’s death, to us all “there is but One God, and One Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus:” wherefore the Apostle wills, that for all, “men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands, without wrath, and doubting,”—without wrath at their admission, or doubt of their adoption.^[339] And wherever emphasis is laid on the vast number benefited by the cross, a contrast is implied with the few (only the Jews) who could have been his subjects, had he not died: and when it is said, “he gave his life a ransom for many;”^[340] his blood was “shed for many, for the remission of sins;”^[341] “thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us by thy blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; and hast made us unto our God kings and priests; and we shall reign on the earth;”^[342] “behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world;”^[343] —by all these expressions is still denoted the efficacy of Christ’s death in removing the Gentile disqualification, and making his dispensation spiritual as his celestial existence, and universal as the Fatherhood of God. Does Paul exhort certain of his disciples, “to feed the church of the Lord, which he hath purchased with his own blood?”^[344] We find that he is speaking of the Gentile church of Ephesus, whose elders he is instructing in the management of their charge, and to which he afterwards wrote the well-known epistle, on their Gentile freedom and adoption obtained by the Messiah’s death. When Peter says, “ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation, received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot,”^[345] we must inquire to whom he is addressing these words. If it be to the Jews, the interpretation which I have hitherto given of such language will not apply, and we must seek an explanation altogether different. But the whole manner of this epistle, the complexion of its phraseology throughout, convinces me that it was addressed especially to the Gentile converts of Asia Minor; and that the redemption of which it speaks is no other than that which is the frequent theme of their own apostle.

In the passage just quoted, the form of expression itself suggests the idea, that Peter is addressing a class which did not include himself; “YE were not redeemed, &c.:” further on in the same epistle the same sentiment occurs, however, without any such visible restriction. Exhorting to patient suffering for conscience sake, he appeals to the example of Christ; “who, when he suffered, threatened not, but committed himself to Him that judgeth righteously: who, his own self, bare our sins in his own body on the tree; that we, being dead to sin, should live unto righteousness:” yet, with instant change in the expression, revealing his correspondents to us, the Apostle adds, “by whose stripes YE were healed. For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the shepherd and bishop of your souls.”^[346] With the instinct of a gentle and generous heart, the writer, treating in plain terms of the former sins of those whom he addresses, puts himself in with them; and avoids every appearance of that spiritual pride, by which the Jew constantly rendered himself offensive to the Gentile.

Again, in this letter, he recommends the duty of patient endurance, by appeal to the same consideration of Christ’s disinterested self-sacrifice. “It is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing than for evil doing: for Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.” And who are these “unjust” that are thus brought to God? The Apostle instantly explains, by describing how the “Jews by nature” lost possession of Messiah by the death of his person, and “sinners of the Gentiles” gained him by the resurrection of his immortal nature; “being put to death in flesh, but quickened in spirit; and thereby he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, who formerly were without faith.” This is clearly a description of the Heathen world, ere it was brought into relation to the Messianic promises. Still further confirmation, however, follows. The Apostle adds: “forasmuch, then, as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind; for the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles; when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquettings, and abominable idolatries.”^[347] If we cannot admit this to be a just description of the holy Apostle’s former life, we must perceive that, writing to Pagans of whom it was all true, he beautifully withholds from his language every trace of invidious distinction, puts himself for the moment into the same class, and seems to take his share of the distressing recollection.

The habitual delicacy with which Paul, likewise, classed himself with every order of persons in turn, to whom he had any thing painful to say, is known to every intelligent reader of his epistles. Hence, in his writings too, we have often to consider with whom it is that he is holding his dialogue, and to make our interpretation dependent on the answer. When, for example, he says, that Jesus “was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification;” I ask, “for whose?—was it for every body’s?—or for the Jews’, since Paul was a Hebrew?” On looking closely into the argument, I find it beyond doubt that neither of these answers is correct; and that the Apostle, in conformity with his frequent practice, is certainly identifying himself, Israelite though he was, with the Gentiles, to whom, at that moment, his reasoning applies itself. The neighbouring verses have expressions which clearly enough declare this; “when we were yet without strength,” and “while we were yet sinners,” Christ died for us. It is to the Gentile Church at Corinth, and while expatiating on their privileges and relations as such, that Paul speaks of the disqualifications and legal unholiness of the Heathen, as vanishing in the death of the Messiah; as the recovered leper’s uncleanness was removed, and his banishment reversed, and his exclusion from the temple ended, when the lamb without blemish, which the law prescribed as his sin-offering, bled beneath the knife, so did God provide, in Jesus, a lamb without blemish for the exiled and unsanctified Gentiles, to bring them from their far dwelling in the leprous haunts of this world’s wilderness, and admit them to the sanctuary of spiritual health and worship: “He hath made him to be a sin-offering for us (Gentiles), who knew no sin; that we might be made the justified of God in him;”^[348] entering, under the Messiah, the community of saints. That, in this sacrificial allusion, the Gentile adoption is still the Apostle’s only theme, is evident hence; that twice in this very passage, he declares that he is speaking of that peculiar “reconciliation,” the word and ministry of which have been committed to himself; he is dwelling on the topic most natural to one who “magnified his office,” as “Apostle of the Gentiles.”

To the same parties was Paul writing, when he said, “Christ, our passover, is sacrificed for us.”^[349] Frequently as this sentence is cited in evidence of the doctrine of Atonement, there is hardly a verse in Scripture more utterly inapplicable; nor, if the doctrine were true, could anything be more inept than an allusion to it in this place. I do not dwell on the fact that the paschal lamb was neither sin-offering nor proper sacrifice at all: for the elucidation of the death of Jesus by sacrificial analogies is as easy and welcome, as any other mode of representing it. But I turn to the whole context, and seek for the leading idea before multiplying inferences from a subordinate illustration. I find the author treating, not of the deliverance of believers from curse or exclusion, but of their duty to keep the churches cleansed, by the expulsion of notoriously profligate members. Such persons they are to cast from them, as the Jews, at the passover, swept from their houses all the leaven they contained; and as, for eight days at that season, only pure unleavened bread was allowed for use, so the church must keep the Gospel-festival, free from the ferment of malice and wickedness, and tasting nothing but sincerity and truth. This comparison is the primary sentiment of the whole passage; under cover of which, the Apostle is urging the Corinthians to expel a certain licentious offender: and only because the feast of unleavened bread, on which his fancy has alighted, set in with the day of passover, does he allude to this in completion of the figure. As his correspondents were Gentiles, their Christianity first became possible with the death of Christ; with him, as an immortal, their spiritual relations commenced; when he rose, they rose with him, as by a divine attraction, from an earthly to a heavenly state; their old and corrupt man had been buried together with him, and, with the human infirmities of his person left behind for ever in his sepulchre; and it became them, “to seek those things which are above,” and to “yield themselves to God, as those that are alive from the dead.” This period of the Lord’s sequestration in the heavens, Paul represents as a festival of purity to the disciples on earth, ushered in by the self-sacrifice of Christ. The time is come, he says; cast away the leaven, for the passover is slain, blessed bread of heaven to them that taste it! let nothing now be seen in all the household of the church, but the unleavened cake of simplicity and love.

Paul again appears as the advocate of the Gentiles, when he protests that now between them and the Jews “there is no difference; since all have sinned and come short of the glory of God:” that the Hebrew has lost all claim to the Messianic adoption, and can have no hope but in that free grace of God, which has a sovereign right to embrace the Heathen too; and which, in fact, has compassed the Gentiles within its redemption, by causing Jesus the Messiah to die; “by whose blood God hath set forth a propitiation, through faith; to evince his justice, while overlooking, with the forbearance of God, transgressions past;—to evince his justice in the arrangements of the present crisis; which preserve his justice (to the Israelite), yet justify on mere discipleship to Jesus.”^[350] The great question which the Apostle discusses throughout this epistle, is this: “on what terms is a man now admitted as a subject to the Messiah, so as to be acknowledged by him, when he comes to erect his kingdom?” “He must be one of the circumcised, to whom alone the holy law and promises are given,” says the Jew. “That is well,” replies Paul: “only the promises, you remember, are conditional on obedience; and he who claims by the law must stand the judgment of the law. Can your nation abide this test, and will you stake your hopes upon the issue? Or is there on record against you a violation of every condition of your boasted covenant; wholesale and national transgression, which your favourite code itself menaces with ‘cutting off?’ Have you even rejected and crucified the very Messiah, who was tendered to you in due fulfilment of the promises? Take your trial by the principles of your law, and you must be cast off, and perish, as certainly as the Heathen whom you despise; and whose rebellion against the natural law, gross as it is, does not surpass your own offences against the tables of Moses. You must abandon the claim of right, the high talk of God’s Justice and plighted faith;—which are alike ill-suited to you both. The rules of law are out of the question, and would admit nobody; and we must ascend again to the sovereign will and free mercy of him, who is the source of law; and who, to bestow a blessing which its resources cannot confer, may devise new methods of beneficence. God has violated no pledge. Messiah came to Israel, and never went beyond its bounds; the uncircumcised had no part in him; and every Hebrew who desired it, was received as his subject. But when the people would not have him, and threw away their ancient title, was God either to abandon his vicegerent, or to force him on the unwilling? No: rather did it befit him to say; ‘if they will reject and crucify my servant,—why, let him die, and then he is Israelite no more; I will raise him, and take him apart in his immortality; where his blood of David is lost; and the holiness of his humanity is glorified; and all shall be his, who will believe, and love him, as he there exists, spiritually and truly.’” Thus, according to Paul, does God provide a new method of adoption or justification, without violating any promises of the old. Thus he makes Faith in Jesus,—a moral act instead of a genealogical accident,—the single condition of reception into the Divine kingdom upon earth. Thus, after the passage of Christ from this world to another, Jew and Gentile are on an equality in relation to the Messiah; the one gaining nothing by his past privileges; the other, not visited with exclusion for past idolatry and sins; but assured, in Messiah’s death, that these are to be overlooked, and treated as if cleansed away. He finds himself invited into the very penetralia of that sanctuary of pure faith and hope, from which before he had been repelled as an unclean thing; as if its ark of mercy had been purified for ever from his unworthy touch, or he himself had been sprinkled by some sudden consecration. And all this was the inevitable and instant effect of that death on Calvary; which took Messiah from the Jews, and gave him to the world.

With emphasis, not less earnest than that of Paul, does the apostle John repudiate the notion of any claim on the Divine admission by law or righteousness; and insist on humble and unqualified acceptance of God’s free grace and remission for the past, as the sole avenue of entrance to the kingdom. This avenue was open, however, to all “who confessed that Jesus the Messiah had come in the flesh;”^[351] in other words, that, during his mortal life, Jesus had been indicated as this future Prince; and that his ministry was the Messiah’s preliminary visit to that earth on which shortly he would re-appear to reign. The great object of that visit was to prepare the world for his real coming; for as yet it was very unfit for so great a crisis; and especially to open, by his death, a way of admission for the Gentiles, and frame, on their behalf, an act of oblivion for the past. “If,” says the apostle to them, “we walk in the light, as he is in the light” (of love and heaven), “we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin:”^[352] the Israelite will embrace the Gentiles in fraternal relations, knowing that the cross has removed their past unholiness. Nor let the Hebrew rely on anything now but the divine forbearance; to appeal to rights will serve no longer: “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”^[353] Nor let any one despair of a reception, or even a restoration, because he has been an idolater and sinner: “Jesus Christ the righteous” is “an advocate with the Father” for admitting all who are willing to be his; “and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only (not merely for our small portion of Gentiles, already converted); but also for the whole world,”^[354] if they will but accept him. He died to become universal; to make all his own; to spread an oblivion, wide as the earth, over all that had embarrassed the relations to the Messiah, and made men aliens, instead of Sons of God. Yet did no spontaneous movement of their good affections solicit this change. It was “not that we (Gentiles) loved God; but that he loved us, and sent his Son, the propitiation for our sins;” “he sent his only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.”^[355] That this epistle was addressed to Gentiles, and is therefore occupied with the same leading idea respecting the cross, which pervades the writings of Paul, is rendered probable by its concluding words, which could hardly be appropriate to Jews: “keep yourselves from idols.”^[356] How little the apostle associated any vicarious idea even with a form of phrase most constantly employed by modern theology to express it, is evident from the parallel which he draws, in the following words, between the death of our Lord and that of the Christian martyrs; “hereby perceive we love, because Christ laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”^[357]

Are then the Gentiles alone beneficially affected by the death of Christ; and is no wider efficacy ever assigned to it in Scripture? The great number of passages to which I have already applied this single interpretation, will show that I consider it as comprising the great leading idea of the apostolic theology on this subject; nor do I think that there is (out of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which I shall soon notice) a single doctrinal allusion to the cross, from which this conception is wholly absent. At the same time, I am not prepared to maintain, that this is the only view of the crucifixion and resurrection ever present to the mind of the apostles. Jews themselves, they naturally inquired, how Israel, in particular, stood affected by the unanticipated death of its Messiah; in what way its relations were changed, when the offered Prince became the executed victim; and how far matters would have been different, if, as had been expected, the Anointed had assumed his rights and taken his power at once; and, instead of making his first advent a mere preliminary and warning visit “in the flesh,” had set up the kingdom forthwith, and gathered with him his few followers to “reign on the earth.” Had this—instead of submission to death, removal, and delay—been his adopted course, what would have become of his own nation, who had rejected him;—who must have been tried by that law which was their boast, and under which he came; who had long been notorious offenders against its conditions, and now brought down its final curse by despising the claims of the accredited Messiah? They must have been utterly “cut off,” and cast out among the “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel,” “without Messiah,” “without hope,” “without God;” for while “circumcision profiteth, if thou keep the law; yet if thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision.”^[358] Had he come then “to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all them that believe;”—had he then been “revealed with his mighty angels” (whom he might have summoned by “legions”);—it must have been “in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that knew not God, nor obeyed the glad tidings of the Lord Jesus Christ;” to “punish with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of his power.”^[359] The sins and prospects of Israel being thus terrible, and its rejection imminent (for Messiah was already in the midst of them),—he withheld his hand; refused to precipitate their just fate; and said, “Let us give them time and wait; I will go apart into the heavens, and peradventure they will repent; only they must receive me then spiritually, and by hearty faith, not by carnal right, admitting thus the willing Gentile with themselves.” And so he prepared to die and retire; he did not permit them to be cut off, but was cut off himself instead; he restrained the curse of their own law from falling on them, and rather perished himself by a foul and accursed lot, which that same law pronounces to be the vilest and most polluted of deaths. Thus says St. Paul to the Jews: “he hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us; for it is written ‘cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’”^[360] In this way, but for the death of the Messiah, Israel too must have been lost; and by that event they received time for repentance, and a way for remission of sins; found a means of reconciliation still; saw their providence, which had been lowering for judgment, opening over them in propitiation once more; the just had died for the unjust, to bring them to God. What was this delay,—this suspension of judgment,—this opportunity of return and faith,—but an instance of “the long-suffering of God,” with which “he endures the vessels of wrath (Jews) fitted to destruction; and makes known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy; which he had afore prepared unto glory?”^[361] If Christ had not withdrawn awhile,—if his power had been taken up at once, and wielded in stern and legal justice, a deluge of judgment must have overwhelmed the earth, and swept away both Jew and Gentile, leaving but a remnant safe. But in mercy was the mortal life of Jesus turned into a preluding message of notice and warning, like the tidings which Noah received of the flood; and as the growing frame of the ark gave signal to the world of the coming calamity, afforded an interval for repentance, and made the patriarch, as he built, a constant “preacher of righteousness;”^[362] so the increasing body of the Church, since the warning retreat of Christ to heaven, proclaims the approaching “day of the Lord,” admonishes that “all should come to repentance,”^[363] and fly betimes to that faith and baptism which Messiah’s death and resurrection have left as an ark of safety. “Once in the days of Noah, the long-suffering of God waited while the ark was preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls, were saved by water: a representation, this, of the way in which baptism (not, of course, carnal washing, but the engagement of a good conscience with God,) saves us now, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ; who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels, and authorities, and powers, being made subject to him.”^[364] Yet, “the time is short,”^[365] and must be “redeemed;”^[366] “it is the last hour;”^[367] “the Lord,” “the coming of the Lord,” “the end of all things,” are “at hand.”^[368]

I have described one aspect, which the death of the Messiah presented to the Jews; and, in this, we have found another primary conception, explanatory of the scriptural language respecting the cross. Of the two relations in which this event appeared (the Gentile and the Israelitish) I believe the former to be by far the most familiar to the New Testament authors, and to furnish the true interpretation of almost all their phraseology on the subject. But, as my readers may have noticed, many passages receive illustration by reference to either notion; and some may have a meaning compounded of both. I must not pause to make any minute adjustment of these claims, on the part of the two interpreting ideas: it is enough that, either separately or in union, they have now been taken round the whole circle of apostolic language respecting the cross, and detected in every difficult passage the presence of sense and truth, and the absence of all hint of vicarious atonement.

It was on the unbelieving portion of the Jewish people, that the death of their Messiah conferred the national blessings and opportunities to which I have adverted. But to the converts who had been received by him during his mortal life, and who would have been heirs of his glory, had he assumed it at once, it was less easy to point out any personal benefits from the cross. That the Christ had retired from this world was but a disappointing postponement of their hopes: that he had perished as a felon, was shocking to their pride, and turned their ancient boast into a present scorn: that he had become spiritual and immortal made him no longer theirs “as concerning the flesh,” and, by admitting Gentiles with themselves, set aside their favourite law. So offensive to them was this unexpected slight on the institutions of Moses, immemorially reverenced as the ordinances of God, that it became important to give some turn to the death of Jesus, by which that event might be harmonized with the national system, and be shown to effect the abrogation of the Law, on principles strictly legal. This was the object of the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews; who thus gives us a third idea of the relations of the cross,—bearing, indeed, an essential resemblance to St. Paul’s Gentile view, but illustrated in a manner altogether different. No trace is to be observed here of Paul’s noble glorying in the Cross: so studiously is every allusion to the crucifixion avoided, till all the argumentative part of the epistle has been completed, that a reader finds the conclusion already in sight, without having gained any notion of the mode of the Lord’s death, whether even it was natural or violent,—a literal human sacrifice, or a voluntary self-immolation. Its ignominy and its agonies are wholly unmentioned; and his mortal infirmities and sufferings are explained, not as the spontaneous adoptions of previous compassion in him, but as God’s fitting discipline for rendering him “a merciful and faithful high priest.”^[369] They are referred to in the tone of apology, not of pride; as needing rather to be reconciled with his office, than to be boldly expounded as its grand essential. The object of the author clearly is, to find a place for the death of Jesus among the Messianic functions; and he persuades the Hebrew Christians that it is (not a satisfaction for moral guilt, but) a commutation for the Mosaic Law. In order to understand his argument, we must advert for a moment to the prejudices which it was designed to conciliate and correct.

It is not easy for us to realize the feelings with which the Israelite, in the yet palmy days of the Levitical worship, would hear of an abrogation of the Law;—the anger and contempt with which the mere bigot would repudiate the suggestion;—the terror with which the new convert would make trial of his freedom;—the blank and infidel feeling with which he would look round, and find himself drifted away from his anchorage of ceremony; the sinking heart, with which he would hear the reproaches of his countrymen against his apostacy. Every authoritative ritual draws towards itself an attachment too strong for reason and the sense of right; and transfers the feeling of obligation from realities to symbols. Among the Hebrews, this effect was the more marked and the more pernicious, because their ceremonies were, in many instances, only remotely connected with any important truth or excellent end; they were separated by several removes from any spiritual utility. Rites were enacted to sustain other rites; institution lay beneath institution, through so many successive steps, that the crowning principle at the summit easily passed out of sight. To keep alive the grand truth of the Divine Unity, there was a gorgeous temple worship: to perform this worship there was a priesthood: to support the priesthood, there were (among other sources of income) dues paid in the form of sacrifice: to provide against the non-payment of dues there were penalties: to prevent an injurious pressure of these penalties, there were exemptions, as in cases of sickness: and to put a check on trivial claims of exemption, it must be purchased by submission to a fee, under name of an atonement. Wherever such a system is received as divine, and based on the same authority with the great law of duty, it will always, by its definiteness and precision, attract attention from graver moral obligations. Its materiality renders it calculable: its account with the conscience can be exactly ascertained: as it has little obvious utility to men, it appears the more directly paid to God; it is regarded as the special means of pleasing him, of placating his anger, and purchasing his promises. Hence it may often happen, that the more the offences against the spirit of duty, the more are rites multiplied in propitiation; and the harvest of ceremonies and that of crimes ripen together.

At a state not far from this, had the Jews arrived, when Christianity was preached. Their moral sentiments were so far perverted, that they valued nothing in themselves, in comparison with their legal exactitude, and hated all beyond themselves for the want of this. They were eagerly expecting the Deliverer’s kingdom, nursing up their ambition for his triumphs: curling the lip, as the lash of oppression fell upon them, in suppressed anticipation of vengeance; satiating a temper, at once fierce and servile, with dreams of Messiah’s coming judgment, when the blood of the Patriarchs should be the title of the world’s nobles, and the everlasting reign should begin in Jerusalem. Why was the hour delayed, they impatiently asked themselves? Was it that they had offended Jehovah, and secretly sinned against some requirement of his law? And then they set themselves to a renewed precision, a more slavish punctiliousness than before. Ascribing their continued depression to their imperfect legal obedience, they strained their ceremonialism tighter than ever: and hoped to be soon justified from their past sins, and ready for the mighty prince and the latter days.

What then must have been the feeling of the Hebrew, when told that all his punctualities had been thrown away; that at the advent, faith in Jesus, not obedience to the law, was to be the title to admission; and that the redeemed at that day would be, not the scrupulous Pharisee,—whose dead works would be of no avail; but all who, with the heart, have worthily confessed the name of the Lord Jesus? What doctrine could be more unwelcome to the haughty Israelite? it dashed his pride of ancestry to the ground. It brought to the same level with himself the polluted Gentile, whose presence would alone render all unclean in the Messiah’s kingdom. It proved his past ritual anxieties to have been all wasted. It cast aside for the future the venerated law; left it in neglect to die; and made all the apparatus of Providence for its maintenance end in absolutely nothing. Was then the Messiah to supersede, and not to vindicate the law? How different this from the picture which prophets had drawn of his golden age, when Jerusalem was to be the pride of the earth, and her temple the praise of nations, sought by the feet of countless pilgrims, and decked with the splendour of their gifts! How could a true Hebrew be justified in a life without law? How think himself safe in a profession, which was without temple, without priest, without altar, without victim?

Not unnaturally, then, did the Hebrews regard with reluctance two of the leading features of Christianity; the death of the Messiah, and the freedom from the law. The epistle addressed to them was designed to soothe their uneasiness, and to show, that if the Mosaic institutions were superseded, it was in conformity with principles and analogies contained within themselves. With great address, the writer links the two difficulties together, and makes the one explain the other. He finds a ready means of effecting this, in the sacrificial ideas familiar to every Hebrew; for by representing the death of Jesus as commutation for legal observances, he is only ascribing to it an operation, acknowledged to have place in the death of every lamb slain as a sin-offering at the altar. These offerings were a distinct recognition on the part of the Levitical code, of a principle of equivalents for its ordinances; a proof that, under certain conditions, they might yield: nothing more, therefore, was necessary, than to show that the death of Christ established those conditions. And such a method of argument was attended by this advantage, that while the practical end would be obtained of terminating all ceremonial observance, the Law was yet treated as in theory perpetual; not as ignominiously abrogated, but as legitimately commuted. Just as the Israelite, in paying his offering at the altar to compensate for ritual omissions, recognized thereby the claims of the law, while he obtained impunity for its neglect; so, if Providence could be shown to have provided a legal substitute for the system, its authority was acknowledged, at the moment that its abolition was secured.

Let us advert then to the functions of the Mosaic sin-offerings, to which the writer has recourse to illustrate his main position. They were of the nature of a mulct or acknowledgment rendered, for unconscious or inevitable disregard of ceremonial liabilities, and contraction of ceremonial uncleanness. Such uncleanness might be incurred from various causes; and while unremoved by the appointed methods of purification, disqualified from attendance at the sanctuary, and “cut off” “the guilty” “from among the congregation.” To touch a dead body, to enter a tent where a corpse lay, rendered a person “unclean for seven days;” to come in contact with a forbidden animal, a bone, a grave; to be next to any one struck with sudden death; to be afflicted with certain kinds of bodily disease and infirmity; unwittingly to lay a finger on a person unclean, occasioned defilement, and necessitated a purification or an atonement.^[370] Independently of these offences, enforced upon the Israelite by the accidents of life, it was not easy for even the most cautious worshipper to keep pace with the complicated series of petty debts which the law of ordinances was always running up against him. If his offering had an invisible blemish; if he omitted a tithe, because “he wist it not;” or inadvertently fell into arrear, by a single day, with respect to a known liability; if absent from disease, he was compelled to let his ritual account accumulate; “though it be hidden from him,” he must “be guilty, and bear his iniquity,” and bring his victim.^[371] On the birth of a child, the mother, after the lapse of a prescribed period, made her pilgrimage to the temple, presented her sin-offering, and “the priest made atonement for her.”^[372] The poor leper, long banished from the face of men, and unclean by the nature of his disease, became a debtor to the sanctuary, and on return from his tedious quarantine, brought his lamb of atonement, and departed thence, clear from neglected obligations to his law.^[373] It was impossible, however, to provide by specific enactment for every case of ritual transgression and impurity, arising from inadvertency or necessity. Scarcely could it be expected that the courts of worship themselves would escape defilement, from imperfections in the offerings, or unconscious disqualification in people or in priest. To clear off the whole invisible residue of such sins, an annual “day of atonement” was appointed; the people thronged the avenues and approaches of the tabernacle; in their presence a kid was slain for their own transgressions, and for the high-priest the more dignified expiation of a heifer: charged with the blood of each successively, he sprinkled not only the exterior altar open to the sky, but, passing through the first and Holy chamber into the Holy of Holies, (never entered else), he touched, with finger dipped in blood, the sacred lid (the Mercy-seat) and foreground of the Ark.^[374] At that moment, while he yet lingers behind the veil, the purification is complete; on no worshipper of Israel does any legal unholiness rest; and were it possible for the high-priest to remain in that interior retreat of Jehovah, still protracting the expiatory act, so long would this national purity continue, and the debt of ordinances be effaced as it arose. But he must return; the sanctifying rite must end; the people be dismissed; the priests resume the daily ministrations; the law open its stern account afresh; and in the mixture of national exactitude and neglects, defilements multiply again till the recurring anniversary lifts off the burden once more. Every year, then, the necessity comes round of “making atonement for the Holy sanctuary,” “for the tabernacle,” “for the altar,” “for the priests, and for all the people of the congregation.” Yet, though requiring periodical renewal, the rite, so far as it went, had an efficacy which no Hebrew could deny; for ceremonial sins, unconscious or inevitable (to which all atonement was limited^[375]), it was accepted as an indemnity; and put it beyond doubt that Mosaic obedience was commutable.

Such was the system of ideas, by availing himself of which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews would persuade his correspondents to forsake their legal observances. “You can look without uneasiness,” he suggests, “on your ritual omissions, when the blood of some victim has been presented instead, and the penetralia of your sanctuary have been sprinkled with the offering: well, on no other terms would I soothe your anxiety; precisely such equivalent sacrifice does Christianity exhibit, only of so peculiar a nature, that for all ceremonial neglects, intentional no less than inadvertent, you may rely upon indemnity.” The Jews entertained a belief respecting their temple, which enabled the writer to give a singular force and precision to his analogy. They conceived, that the tabernacle of their worship was but the copy of a divine structure, devised by God himself, made by no created hand, and preserved eternally in heaven: this was “the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man;” which no mortal had beheld, except Moses in the mount that he might “make all things according to that pattern;”^[376] within whose Holy of Holies dwelt no emblem or emanation of God’s presence, but his own immediate Spirit; and the celestial furniture of which required, in proportion to its dignity, the purification of a nobler sacrifice, and the ministrations of a diviner priest, than befitted the “worldly sanctuary”^[377] below. And who then can mistake the meaning of Christ’s departure from this world, or doubt what office he conducts above? He is called by his ascension to the Pontificate of heaven; consecrated, “not after the law of any carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life;”^[378] he drew aside the veil of his mortality, and passed into the inmost court of God: and as he must needs “have somewhat to offer,”^[379] he takes the only blood he had ever shed,—which was his own,—and like the high-priest before the Mercy-seat, sanctifies therewith the people that stand without, “redeeming the transgressions” which “the first covenant” of rites entailed.^[380] And he has not returned; still is he hid within that holiest place; and still the multitude he serves turn thither a silent and expectant gaze; he prolongs the purification still; and while he appears not, no other rites can be resumed, nor any legal defilement be contracted. Thus, meanwhile, ordinances cease their obligation, and the sin against them has lost its power. How different this from the offerings of Jerusalem, whose temple was but the “symbol and shadow” of that sanctuary above.^[381] In the Hebrew “sacrifices there was a remembrance again made of sins every year;”^[382] “the high-priest annually entered the holy place;”^[383] being but a mortal, he could not go in with his own blood and remain but must take that of other creatures and return; and hence it became “not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins,”^[384] for instantly they began to accumulate again. But to the very nature of Christ’s offering, a perpetuity of efficacy belongs; bearing no other than his own blood,” he was immortal when his ministration began, and “ever liveth to make his intercession;^[385] he could “not offer himself often, for then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world,”—and “it is appointed unto men only once to die:” so that “once for all he entered into the holy place, and obtained a redemption that is perpetual;” “once in the end of the world hath he appeared, and by sacrificing himself hath absolutely put away sin;” “this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down on the right hand of God,” “for by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified,”^[386] The ceremonial then, with its periodical transgressions, and atonements, is suspended; the services of the outer tabernacle cease, for the holiest of all is made manifest;^[387] one who is “priest for ever” dwells therein: one “consecrated for evermore,” “holy, harmless, undefiled, in his celestial dwelling quite separate from sinners;^[388] who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people’s; for this he did once for all when he offered up himself.”^[389]

Nor is it in its perpetuity alone, that the efficacy of the Christian sacrifice transcends the atonements of the law; it removes a higher order of ritual transgressions. It cannot be supposed, indeed, that Messiah’s life is no nobler offering than that of a creature from the herd or flock, and will confer no more immunity. Accordingly, it goes beyond those “sins of ignorance,” those ceremonial inadvertences, for which alone there was remission in Israel; and reaches to voluntary neglects of the sacerdotal ordinances; ensuring indemnity for legal omissions, when incurred not simply by the accidents of the flesh, but even by intention of the conscience. This is no greater boon than the dignity of the sacrifice requires; and does but give to his people below that living relation of soul to God, which he himself sustains above. “If the blood of bulls and of goats ... sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purify (even) your conscience from dead works (ritual observances) to serve the living God!”^[390] Let then the ordinances go, and the Lord “put his laws into the mind and write them in the heart;” and let all have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by this new and living way which he hath consecrated for us;” “provoking each other to love and to good works.”^[391]

See, then, in brief, the objection of the Hebrews to the gospel; and the reply of their instructor. They said; “What a blank is this; you have no temple, no priest, no ritual! How is it that, in his ancient covenant, God is so strict about ceremonial service, and permits no neglect, however incidental, without atonement; yet in this new economy, throws the whole system away; letting us run up an everlasting debt to a law confessedly unrepealed, without redemption of it, or atonement for it?”

“Not without redemption and atonement,” replies their evangelical teacher; “temple, sacrifice, priest, remain to us also, only glorified into proportions worthy of a heavenly dispensation; our temple, in the skies; our sacrifice, Messiah’s mortal person; our priest, his ever-living spirit. How poor the efficacy of your former offerings! year after year, your ritual debt began again: for the blood dried and vanished from the tabernacle which it purified; the priest returned from the inner shrine; and when there, he stood, with the interceding blood, before the emblem, not the reality of God. But Christ, not at the end of a year, but at the end of the great world-era of the Lord, has come to offer up himself,—no lamb so unblemished as he; his voluntary and immortal spirit, than which was nothing ever more divinely consecrate, becomes officiating priest, and strikes his own person with immolating blow; it falls and bleeds on earth, as on the outer altar, standing on the threshold of the sanctuary of heaven: thither he ascends with the memorials of his death, vanishes into the Holy of Holies of the skies, presents himself before the very living God, and sanctifies the temple there and worshippers here: saying to us, ‘drop now for ever the legal burdens that weigh you down; doubt not that you are free, as my glorified spirit here, from the defilements you are wont to dread; I stay behind this veil of visible things to clear you of all such taint, and put away such sin eternally. Trust then in me, and take up the freedom of your souls: burst the dead works, that cling round your conscience like cerements of the grave; and rise to me, by the living power of duty, and loving allegiance to God.’”

So far then, as the death of Christ is treated in scripture dogmatically, rather than historically, its effects are viewed in contrast with the different order of things which must have been expected, had he, as Messiah, not died. And thus regarded, it presented itself to the minds of the Apostles in three relations;

First, to the Gentiles, whom it drew in to be subjects of the Messiah, by breaking down the barriers of his Hebrew personality, and rendering him spiritual as well as immortal.

Secondly, to the unbelieving Jews; whom his retirement from this world delivered from the judgment due to them, on the principles of their own law, both for their general violation of the conditions of their covenant, and for their positive rejection of him. His absence re-opened their opportunities; and to tender them this act of long-suffering, he took on himself the death which had been incurred by them.

Thirdly, to the believing Jews; the terms of whose discipleship the Messiah’s death had changed, destroying all the benefits of their lineage, and substituting an act of the mind, the simpler claim of faith. It was therefore a commutation for the Ritual Law, and gave them impunity and atonement for all its violations.

With the last two of these relations, beyond their remarkable historical interest, we have no personal concern. The first remains, and ever will remain, worthy of the glorious joy, with which Paul regarded and expounded it. God has committed the rule of this world to no exclusive Prince, and no sacerdotal power, and no earthly majesty; but to one whose spirit, too divine to be limited to place and time, broke through clouds of sorrow into the clearest heaven; and thither has since been drawing our human love, though for ages now he has been unseen and immortal. An impartial God, a holy and spiritual Law, an infinite hope for all men,—are given to us by that generous cross.

It is evident that all three of the relations which I have described, belonged to the death of Jesus, in his capacity of Messiah; and could have had no existence, if he had not borne this character, but had been simply a private martyr to his convictions. The foregoing exposition gives a direct answer to the inquiry, pressed without the slightest pertinence upon the Unitarian, why the phraseology of the cross is never found applied to Paul or Peter, or any other noble confessor, who died in attestation of the truth; why “no record is given that we are justified by the blood of Stephen; or that he bare our sins in his own body, and made reconciliation for us.”^[392] I know not why such a question should be submitted to us; we have assuredly no concern with it; having never dreamt that the Apostles could have written as they did respecting the death on Calvary, if they had thought of it only as a scene of martyrdom. We have passed under review the whole language of the New Testament on this subject; and in the interpretation of it have not even once had recourse to this, which is said to be our only view of the cross. We have seen the apostles justly announcing their Lord’s death, as a proper propitiation; because it placed whole classes of men, without any meritorious change in their character, in saving relations: declaring it a strict substitute for others’ punishment; on the ground that there were those who must have perished, if he had not; and that he died and retired, that they might remain and live: describing it as a sacrifice which put away sin; because it did that for ever, which the Levitical atonements achieved for a day: but we have not found them ever appealing to it either as a satisfaction to the justice of God, or an example of martyrdom to men. The Trinitarians have one idea of this event themselves; and their fancy provides their opponents with one idea of it; of the former not a trace exists, on any page of Scripture; and of the latter, the Unitarian need not avail himself at all, in explaining the language, whereof it is said to be his solitary key.

Nowhere, then, in Scripture do we meet with anything corresponding with the prevailing notions of vicarious redemption; everywhere, and most emphatically in the personal instructions of our Lord, do we find a doctrine of forgiveness, and an idea of salvation, utterly inconsistent with it. He spake often of the unqualified clemency of God to his returning children; never once of the satisfaction demanded by his justice. He spake of the joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth; but was silent on the sacrificial faith, without which penitence is said to be unavailing. Nor did he, like his modern disciples, teach that there are two separate salvations, which must follow each other in a fixed order; first, redemption from the penalty, secondly from the spirit, of sin; pardon for the past, before sanctification in the present; a removal of the “hindrance in God,” previous to its annihilation in ourselves. If indeed there were in Christianity two deliverances, discriminating and successive, it would be more in accordance with its spirit to invert this order;—to recal from alienation first, and announce forgiveness afterwards; to restore from guilt, before cancelling the penalty; and permit the healing to anticipate the pardoning love. At least, there would seem, in such arrangement, to be a greater jealousy for the holiness of the divine law, a severer reservation of God’s complacency for those who have broken from the service of sin, than in the system, which proclaims impunity to the rebel will, ere yet its estrangement is renounced. If the outward remission precedes the inward sanctification, then does God admit to favour the yet unsanctified; guilt keeps us in no exile from him: and though the holy Spirit is to follow afterwards, it becomes the peculiar office of the cross to lift us as we are, with every stain upon the soul and every vile habit unretraced, from the brink of perdition to the assurance of glory: the divine lot is given to us, before the divine love is awakened in us; and the heirs of heaven have yet to become the children of holiness. With what consistency can the advocates of such an economy accuse its opponents of dealing lightly with sin, of deluding men into a false trust, and administering seductive flatteries to human nature?^[393] What! shall we, who plant in every soul of sin a Hell, whence no foreign force, no external God, can pluck us, any more than they can tear us from our identity;—we, who hide the fires of torment in no viewless gulf, but make them ubiquitous as guilt;—we, who suffer no outward agent from Eden, or the Abyss, or Calvary, to encroach upon the solitude of man’s responsibility, and confuse the simplicity of conscience;—we, who teach that God will not, and even cannot, spare the froward, till they be froward no more, but must permit the burning lash to fall, till they cry aloud for mercy, and throw themselves freely into his embrace;—shall we be rebuked for a lax administration of peace, by those who think that a moment may turn the alien into the elect? It is no flattery of our nature, to reverence deeply its moral capacities: we only discern in them the more solemn trust; and see in their abuse the fouler shame. And it is not of what men are, but of what they might be, that we encourage noble and cheerful thoughts. Doubtless, we think exaggeration possible (which our opponents apparently do not) even in the portraiture of their actual character: and perhaps we are not the less likely to awaken true convictions of sin, that we strive to speak of it with the voice of discriminative justice, instead of the monotonous thunders of vengeance; and to draw its image in the natural tints provided by the conscience, rather than in the prÆternatural flame-colour mingled in the crucibles of Hell.

In making penal redemption and moral redemption separate and successive, the vicarious scheme, we submit, is inconsistent with the Christian idea of salvation. Not that we take the second, and reject the first, as our Trinitarian friends imagine; nor that we invert their order. We accept them both; putting them however, not in succession, but in super-position, so that they coalesce. The power and the punishment of sin perish together; and together begin the holiness and the bliss of heaven. Whatever extracts the poison, cools the sting: nor can the divine vigour of spiritual health enter, without its freedom and its joy. That there can be any separate dealings with our past guilt and with our present character, is not a truth of God, but a fiction of the schools. The sanctification of the one is the redemption of the other. The mind given up to passion, or chained to self, or any how alienated from the love and life divine, dwells, whatever be its faith, in the dark and terrible abyss: while he, and he only, that in the freedom and tranquillity of great affections, communes with God and toils for men, understands the meaning, and wins the promises, of heaven. Am I asked, ‘What then is to persuade the sinful heart, thus to draw near to God;—what, but a proclamation of absolute pardon, can break down the secret distrust, which keeps our nature back, wrapped in the reserve of conscious guilt?’ I reply; however much these fears and hesitations might cling round us, and restrain us from the mystic Deity of Nature, they can have no place in our intercourse with the Father whom Jesus represents. It needs only that Christ be truly his image, to know “that the hindrance is not with him, but entirely in ourselves:”^[394] to see that there is no anger in his look; to feel that he invites us to unreserved confession, and accepts our self-abandonment to him; that he lifts the repentant, prostrate at his feet, and speaks the words of severe, but truest hope. Am I told, ‘that only the gratitude excited by personal rescue from tremendous danger, by an unconditional and entire deliverance, is capable of winning our reluctant nature, of opening the soul to the access of the Divine Spirit, and bringing it to the service of the Everlasting Will?’ I rejoice to acknowledge, that some such disinterested power must be awakened, some mighty forces of the heart be called out, ere the regeneration can take place that renders us children of the Highest; ere we can break, with true new-birth, from the shell of self, and try and train our wings in the atmosphere of God. The permanent work of duty must be wrought by the affections; not by the constraint, however solemn, of hope and fear; no self-perfectionating process, elaborated by an anxious will, has warmth enough to ripen the soul’s diviner fruits; the walks of outward morality, and the slopes of deliberate meditation, it may keep smooth and trim; but cannot make the true life-blossoms set, as in a garden of the Lord, and the foliage wave as with the voice of God among the trees. I gladly admit that to a believer in the vicarious sacrifice, the sense of pardon, the love of the great deliverer, may well fulfil this blessed office, of carrying him out of himself in genuine allegiance to a being most benign and holy. And perceiving that, if this doctrine were removed, there is not, in the system of which it forms a part, and which else would be all terror, anything that could perform the same generous part, I can understand why it seems to its advocates, an essential power in the renovation of the character. But great as it may be, within the limits of its own narrow scheme, ideas possessed of higher moral efficacy are not wanting, when we pass into a region of nobler and more Christian thought. Shall we say that the view of the infinite Ruler, given in the spoken wisdom or the living spirit of Christ, has no sanctifying power? Yet where is there any trace in it of the satisfactionist’s redemption? When we sit at Messiah’s feet, that transforming gratitude for an extinguished penalty on which the prevailing theology insists, as its central emotion, becomes replaced by a similar and profounder sentiment towards the eternal Father. If to rescue men from a dreadful fate in the future be a just title to our reverence, never to have designed that fate claims an affection yet more devoted; if there be a divine mercy in annihilating an awful curse, in shedding only blessing there is surely a diviner still. Shall the love restored to us after long delay, and in consideration of an equivalent, work mightily on the heart; and shall that which asked no purchase, which has been veiled by no cloud, which has enfolded us always in its tranquillity, nor can ever quit the soul opened to receive it, fail to penetrate the conscience, and dissolve the frosts of our self-love by some holier flame? Never shall it be found true, that God must threaten us with vengeance, ere we can feel the shelter of his grace!

In truth, the Christian idea of salvation cannot be better illustrated, than by the doubt which has been entertained respecting the proper translation of my text. Some, referring it to spiritual redemption, adhere to the common version; others, seeing that the apostle Peter is explaining “by what power, or by what name” he had cured the lame man at the temple gate, refer the words to this miracle of deliverance, and render them thus; “neither is there healing in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we can be healed.” It matters little which it is; for whether we speak of body or of mind, Jesus “saves” us by “making us whole;” by putting forth upon us a divine and healing power, through which past suffering and present decrepitude disappear together; which supplies the defective elements of our nature; cools the burning of inward fever; or calls into being new senses and perceptions, opening a diviner universe to our experience. The deformed and crooked will, bowed by Satan, lo! these many years, and nowise able to lift up itself, he loosens and makes straight in uprightness. The moral paralytic, collapsed and prostrate amid the stir of life, and incapably gazing on the moving waters in which others find their health, has often started up at the summons of that voice, though perchance “he wist not who it was;” and going his way, has found it to be “the sabbath,” and owned the “work” of one who is in the spirit of “the Father.” From the eye long dark and blind to duty and to God, he has caused the film to pass away, and shown the solemn look of life beneath a heaven so tranquil and sublime. Even the dead of soul, close wrapped in bandages of selfishness,—that greediest of graves,—have been quickened by his piercing call, and have come forth; to learn, “when risen,” that only in the meekness that can obey is there the power to command, only in the love that serves is there the life of heart-felt liberty. To call, then, on the name and trust in the spirit of Christ, is to invoke the restoring power of God; to give symmetry and speed to our lame affections, and the vigour of an athlete to our limping wills. There is not any Christian salvation that is not thus identical with Christian perfection: “nor any other name under heaven given among men, whereby we may be (thus) made whole.” Let all that would “be perfect be thus minded;”^[395] seek “the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ;”^[396] and they shall find in him a “power to become the Sons of God.”^[397]

NOTES.

It is not easy to determine, with any precision, what is Mr. M‘Neile’s estimate of the capabilities and defects of natural religion. It is subjected to a vague and indistinct disparagement throughout his lecture; the impression is left, that the character of God cannot be vindicated by appeal to his works; but I do not perceive that the lecturer commits himself to any logical proposition on the subject. One of his coadjutors,^[398] however, has supplied this deficiency; and taking, as an antagonist, a sentence from the second Lecture of the present series, has argued at length, that “The moral Character and Unity of God are not discoverable from the works of Creation.” He affirms that “to talk of ‘discerning the moral attributes of God on the material structures of the universe,’ is not only idle, but unreasonable:” and the justification which he offers of this bold statement seems to comprise the two following arguments:—

That the universe is analogous to a cathedral or other human edifice; which discloses something of the Architect’s genius and power, but nothing of his moral qualities: and

That the mixture of good and evil in the world perplexes the mind with opposite reports of the Creator’s character.

If scepticism were a just object of moral rebuke, in what terms might we not speak of this “infidel” rejection of God’s ancient and everlasting oracles of nature? For the serious doubts and perplexities of the devout student of creation, an unqualified respect may be entertained. But it is to be regretted that the necessities of a system should tempt the expounder of revelation to assail, with reckless indifference, the primitive sentiments of all religion. The aversion of orthodoxy to the theology of the unsophisticated reason and heart is, however, to be classed among the natural antipathies. Among all the extravagances of modern English divinity, unknown to the sound and healthy era of our national church, it is perhaps the most significant; indicating that final obscuration of Christianity, in which it cannot be made to shine without putting out every other light. This destructive mode of argumentation, which discredits everything foreign to the favourite system, is the evident result of fear, not of faith: it is a theological adoption of the Chinese policy; and keeps the Celestial Empire safe, by regarding every stranger as a possible spy; and excluding all alien ideas as forerunners of revolution. The citadel of faith is defended, by making the most dreadful havoc of every power which ought to be its strength and ornament. Put out reason, but save the Trinity; suborn experience, but prove depravity; disparage conscience, but secure the Atonement; bewilder the sentiments of justice and benevolence, only guard the everlasting Hell;—have long been the instructions of orthodoxy to its defenders: and now we are asked to silence the anthem of nature to the God of love, that priests without disturbance may prove him the God of vengeance; and to withdraw our eye from the telescope of science, which reveals the ONENESS of the Creator’s work, that we may examine, through a church microscope, the plurality of a Hebrew noun. Can those who taunt the Unitarians with the negative character of their system, give a satisfactory account of the positive merits of a religion which disbelieves reason, distrusts the moral sense, dislikes science, discredits nature, and for all who are without the Bible and a fit interpreter, disowns the moral character of God?

In commenting upon Mr. James’s position on this last point, I will confine myself to three observations:—the first, relating to the consequences of his doctrine, if true; the others explaining, by separate reference to his two arguments, why I conceive it to be false.

(1.) If there is no trace in nature of the moral attributes of God, there can be no disclosure of them in Scripture. The character of the Revealer is our only guarantee for the truth and excellence of the Revelation: and if his character is antecedently unknown, if there is nothing to preclude the idea of his being deceitful and malignant, how can we be assured that his communication is not a seduction and a lie? It is not the prÆternatural rank, but the just and holy mind, of a celestial Being, that entitles his messages to reception: and surely it is this alone which, in our opponents’ own system, makes the whole difference between the suggestions of Satan and the inspiration of God. But let us hear, in this matter, the judgment of one who adorned the English church in times when solidity of thought and truth of sentiment were still in esteem among her clergy. Archbishop Tillotson observes; “Unless the knowledge of God and his essential perfections be natural, I do not see what sufficient and certain foundation there can be of revealed religion. For unless we naturally know God to be a Being of all perfection, and consequently that whatever he says is true, I cannot see what divine revelation can signify. For God’s revealing or declaring such a thing to us, is no necessary argument that it is so, unless antecedently to this revelation, we be possessed firmly with this principle, that whatever God says is true. And whatever is known antecedently to revelation, must be known by natural light, and by reasonings and deductions from natural principles. I might further add to this argument, that the only standard and measure to judge of divine revelations, and to distinguish between what are true, and what are counterfeit, are the natural notions which men have of God, and of his essential perfections.”^[399] And elsewhere, still more explicitly; “The strongest and surest reasonings in religion are grounded upon the essential perfections of God; so that even divine revelation itself doth suppose these for its foundation, and can signify nothing to us, unless these be first known and believed. Unless we be first persuaded of the providence of God, and his particular care of mankind, why should we believe that he would make any revelation of himself to men? Unless it be naturally known to us, that God is true, what foundation is there for the belief of his word? And what signifies the laws and promises of God, unless natural light do first assure us of his sovereign authority and faithfulness? So that the principles of natural religion, are the foundation of that which is revealed; and therefore in reason nothing can be admitted to be a revelation from God, which plainly contradicts his essential perfection; and consequently if any pretends divine revelation for this doctrine, that God hath from all eternity absolutely decreed the eternal ruin of the greatest part of mankind, without any respect to the sins and demerits of men, I am as certain that this doctrine cannot be of God, as I am sure that God is good and just; because this grates upon the notion that mankind have of goodness and justice. This is that which no good man would do, and therefore cannot be believed of infinite goodness; and therefore if an Apostle or Angel from heaven teach any doctrine which plainly overthrows the goodness and justice of God, let him be accursed. For every man hath greater assurance that God is good and just, than he can have of any subtle speculations about predestination and the decrees of God.”^[400]

It is somewhat curious, that in the position which they have assumed with respect to natural religion, our reverend opponents are allying themselves with Socinus: and that, in answering them, I should find myself citing the words of an Archbishop of their own church in direct reply to this great heresiarch. On the adjoining page to the first from which I have quoted, Tillotson says, “God is naturally known to men: the contrary whereof Socinus positively maintains, though therein he be forsaken by most of his followers,—an opinion, in my judgment, very unworthy of one who, not without reason, was esteemed so great a master of reason; and (though I believe he did not see it) undermining the strongest and surest foundation of all religion, which, when the natural notions of God are once taken away, will certainly want its best support. Besides that, by denying any natural knowledge of God and his essential perfections, he freely gives away one of the most plausible grounds of opposing the doctrine of the Trinity.” That which Socinus could afford “freely to give away,” our reverend opponents, it seems, find it necessary violently to take away.^[401]

(2.) The arguments by which Mr. James endeavours to justify his repudiation of the primary sentiments of unrevealed religion, might be sufficiently answered by a reference to any work treating of natural theology, from the Memorabilia of Socrates to the last Bridgewater Treatise. But as a phrase occurring in my first lecture appears to have been concerned in their production, it is incumbent on me to show where their fallacy lies.

The lecturer’s reasoning stands thus: The universe is a material structure; and so is a cathedral; but a cathedral gives no report of the moral character of its architect: neither, therefore, does the universe:—an excellent example, when reduced to form, of the violation of the first general rule of the syllogism, forbidding an undistributed middle term.

Did it never occur to our reverend opponent that “the material structures of the universe” are of various kinds, not all of them resembling a cathedral; nay, that he himself (not being able “to sit in a thimble,” or even “in the smallest compass imaginable,” “without inconvenience from want of room,”)^[402] is a “material structure,” in one part of his human constitution?—a circumstance which might have suggested the distinction between organized and unorganized nature. Admitting even (what is by no means true) that the arrangements of the latter terminate, like the design of a minster, in the mere production of beauty, and indicate only genius and skill, the contrivances of the former fulfil their end in the creation of happiness in the animal world, and the maintenance of a retributive discipline in human life: results which are the appropriate fruit and expression of benevolence and equity. Even the beauty of creation, however, cannot be attributed to sentiments as little moral in their character, as those which may actuate the human artist; for He who has called into being whatever is lovely and glorious, has created also percipient minds to behold it, and transmute it from a material adjustment into a mental possession.

It is not even true that a work of art, like a cathedral, expresses no moral quality. The individual builder’s character, indeed, it may not reveal. But no architect ever produced a cathedral; he is but the tool wielded by the spirit of his age; and Phidias could no more have designed York Minster, than the associated masons could have adorned the Parthenon. Ages must contribute to the origination of such works: and when they appear, they embody, not indistinctly, some of the great sentiments which possess the period of their birth.

(3.) The mixture of good and evil in the world is said to confuse our reasonings respecting the Divine Being, by presenting us with opposite reports of his character.

This argument is evidently inconsistent with the former. While that declared the silence of creation on the moral attributes of its Author, this affirms its double (and therefore doubtful) speech. After all, then, there are phenomena which depose to the character of the Creator, if we can only interpret their attestation aright.

The rules for the treatment of conflicting evidence are plain and intelligible; nor is there any reason why they should not be applied to the great problems of natural religion. The preponderant testimony being permitted to determine our convictions, the evils and inequalities of the world cannot disturb our faith in the benevolence and holiness of God; but must stand over, as a residue of unreduced phenomena, to be hereafter brought under the dominion of that law of love, which the visible systematic arrangements of Providence show to be general.

Happily, no sceptical reasonings, like those on which I am animadverting, can permanently prevent the natural sentiments of men from asserting their supremacy. To use the words of Bishop Butler, “Our whole nature leads us to ascribe all moral perfection to God, and to deny all imperfection of him. And this will for ever be a practical proof of his moral character, to such as will consider what a practical proof is; because it is the voice of God speaking in us.”^[403]

From the opposite appearances of good and evil in the world, Mr. James derives an argument against the Unity of God, and affirms that “reason thinks it more reasonable to admit the existence of two almighty and independent Beings, the one eternally good, the other eternally evil.”^[404] If the lecturer’s “reason” really recommends to him such extraordinary conclusions, and insists on patronizing the Manichean heresy, the intellectual faculty may well be in bad theological repute with him. The constant origin of pain and enjoyment, good and evil, from the very same arrangements and structures, renders the partition of the creative work between two antagonistic principles not very easy of conception; and it yet remains to be explained, how the laws which produce the breeze can proceed from one Being, and those which speed the hurricane from another; how hunger can have one author, and the refreshment of food another; how the power of right moral choice can be the gift of God, and that of wrong moral choice of a Demon.

The reverend lecturer attempts to weaken the argument from the unity of the creation to that of the Creator. His eccentric remarks on comets I must leave to the consideration of astronomers. The rest of the argument is entitled to such reply as the following words of Robert Hall may give to it. “To prove the unity of this great Being, in opposition to a plurality of Gods, it is not necessary to have recourse to metaphysical abstractions. It is sufficient to observe, that the notion of more than one author of nature is inconsistent with that harmony of design which pervades her works; that it solves no appearances, is supported by no evidence, and serves no purpose but to embarrass and perplex our conceptions.”^[405]

B.

Trinitarian and Unitarian Ideas of Justice.

It is only natural that the parable of the Prodigal Son should be no favourite with those, who deny the unconditional mercy of God. The place which this divine tale occupies in the Unitarian theology appears to be filled, in the orthodox scheme, by the story of Zaleucus, king of the Locrians; which has been appealed to in the present controversy by both the Lecturers on the Atonement, and seems to be the only endurable illustration presented, even by Pagan history, of the execution of vicarious punishment. This monarch had passed a law, condemning adulterers to the loss of both eyes. His own son was convicted of the crime: and to satisfy at once the claims of law and of clemency, the royal parent “commanded one of his own eyes to be pulled out, and one of his son’s.” Is it too bold a heresy to confess, that there seems to me something heathenish in this example, and that, as an exponent of the Divine character, I more willingly revere the Father of the prodigal, than the father of the adulterer?

Without entering, however, into any comparison between the Locrian and the Galilean parable, I would observe, that the vicarious theory receives no illustration from this fragment of ancient history. There is no analogy between the cases, except in the violation of truth and wisdom which both exhibit; and whatever we are instructed to admire in Zaleucus, will be found, on close inspection, to be absent from the orthodox representation of God. We pity the Grecian king, who had made a law without foresight of its application, and so sympathize with his desire to evade it, that any quibble which legal ingenuity can devise for this purpose, passes with slight condemnation: casuistry refuses to be severe with a man implicated in such a difficulty. But the Creator and Legislator of the human race, having perfect knowledge of the future, can never be surprised into a similar perplexity; or ever pass a law at one time, which at another he desires to evade. Even were it so, there would seem to be less that is unworthy of his moral perfection, in saying plainly, with the ancient Hebrews, that he “repented of the evil he thought to do,” and said, “it shall not be;” than in ascribing to him a device for preserving consistency, in which no one capable of appreciating veracity can pretend to discern any sincere fulfilment of the law. However barbarous the idea of Divine “repentance,” it is at least ingenuous. Nor does this incident of Zaleucus and his son present any parallel to the alleged relation between the Divine Father who receives, and the Divine Son who gives, the satisfaction for human guilt. The Locrian king took a part of the penalty himself, and left the remainder where it was due; but the Sovereign Law-giver of Calvinism puts the whole upon another. To sustain the analogy, Zaleucus should have permitted an innocent son to have both his eyes put out, and the convicted adulterer to escape.

The doctrine of Atonement has introduced among Trinitarians a mode of speaking respecting God, which grates most painfully against the reverential affections due to him. His nature is dismembered into a number of attributes, foreign to each other, and preferring rival claims; the Divine tranquillity appears as the equilibrium of opposing pressures,—the Divine administration as a resultant from the collision of hostile forces. Goodness pleads for that which holiness forbids; and the Paternal God would do many a mercy, did the Sovereign God allow. The idea of a conflict or embarrassment in the Supreme Mind being thus introduced, and the believer being haunted by the feeling of some tremendous difficulty affecting the Infinite government, the vicarious economy is brought forward as the relief, the solution of the whole perplexity; the union, by a blessed compromise, of attributes that could never combine in any scheme before. The main business of theology is made to consist, in stating the conditions, and expounding the solution, of this imaginary problem. The cardinal difficulty is thought to be, the reconciliation of Justice and Mercy; and, as the one is represented under the image of a Sovereign, the other under that of a Father, the question assumes this form: how can the same being at every moment possess both these characters, without abandoning any function or feeling appropriate to either? how, especially, can the Judge remit,—it is beyond his power; yet, how can the Parent punish to the uttermost?—it is contrary to his nature.

All this difficulty is merely fictitious; arising out of the determination to make out that God is both wholly Judge, and wholly Father; from an anxiety, that is, to adhere to two metaphors, as applicable, in every particular, to the Divine Being. It is evident that both must be, to a great extent, inappropriate; and in nothing surely is the impropriety more manifest, than in the assertion that, as Sovereign, God is naturally bound to execute laws which, nevertheless, it would be desirable to remit, or change in their operation. Whatever painful necessities the imperfection of human legislation and judicial procedure may impose, the Omniscient Ruler can make no law which he will not to all eternity, and with entire consent of his whole nature, deem it well to execute. This is the Unitarian answer to the constant question, “How can God forgive in defiance of his own law?” It is not in defiance of his laws: every one of which will be fulfilled to the uttermost, in conformity with his first intent; but nowhere has he declared that he will not forgive. All justice consists in treating moral agents according to their character; the inexorability of human law arises solely from the imperfection with which it can attain this end, and is not the essence, but the alloy, of equity: but God, who searches and controls the heart, exercises that perfect justice, which permits the penal suffering to depart only with the moral guilt; and pardons, not by cancelling any sentence, but by obeying his eternal purpose to meet the wanderer returning homeward, and give his blessing to the restored. Only by such restoration can any past guilt be effaced. The thoughts, emotions, and sufferings of sin, once committed, are woven into the fabric of the soul; and are as incapable of being absolutely obliterated thence and put back into non-existence, as moments of being struck from the past, or the parts of space from infinitude. Herein we behold alike “the goodness and the severity of God;” and adore in him not the balance of contrary tendencies, but the harmony of consentaneous perfections. How plainly does experience show that, if his personal unity be given up, his moral unity cannot be preserved!

The representation of God as a Creditor, to whom his responsible creatures are in debt to the amount of their moral obligations, is no less unfit to serve as the foundation of serious reasonings, than the idea of him as a Sovereign. As a loose analogy, likely to produce a vivid impression on minds filled with ideas borrowed from the institution of property, it unavoidably and innocently occurs to us; but to force any doctrinal sentiments from it, is to strain it beyond its capabilities. Mr. Buddicom describes it as a favourite with the Unitarians: “our opponents assert, that sins are to be regarded as debts and as debts only.”^[406] I will venture to affirm that no Unitarian who heard this believed his own ears, till he saw it in print; so incredibly great must be the ignorance of Unitarian theology which could dictate the statement. The sentiment attributed to us is one, against which our whole body of moral doctrine is one systematic protest, and which has place in our arguments against the vicarious scheme, only because it is the fundamental idea, on which that scheme is usually declared to rest. In one of the most recent and deservedly popular Unitarian publications on this subject, I find a long note devoted to the destruction of this pecuniary analogy, which, the Author observes, “seems very incomplete and unsatisfactory. Punishment is compared to a debt, supposed to be incurred by the commission of the offence. To a certain degree there is a resemblance between the two things, which may be the foundation of a metaphor; but when we proceed to argue upon this metaphor, we fall into a variety of errors.”^[407] That orthodoxy does incessantly “argue upon this metaphor,” is notorious; and the present controversy is not deficient in specimens. “All that the creature can accomplish is a debt due to the Creator,”^[408] says Mr. James, who reasons out the mercantile view of redemption with an unshrinking precision, unequalled since the days of Shylock; who insists on “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life,” and condemns any alteration (of course, our Lord’s) of this rule, as “false charity, or mistaken compassion;”^[409] who inquires whether, in the payment of redemption, an angel might not go for a number of men, and decides in the negative, because “the highest created angel in existence” (having as much as he can do for himself) “could not produce the smallest amount of supererogatory obedience or merit to transfer to a fellow angel, or to man;”^[410] and who, in reply to the question, “What price will God accept for the lives that are justly sentenced to eternal death?” says, “the answer to this is very simple: he will accept nothing but what will be a real equivalent—a full compensation—an adequate price.”^[411] In what bible of Moloch or of Mammon all this is found, I know not; sure I am, it was never learned at the feet of Christ.

Unitarians object to the cruelty and injustice attributed to the Eternal Father, in laying upon the innocent Jesus the punishment of guilty men. Mr. Buddicom’s reply, though not new, is remarkable. “Do we, however, assert anything as to the fact of our Lord’s sufferings, which they who deny his atonement do not also assert? If, then, it be a truth historical, that he did suffer through life, agonize in the garden, and die on the cross, does it not appear much greater cruelty in God, to impose those sufferings, which Jesus is admitted to have undergone, without any benefit to the transgressor, or any vindication of his own glory?”^[412]

I had always thought, and still think, that our Trinitarian friends do assert a great deal “as to the fact” (i.e., the amount and intrinsic character, apart from the effects) “of our Lord’s sufferings, which we cannot admit. A human being, says the Unitarian, died on the cross, with such suffering as a perfect human being may endure.” Will Mr. Buddicom be content with this description of “the fact?” and does he merely wish to subjoin, that on the death of “this man,” God took occasion to forgive all men who are to be saved at all? If so, I admit that the imputation of cruelty is groundless; and have only to observe, that there is no perceptible relation of cause and effect between the occasion and the boon; and that the cross becomes simply the date, the chronological sign, of a Divine volition, arbitrarily attached to that point of human history. But then, how can Mr. Buddicom defend (as he does) the phrase “blood of God”?^[413] Theology can perform strange feats, and to its sleight of words nothing is impossible. The doctrine of the communication of properties between the two natures of our Lord, comes in to relieve the difficulty; and having established that whatever is true of either nature may be affirmed of Christ, and by inference, even of the other, it proves the propriety of saying, both that the Divine nature cannot suffer, and yet that God bled.^[414] Heterodoxy, however, in its perverseness, still thinks with Le Clerc of this ???????a ?d???t??, that it is “as intelligible, as if we were to say, there is a circle so united with a triangle, that the circle has the properties of the triangle, and the triangle those of the circle.”^[415]

C.

The reading in Acts xx. 28.

No competent critic, I apprehend, can read without surprise Mr. Buddicom’s note (H.) on the reading of this verse. The slight manner in which Griesbach is set aside, to make way for the authority of critical editions of the N. T. since his time; the vague commendation of the edition of Dr. Scholtz, “which, it may well be hoped, leaves us little more to expect or desire,”—as if there were nothing peculiar or controverted in the critical principles of that work; the citation of a passage from this Roman Catholic editor, in which the critic becomes the theologian, and makes use of his own reading of Te?? to prove “that Christ is God;” together with the statement that the reading is of no doctrinal importance; combine to render this a remarkable piece of criticism. If the learned Lecturer had defended his dissent from Griesbach, or attempted to invalidate the reasoning of that Editor’s elaborate note on the passage, some materials for consideration and argument would have been afforded. But no reason is assigned for the preference of Te?? over ??????, except that Dr. Scholtz adopts it, and says nothing about it; though Griesbach rejects it, and says a great deal about it; and very conclusively too, in the opinion of most scholars, not excepting Mr. Byrth. Surely the paradoxical preference which Scholtz gives to the Byzantine recension is not a reason for hoping that he has left us nothing more to expect, in the determination of the text of the N. T.; still less is it a reason why his readings, simply because they are his, should supersede Griesbach’s;—from whom, I submit, no sober critic should venture to depart, without at least intimating the grounds of his judgment. I have not seen the critical edition of the learned Roman Catholic; but unless its Prolegomena contain some much better reasons than are adduced in his “Biblisch-kritische Reise,” for his attachment to the Constantinopolitan family of manuscripts, it may be safely affirmed, that Griesbach will no more be superseded by Scholtz, than he was anticipated by MatthÆi.

The text in question is not one, on the reading of which Griesbach expresses his opinion with any hesitation. “Ex his omnibus luculenter apparet, pro lectione ?e?? ne unicum quidem militare codicem, qui sive vetustate, sive intern bonitate su testis idonei et incorrupti laude ornari queat. Non reperitur, nisi in libris recentioribus, iisdemque vel penitus contemnendis, vel misere, multis saltem in locis, interpolatis.”—“Quomodo igitur, salvis criticÆ artis legibus, lectio ?e??, utpote omni auctoritate justa destituta, defendi queat, equidem haud intelligo.” In the face of this decision, Mr. Buddicom reads ?e??: and does any one then believe, that in Unitarians alone theological bias influences the choice of a reading?

The attempt to elicit from the word ?????? the same argument for the Deity of Christ, which might be derived from the reading ?e??, I confess myself unable to comprehend. Does Mr. Buddicom intend to assert, that when any person is called ?????? (Lord) in the N. T., it means that he is Jehovah? Or, when this is denoted, is there some peculiarity of grammatical usage, indicating the fact? If so, it is of moment that this should be pointed out, and illustrated by examples: the idiom not being adequately described by saying that “the word” is “put in the form of an unqualified and unequalled preference.”

D.

Archbishop Magee’s controversial Character.

In the year 1815 a discussion arose out of the general controversy on the doctrine of the Trinity, respecting the proper use of the word Unitarian. Those who were anxious to be designated by this name were divided in opinion as to the latitude with which it should be employed. One class proposed to limit it to believers in the simple humanity of our Lord, and to exclude from it all who held his pre-existence, from the lowest Arian to the highest Athanasian. Another class protested against this restriction; suggested that, both by its construction and its usage, the word primarily referred, not to the nature of Christ, but to the personality of the Godhead; that as Trinitarians denoted, by the prefix (Tri) to their name, the three persons of their Deity, so by the prefix (Un) should Unitarians express the one person of theirs; that in no other way could the numerical antithesis, promised to the ear, be afforded to the mind; and accordingly that under the title Unitarian should be included all Christians who directed their worship to one personal God, whatever they might think of the nature of Christ. It is evident that, in this latter sense, the name must comprehend a much larger class than in the former. The discussion between the two parties was conducted in the pages of the Monthly Repository, at that time the organ of the English Unitarian theology.

Meanwhile the defenders of orthodoxy were not indifferent to the subject of debate; nor at all more agreed about it than their theological opponents. The majority regarded the word Unitarian as a creditable name, which was by no means to be abandoned to a set of heretics, hitherto held up to opprobrium by the title of Socinian. They accordingly proposed to consider it as expressing the belief in One God (without reference to the number of persons), in contradistinction to the belief in many Gods; so that its opposite should be, not as the analogy of language seemed to require, Trinitarian, but Polytheist. Thus defined, the appellation belonged to Trinitarians as well as to others; and the assumption of it, by those who dissented from the doctrine of the Trinity, was construed into a charge of Tritheism against the orthodox. Another party, however, comprising especially Archbishop Magee in the church, and the High Arians out of it, treated the name as one, not of honour, but of disgrace;—were anxious to fix it exclusively on Mr. Belsham’s school of humanitarians, and to rescue the believers in the pre-existence of Christ, of every shade, from its pollution;—and affected to regard every extension of it to these, as a disingenuous trick, designed to swell the appearance of numbers, and to act as “a decoy” for drawing “to Mr. Belsham” all who were “against Athanasius.”^[416] And so the poor Unitarians could please nobody, and were in imminent danger of being altogether anonymous. If they did not extend their name so as take in every church, Athanasian and all, they were guilty of false imputation on Trinitarians, and of monopolizing an honour which was no property of theirs. If they did not narrow it to “Mr. Belsham’s class,” they were accused of “equivocation,” and of cunningly dragging the harmless Arians into participation of their disgrace. If they denied that the whole Church of England was Unitarian, they committed an act of impudent exclusion; if they affirmed that Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton were Unitarian, they were chargeable with a no less impudent assumption, and rebuked for “posthumous proselytism.”

Of the three possible meanings of the word, the Humanitarian, the Uni-personal, and the Monotheistic,—Mr. Aspland ably and successfully vindicated the second; in opposition to Mr. Norris, a Trinitarian controversialist, who insisted on the third, and declared he would call his opponents Socinians; and amid the reproaches of Archbishop Magee, who clung to the first, and denounced the wider application as a “dishonest” “management of the term.” With these things in mind, let the reader attend to the following passage from that prelate’s celebrated work:

“How great are the advantages of a well-chosen name! Mr. Aspland, in his warm recommendation of the continuance of the use of the word Unitarian, in that ambiguous sense in which it had already done so much good to the cause, very justly observes, from Dr. South, that ‘the generality of mankind is wholly and absolutely governed by words and names;’ and that ‘he who will set up for a skilful manager of the rabble, so long as they have but ears to hear, needs never enquire whether they have any understanding whereby to judge: but with two or three popular empty words, well tuned and humoured, may whistle them backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, till he is weary; and get upon their backs when he is so.’ Month. Rep. vol. x. p. 481.—And what does Mr. Aspland deduce from all this? Why, neither more nor less than this,—that the name Unitarian must never be given up; but all possible changes rung upon it, let the opinions of those who bear that name be ever so various and contradictory.”^[417]

Now what does the reader think of Mr. Aspland? He despises him, as the deliberate proposer of an imposture; as one who sets up for “a skilful manager of the rabble,” and who argues for the name “Unitarian,” because it may enable his party to “get upon the backs” of the multitude. The Archbishop, I presume, means to leave this impression. Let us look then to the facts.

The quotation is from Mr. Aspland’s “Plea for Unitarian Dissenters.” The author is expostulating with Mr. Norris, who had vowed still to fasten the term Socinian on dissentients from the doctrine of the Trinity; and is urging the impropriety of irritating a religious body by giving them a disowned and confessedly unsuitable designation. Mr. Aspland introduces his reference to Dr. South by the following passage:

“It is not without design that you cling to a known error. The name of Socinian is refused by us; this is one reason why an ungenerous adversary may choose to give it: and again, the term having been used (with some degree of propriety) at the first appearance of this class of Unitarians, which was at a period when penal laws were not a dead letter, and when theological controversies were personal quarrels, it is associated in books with a set of useful phrases such as pestilent heretics, wretched blasphemers, and the like, which suit the convenience of writers who have an abundance of enmity but a lack of argument, and who, whilst they are reduced to the necessity of borrowing, are not secured by their good taste or sense of decorum from taking, in loan, the excrescences of defunct authors; this is a second reason why the name ‘Socinian’ is made to linger in books, long after Socinians have departed from the stage.”

Then follows the note from which Archbishop Magee has quoted: but from which he has omitted the parts inclosed in brackets.

[“Once more, I must beg leave to refer you to Dr. South, for an appropriate observation or two, on the fatal imposture and force of words.]

“‘The generality of mankind is wholly and absolutely governed by words and names; [without, nay, for the most part, even against the knowledge men have of things. The multitude or common route, like a drove of sheep, or an herd of oxen, may be managed by any noise, or cry, which their drivers shall accustom them to.

“‘And] he who will set up for a skilful manager of the rabble, so long as they have but ears to hear, needs never enquire whether they have any understanding whereby to judge: but with two or three popular, empty words,’ ‘well-tuned and humoured, may whistle them backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, till he is weary; and get upon their backs when he is so.’”^[418]

And now, may I not ask, what does the reader think of Archbishop Magee? Mr. Aspland indignantly CONDEMNS the “imposture” practised by false names; and, by a garbled quotation he is held up as RESORTING to it. He really says to his opponents, “Call us Socinians no more, for you must know it is unjust;” he is represented as saying to his friends, “We will never cease to call ourselves Unitarians, for it is a capital trick.” And thus, by scoring out and interlining, his own expostulation against a base policy is metamorphosed into an indictment, charging him with the very same. Mr. Byrth and Mr. M‘Neile are men, as I believe, of honourable minds: and the latter has rebuked, as they deserve, “garbled quotations.” I ask them to acquit me of “outraging the memory of departed greatness.”

“My respected opponents know as well as I do,” “that dishonest criticism, as well as dishonesty of every kind, consists not in the number of the acts which are perpetrated, but in the unprincipled disposition which led to the perpetration.”^[419] I might therefore be content with the example of “misrepresentation the most black” which I have given. But from the list which lies before me, I think it right to take one or two instances more, admitting of brief exposure.

In the Authorized Version, 1 Cor. xv. 47, stands thus; “The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven;” the substantive verb in both parts of the verse having nothing, as the Italics indicate, to correspond with it in the original; but being inserted at the discretion of the translators to complete the sense. From the second clause Trinitarians usually derive an argument for the pre-existence of Christ, conceiving that it teaches the origin of our Lord from heaven. Some of their best commentators, however, understand the clause as referring not to Christ’s past entrance into this world, but to his future coming to judgment. Thus Archbishop Newcome renders, “The second man will be [the Lord] from heaven.” And Dr. Whitby paraphrases, ”The second man is the Lord [descending] from heaven [to raise our bodies, and advance them to that place];” and he defends this interpretation in a note.^[420] Mr. Belsham adopts this rendering, both in the “Improved Version” and in his “Calm Enquiry,” giving, with the sanction of the authorities I have cited, a past verb to the first clause, a future verb to the second. The admirable Newcome and Whitby, then, must share the Archbishop’s rebuke, for “the total inadmissibility of this arbitrary rendering of the Unitarians, and the grossness of their endeavour to pervert the sense of Scripture.” “Here,” he observes, “we have a change of tense, which not only has no foundation in either the Greek or Latin text, but is in direct opposition to both; since in both the perfect sameness of the corresponding clauses obviously determines the sameness of the tense.”^[421] Of the “unscholarlike exaggeration” of this criticism I say nothing, merely wishing it to be observed in passing, that Mr. Belsham’s version is not of Unitarian origin, and proves no doctrinal bias, much less any “dishonesty.”

But a question arises respecting the text, as well as the translation, of this verse; the phrase “the Lord,” in the second clause, being marked by Griesbach as probably to be omitted; and the word “heavenly” to be appended at the close. The original of the common translation stands thus: ? p??t?? ?????p??, ?? ??? ??????· ? de?te??? ?????p??, ? ?????? ?? ???a???. With the probable emendations the latter clause would read thus: ? de?te??? ?????p?? ?? ???a??? ? ????????: and Archbishop Newcome’s translation, conformed to this text, becomes that of Mr. Belsham; “The first man was from the ground, earthy: the second man will be from heaven, heavenly.”

There are then two points to be determined respecting this passage—the reading, and the rendering, which, in this case, is equivalent to the interpretation also. Mr. Belsham, in his Calm Inquiry, treats of both; and is accused by the Archbishop, in the following passage, of discussing the “unimportant matter” of the text with great pomp; while adducing, in favour of his translation and the future tense, no authority except the Vulgate: “primus homo de terra, terrenus: secundus homo de coelo, cÆlestis.” The indictment and argument run thus:—“The grand point to be established for the Unitarians is, as we have seen, the use of the future in the second clause of the text:—‘the second man WILL BE from heaven:’—for, if we read ‘WAS from heaven,’ actum est! it is all over with the Unitarians; inasmuch as, in this passage, the origin of the BEING, without any possible pretence as to the doctrines, is unequivocally the subject. How does Mr. Belsham proceed? Having made a good deal of flourish, as the Improved Version had also done before him, about the words ?????? and ????????; having also lumped together some irrelevant matter about the Polish Socinians and Dr. Price; and having observed somewhat upon the interpretation of Newcome, Whitby, and Alexander; having, in short, appeared to say a good deal, whilst he took care to preserve a profound silence throughout (as the Improved Version also has done,) respecting any arguments in favour of the future tense in the second clause—the single point on which the entire question rests,—he all of a sudden, very calmly and composedly asserts, ‘The Vulgate renders the text, “The first man was of the earth, earthy. The second man will be from heaven, heavenly.”’ (Calm Inq. p. 121.^[422]) He then triumphantly concludes, and all is settled. In this manner, one text after another, of those that proclaim our Lord’s pre-existence, is extinguished by the Calm Inquirer and his coadjutors. And so the cause of Socinian expurgation goes forward.

“Perhaps, in the annals of dishonest controversy, another instance like this is not to be found. A discussion of unimportant matter is busily kept up: the main point of difference, and in truth the only one deserving of attention, the change of tense, is passed over, as if it were a thing not at all in dispute: the Vulgate is then quoted, in direct opposition to the truth, as reading the words ‘WAS’ and ‘WILL BE’ in the two corresponding clauses: and thus, indirectly, the false rendering of the text by the Unitarians is sustained by a false quotation from the Vulgate; and by a quotation which the author, if his memory had lasted from one page to the other, must have known to be false; since, in the preceding page, he had himself cited the very words of the Vulgate:—‘Primus homo de terra, terrenus; secundus homo de coelo, cÆlestis:’—in which, words there is not only no justification of the change from WAS to WILL BE; but there is, on the contrary, as in the original Greek, a declaration, as strong as the analogies of language will admit, that the tense employed in the first clause must pass unchanged into the second. In a word, there is given by the Vulgate itself a direct contradiction to the report which is made of it by the Calm Inquirer. The man of ‘sound understanding,’ however, whom he addressed in English on the one page, being possibly not exactly acquainted with what was contained in the Latin on the other, and being consequently unaware that his author was imposing on him a false translation, would of course be fully satisfied on the authority of the Vulgate (more especially as so much had been said to leave the general impression of uncertainty as to the true reading of the Greek text, and the consequent opinion, that the Vulgate was the only ancient authority to be relied on,) that in this passage could be found no proof of our Lord’s pre-existence! What are we to think of the cause that needs such support; and what of the interests that can attract such supporters?”^[423]

We are to understand, then, that Mr. Belsham’s only authority for the tenses of his version is a wilful mistranslation of the Vulgate; and that he cunningly conceals from the mere English reader the circumstance that the Vulgate, having no verb, has no tenses. Now, as to the last point, he distinctly informs his reader that there is no verb in the Latin; and as to the former, he never appeals to the RENDERING of the Vulgate at all but to the READING only. “How can this be?” I shall be asked; “for the Archbishop cites his words, ‘The Vulgate RENDERS the text,’ &c.” True, but the Archbishop quotes him falsely; and the real words are, “The Vulgate READS the text,” &c. Let the original and the citation appear side by side.

The verbs, in both clauses, Mr. Belsham has printed in italics, to indicate (in conformity with the usual practice in his work, and the Improved Version, as well as in our common translation) the absence of any corresponding words in the Latin text. This circumstance, which destroys the whole accusation, his accuser has suppressed.

And as to the “preserving a profound silence throughout respecting any arguments in favour of the future tense in the second clause,” it so happens that the “somewhat” which is observed “upon the interpretation of Newcome, Whitby, and Alexander,” is simply an appeal to these authorities on this very matter of the future tense,—“the single point on which the entire question rests.”

On the whole, can our upright and learned opponents tell, whether “in the annals of dishonest controversy, another instance like” the foregoing “is to be found?” I can assure them, that from the same work, I could produce many more.

In our present controversy, our Rev. opponents have been misled by their reliance on this unscrupulous adversary of the Unitarians: and by not referring to his pages, have taken his heavy responsibilities on themselves. In the first Lecture of the series, Mr. Ould has represented Dr. Priestley as saying, that the sacred writers produced “lame accounts, improper quotations, and inconclusive reasonings.”^[425] Dr. Magee has exhibited this sentence as a citation from Priestley’s 12th Letter to Mr. Burn;^[426] the fact being, that he wrote only six letters to Mr. Burn; and that neither in these, nor anywhere else, is such a sentence to be found. The first phrase, indeed (“lame account”) was once applied by Dr. Priestley to the early chapters in Genesis; but deliberately retracted with an expression of regret that it had been used. Let the learned prelate pass sentence on himself: he says, “It is surely a gross falsification of his author, to give, as one continued quotation from him (as the established meaning of the form here employed, unequivocally implies), that which is an arbitrary selection of words drawn violently together from a lengthened context.”^[427] I can assure our respected opponents, that their Lectures contain other citations, drawn from the same source, which, after the most careful search, I believe to be no less false. And is not an ungenerous use made of obnoxious writings, when we find enumerated and quoted among Unitarian authors, Evanson, whose scepticism received its most effectual replies from Priestley and his friends; and Gagneius, who was an orthodox professor of the Sorbonne, and preacher to Francis the First?

For other instances of Archbishop Magee’s flagrant injustice and misrepresentation, I must refer to the “Examination of his charges against Unitarians and Unitarianism,” by my learned and venerated friend Dr. Carpenter, who has found it only too easy to fill a volume with the exposure of a mere portion of them. I have purposely taken fresh examples, not hitherto noticed, so far as I know, and it may be supposed that the earlier gleaning by Dr. Carpenter would naturally yield the most remarkable results; so that the cases now adduced cannot be thought to be peculiarly unfavourable specimens.

If our reverend opponents, having read this Prelate’s work, really think my charge against him, of “abuse the most coarse,” an “unwarrantable attack on the reputation of the dead,” I cannot hope to justify myself in their estimation: there must be an irremediable variance between their notion of “coarse abuse” and mine. I regret that we cannot agree in a matter of taste which, to say the least, borders so closely on morals as to be scarcely distinguishable from them, and to be connected with the same strong feelings of approbation or disgust. With what levity must a writer sport with moral terms, what indistinct impressions must he have of moral qualities, who having pronounced an opponent (I quote the language of the Archbishop of Mr. Belsham) “incapable of duplicity,”^[428] can yet proceed to charge him with “artifice and dishonesty,”^[429] with “huddling up a matter,”^[430] with “filching away a portion of evidence,”^[431] with “direct violations of known truth,”^[432] and with “bad faith, unchecked by learning and unabashed by shame!”^[433] I cannot wonder at the spirit pervading Mr. Byrth’s letter to my friend and colleague Mr. Thom, when I find that he sees nothing coarse or abusive, but only the expression of “departed greatness,” in accusing an opponent of “miserable stupidity,”^[434] of “downright and irremediable nonsense,”^[435] of “proposing” a suggestion “(as he AVERS) with great diffidence,”^[436] of furnishing “twenty-eight pages of the most extraordinary quagmire;”^[437] in begging him to “rest assured, that to know the Greek language it must be learned;”^[438] in proclaiming that he “stands in a pillory”^[439] erected for him by a Bishop; that he belongs to “the family of Botherims in Morals and Metaphysics,” and is “connected with that of Malaprops in Mathematics;”^[440] in ridiculing the idea of publishing his portrait;^[441] in asking him whether he has “lost his senses;”^[442] and hinting that, whereas he knows not “how to choose between two bundles” of evidence, he is an Ass.^[443] Are we to consider it a condescension in this distinguished Prelate, that he bends from his Episcopal dignity to console the Dissenting ministers in their “contemplation of the advantages of the national clergy,” and assures them that they have “not only more of positive profit,” but, “in addition to this,” “the indulgence of vanity, and the gratification of spleen,—qualities which, time out of mind, have belonged to the family of Dissent;” nay, further, that in preparation for their ministry, they have a much lighter “outfit” “in point of expenditure,” since among Nonconformists, in some cases at least, “the individual is his own University; confers his own degrees and orders; and has little more difficulty in the way of his vocation, than to find a new hat, a stout pony, and a pair of saddle-bags.”^[444] This is very smart, no doubt; but does the Church exclude us from the Universities, that her Bishops may enjoy the entertainment of making us their laughing-stock, and inditing lampoons against us? Does she injure us first, that we may be insulted afterwards?

Mr. M‘Neile speaks of the late Archbishop’s work as “a barrier in the way of Unitarianism.”^[445] It is so; and if its influence were only that of fair argument, we should wish the barrier to stand in all its strength. But the book has become a standard authority for every kind of false and malignant impression respecting Unitarians, and prevents, instead of advancing, the knowledge of what we are. To be held up as entertaining “the cool and deliberate purpose of falsifying the word of God;”^[446] as guilty of “machinations” to “subvert through fraud what had been found impregnable by force;”^[447] as “staking” our “very salvation on the adoption of a reading which is against evidence;”^[448] as distinguished for “steady and immovable effrontery,”^[449] and “shameful disingenuousness;”^[450] as discerning in our Lord “that one HATED form on which we are terrified to look;”^[451] as so “determined to resist and subvert one great truth,” that we “set but little value on every other,” and make a “prevailing practice” of “DIRECT AND DELIBERATE FALSEHOOD:”^[452] to be thus slandered by one, for whom his station and accomplishments have procured, from the party spirit of the age, a credit denied to any possible learning or excellence of ours; this, being a grievous wrong to the character of Christianity as much as to our own, we confess to be a trial hard to bear: and we may well feel like the good man under successful calumny, which wounds himself a little, but truth and virtue more. Meanwhile, injury may have its compensations; and since, to prove his accusations, even this distinguished Prelate had occasion to tamper with the evidence, we have a fresh presumption that our cause is one, against which learning and acuteness, under the restraints of justice, find themselves of no avail.

Footnotes for Lecture VI.

294.Lecture, p. 450. Note.