Gospels, but my argument does not require the con cession that the writers received a supernatural guidance which protected them from the possibility of error. I assume that a considerable number of the epistles of the New Testament were written by the apostles to whom they are commonly ascribed, but if to any of my readers the genuineness of some of these epistles is doubtful, the evidence derived from the rest remains in all its integrity and force. And, further, I have endeavoured to show that whether we acknowledge or deny that exceptional inspiration was granted to the apostles, their teaching on the relation of the Death of Christ to the forgiveness of sin must have been derived from Christ Himself.

In the construction of the Theory of the Atonement in the last two Lectures, the theological assumptions are, no doubt, much broader: even in these Lectures, however, I am not aware that my speculations rest on the "traditional foundation of biblical infallibility." For many years it has been my settled conviction that the question whether all or any of the writers of Holy Scripture received exceptional inspiration, and to what extent this inspiration protected them from error, is one which is to be settled after a man has become a believer in the principal facts and truths of the gospel of Christ-not before. As I have said in Lecture IV., "the inquiry has considerable speculative interest," but

even when it is narrowed to the inspiration of the apostles themselves, "the solution of it is unimportant in relation to the chief articles of the Christian Faith.

2.—The Relation of the Lord Jesus Christ to Moral Law.

Among the broader theological assumptions in the last two Lectures, is one which has been made the ground of criticism by two, at least, of my reviewers. The whole of Lecture IX. rests on the position stated in page 363, that "the Lord Jesus Christ is the Moral Ruler of the human race; moral responsibility is responsibility to Him." And I assume that the existing relations of the Lord Jesus Christ to the human race as their Moral Ruler and final Judge, have their root in the original relation of the Eternal Son of God to mankind.

A reviewer in the "British Quarterly" for April, 1876, objects that the passages which I quote

"certainly prove that Christ, by virtue of the redemptive ar rangement, and on the ground of what He did and suffered as the Saviour of the world, does sustain the function of the Moral Ruler of the human race. But they certainly do not prove that this was a function which originally belonged to Him as the second Person in the Trinity. . . . Besides, we are explicitly told that this sublime relation is so far from being original, that at the consummation of all things it is destined to terminate. 'When all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.' Is it not inverting the natural order of things to convert the result of the Atonement into the ground of it” (pp. 480, 481)?

The writer of an able notice in the "British and Foreign Evangelical Review" for October, 1875, calls attention to the same point.

"The Lawgiver, in common theological statement, is not regarded as distinctively the Son, the second person of the Trinity; and yet to justify the statement that in the Atonement it is the author of the law which satisfies the law, we must either adopt without proof that new practice, or fall back into the old error of Patripassianism. Those other functions of Christ—as Judge and Moral Governor of men-alluded to by Mr. Dale, he makes no attempt to develop out of the eternal relation between the Son of God and the Father. It has been usual with theologians, as we have already said, to regard these as results of the mediatorial position, not as the grounds on which Christ could become mediator; but the hint which Mr. Dale has worked out is worth considering. If 'all judgment is now committed unto the Son,' is there not suggested an 'original relation of the Son to righteousness and law which will cast some light on the rationale of the substitution for sinners in bearing the penalty ?” 1

I

I am grateful to the writer of the notice in the "British and Foreign Evangelical Review" for referring to the conception of the doctrine of the Trinity on which the theory illustrated in the two last Lectures is constructed. I ought, no doubt, to have developed the conception more fully; but it is stated with what seems to me tolerable distinctness in the Introductory Lecture (p. 6). "It is the habit of some modern theological thinkers to say that the names by which we know the several Persons of the Trinity are British and Foreign Evangelical Review, October, 1875, page

777.

derived from their revealed relations to mankind.

This

may be conceded; but surely these relations are conditioned by relations deeper than themselves. We cannot imagine that He whom we know as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ could have laid aside His glory and assumed the same relationship to the Son that the Son assumed to Him. If this were possible, then the relationship as known to us between the Lord Jesus Christ and the Father would be purely contingent and arbitrary, and would rest on no eternal fact in the nature of God."

To establish this conception of the Trinity would require a separate treatise, instead of a paragraph or two in a preface; nor do I suppose that I have the resources which the task of establishing it would require. But the principle which is the guarantee of this conception is one of supreme theoretical and practical importance, and one which is firmly rooted in the faith. of the Church. Is that which we are accustomed to call the Christian Revelation a revelation at all? or do we still stand in the presence of an 66 Unknown God"? Notwithstanding all the logical paradoxes which look so formidable in discussions on the Absolute and the Relative, the Infinite and the Finite, the Church refuses to surrender its conviction that the Christian Revelation actually reveals the God from whom it comes. If the Revelation consists of a series of pro

positions and of historical events, which stand for nothing in the actual life and nature of God, religious faith-faith in God Himself-would be impossible, for we should have no knowledge of Him on which our faith could rest.

The Revelation consists, not merely or chiefly in words, but in Divine acts; in the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ; His earthly history; His personal character; His bearing toward mankind; His miracles; His Death as a sacrifice for the sins of men; His resurrection and ascension into heaven; in the Divine forgiveness of human sin on the ground of the Death of Christ; in the mission of the Holy Ghost, and in the regeneration and sanctification by Him of all who confess that Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of mankind; in the new relations between those who are "in Christ" and the Eternal Father-relations which are new and yet old, and are the fulfilment of the original thought of God concerning our race; in the universe of spiritual blessings which are the inheritance of those who have "received power to become the sons of God."

Among the central elements of the whole revelation we must place the assumption of our nature by the Eternal Word, and the actual relations of our Lord Jesus Christ to the Law of Righteousness and to the human race, which are illustrated in the last two sections of this volume.