ART. IV. THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT.

In the early Church, we are told, there was not much controversy concerning the relation of Christ's death to the salvation of the world. The great question of metaphysical and theological discussion was the Person of Christ; the atonement was neither scientifically apprehended nor developed. During the ante-Nicene age the counsel of the world's redemption was not darkened by words without knowledge. The Church rested with a sublime faith on the simple fundamental truth that the sufferings and death of Christ were essential to the forgiveness of sin. Its teaching was the undistorted reflection of the plain utterances of the New Testament. The teaching of Paul, who represents the judicial and rectoral view, and that of John, who represents the love and moral influence view of the atonement, were fairly reproduced by the writers of the second century. Then the speculative spirit fastened itself on the leaders of theological thought; a spirit that produced such theories as have made it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for the average mind to ascertain with tolerable exactness the teaching of the Bible concerning the necessity, nature, and benefits of the atonement.

Most certainly, the atoning work of Christ is shrouded in mystery. Its perplexities baffle the skill of the acutest intellects. It has depths that lie beyond the fathoming of the profoundest minds, heights that soar above the loftiest finite thought. The heart can best understand the atonement, for the reason that it is larger than the intellect. The atonement is a many-sided truth, and the heart seizes it as a whole, while the intellect lays hold of single points. This fact mainly explains why men possessing depth and breadth of thought have produced such distorted, repugnant, and incomplete theories of the atonement; theories that have led vast numbers to instinctively reject it altogether, or to so modify them as to eliminate therefrom the element that imparts the atoning character to the sufferings and death of Christ. It is sometimes difficult to determine which class has injured most the cause of Christthose who have openly opposed it, or those who, by perverting and misrepresenting its foundational truths, have made it offen

sive to enlightened reason, and repulsive to the best instincts of the human heart. One of the reasons why the world has been cursed with so many repulsive and conflicting theories of Christ's atoning work is, men have put forth herculean efforts to so interpret the Bible as to make it support their own cherished theory. They have tried to compress infinite thought, love, and suffering into their little, logical, theological, and philosophical propositions. This seemingly laudable, scholarly, but unwise attempt is largely responsible for many of the diffi culties now connected with the atonement. Some are the results of careful, candid, deep, and comprehensive thought; others-and by far the most-are products of a cold, rationalizing literature. We should discriminate, however, between the difficulties involved in Christ's atoning work and those which are the results of speculative thought concerning that work.

Looking at the present status of theological thought concerning God, man, sin and its results, and redemption through Christ, we recognize two extremes: one which says that God is all love, therefore does not need to be propitiated, and that sin is simply a trifle, an imperfection, a resultant of finite conditions and powers, to be remedied by intellectual evolutionary processes, hence does not demand any blood atonement; the other maintains that sin is so exceeding sinful that its penaltypain for pain, death for death-must be, and was, endured by the divine Christ, in order to make salvation from sin and its penalty possible; that is to say, Christ must pay the debt, mill for mill, that man has contracted against divine justice, and when once paid, that is the last of it. Justice has no further demands, the debt cannot be collected a second time, it is on Christ, the sinner goes forever free. Of course, the logic of this theory depends on whether Christ died for a part or for the whole of the human race. If for a part, that part must inevitably be saved; if for the whole, then the whole is absolutely sure of salvation, as all conditions are excluded; besides, justice cannot exact payment twice for one debt. The palpable and inevitable conclusion of the first is simon-pure Calvinism, and the only logical conclusion of the latter is Universalism. If, then, Christ thus died for a part of the human race, that part may exultingly exclaim, "Therefore hath he mercy

on whom he will have mercy," and we are the "elect according to the good pleasure of his will." But, on the other hand, if Jesus, by tasting death for every man, paid every man's debt, then every descendant of Adam can joyfully sing the misleading little ditty, "Jesus paid it all, paid it all for me."

But this theory, denominated the commercial theory of the atonement, is not only full of difficulties, but contains absurdities and contradictions. It makes Christ, whose life was sinless, both a debtor and sinner, as he is said to have so identified himself with those for whom he died as "to be counted as sinful," and punished for those sins; things that were psychologically and morally impossible. Now in these extreme theories are involved most of the difficulties connected with the atonement.

Let us look first at the extreme theory which tells us that God, being love, possesses no attribute that needs to be propitiated. That "God is love," in the deepest depths of his infinite nature, attributes, activities, and moral government, is a subject that challenges our admiration, profoundest thought, and affection. But does this life principle of the universe—this primal cause of all that is-this essence of the divine naturethis deepest feeling of the Infinite-exclude every principle and feeling that demands a propitiation for man's sin? How can that be? Does not the love of God express not only deep and matchless feeling for a world of lost sinners, but also the universal rectitude of his nature and character? It cements into grandest harmony all the perfections of his being. God is one. In him there can be no conflicting tendencies, movements, or claims. Justice and mercy, as they exist in God, were never at war, and never can be. God is at one with himself; and this unity of his nature and attributes is the unity of his goodness. His mercy and justice, therefore, can never move on separate lines or seek to accomplish opposite tasks. Both move and act together, and for precisely the same object. God never acts on the ground of pure sovereignty, but on the ground of righteousness. Things are not done by him as products of his arbitrary will, but of his righteous will. His love enthrones justice in the defense of truth and right. Justice and judgment are the foundations of his moral government. Justice, then, is love under another name, when acting

in the domain of retribution. Love is the "pure white light" of God's righteous character, "analyzed as it falls upon human life, throwing against the sky of our view the upper and nether rainbows of the Gospel and the Law, of rewards and punishments." It is in this love we may find the hottest fires of retribution. When man sinned love did not command justice to vacate the throne, but insisted upon a rigid and immediate enforcement of righteous law; and for the reason that a God of love-not blind sentiment, but holy love-must be a righteous God, and a righteous God must condemn and punish sin. Love must "condemn as well as approve, curse as well as bless, and make a hell as well as a heaven."

On these momentous questions we are not left to mere guessings, as we may read this twofold manifestation of love both on the pages of history and the Bible. We know absolutely nothing of God but what his works and word reveal, and these tell of justice as well as mercy, of severity as well as love. Professor Tyndall speaks of an inscrutable Power, at once terrible and beneficent, that is to be propitiated by knowledge and action-action shaped and illuminated by knowledge. Who cannot see that nature has in it more than sunshine, zephyrs, calm, beauty, and beneficence? Science, no doubt, reveals to us the workings of a beneficent law, but it also reveals terrific disintegrating, and destructive forces. John Stuart Mill says, "Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature's every-day performances." But, of itself, nature does nothing. It is the Omnipotent Will that speaks beneficently and severely through the operations of nature. So he does in man's moral being, in the Bible, and in history. The world is full of wretched victims of physical, mental, and moral retribution; a fact that has no explanation unless there is a sternly severe element in God that he has expressed in his dealings with the human family. The God of love is also a consuming fire. He can and does create in human souls a hell as well as a heaven. Epicurus said, "The world is imperfect, presenting nothing but scenes of misery." Homer makes Jupiter exclaim, “There is nothing more wretched than man!" And a greater than these tells us, that "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain."

Nature, history, and the Bible unite in proclaiming the

existence of a severe element in the Creator, Ruler, and Redeemer of man. And it is this severe element that constitutes an impassable barrier in the way of a sinner's forgiveness without an atonement. It must be propitiated, or the salvation of a sinful race cannot be righteously accomplished.

What is the verdict of consciousness on this point? Joseph Cook says: "When a man has willfully violated the radiant moral law it is instinctive, if the eyes are kept open to its light, to feel that something ought to be done to bring about satisfactory relations between the rebellious spirit and the Author of that ineffably resplendent moral enactment." These words of light and strength express a deep and universal feeling a feeling that reveals what God has implanted in man's moral nature. Consciousness of guilt, of danger, of ill-desert, of the necessity of doing something to restore the soul to its normal state and relations to God, is a resultant of God's action in the realm of conscience. From the beginning of man's sinful history he has instinctively felt moved to make some reparation to an offended God, so as to regain his lost approval. This is the ineradicable feeling that underlies all the sacrifices in pagan lands. But the pagan world has never felt satisfaction with its sacrifices. Its innate sense of justice, which lies back of its consciousness of ill-desert and the necessity for an atonement, has led it to make its costliest sacrifices, but it has not found in them permanent satisfaction and peace. The logic of this universal experience is, that there is One who is in our sinful race but not of it, who is displeased with its sins, and who will not be satisfied with mere reform or human methods of salvation, but imperatively demands an atonement that possesses infinite value.

A shallow liberalism may dogmatically affirm that because God is love he needs not to be propitiated; but God's revela tion of himself, as read in the deeply rooted instincts of the race for thousands of years, stamps the affirmation as false. Those instincts confirm the plain statements of the Bible on this question. God's love is holy love; not a mere sentiment or sympathy that prompts a father to forgive his child without an atonement, but the love of a righteous Ruler who upholds righteous law and government. What a father may safely do in his private domain is one thing; what a ruler may do in his