tihtary of ^he t:heolo0ical ^tminavy PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY •d^D' 'rom librc'^ry of Dr. A. A. Ko^ge THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT AND ITS RELATION TO REMISSION OF SINS AND ETERNAL LIFE BY JOHN McLEOD CAMPBELL, D.D. FO UR TH EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES MACMILLAN AND CO, 1S73 All Rights Reset-ved LONDON : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, 6TAMF0BD STBEET AND CUABING CBOSS. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. PAGE The Atonement presupposes the Incarnation of which it is the development, xvi Yet some believe in the Incarnation who do not believe in the Atonement, xviii Two hindrances to faith in the Atonement — (i) Views of human progress, xxi (2) Views of the Reign of Law, xxii Two regions of divine self-manifestation — ( I ) The Reign of Law : (2) The kingdom of God, . xxvi The place which prayer has in the kingdom of God, . . xxvii Theism and religion xxix The kingdom of God seen in Christ, xxx Miracles considered, xxxv The Atonement belongs to the kingdom of God, . . . xxxix CHAPTER L THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED IN THE ATONEMENT AWAKEN THE EXPECTATION THAT WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND ITS NATURE — Three aspects of the Atonement : its extent, object and nature. The third aspect now to be considered, Reasonableness of the demand for light on this subject, . Twofold aspect of the Gospel, retrospective and prospective, . 4 Importance of the internal evidence of the Atonement, . Conscience testifies to a need be for an Atonement, .... 7 Further, there is in conscience — (i) A response to the testimony of Scripture as to the evil sin, ..... 10 (2) A capacity of apprehending the excellence of Eternal Lije, 13 * a 2 CONTENTS. Difficulty of habitually realising these two opposite states, , . 14 Importance of doing so in studying this subject, . . . . 15 Belief that there is forgi vene ss with God, the Jirst_deinand of the Gospel, . . . • 16 This belief found difficult by the awakened conscience, ... 20 The doctrine of the Atonement alone meets this difficulty, , 21 This doctrine, however, involves difficulties of another kind, . 22 Due prominence has not been given to the prospective aspect of the Atonement, 24 The righteousness as well as the love of God a ground of hope, 26 CHAPTER II. TEACHINCx OF LUTHER- Bearing of Luther's personal experience on his teaching. His commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, How he sets forth the reality of Christ's bearing our sins, . Luther's conception, ist of the nature of Faith, 2nd of its results, His views of the difference between the Law and the Gospel, God's will as revealed in Christ the proper object of faith, . Importance of the personal appropriation of the Atonement, Nature and limits of Luther's teaching, 30 32 33 34 35 37 39 41 CHAPTER IIL CALVINISM, AS TAUGHT BY DR. OWEN AND PRESIDENT EDWARDS — Characteristics of these two writers, 4j Their treatment of the subject contrasted with Lutlier's, . . 45 Results at which they arrived — I. Limitation of the Atonement, 47 How they met objections to this doctrine, 50 (i) First objection and answers to it by Owen and Chalmers, 51 Consideration of these answers, 53 (2) Another objection taken by tlie present writer, ... 54 An arbitrary act cannot reveal character, 55 Contradiction between the failh of the head and the love of the heart, 57 II. Substitution of a legal for a filial confidence, .... 59 Reasons for not being satisfied with this view, .... 62 The Son alone could reveal the Father, 6"; CONTENTS. CHAPTER IV. CALVINISM, AS RECENTLY MODIFIED — PAGE Four points of difference from the earlier Calvinism, ... 65 Other differences involved in these, 66 Assumed advantages of this system, 66 The mental history of these writers commands our sympathy, . 68 Their conception of " rectoral justice," 68 Sense in which they hold that our sins were imputed to Christ, 71 Two points of coincidence with earlier Calvinism, . , . . 71 Their analysis of the elements of Christ's sufferings, • • • 75 I t does not accor d with the penal character ascribed to them, . 77 Like the earlier~CaIvImsts they think of the Atonement as purely legal, 7^ Their view of the relation of the Atonement to justification by faith, 80 Their modification of the doctrine of imputation un tenable, . 83 Teaching of Edwards on this point, preferred to that of Payne, 84 Relation of faith to justification, not in truth arbitrary, . . 88 Reason for examining this system at length : its merits and defects, 92 The Atonement even imperfectly understood, a source of light, 94 Still we ought to desire a fuller apprehension of it, . . = . 97 CHAPTER V. REASON FOR NOT RESTING IN THE CONCEPTION OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT ON WHICH THESE SYSTEMS PROCEED. — THE ATONEMENT TO BE SEEN " BY ITS OWN LIGHT — What was the atoning element in the sufferings of Christ The Calvinistic writers held that it was pain as pain. Was it not rather pain as a condition and form of holiness The staying of the plague by Phinehas affords us light. Light to be sought not in types but in the antitype. In the Epistle to the Hebrews we find the true method used, Consideration of Heb, x. 4-10, Ps. xl. 7-11, and John xvii. 26, 107 Love to God and love to man, united in Christ, . . • .109 99 lOI 102 103 105 107 CHAPTER VL RETROSPECTIVE ASPECT OF THE ATONEMENT — I. Chrisfs dealmg with rnen on the part of God, . . . . ri2 Both joy and sorrow had a place in Christ's witness-bearing, 113 vi CONTENTS PAGE This sorrow a part of the Atonement, 114 But not to be regarded as /^//a/ sufifering, 115 II. Chrisfs dealing toith God on behalf of men, 116 Cod's wrat^i against sin a reality, . . . ... . .117 Christ's perfect response to God's condemnation of sin, . .118 Edwards' alternative : equivalent punishment, or equivalent repentance, 119 Sorrow for another's sin not penal, 122 The Atonement a development of the incarnation, . . .123 Due repentance for sin expiates guilt, 125 An illustration of what is here meant, 126 Question of personal identity of the guilty and the righteous, 127 Christ's confession was followed up by intercession, . . .128 CHAPTER VII. PROSrECTIVE ASPECT OF THE ATONEMENT — The Atonement rightly understood essentially prospective, . 131 That its ultimate reference is prospective, all admit, . . .132 But in truth its results are directly connected with itself, . .133 Erroneous views as to imparted and imputed righteousness, 134, 135 The subject of atoning confession recurred to, 137 The revealer of the Father, also the revealer of man, . . .138 Two aspects of the life of love in Christ — I. Christ zvitncssijig for the Father to men, 140 His hope for humanity closely connected with His sufferings, 141 Our hope ought to have the same foundation as His, . . 144 Christ revealed the hidden capacities of humanity, . . . 145 The life of sonship is eternal life, 146 God's fatherliness and man's capacity of sonship alike revealed by Christ, 148 How we ought to think of the righteousness of Christ, . .149 II. Christ's dealifigioith the Father on behalf of men, . . .151 Right conception of Christ's pleading His own merits on our behalf, 151 The full light of the Atonement shines in Christ's life, . .155 Three important points which are thus made clear, . . 153-155 Fitness for worship the true end of the Levitical sacrifices, . 156 Access to God must be in the Spirit of Christ, . . . .158 Superiority of a moral and spiritual Atonement as an expiation of sin, 159 Error of supposing that the fatherliness and the righteous severity of God are at variance, . . , , 162 Man is encompassed with spiritual necessities, .... 165 CONTENTS. CHAPTER VIII. FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION AS DETERMINING THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT AND THE FORM OF THE GRACE OF GOD TO MAN — PAGE As the Mosaic sacrifices were a preparation for worship, so by the blood of Jesus we enter into the hohest, 167 Consideration of I John i. 5 — ii. 6, 169-172 Christ himself the /rf^/zymZ/fw for our sins, (ii. 2) . . . .171 Meaning of "making reconciliatioii'''' as illustrated by Heb. ii. 17, 18, , . 173 Further illustration from Eph. ii. 14. — " Christ our peace, ' 174-176 This peace first spiritual and then, as a consequence, legal, 177-179 An Atonement which is morally and spiritually adequate, will of necessity be also legally adequate, 1 80 ** He suffered, therefore I shall not suffer," — this view con- sidered, 181 Reconciliation to "the Father of spirits" theessence of salvation, 181 We cannot too soon present the Father to awakened sinners, . 187 St. Paul's argument in Gal, iii. 17 accords with this view, . .188 Faith the highest righteousness because in it glory is given to God, 189 A common error as to i Cor. i. 30, "Christ made unto us righteousness," &c., 191 '^ojiction need be introduced into the doctrine of justification, 193 Illustration of this derived from Rom. vii. 24, 25, and viii. i, 2, 194 Summary of what has been advanced in this chapter, . . . 197 CHAPTER IX. THE INTERCESSION WHICH WAS AN ELEMENT IN THE ATONEMENT CONSIDERED AS PRAYER — How this chapter is related to the foregoing, 198 Christ's work not to be thought of as the acting out of a plan, . 199 Special difficulty of realising Christ's intercession for men, . 200 How was intercession necessary ? Answer to the question, . 203 The intercession and the Father's response to it alike realities, 205 Real source of our difficulty in regard to Prayer, .... 206 Bearing of these considerations on our own religious life, . . 207 CHAPTER X. THE ATONEMENT, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE DETAILS OF THE SACRED NARRATIVE — The outward course of Christ's life, now to be considered, . . 2oq Christ's inward life developed through outward circumstances, 211 CONTENTS. Significance for us of the private life of our Lord, His public ministry : the Sermon on the Mount, The life of Sonship as presented in His ministry, Christ's sufferings as anticipated by Himself, The agony in the Garden, . 213 • 215 . 216 217-219 . 219 CHAPTER XI. HOW WE ARE TO CONCEIVE OF THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST, DURING THAT CLOSING PERIOD OF WHICH SUFFERING WAS THE DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER — Two opposite ways in which the subject has been ap- proached, 220 Both errors arise from regarding the sufferings as penal and so as sufferings merely, 222 Christ's sufferings, (i) as related to the life of Sonship and (2) as intended to be shared in by His disciples, . . . 223-225 The life in the Father's favour, untouched by the permitted suffering, 226 Importance of taking into account the mind in which He suffered, 228 The cross as implying shame, 229, 230 In what sense the favour of man is to be desired, . 231-233 Christ sought men's good more than their favour, .... 233 Physical aspect of Christ's sufferings, 233-235 CHAPTER XII. THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST, IN WHICH THE ATONEMENT WAS PERFECTED, CONSIDERED IN THEIR RELATION, FIRST, TO HIS WITNESSING FOR GOD TO MEN, AND SECONDLY, TO HIS DEALING WITH GOD ON BEHALF OF MEN — I. Christ's sufferings ais related to His witnessing for the Father, 237-247 Psalm xxii. to be taken as supplementing the narrative of the Gospels : the sufferings here setnfrom Christ'' s side, . . 238 Detailed examination of this Psalm, 238-241 Light thus shed upon the nature of Christ's sufferings, . 241-247 The continuity of the life of Sonship unbroken, .... 242 The close of the Psalm sheds light, — (i) On the fact that the interests of all humanity were involved in these sufferings, 244 (2) On the way in which mankind were to share in salvation,, 245 II. Christ's sufferings as related to His dealing with the Father on behalf of men, 247-255 CONTENTS. Christ's confession of man's sin and intercession for sinners, 248, 249 It was necessary that the elements of man's alienation fi-om God should be present to the spirit of Christ, . . 250, 251 True meaning of being " washed in the blood of Christ," . 25.1 A moral and spiritual atonement, when understood, is seen to be a perfect expiation for man's sin, 252 It is also the light of life to us, 254 CHAPTER XIII. THE DEATH OF CHRIST CONTEMPLATED AS HIS "TASTING DEATH," AND "FOR EVERY MAN;" AND THE LIGHT IT SHEDS ON HIS LIFE, AND ON THAT FELLOWSHIP IN HIS LIFE, THROUGH BEING CONFORMED TO HIS DEATH, TO WHICH WE ARE CALLED — Christ's faith in death identical with his faith in life, . . . 256 His death was (i) the perfect fnanifestation, 258 And (2) the consummation of His faith in the Father, , . . 258 Christ alone truly tasted death, 259, 260 And He alone realised death as the wages of sin, . . . .261 Suitableness of the circumstances of Christ's death, . . . 263 Fellowship in Christ's death, a prerequisite to fellowship in His resurrection, 265 Illustration of the directly practical aspect in which the cross of Christ is contemplated in the Scriptures, 266 The present teaching appeals to the conscience even more than to the understajidtng, 268 The view now taken of the nature of the Atonement is in- dependent of the question of imputation, 270 CHAPTER XIV. COMPARATIVE COMMENDATION OF THE VIEW NOW TAKEN OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT CONSIDERED IN FOUR ASPECTS — (1) Light, 273-275 (2) Unity and simplicity, 276-278 (3) Natural relation to Christianity, 278-281 (4) Harmony with the Divine Righteousness, .... 281-289 Erroneous use of the expression " for Christ's sake," . . . 286 Two great truths to be here remembered — (i.) The ultimate ground of the Atonement is to be seen in God, 287 (ii.) The work of Christ is to be seen in the light of its results in hiimanity, 287 CONTENTS. CHAPTER XV. THAT GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, THE ULTIMATE TRUTH ON WHICH FAITH MUST HERE ULTIMATELY REST — PAGE Relation of redemption to the fatherliness of God according to the view now taken, 291 Two considerations to be here noted — (i.) It is a special glory to God that His fatherliness is itself the source of saving power, 292 (ii.) Our reconciliation to God nmst have this origin, . . 293 True significance of the words, " The Father sent the Son," . 295 The faith that God is the Father of our spirits has as deep a root in us as the faith that there is a God, 297 A similar faith belongs to the two great results of the Atone- ment, Sonship and Brotherhood, ....... 298-320 {i) Sonskip towards God, 298-315 Examination of the view that "adoption" rests upon a legal justification, 299-301 *' Have I a right to call God Father?" this question con- sidered, 301-303 As faith excludes boasting, so does the confidence of Sonship exclude self-righteousness, 304>305 Luther's teaching as to faith superior to that of the Calvinists, 307 But, as to Sonship, he falls short of the Apostles' teaching, . 307 Possible objections to the present teaching, .... 309-311 Progress of mind often experienced in refei-ence to this subject, 311-314 Bearing of these thoughts on the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration, . . , 3H»3i5 (2) Brotherhood toi.va7-ds nieriy 3 1 6-320 Brotherhood fulfils the second commandment, 316 We cannot be in Christ the sons of God if we refuse to be in Christ the brothers of men, . 318 It is in the death of self that the life of God is quickened, 319,320 CONTENTS. CHAPTER XVI. co^xLUSIOx — PAGE Limits realised in this inquiry, 321 Reason has its mysteries as well as revelation, . . . 322, 323 Statement of some mysteries of faith, 324 — 327 The failure of some attempted solutions, a cause for thankful- ness, 327 The mysteries which encompass the Atonement need not he first solved before we can understand it, 329 Solemnity of the question of the nature of the Atonement, . 329 NOTES. NOTE TO INTRODUCTION. On the tendency to resolve religion into love of man to man, . 331 NOTE TO CHAPTER II. Luther's teaching of Justification by faith alone, 333 NOTE TO CHAPTER VI. "Mediatorial Religion," — National Reziew iox K-^v\, 1%"^^, . 340 NOTE TO CHAPTER XIII. The death of Christ, 347 INTRODUCTION. I AVAIL myself of a second edition to ask attention to some thoughts in relation to the Atonement which may be a needed help to some of my readers, but which I was not led to notice in writing this book. That is an abiding obligation which the Apostle expresses when he says, " Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. The freedom of thought which so strongly characterises our time, and the liberty taken to regard all questions on the subject of Religion as open questions, render due obedience to this charge of the Apostle's peculiarly difficult : the range of the questions which may be put to us is so wide, and our answers are so likely to suggest previous questions. At the same time the field in which we are to look for our answer may be regarded as narrowed by the words " a reason of the hope that is in you." The Apostle's " becoming all things to all men " suggests a wide range, which yet is narrowed by the words, " by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God." The free controversy of the present day would be regarded with less anxiety and with more hope than it often is if this were clearly seen to be the course to which that- controversy shuts us up. We believe that God is, that God is light, that it is His will that in His light we should see light We, therefore, cannot recog- nise, in the questioning and controversy which abound, INTRODUCTION. a reason for suspended faith or universal doubt on the one hand, or for an unreasoning and bhnd faith on the other. It has been said — and some have received it as at this time a word in season, ministering comfort which many have needed — that " there hves more faith in honest doubt" " than in half the creeds." The creeds may, we know, be held without faith, that living faith which alone God accepts, and doubt, if honest, may be assumed to have some true faith underlying it. The very freedom and strength to question are often traceable to the firm hold of something true. The faith of righteousness sustains the spirit in asking, " Is this righteous ?" so long as the righteousness of what is presented to us is not yet discerned. The faith that God is love is often the root of questionings which have not yet issued in the appre- hension of the divine love present in that concerning which the questions arise; while on the other hand, many things are received in a way of blind submission to authority which, in the light of righteousness and love, would be seen to be unbelievable. It is also tiTie that at the present time the expression of doubt is often con- nected with an undeniable earnestness of spirit which contrasts strongly with the levity of the scepticism of a former age : and we cannot be too thankful for the tenderness and respect with which many deep thinkers, themselves strong in faith, deal with the earnest and anxious doubting to which I refer. Yet two considerations seem here to ask our attention : First, the jealousy for God as never asking for any but " a reasonable service," while " without faith it is im- possible to please Him," which should always be present in our dealing with unbelief. However tenderly it becomes us to deal with difficulties of other minds, however much we should guard against measuring their responsibility by our own light, we should never feel, or appear to feel, as if we admitted that God had left Himself without a witness, or that unbelief was more reasonable than faith. INTRODUCTION. Secondly., the danger to which undue concessions as to the reasonableness of doubt may expose those with whose doubts we are deahng; for by such concessions we may help them to a self-complacency on the ground of their doubts — to the feeling that doubting pertains to a higher order of mind than simple faith, and thus to a self-righteous trust in their doubting ; a form of self- righteousness not worse, it may be, than the self-con- gratulations of a blind orthodoxy which knows not the living God; yet surely not better, but equally remote from that living dealing with God which gives its pre- ciousness to faith as a grain of mustard seed. I have in this volume approached the subject of the atonement from the. side. of faith; in some sense writing for those who believe that they may believe. Yet I have sought to have present to my mind whatever I felt most reasonable or deserving of consideration in the difficulties of those who doubt : and I may here beg readers of this latter class not to be deterred by the title which indicates my subject because I seem to take for gra?ited points as to which they would ask a proof An atonement, v^ remission of sins, the gift of eternal life, and a relation of the two last to the first, all are in one view assumed; yet my hope has been that the manner of considering them will be in effect a successful argument for their reahty. For I beheve that Christianity has its highest and ultimate evidence in what it is; that therefore to illustrate any element of Christianity successfully is to establish its claim on faith. But I have approached my subject, not only from the side of faith, but also through an examination of the forms which faith in the atonement presents in the systems which I have assumed to be most in possession of the religious mind of our land. It has been suggested to me that it might have been better to have limited myself to the exposition of my own faith, and this would have had some advantages ; but the experience of many has justified the choice I made, as they have found the attempt to separate the elements of truth in received INTRODUCTION. systems from the error present in them profitable. I ^have not gone farther back than the Reformation. A recent writer* on the " CathoHc doctrine of the Atone- ment" traces its development in the Church from the beginning " historically," not " controversially/' though indicating clearly some of the grounds on which he objects to the teaching of the Reformers as that teaching presents itself to his mind. His book gives the im- pression of fairness, though the writer may not have altogether overcome the difficulty of seeing a subject from the point of view of an antagonist. Two things must strike one, first, the great diversity of views on the subject of the atonement before the Reformation, as well as then and since, and secondly, the " anxious hope " with which the writer looks to the " Catholic thinkers of Germany " in closing the record of the past ; for he thus leaves us under the impression that his introduction " On the principle of Theological developments " has been intended, in reference to the subject of his book, to prepare us to accept something which the Church has yet to speak, rather than to rest in what she has spoken. The faith of the atonement presupposes the faith of the incarnation. It may be also said historically that the faith of the incarnation has usually had conjoined with it the faith of the atonement. The great question which has divided men as to these fundamental doctrines of the Faith has been the relation in which they stand to each other — which was to be regarded as primary, which secondary? — was an atonement the great necessity in reference to man's salvation, out of which the necessity for the incarnation arose, because a divine Saviour alone could make an adequate atonement for sin ? — or, is the incarnation to be regarded as the primary and highest / fact in the history of God's relation to man, in the light / of which God's interest in man and purpose for man can I alone be truly seen? — and is the atonement to be con- templated as taking place in order to the fulfilment of the divine purpose for man which the incarnation reveals ? * Henry Nutcombe Oxenham, M.A. INTRODUCTION. I feel it impossible in any measure to realise what I believe in believing in the incarnation without giving a preference to the latter view; and accordingly my attempt to understand and illustrate the nature of the atonement has been made in the way of taking the subject to the light of the incarnation. Assuming the incarnation, I have sought to realise the divine mind / in Christ as perfect Sonship towards God and perfect Brotherhood towards men, and, doing so, the incarnation has appeared developing itself naturally and necessarily as the atonement. This attempt to see the atonement by the light of the incarnation is so far an attempt to answer Anselm's question, " Cur Deus homo " by the light of the divine \/ fact itself as to which the question is put; instead of seeking an answer, as he has done, in considerations exterior to that fact. If, as has been my endeavour and is my hope, I have kept within the limits of self- evidencing light, it ^^dll be felt by those who accompany me to that light that I have set down nothing as having a place in the life of Christ which has not really had such a place; although long cherished thoughts as to the ' jj/- nature of the atonement may, in the case of some, make it specially difficult for them to regard the divine facts traced as filling with their true meaning such expressions as propitiation, sacrifice for sin ; while others, hitherto not believing in an atonement at all, may hesitate to ascribe that character to these facts, although seeing them to be facts. But whether the results at which I have arrived be or be not accepted, I trust the path in which I lead the mind will be felt to be one of deep interest ; and also one which it is not presumption to attempt to tread^ seeing that the life of Christ is the light ^. of life to us, and that the divine mind in Him is presented to our faith as human, while divine, and what therefore humanity sustained in its faith by the divine Spirit may understand. That this light is human while divine saves from the charge of presumption the attempt to see by it ; yet doubtless that it is divine while human may well fill CAMPE. b INTRO D UCTION. y us with awe while making this attempt : rendering our hope in engaging in it not merely a reverent use of the intelligence with which God has endowed us, but also trust in our Heavenly Father's willingness to give His Holy Spirit to them that ask Him. An intellectual form our spiritual apprehensions must receive, that the demand of our intellectual nature may be met ; but that which is spiritual must be spiritually discerned, and, while I hope to carry the understanding of my readers along with me, I am not to be regarded as seeking to recommend the doctrine of the atonement by what might be called a bringing it down to the level of the human understanding. I seek rather to raise the understanding to that which is above it, and to that exercise of thought on that which is spiritual in which we feel ourselves brought near to what is divine and infinite, and made partakers in the know- ledge of the love which passeth knowledge. If the atonement is rightly conceived of as a develop- ment of the incarnation, the relation of the atonement to the incarnation is indissoluble ; and in a clear appre- hension of the incarnation must be felt to be so. Further, if the eternal life given to us in Christ is that divine life in humanity in which Christ made atonement for our sins, then the connection between the atonement and our participation in the life of Christ is not arbitrary, but natural : and thus the incarnation, the atonement, and man's participation in the divine nature offer to our faith one purpose of divine love, reaching its fulfilment by a path which is determined by what God is and what He wills that man should be. This unity and simplicity in the grace of God to man, and natural relation subsist- ing among the elements of our faith, is *' the simplicity that is in Christ," — a harmony in the gracious whole, the apprehension of which must strengthen faith. Yet I cannot forget that there are earnest and deep- thinking minds in whose case the faith of the incarnation and their acceptance of it as the fundamental grace of God to man to the light of which all that concerns God's relation to man is to be taken, has issued, not in the INTRODUCTION. recognition of the atonement as a development of the incarnation, but on the contrary, in regarding the atone- ment as in the Hght of the incarnation alike uncalled for and inconceivable. So soon as the incarnation, no longer regarded only as a mystery of condescending love — love which took this form because of the need-be for an atonement, is accepted as itself the light to which the subject of the atonement must be taken, we are prepared to find that all con- ceptions of the atonement which accord not with the love of the Father of Spirits to men His offspring manifested in the incarnation, will be rejected. But we expect true con- ceptions on this great subject to take the place of the errors rejected. For, if the atonement be the develop- ment of the incarnation, how can we stop short with the fact of the incarnation itself as if it were the whole of the Gospel? One reason for stopping short with the in- carnation may be the overwhelming, sense of the deep root of man's relation to God, of man's inconceivable preciousness in the sight of God, which fills the mind in reahsing the incarnation — fills the mind apart from and antecedent to all tracing of the course of the incarnate Saviour, in His working out of our salvation. As divine love fitted to subdue man's enmity, as divine power entering into humanity and equal to the task of regene- rating all humanity, the incarnation may seem a Gospel sufficient to meet all the need of man. Yet our " need " is to be measured, not by our own sense of need, but by what God has done to meet our need. How little may meet our sense of need, the inadequate and superficial views of the gospel which so often give peace, even to minds considerably awakened on the subject of religion, may warn us. The faith of what the Scriptures teach of the development of the incarnation is not less essential to an enlightened peace of mind than the faith of the incarnation itself And if the greatness of the grace of God to man in the incarna- tion is enough to assure us of the hope that is for man in God, is not the unanticipated and marvellous character b 2 \ INTRODUCTION. of that divine mystery what should constrain us to the attitude of reverently learning from the course of its development in the work of our redemption all that concerns the manner of the love which the Father hath bestowed on us? It seems to me a contradiction to believe in the incarnation,'and to expect to understand its relation to us otherwise than through the faith of the divine facts which are the form which divine wisdom has ^ taken in accomplishing the results which, in the incar- nation, divine love has contemplated. The incarnation may itself be traced back to the love which has taken that form, and we may propose to ourselves to set out from the axiom that God is love, and think that we can deduce from it creation, incarnation, and the ultimate participation of individual men in the divine nature. But we cannot, in contradiction to the history of human thought, assert that we could have anticipated the course of the divine self-manifestation ; while we may and must thankfully rejoice that God gives us the capacity of recog- nising His glory in all these manifestations of Himself. But to be thus i7i the light of rei)elation children of the light and of the day is very different from stopping short at any divine fact, however high and ultimate, and substituting our own deductions from it for the facts of the gospel. It is natural and right to ascend from the facts of historical Christianity to the principles and laws ot the kingdom of God which these facts make known to us. But, if this has been a sound process of thought, to descend again in order to rest in these facts with a confirmed faith must also be natural, and what we shall rejoice to do. And so it is with the Apostles. St. Paul says, " God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us ;" and the language of St. John is, " Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." Both Aposdes see the love of God not in the incarnation simply, but in the incar- ' nation as developed in the atonement. Those who in former times gave the first place to the INTRODUCTION. 1 incarnation, subordinating the atonement to it, while still beheving in the atonement, sometimes speculated on the probable history of man if he had not sinned, as what would still have implied the incarnation in order to the fulfilment of the divine purpose in man. Such specu- lations are recalled to us when we now see faith in the incarnation combined with the rejection of the atonement. What is left out of Christianity is just that part of re- vealed truth in which the love of God is connected with the need of man as a sinner ; all, in a word, which gives the Gospel a remedial character, representing the Son of God as having come " to seek and to save that which \/ was lost," — representing man as having destroyed himself, ^ while revealing the hope that remained for him in God. Redemption only f^ez>eals the deep love of the Father of our spirits ; and hence an Apostle, in the full light of redeeming love, speaks of "committing ourselves unto God as unto a faithful Creator." But to trace redemption to its ultimate root in the divine Fatherliness, and to regard that Fatherliness as leaving no room for the need of redemption, are altogether opposite apprehensions of the grace of God. Two tendencies of philosophic thought which sti'ongly characterise our time, favour this resting in the faith of the incarnation, while rejecting that of the atonement. I. We can hear as an echo of Christianity such words as " Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs " in reference to the race, and "Men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things" in reference to the individual man. For, in the light of revelation we see the " increasing purpose " that runs through the ages, and through Christ we rise from our " dead selves to higher things." But speculation on man as the subject of progress has sometimes assumed what we feel to be an anti-Christian character ; as when sin is regarded as only one form of ignorance, deliverance from INTRODUCTION. 1/ which is a gain, hke every other advance in knowledge, but not as what can be rationally regarded with self-blame, penitence, remorse. It is not too much to say that the real ignorance which is present in sin is what that man has not yet been delivered from who is not looking back on sin with genuine self-blame. To judge otherwise is to treat the light of conscience, surely, at lowest, co-ordinate with that of pure reason, as on a level with what have been called delusions of sense, from which philosophy delivers us. But far short of this denying, as we may say, that sin is sin, there is room for thoughts excusing and palliating sin whose operation is to hinder the sense of a need-be for an atonement. We believe that through the redemp- tion man is raised to a level higher than that on which he stood at the first, while we see the God of creation in the God of redemption, and accept the unsearchable riches which we have in Christ, as the divine purpose from the beginning ; but to philosophic thought not accepting the utterances of conscience as axiomatic, redemption and the atonement which it imphes do not harmonise with development and progress, while incarnation may. II. Another tendency of thought strongly characteristic I of our time, to which I refer as hindering faith in the atonement, is that which has its extreme evil development when a personal God is lost to the human spirit in the uniformity of the course of nature or the reign of law. The reign of law, making experience possible, and all those results of experience which we call Science, has necessarily the deepest practical interest to us ; while apart from practice it is full of intellectual interest, and an ever inviting theme of speculative thought ; but its highest and purest interest is that which belongs to it as the form which the will of God has taken in ordering this fair universe, and in respect of which it is to faith a re- velation of God. There are indeed minds, and some even of a high order intellectually, to which the scientific interest of the reign of law is its highest, and seems its only rational interest. INTROD UCTION. They are satisfied to take the facts of existence as they present themselves as facts ; regarding the contemplation of them as manifestations and revelations of a divine mind as an exercise of speculative thought in which we have no sure footing, into which we are tempted by our own human consciousness, which, they say, suggests to us the conception but does not justify the faith of a God. But it is not too much to say that what is thus rejected as an unwarranted exercise of thought, leading to no sure results, is what the laws of thought necessitate. We are so constituted that the appearance of design suggests to us a designing mind ; and, in proportion as this appear- ance is varied, wide spread, and abiding, our sense of the necessity of the recognition of design deepens. So truly is this the case, that the realisation of the reign of law, which the ordered universe of which we find ourselves a part presents to us, renders the possibility of accepting that reign simply as a fact, and without being constrained to rise from the fact to the faith of mind and thought as manifested in the fact, inexplicable. Thus to stop short of God is, we feel, to do violence to a deep instinct of our being. Further, as the manifestation of design in the ordering of the universe as we know it raises our faith to a divine purpose and plan, as what we see being realised, so does the same necessity of thought which we are thus obeying constrain the further step of tracing all the laws and powers, which we see acting together in obedience to One Will, to that Will as the source of their existence. Here we are come to the point at which our own experi- ence no longer accompanies us as light, and we pass from that in God of which there is an image in man, to that which is distinctive of God as God — what the Apostle names as His " eternal power and Godhead." For here we pass from the relation of a reign of law to thought and design using law, to the relation of that reign to thought and design manifested in giving laws their existence. There is a certain likeness in human action to divine action as employing means to accomplish ends ; but there is no INTRODUCTION. likeness in any human consciousness to what we must ascribe to God when we contemplate Him as giving to means their existence and their fitness to accomplish ends. Intelligent beings as we are, we find ourselves encom- passed by a reign of law of the stability and fixedness of which we avail ourselves, finding the knowledge of laws to be to us power. But we cannot for a moment con- ceive of the original relation of this universe to God as that of an infinite multitude of laws to an infinite mind, having perfect knowledge of them, and using this know- ledge in turning them to account in accomplishing designs of infinite wisdom. We cannot conceive of infinite wisdom thus, as it were, finding infinite resources already existing. A capacity to be used for ends of wisdom could not be fortuitous. That capacity as well as the use made of it must be traced to wisdom, to designing thought. It is quite essential that our consideration of the reign of law, while it begins with our human con- sciousness of forming designs and employing means, should thus pass beyond and rise above any consciousness possible to us, in order that the invisible things of God may be revealed to our faith by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead. We cannot lose the living God in the reign of law, if we freely yield ourselves to the necessary relations of thought in our meditation on that reign even as seen in the physical universe, still less I may say is this possible in regard to the moral world : although the tendency to rest in law without ascending to God is manifested in relation to moral law also. There is this difference between the laws of the moral universe and those of the physical universe, that we do not trace the existence of the former to an act of will in God, as we do that of the latter. I know that to some it has appeared otherwise ; but to my mind, to say that God has given existence to goodness, as He has to the laws of nature, would be equivalent to saying that He has given existence to Himself. The Being of God implies goodness. But what we refer to the divine will here is the existence of INTRO D UCTION. beings such as we know ourselves, to whom God has given goodness as the law of their being. And so the difference between the physical universe and the moral universe in respect of law is, that the former we trace to the will of God, the latter to what God is. But we are called to ascend to a higher region than pure Theism. As it appears due obedience to a voice of reason and to necessities of thought to rise from Science to Theism, so do I believe is there a corresponding necessity in reason and the constitution of our being, for rising from Theism to Religion, from the faith of God as God, to the faith of God as the Father of our spirits. For, for us as God's offspring there is intended a nearer approach to God than even the apprehension and faith of His eternal power and Godhead. Theism raises us into a higher light of truth than that to which Science attains, and in seeing the reign of law in its relation to God we may be said to ascend from what we possess in God's works to a certain possession in God Himself. The power, goodness, and wisdom, of God become riches to us, — the goodness of God especially, both as putting the highest seal upon the excellence of moral law, and as enabling us in our own conscious weakness to realise that excellence with a peaceful hope while meditating on the moral universe and its yet unde- veloped future. Praise also, though it be but silent, will be added to our joy in God as God. I do not know that pure Theism can be regarded as going beyond this. In passing from Theism to Religion, or rather in adding Religion to Theism, we are changing a con- templative position in God's universe for the active occupation of our own special place as God's offspring. We are welcoming the privileges, and accepting the responsibilities which pertain to this our personal relation to God, in the faith of the feelings with which God is regarding us, and in the apprehension of the response to these feelings which is due from us. We are welcoming" a life in communion with God, a life in His favour, a life the lights and shadows, the joys and sorrows of which INTRODUCTION. have exclusive reference to the aspect of our God toward us ; the aspect toward us of that divine love which, while as love it is unchanging, yet must, because of its very nature, ever change in the look with which it regards us according to our changing selves. Such a life, the interest and aim of which is to occupy aright a filial relation to God, is at least conceivable, if only it be the will of God concerning us, and that He has made pro- vision for it ; and to such a life it is that the Gospel calls us, and it is in relation to it that it is said that God has given to us all that pertains to life and Godliness. ^ Here then are two regions of the divine self-mani- festation to which we are related ; the one the reign of law, as seen in the light of Theism, the other the king- dom of God proclaimed in the Gospel and the light of which is the Son revealing the Father. As our connection with both these regions is of God, what practical obligations our relations to them severally may imply cannot be contradictory. But they are two, and distinct, though the former is subordinated to the latter, and it is important that we discern clearly their distinctness ; because though we cannot live in the latter and forget the former, we may give place in our thoughts to the former while not knowing the latter. I mean, that while Religion presupposes Theism, Theism may exist without Religion : although in truth Religion is, as well as Theism, contemplated in the most elemental statement of the faith without which it is impossible to please God, that it is the faith that God is, and that He is the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. To the practical demands made upon us as related to these two several regions, this is common, that in both we have to do with fixed and determinate laws, which we are capable of knowing, and to which we have to conform ourselves. The difference between these regions lies in this, that in our relation to the former we have to do with a work of God — a system of things to which He has given existence ; while in our relation to the latter we have to do directly with the will of God ; that is to say, INTRODUCTION. His will as His mind and character, — that in respect of which we say, God is love. To know the system of things of which we find ourselves a part, and to conform ourselves to it, is practical wisdom in relation to the reign of law. To know the mind of God, and conform ourselves to it, is practical wisdom in our relation to the kingdom of God. And here we mark this difference, that the practical wisdom which the reign of law demands, may exist apart from faith in God, while that which the kingdom of God demands cannot. Thus, two men may cultivate Science with equal success, of whom the one never thinks of God — may even be an atheist, while the other acknowledges God in that stabihty of the laws of nature, on which they both alike are calculating. But any corresponding absence of faith in God, in the exercise of the wisdom proper to the kingdom of God, is manifestly impossible. For, while Theism may be said to crown science, en- nobling and exalting it by the relation to God in which it contemplates it, it in no way affects Science viewed simply in itself; but of Religion Theism is the foundation, underlying it as that on which it must rest or not be at all. The distinction between the will of God as what has taken a fixed form in the constitution of things around us, and the will of God as the divine mind or character is what we must endeavour clearly to apprehend and realise, in seeking to understand our own place — our responsibilities and our privileges — in the kingdom of God. What God is in that He is love is what God wills us to be. His choice for us He desires may be our choice for ourselves. In making that choice known to us, He speaks at once with authority and in love, ex- pecting the response of obedience and love from us; the authority and love on His part being blended in the claim to be known as the Father of our Spirits, the obedience and the love expected from us being blended also in the Spirit of Sonship. Further, what He reveals Himself as desiring that we should be, He authorises us to seek in prayerful trust, expecting His strength to be INTRODUCTION. perfected in our weakness. Therefore the inner aspects of our relation to the kingdom of God, to which as God's offspring we belong, are, God's favour as our Ufe, oneness of mind with God, as the condition of that favour, help of God and strengthening of His Spirit as our felt need, in order to being in that condition ; while the aspects of our spirits in the measure in which we are occupying aright our place in the kingdom of God, are faith, hope and love : — " faith " as the fellowship of the mind of the Son towards the Father in the life of Son ship which is being quickened in us ; — " hope " in God according to the words '' If children then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ ;" — and " love," faith and hope resulting in our dwelling in love, being dwelling in God. Thus we are receiving that kingdom of God which cannot be moved, for the coming of which we pray, the light of which is the Divine Will, not yet done on earth as it is done in heaven, and which is the deepest interest of existence to us as God's offspring, on whom the light of the Divine name " our Father " is dawning, and in whom the desire for the hallowing of that name is being quickened. What most fixes our attention, in the practical aspect of the kingdom of God, is the place which prayer has in it. God is the hearer and answerer of prayer ; our aspect toward Him is in its spirit prayer without ceasing. We see a place of free action occupied by God as the Father of our Spirits, and a liberty in relation to Him conceded to us as His offspring, which permit direct personal dealing on His part and on ours : so that we are free to ask directly from God what, in the light of His will, we see to be good ; and He is free to grant with simple and direct reference to us, and in response to our trust, that which we ask. That place which the fixedness of law, as what we may always assume, has in our practical relation to the reign of law, the character of God, as the hearer and answerer of prayer, has in our practical relation to the kingdom of God ; and, as Science in the largest sense of the word is our practical light under the reign of law, so is Christ the INTROD UCTION. light of the kingdom of God. Accordingly we see re- jection of Christianity taking the form of a denial of the existence of the kingdom of God, as distinct from the reign of law. The circle of those is not large, who, looking around them on the reign of law under which we find ourselves, feel it enough to see that reign as a subject of scientific interest, not rising from it to God. There is, however, a larger circle who ascend from Science to Theism, and feel the Divine interests of the works of God, who yet do not advance from Theism to Religion. These are those who seem to themselves to have come as near to God as they are warranted in doing, when from a distance they admire and adore Him as He is revealed to their faith in His works ; holding the due expression of reverence on their part to be the grateful use of this universe which He has made, in the exercise of the powers by which He has fitted them for their place in it, and feeling any personal approach to God, any seeking of communion with Him, still more any exercise of trust toward Him for a putting forth of His power in response to such trust, that is, anything strictly of the nature of prayer, as an unwarranted stepping out of man's proper place. This stopping short in Theism, not rising to Religion, has always had much charm for philosophic minds; while the instinct in man which gives attraction to Re- ligion has ever in some way or other influenced the ordinary thought and feeling of humanity. How blindly the religious instinct has wrought, how unworthy of the true God have so often been the approaches made to Him, in what ignorance of that in which He delights men have sought His favour — this we know : and how far Philosophic thought of old has been excused in its shrinking from the confines of religion, by what the popular religions of heathendom have been, we may not judge ; while surely we may give thanks for what has been pure and high in its Theism. But, doubtless, philo- sophers as well as their unreflecting brethren have both needed and shared the forbearance extended to a time, INTROD UCTION. at the ignorance of which God is said by the Apostle to have winked ; excusing in some sense what yet He con- demned as disobedience to a hght men's possession of which was evidenced in that one of their own poets had spoken of men as God's offspring. But to us the claim which a kingdom of God in which He makes Himself known as the Father of our spirits, asking for a filial response from us, has on our faith, goes beyond that which has existed always in proportion as our relation to God in Christ goes beyond that germ of religion which the words express, " In God we live and move and have our being " and " He appoints the bounds of our habitation that we should seek after Him. The kingdom of God as it asks our faith is seen in Christ. The conception of God as a Father, and of a relation to Him which is sonship, is seen realised in Christ. The Son of God is seen revealing the Father as the Father, by being in our sight the beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased. What therefore we are called to judge is whether this is a reality. As we look on Him who has thus come to us in the Father's name, hear His words, trace His path, do we find ourselves in a condition to accept His claim, to believe that God is a Father, that Christ is His Son, and that the life seen in Him is the life of Sonship. In so high a matter, the warrant for faith must be as high as the demand for faith. It is recorded that, when Jesus was on earth, a voice from heaven was heard saying, " This is my beloved Son." This voice was received as the voice of God. It was accepted as the Father's testimony to the Son — the Father's seal to the claim on man's faith which the Son made in coming in the Father's name. Is there at all times in the spirit this testimony of the Father to the Son ? Is there such a drawing of us to the Son by the Father as this ? And is this drawing what our Lord referred to in saying " It is written in the prophets, and they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me ?" And is this testimony of the Father to the Son in humanity INTRODUCTION. addressed to us with a personal reference to ourselves ? Is it now added in the spirit as then outwardly, " Hear ye Him?" And do we understand that we are thus taught that the Son has come to reveal the Father to us, and to quicken in us the hfe of sonship towards the Father ? If it be so, if the living God thus teach us that He has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son, then is this the highest and ultimate claim which the kingdom of God revealed in Christ has on our faith. On this turns our responsibility in reading the New Testament record, and our responsibility in reading the history of Christianity also ; for though Christianity may not have reahsed the promise of its early dawn, yet have Christians, being living branches in Christ the true vine, and abiding in Him, borne fruit which helps our faith in the purpose of God for man, in the measure in which it has been a fulfilling of that purpose. No doubt veils, in the form of corruptions of Christianity, have from time to time during these eighteen hundred years been thrown over the face of Christ. Human systems also, identifying themselves with Christianity, while diverse one from another, have caused Christianity to appear to superficial thought, not one, but many, and conflicting religions ; and we are not to forget how much all this has tended to hinder men's passing on from Theism to Religion. (" Ye have taken away the key of knowledge : ye enter not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered," S. Luke xi. 52.) But, at the worst, Christianity has never been that difticulty to philosophic thought which heathenism was formerly. In our inability to know what has come between even earnest and thoughtful minds and the clear vision of that which has claimed their faith, we must abstain from individual judgment. But, believ- ing in the abiding testimony of the Father to the Son in the Spirit, we believe in a corresponding abiding re- sponsibility for the due response of faith on men's part. This is a responsibility which men cannot put from them in considering the claim which the kingdom of God has on their faith. Is Divine Fatherhood, .and Divine INTRO D UCTION. Sonship, and the love of God as contemplating for us, God's oftspring, participation in the Divine Sonship, a conception which commands faith — a faith harmonizing with while transcending the elements of our previous faith in God? Our affirmative answer to this question is, however, rightly given only if given in the light of God ; and we must be careful not to plead wath others on lower ground than that on which we stand ourselves ; viz., the ground on which we feel that our Lord stood, when He came to men in the Father's name, and complained that so coming he had not been received by them. While He was come to make known the Father by being in men's sight the Son in whom the Father was well pleased, He constantly assumed that His commending of the Father ought to have a response in their spirits — that the footing of fatherliness in God on which He rested the demand for faith toward God should at once justify that demand to the conscience of those to whom He ad- dressed it. " Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your Father." "Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things." For we may say that the one postulate in all His teaching of faith, and reproof for the want of faith, was that those to whom He was speaking, were, and ought to know themselves, God's otfspring. Is it not thus that w^e are to understand the words " Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein," and, " I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes ?" The receiving as little children God's kingdom. His being revealed to babes, contemplates not a blind credulity, nor even teachableness in any merely general sense, but the welcome to a Father's voice which is the germ of the life of Sonship, a spiritual instinct belonging to our relation to the Father of our spirits. We must therefore be careful, in claiming faith for the kingdom of God, to occupy, as I have said, the ground which our Lord occupied, to assume the reason- ableness in the demand we make which He assumed. INTRODUCTION. and that, in respect of the divine deaUng with men's spirits in the Spirit, we in our pleading for faith are not alone, for the Father is ^^^th us. In following this course we are only doing as to ■ the highest obligation which rests on the human spirit what is done in all sound and healthful teaching of morality, viz. looking for and seeking to awaken an inward response in the taught. And in truth no other course is compatible with the assum.ption that men ought to know God, and trust God as a Father. This however is no reason for not attempting to meet, in so far as our understanding of their mental position may enable us to do so, difficulties of other minds whose habits of pure scientific investigation are to them a tempt- ation to approach the claim of the kingdom of God on our faith by a wrong path, causing them to ask for a kind of evidence not proper to the subject, and so hindering their weighing fairly what belongs to it. No scientific study of the phenomena which imply a reign of law could ever have issued in the discovery of the kingdom of God. But neither can it issue in any discovery that contradicts the existence of that kingdom ; nor can any mind in the light of the kingdom of God hesitate to conclude that if such seeming contradiction arise there is implied the presence of error, either as to facts or as to conclusions from facts. Considering the universality of the obligation to be in the light of the kingdom of God, and the consequent universality of the divine provision for meeting this ob- ligation, while Science is the calling of the few, and ability to weigh its evidence aright the endowment of exceptional men, it seems to me altogether reasonable to ask from scientific men that they should first deal with the claim which the kingdom of God makes on their faith, as what is addressed to them in common with all other men, and, as men judge of that claim, and feel no liberty to recall their acceptance of it once given on its own proper evidence because of difficulties met in another region where there is no corresponding responsibility for CAMPB. c INTRODUCTION. knowledge, nor universality of provision for attaining it. This we are entitled, I think, to urge, irrespective of the fact that the difficulties here felt by some men of science are not felt by all, not by some having the highest place in science, nor by some taking the subject of the reign of law to the light of large philosophic thought on that subject viewed in itself Nevertheless it is the part of brotherhood, and due from those who, believing in God as the hearer and answerer of prayer, feel themselves in a light which harmonizes this faith with the faith of the reign of law, to seek to make others partakers with them in that light. Such harmonizing light must be welcome even to those who most feel that it would be disobedience to the highest light to suspend their faith in the kingdom of God on the success of anything attempted in this direction. The attempt to solve difficulties in this region of thought by dividing the divine action in relation to tlie universe into departments, not mutually related nor strictly one whole, must fail to satisfy, though some in their perplexity have had recourse to it. Apart from the faith of the kingdom of God as revealed in Christ, the faith of God as a moral governor is not satisfied, if, in the name of science, the concession of self-executing moral laws is offered as parallel to self-executing physical laws, in order to reconcile the mind to the emptying the events which touch us through our physical nature of all moral purpose on God's part. And so also the shutting out of the reign of law, physical and moral, from the Father's personal dealing with us in the kingdom of God is what no marking out of a distinct region for the kingdom of God can reconcile us to as God's offspring. No doubt the kingdom of God in its internal aspect may seem to be, so to speak self-contained ; and in proportion as we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness — that kingdom which is neither meat nor drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost — the words " Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you " are felt to have their supreme interest in their relation to the words with INTRODUCTION. which they seem more immediately connected, viz. " If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give His Holy Spirit to them that ask Him ?" But the spirit of sonship in us forbids our recognismg any limitation to the freedom of God in the directness of His dealing with us in all things as our Father, or restriction of our freedom in that direct dealing with God and trust in Him, in respect of which we are authorised to " be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving" to let " our requests be made known unto God." In regard to miracles as included in what we know historically of the kingdom of God, what I can believe as to the subordination of the reign of law to the kingdom of God in so far as the reign of law is within my mental horizon, I must believe as to its expansion beyond that horizon, whatever that may be. But whether miracles are to be regarded as belonging to such an extension, and to be traced to a higher law in the reign of law than the laws which they seem to put aside, or to be conceived of as altogether differently related to God, is a question which may receive different answers without affecting our faith either in the reign of law or in the kingdom of God. Our faith in the reign of law has, as we have seen, two aspects : first, as seen realising divine thoughts and fulfilling divine purposes ; and secondly, as deriving its existence from God. In the first view, God is seen using means to ends ; in the second, giving existence to means. This latter view brings us direct to the will of God, as acting not mediately but immediately, and all observation of God's acting mediately thus takes us up ultimately to His acting immediately. It appears to me that we do not know enough to say as to anything that transcends our knowledge of the reign of law, in which way we are to view it, whether as belonging to the system of law, but to a region of it out of our sight, or as outside of it, and having the same immediate relation to God which the INTRODUCTION. system of law itself ultimately has. There is no doubt that the ordinary feeling with regard to miracles is one that claims for them the latter character; but to me it appears that to decide on this claim transcends our powers ; while, at the same time, our ultimate faith in God's '' eternal power and Godhead " leaves room for the question. But whether we are to conceive of miracles as only a special and unusual use of the powers embraced in a reign of law or not, this is common to them with our ordinary experience in the kingdom of God, that they imply a direct dealing with God on man's part — an accomi)lishing of something through asking and trusting God to do it. All human acting that makes this claim, and is a reality, belongs to the kingdom of God. And here I would notice in relation to miracles, that their place as elements in our faith is much more closely con- nected with our confidence in what I may call the testi- mony regarding them of those who have performed them, than with any intrinsic authority to command belief which we can recognise as inherent in the miracle itself. A miracle has been defined "a manifestation of superhuman power," and to sight it is, and can be, no more. But the manifestation of superhuman power gives no claim on our faith. It may be superhuman power in appearance only, as that was which Cortez claimed when he made use of his knowledge of a coming eclipse to impose on the Mexicans. But, assuming it to be superhuman, it is not therefore divine. It is only in reality a faith in him who performs it, and who claims to do it by "the finger of God " to believe that it is of God. That faith may be justified by what we know otherwise of the performer of the miracle, or by the divine character of the teaching in connection with wliich it is performed ; while there is also an instinctive faith in God which prepares us to believe that superhuman ]Dower put forth by one coming to us in His name would not be permitted to be without His presence. But the instance just referred to of imposture by Cortez proves that God does not authorise such blind confidence in mere manifestation of power. We must INTRODUCTION. therefore hold that the miracle divides with the teaching a joint claim on our faith. To say this is by no means to admit that the miracle hangs as a dead weight on the teaching once supposed to hang on it. They are part of one divine manifestation, whose claim on our faith is to be weighed in its totality, and whose value to us in relation to our place in the kingdom of God is its fitness to help and strengthen the faith by which w^e live and move in that kingdom. When I read the nth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, my faith as to the facts is that certain men, my brethren, did certain things wearing the aspect of superhuman power, and that they professed to do them through direct trust in God. Thus these men are to me witnesses for God that He invites and acknow- ledges such trust. (" Seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, " Heb. xii. i.) In being taken to the faith of our Lord, " The author and finisher of our faith," — in whom it has its root and perfect development, — we are only taken to the highest form of the same thing which we have been already contemplating, viz. direct trust in God and the acknow- ledgment of that trust on God's part. What is here immediately referred to is the faith in which our Lord " endured the cross, despising the shame ;" but the teach- ing of the whole record of His faith and of His mighty works is one and the same. " And Jesus lifted up His eyes, and said, Father, I thank Thee that thou hast heard me, and I knoAv that thou hearest me always : but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me. And when He thus had spoken, He cried with aloud voice, Lazarus, come forth" We are permitted to know that our Lord's part in the mighty work here recorded was faith in the Father, prayer and trust. It was thus an act of the Son revealing the Father — light shed on the kingdom of God ; but which light it could not have been to us apart from our know- ledge of the faith by which this miracle was performed. It is in truth as the history of acts of faith and of the divine acknowledgment of faith, that ^he record of miracles INTRODUCTION. preserved for us in the Scriptures has its essential value to us. It is so receiving them that I find them no clog on Christianity, but indeed one element in its power. Whatever philosophic attraction has been found in the work of trying to extract from Christianity as presented to us in the Scriptures a pure essence of light (eliminating all that claims a miraculous character as, if not altogether to be rejected, only causing difficulty and embarrass- ment), to one seeking to walk by faith, the record of human faith and of the divine acknowledgment of that faith is intended to be, and should be, a most welcome help, a part of the experience of humanity for which to feel ourselves debtors to God and man. How painfully does the suggestion that our Lord's raising Lazarus might be the putting forth of a power within the reign of law emanating from Himself strike at the very life of the faith, which, read as the record of power put forth through God, the narrative of the raising of Lazarus cherishes in us. So also when I read that " God raised Christ from the dead and gave Him glory that our faith and hope might be in God," and connect the Son's part in this divine transaction with the prayer in dying, " Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit," I understand my own calling as a child of God to live by direct faith in God as God, and am made deeply conscious of the distance \vhich separates such naked faith in God, triumphing over death in the knowledge that the fountain of life remains with Him, from man's ordinary walking by sight with an unreflecting trust in the stability of things that are, and in that promise for the future which man seems to himself to hear as the voice of the experience of the past ; feeling the earth firm under him, and that it will be so to-morrow, because it is so to-day. In the present state of men's minds on the subject of miracles, it is impossible to enter at all into the region of thought in which we now are without suggesting the question, how are miracles to be regarded ? But I am anxious that it should be clearly understood, that in pleading for faith in the kingdom of God, what I am INTRODUCTION. immediately concerned with is this aspect of that king- dom, that in it God presents Himself to our faith as the hearer and answerer of prayer. What hes between the Divine Will, willing an answer to prayer, and that answer as realised, faith as faith in God considers not. " Abraham was strong in faith, giving glory to God ; and being fully persuaded that, what He had promised, He was able also to perform." Our highest teaching here is the life of Christ as Sonship towards the Father. The claim of the kingdom of God on our faith is one with the claim of Christ on our faith. What I have now been attempting to do is to fix attention on this claim, as made by our Lord ill coming to me?i i?i the Father's na77ie. To us every word He spoke comes with authority because He spoke it. But we shall suffer loss if we forget that it was otherwise with those who originally heard His words of truth from His OAvn lips. If we rightly consider the record of His personal ministry, we shall see Him ever taking His hearers to a light already given in the Spirit, and in every man ; to which light it is that He appeals in claiming to be received because coming to them in the Father's name. Consider that one word already quoted, " If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children : how much more shall your heavenly Father give His Holy Spirit to them that ask Him ?" No higher faith could be asked for God, no faith so connected with the deepest need of man, as the faith that He gives His Holy Spirit to them that ask Him. Yet the form in which it is taught is a questio;i which assumes prepared- ness to concede whatever is implied in God's relation to them as the Father of their spirits. It is as having a place in the kingdom of God thatl we understand the atonement ; for it is to our personal ) relation to God as the Father of our spirits that the ' atonement belongs ; out of disorder in that relation has the need for it arisen ; to bring that relation into harmony with its divine ideal is the end which it has contemplated. The reign of law as such offers no place for an atonement, "^ even as it offers no place for prayer. The incarnation is xl INTRODUCTION. J the foundation of the kingdom of God, and faith in it prepares us for the faith of whatever nearness to God in love has been contemplated for those into whose nature the Son of God has come. But the incarnation not seen ia its development as the Son revealing the Father may- come, and has come, to be thought of only as a higher region of the reign of law. Christ has come to be con- templated simply as the mind of God become visible in humanity; the words " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father " being received as claiming nothing but this visibility. So understood, they would shed no light on the Divire Fatherhood, and the Divine Sonship, and the participation in the Divine life of Sonship to which it is the grace of God in Christ to raise us. But the words " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," are explained by the words, " I am the way and the truth and the life, no man cometh unto the Father but by me." "We see the Father when we see the Son, not merely because of identity of will and character in the Fathei and the Son, but because a father as such is known only in his relation to a son. THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT. CHAPTER I. THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED IN THE ATONEMENT AWAKEN THE EXPECTATION THAT WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND ITS NATURE. The fundamental place which the atonement occupies in Christianity, gives importance to every aspect in which it can be contemplated. Of these aspects the chief are, its reference, its object, and its nature. For v/hom was it made ? what was it intended to accomphsh ? what has it been in itself? These are distinct questions, though the discussion of any one of them has generally more or less involved that of the other two. Certainly to be in possession of the true answer to any one of them must be a help in seeking the answers of the others ; as also a misconception as to the answer of one must tend to mislead us in our con- sideration of the others. This is true, whichever aspect of the subject we may regard as the most important, or as having in it most light. The question between the Reformers and the Church of Rome — the question of justification by faith alone — was most closely connected with the second aspect of the atonement, viz., what it has accomplished. The dis- cussions which subsequently divided the Reformers among themselves turned on the first ; being as to whether the atonement had been made for all men, or for an election only. Much recent advocacy of the atonement has dealt freely with the third point, i.e., what the atone- CAMPB. B THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED ment is in itself, as to which there was no question raised in the earher discussions, but as to which it has been latterly felt, that the other questions could not be rightly taken up until this one was more closely considered ; and as to which the advocates of the universality of the atone- ment have begun to feel, that the received conceptions of its nature have given to the advocates of an atonement referring to an election only, an advantage in argument which a true apprehension of what the atonement has been would do away with. It is this third aspect of the atonement — i.e.^ its nature — that I now propose to consider ; which I propose to do with more immediate reference to the second aspect of the atonement, what it has accomplished, 2>., its relation to the remission of sins, and the gift of eternal life. The first point, viz., the extent of the reference of the atone- ment, it is no part of my immediate purpose to discuss. I believe that the atonement has been an atonement for sin, having reference to all mankind ; I believe this to be distinctly revealed; I believe it to be also implied in what the atonement is in itself. But it is the illustration of the nature of the atonement which I have immediately in view ; for it is in the prevailing state of men's minds on this subject that I feel a call to write. I have just noticed that the exigencies of controversy, and the natural desire to give a philosophical harmony to theological system, have recently led to a reconsideration of the subject of the nature of the atonement. I shall subsequently have occasion to notice particularly what the result has been : and why I am not satisfied with that result : which had I been, I should gladly have felt this volume superseded. But the intellectual exigencies of systems are, if real, closely connected with the spiritual exigencies of the living man ; and something higher than an intellectual demand, though that is not to be slighted as if it were not of God also, is felt to call for light on the nature of the atonement, when previously received con- ceptions no longer satisfy conscience, developed, and spiritually enlightened. The internal evidence of Chris- IN THE ATONEMENT. tianity all prize, and anything felt to be a real addition to it all must welcome, though the freedom with which men seek such increase in the internal light of the gospel, is various. Some, indeed, may give too much ground for the charge of intellectual arrogance, in the demand they make for internal evidence at every step ; while others, while thankfully receiving such evidence, fall into the error of treating it as something over and above what was needed for faith. I believe the former little realise how much more they believe than they understand; and I beheve the latter as little realise how much their reception of what they believe depends ulti- mately upon what of it they do understand, and spiritually discern to be to the glory of God. I am not now to write on the nature of the atonement as one whose first faith in the atonement rested on a clear understanding of its nature ; and yet I do not look back on that first faith as unwarranted and unreal. Our first faith may have in it elements- which are true and abiding, although mingled with much darkness, which, in the low undeveloped condition of conscience, causes us no pain or uneasiness. As the divine hfe is developed in us, these two things proceed happily together, viz. , a growing capacity of judging what the conditions are of a peace with God in full harmony with His name and character ; and the apprehension of these conditions as all present in the atonement. But it would be altogether in contradic- tion to the nature of that love, which, while we were yet sinners, gave Christ to die for us, to suppose that true yieldings to the drawings of that love, however dimly and imperfectly apprehended, ever deceive the heart ; or that the hope towards God, which accompanies them, can ever disappoint. To come to see more of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is not to come to see reason to conclude that my hope was vain while I saw less. Yet surely, on the other hand, that God acknow- ledged me while I saw least, yet seeing something truly, is no reason why I should not seek to see more, — yea as much as God may give me to see. B 2 THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED The kindness and love of God our Saviour towards man — the grace of God which hath appeared bringing salvation to all men — has a twofold aspect : the one / retrospective, referring to the evil from which that grace v ^ brings deliverance ; the other prospective, referring to the good which it bestows. Of that evil men have the varied and sad experience, as they have also feelings that may be interpreted as longings after that good ; but that experience is unintelligent, and these longings are vague, and the grace which brings salvation is itself the light which reveals both our need of salvation, and what the salvation is which we need ; explaining to us the mystery of our dark experience, and directing our aimless longings to the unknown hope which was for us in God. The light which reveals to us the evil of our condition as sinners, and the good of which God saw the capacity still to remain with us, reveals to us, at the same time, the greatness of the gulf which separated these two con- ditions of humanity; and the way in which the desire which arose in God, as the Father of spirits, to bridge over that gulf, has been accomphshed. That way is the atonement ; as to which it is certain that, if we were so far from seeing the evil of our own evil state as God saw / it, and, I may say, so much farther still from being con- scious to the measure of our own capacity of good, the way in which God was to accomplish the desire of His love for us we could not have of ourselves anticipated, but God Himself must make it known to us. But we know that, though the gospel alone sheds clear and perfect light on the evil of man's condition as a sinner, conscience fully recognises the truth of that reve- lation of ourselves which the gospel makes to us. Were it otherwise, assuredly its light would be no light to us. So also as to the gift of eternal life. When that gift is revealed to our faith, its suitableness to us, and fitness to fill all our capacities of well-being as God's offspring, is discerned by us in proportion as we are awakened to true self-consciousness, and learn to separate between what God made us, and what we have become through sin. IN THE A TONE ME NT. And, in like manner, I believe that the atonement, re- lated as it must needs be, retrospectively to the condition of evil from which it is the purpose of God to save us, and prospectively to the condition of good to which it is His purpose to raise us, will commend itself to our faith by the inherent light of its divine adaptation to accom- plish all which it has been intended to accomplish. Nor can I doubt that the high prerogative which belongs to us of discerning, and, in our measure, appreciating the divine wisdom, as well as the divine goodness, in other regions of God's acting, extends to this region also; which doubtless is the highest region of all, but which, while the highest, is also the region in which our human consciousness, and the teaching of the Spirit of God in conscience, should help our understandings most. When the apostle represents himself as by manifestation of the truth commending himself to every man's conscience in the sight of God, we are not to doubt that he so speaks with reference, no less to the atonement itself, than to the high ends which it contemplates. In this view the internal evidence of the atonement ought to be the securest stronghold of Christianity: whereas we find many who profess to rest all their hope of acceptance with God upon the atonement, receiving it as a mystery which they do not feel it needful to under- stand ; so that to them it is no part of the evidence of revelation, being commended to their faith only by the authority of a revelation itself received upon other 1 grounds ; while there are others to whom the presence \ of that doctrine in revelation is a strong objection tOj revelation itself In this state of things it is natural to| ask, " Can it be that conception of the atonement which ' the apostle expected would commend itself to every man's conscience in the sight of God which some thus treat as an argument against revelation, and which others, while receiving it, hold only as a mystery?" and the latter part of the question is the more difficult : for a rebelUous spirit may reject revelation for the very reason for which it has most claim to be received ; while THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED \J a meek, obedient spirit may be expected at once to receive and to understand. For " the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, and He will shew them His covenant." The lowest measure of internal evidence claimed for the doctrine of the atonement is, that conscience testifies to a need be for an atonement. It has been usual, in arguing with those who refuse to concede even this much, to urge the fact that in all nations, in every age, men have sought to atone for sin by sacrifice. Whether this practice be referable to the universal tradition of an original institution of sacrifice, or be regarded as a con- sentaneous utterance of humanity, expressing its thoughts independently at all successive periods, and in places the most remote from each other, it is unquestionably an arresting fact. But, not to found a sweeping rejection of all the elements of the worship of the heathen on the testimony that they sacrificed to devils and not to God, even in the highest view that can be taken, their worship was that of "the unknown God," and, when brought by us to a higher light, must be judged by that higher light. If, in attempting so to judge, one man says, — " I see here sacrifices offered to propitiate the divine favour. They are offered in manifest ignorance, for some of them are monstrous and revolting, and the least objectionable are manifestly inadequate to the end contemplated ; but still we must respect the feelings that suggested sacrifice ;" another may reply, " To me the feeling and its expression are alike referable to radical ignorance of God." Clearly the determination of this controversy must be sought elsewhere than in the historical fact which is its subject. As to the use that has been made of the recorded in- stances of heroic self-sacrifice connected with assumed divine requirements, — in reference to which it has been lately beautifully said that the love of Christ was "fore- shadowed in these weaker acts of love" (Thompson, p. 35), — however much we must admire the self-devo- tion manifested, it is not very clear how far the moral element in the sacrifice, by which the person sacrificing IN THE A TONE ME NT. himself was endeared to those for whose sakes he so devoted himself, was that which was supposed to give its value to the sacrifice in the eyes of the angry deities whom it was sought to propitiate. All that the demand implied was the high value of the offering to those from whom it was required, and the offended gods may have been thought of only as accepting what cost the people dearly; as Moloch received the children cast into the fire. But if indeed we are to conclude that the spirit of self-sacrifice in the victim was recognised as constituting the virtue of the sacrifice, there is here unquestionably a marvellous ray of light, from the midst of that gross darkness, shed upon the nature of atonement. But if the testimony of conscience on the subject of the need be for an atonement is sought in the history of religion, let it be sought in the history of Christianity: and let not this seem a begging of the question. No man is entitled to put aside the asser- tion of a true man, declaring what the testimony of his conscience is, because that testimony coincides with the man's faith. And to those who say that they find in themselves no internal testimony to the doctrine of the atonement, we present a fact which no serious mind will lightly put aside, when we refer, not to the dark and blind endeavours of the heathen to propitiate an unknown God, but to the experience, recorded by them- selves, of those who, in all ages of the Church, have seemed to have attained to the highest knowledge of God, and closest communion with Him, and who have professed that they have seen a glory of God in the cross of Christ ; that is, in the atonement as the channel through which sinful man receives the pardon of sin and eternal life. No one, indeed, is called upon to constrain his conscience to adopt the testimony of the conscience of others, whoever they may be. But if a man under- stand the nature of conscience, and realise how imperfect its development usually is, and how much the more matured Christian mind of one man may, without dic- tating, aid the faith of another man, he can never make 8 THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED little account of the conclusions on this great subject at which men characterised by holiness, and love to God and man, have arrived. But the question is not to be decided by authority. Nor would I seem to be insensible — for I am not — to the force of what may be urged, even in reference to the recorded experience of the better portion of the Church, as to the extent to which theological systems and tra- ditional habits of thought may affect, and have affected, religious experiences. I have, indeed, seen, in cases of deep awakening of spirit on the subject of religion, an identity of experience in reference to this matter under teachings so very different as to form of thought, as to preclude the idea that these experiences were an echo of the teaching ; while, most certainly, they were not traceable to any previous habits of thought in the taught. But I dwell not on the argument from this source, as no man will or should accept the doctrine of the atonement . ,^ because it has commended itself to the consciences of ^ others while it does not as yet commend itself to his own. But a response in conscience as contemplated by the apostle, implies much more than a recognition of a need be for an atonement ; nor can it be regarded as accom- plished, unless the atonement revealed be felt to com- mend itself by its own eternal light, and its divine fitness to accomplish the high ends of God in it. And as this presupposes that these ends are themselves seen in the light of God, it is necessary, before proceeding further, to fix attention for a little on the amount of the assertion, that there is a response in conscience to the testimony of the gospel regarding the evil condition in which the grace of God finds us, and the excellence of the salvation which it brings. When it is said that the representations of revelation on the subject of our sin and guilt, and need of forgive- ness, have a response in conscience, this is not asserted on the ground of the ordinary habit of thought of men's minds on these subjects, or of the feeling with which they usually treat the statements of the word of God regarding IN THE ATONEMENT. them. Men, indeed, readily enough confess that they are sinners, and that they need forgiveness; but this does not at all imply that they understand the charge of guilt which the Scriptures contain, far less respond to it ; or that they have any conception of the forgiveness which they need while they speak about it so easily. How far it is otherwise becomes very manifest when the reality of sin is steadily contemplated, and the charge of guilt is weighed, and the testimony of conscience in reference to that charge is calmly listened to, and its solemn import is considered. All the experience that now ensues, shews how much the fact of sin is a dis- covery to the awakened sinner. Seeing what it amounts to, he now shrinks from the admission which he had previously made so easily; — though he may not now dare to recall it ; while, as to forgiveness, in proportion as he comes to understand that he really needs it, he finds it difficult to believe that he himself, and his own sins, can be the subject of it. As long as to confess that I am a sinner is felt to be nothing more than to confess that my moral state is an imperfect one, that it presents a mixture of good and evil, — that much in me needs forgiveness, — I cannot say how much ; while I trust that there is also good in me which God accepts, and which may so far counterbalance the evil, I can easily say, " I know I am a sinner ; but I trust in God's mercy." But when the light of that word, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself," shines in upon me, and the clear, calm, solemn testimony within is heard responding, " It is true — so it ought to be;" and in proportion as I am honest with myself, I feel constrained to reply, " But it is not so with me, I do not so love God, I do not so love my neighbour;" then the case is altogether changed. I am tempted to turn away, alike from the testimony of Scripture, and the testimony of conscience, — shrinking from the confession which, if I hsten and reply honestly, I must make. Or, if I am too much awakened, and THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED ^ too much in earnest, so to tamper with the hght that is dawning on me, — if I feel that I must look this terrible fact of sin full in the face, and do look at it ; then does the forgiveness, of which I spoke easily while I knew not what it was to be forgiven, become to me most difficult of faith. Now it is not strange, or, in one sense, wrong, that we should shrink from the feeling of simple unqualified guilt. It would not be well that it should be otherwise than both painful and terrible to conclude that, in the sight of God, I am guilty of not loving God, and not loving men. Things would be worse than they are with us, if such a discovery could be without causing both self-loathing and fear. Nor, as to forgiveness, is it to be wondered at that, when we really come to understand that we need it, we find it most difficult to believe in it. God has been to us too much an unknown God, and our thoughts of Him too far removed from the apprehension that there is forgiveness with God that He may be feared, to permit it to be otherwise. But, however painful the discovery of our sin, and however unprepared we may be to bear it by the knowledge of the help that is for us in God, the thoroughly awakened conscience, or rather conscience when we are thoroughly awakened to hear its voice, forces upon us the conviction, that the testimony of the Scriptures as to our sin and guilt before God and our need of forgiveness, — of a forgiveness that shall be purely and simply such, — the forgiving of a debt to one who has nothing to pay, is just and true. If any will not concede this much, — if any will ex- tenuate the guilt of sin by referring what man is to his circumstances, — or by treating his moral condition as a low state of development, corresponding to that in which intellectually he is found in savage life, and if the for- giveness needed be thus reduced to the lowest possible amount, until, indeed, it ceases to be forgiveness, and there is room left only for a benevolent pity at the most ; from persons in this mind I cannot expect that they will take the next step with me in this path, seeing they do IN THE ATONEMENT. not take the first. But, although I can concede much quahfication of the apprehension of sin which we find uttered by newly awakened sinners, and admit that their language is very much affected by their ignorance of God, and the perturbing effect of the awful discovery as to their own moral and spiritual state which they have made, I cannot qualify the assertion, that the testimony of Scripture as to the reality and guilt of sin, and the sinner's dependence upon free grace for pardon, has a clear and unequivocal response in conscience; the re- cognition of which response on the sinner's part, is the proper attitude for his mind to assume, in listening to and weighing the doctrine of the atonement. Nay mxore, looking at sin in reference to a still deeper weighing of a man's own state as a sinner, I believe that the experience which the apostle Paul speaks of, in the close of the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, must be recognised as the completeness of that develop ment of conscience, which fitly prepares the mind for understanding and welcoming the atonement. I refer to that condition of the human spirit in which a man has so seen the claims of the law of God in the light of con- science, that he can say, " I delight in the law of God after the inner man," while by that same light, he judges what his own flesh is, and what its power over him makes him to be ; so that he says, " I find a law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin that is in my members," and his heart's cry is, " O wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body of this death ?" Until, not only the contrariety that is between sin and the law of God, and the position of guilt in which it places the sinner, are seen in the light of conscience ; but, beyond this, the inward contradiction with the law of his own well-being, and with that which he must recognise as the true ideal of excellence for humanity, is also seen in that light, and painfully felt, a man is not truly having the full testimony of conscience on the subject of sin, or con scious in himself to that full response which is in man to THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED the teaching of revelation on this subject. And until a man has come to stand at this point, he is not fully pre- pared to consider the atonement 7'etrospective/y, that is, in its relation to the evil condition from which it is our deliverance. As to the testimony of conscience to the discovery of revelation on the subject of the gift of eternal life, to which the atonement has prospective reference, the fact of this testimony is not alleged on the ground of men's ordinary habits of thought and feeling, in this case any more than in the former. The intelligent apprehension of that which is said, when it is said, that "God has given to us eternal life," and the enlightened self-con- sciousness in which that gift is welcomed as altogether suited to man, and the highest good of which he is capa- ble, imply a development of conscience, and a clearness of inward light, beyond even what the fullest reception of the teaching of the Bible on the subject of sin, and guilt, and spiritual death supposes. But conscience is capable of such development ; and eternal life may be apprehended by us as a manner of existence — a kind of life, the elements of which we under- stand, the excellence of which commends itself to us, and our own capacity for participation in which as originally created in God's image, and apart from our bondage to sin, we can discern in ourselves. *^i speak of eternal life — that life which was with the Father before the world was, and which is manifested in the Son — of his own acquaintance w^th which as a life lived in humanity, through his acquaintance with Him in whom it was manifested, the apostle John speaks with such fulness of expression in the beginning of his first epistle. I do not speak of an unknov/n future blessed- ness, in a future state of being, of which conscience can understand nothing ; but I speak of a life which in itself is one and the same here and hereafter, — however it may be developed in us hereafter beyond its development here. Of this life conscience can take cognisance, its elements it can understand and consider, — comparing them with IN THE ATONEMENT. the elements of that other perishing Ufe of which man has experience ; and, taking both to the hght of what man is as God's offspring, it can, in that hght, decide on the excellence of eternal hfe, and on the great grace of God in bestowing it, and the perfect salvation in which man partakes in receiving it. How little men's con- sciences address themselves to this high task is too manifest; inasmuch as ordinary religion is so much a struggle to secure an unknown future happiiiess^ instead of being the meditation on, and the welcoming of the present gift of eternal life. But to this high task con- science is equal, and to engage in it is the imperative demand which the preaching of the gospel makes on it, that preaching which seeks to commend itself to every man's conscience in the sight of God. This, then, is the second part of the due preparation for considering the nature of the atonement, with the purpose of coming to know what response that doctrine has in the heart of man, viz., that the gift of eternal hfe, revealed as bestowed on us through the atonement, be taken to the light of conscience ; and what that gift is, / be there seen \ and the high result that is accomplished [Jy in man in his coming to live that life, be truly conceived of. For thus having before the mind what God has pro- ^ posed to do through the atonement, now prospectively, as formerly retrospectively, there is the likelihood that its nature, and its suitableness for accomplishing the diviif? end, shall become visible to us ; if that may be at all. These two extreme points being clearly conceived of, and together present to the mind ; and the evil condition of man which the gospel reveals, and the blessed condi- tion to which it raises our hopes, being seen in the light of conscience, developed to this degree under the teach- ing of God ; the gulf which separates them is seen to be very great. We are contemplating extreme opposites, in the highest and most solemn region of things : — spiritual darkness and death, sin and guilt, the righteous condem- nation and wrath of God, inward disorder and strife between man and the law of his own well-being \ — from / yi 14 THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED these our thoughts pass to divine hght fining humanity, eternal hfe partaken in, righteousness and hohness, the acceptance and favour of God, inward harmony expe- rienced in the fulfihiient in man of that ideal for him which was in the divine mind from the beginning. It is difficult for us to realise the opposite states which, by such words, we attempt to describe. The very words we use, though we know them to be the right words, we use with the consciousness that they have, in our lips, but a small part of their meaning. If we set ourselves steadfastly to study their use in the Scriptures, and listen with open ear and heart to the interpretation of them which conscience, under the teaching of the Holy Spirit, accepts, we find these awful realities of evil and good, becoming gradually more and more palpable and real to us; so that they come to be felt as the only realities, and exis- tence comes to have its interest entirely in relation to them. But the wings of our faith do not long sustain this flight. Not that we come to doubt the conclusions at which in such seasons we have arrived ; but that, so to speak, we descend from this high region of light and truth, and come down to the earth, and to ordinary human life, and the conditions of humanity that present themselves around us ; and, looking at men and women as they are, and at the mixture of good and evil which they exhibit, — seeing also ourselves in others — we prac- tically reconcile ourselves to them, and to ourselves ; and the vision of unmixed evil, and of perfect good, fades from our remembrance, or, at best, from having been felt as that which was most real, becomes but as an ideal. One cause of the practical difficulty that is experienced in keeping our habitual thoughts and feelings in harmony with the perceptions of our most far-seeing moments, is this, that the world in which we are is actually a mixture of good and evil; that it presents neither the unmixed evil of which the Scriptures speak, and to which con- science testifies as man's sinful state, nor the unmixed good which the Scriptures reveal, and which, in the light of conscience, we recognise as eternal hfe. We are not IN THE ATONEMENT. 15 in a world yet unvisited by the grace of God ; on the contrary, we are encompassed by fruits of that very atonement in which we are called to beheve. Nay, the appearances presented in man's condition as we know it, which have furnished the objectors to the atonement with their most specious arguments, are actually to be traced to that atonement itself; while, at the same time, the power for good which belongs to the atonement, and its true working, have" no perfect realisation in what men are seen to be ; for none are, simply and absolutely, what the atonement would make them; so that, on the one side, none are seen so far from God as, but for the atone- ment, they would have been ; — while, on the other hand, none are seen so near to God as it has been the end of the atonement to bring them. The light shining in the darkness modifies the darkness, even while the darkness comprehends it not; — and, even where it is compre- hended, the darkness is not yet seen altogether destroyed by it. Therefore we must, in studying the subject of the atonement, exercise our minds to abide in that sense and perception of things to which we attain, when the teach- ing of the Bible, as to the sinful state from which the atonement delivers us, and the eternal life which through it we receive, is having a full response in conscience. So shall we see the work of God in Christ in the light of a true apprehension of what that work had to accomplish ; and shall not fall into the error of allowing the partial effects of that work itself to be to us arguments for doubting its necessity and reality. The first demand which the gospel makes upon us in relation to the atonement is, that we believe that there is forgiveness with God. Forgiveness — that is, love to an enemy surviving his enmity, and which, notwithstanding his enmity, can act towards him for his good; this we must be able to believe to be in God towards us, in order that we may be able to believe in the atonement. This is a faith which, in the order of things, must pre- cede the faith of an atonement. If we could ourselves ^ i6 THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED make an atonement for our sins, as by sacrifice the hea- then attempted to do, and as, in their self-righteous endeavours to make their peace with God, men are, in fact, daily attempting, then such an atonement might be thought of as preceding forgiveness, and the cause of it. But if God provides the atonement, then forgiveness must ( precede atonement ; and the atonement must be the form of the manifestation of the forgiving love of God, not its ' cause. But surely the demand for the faith that there is for- giveness in God has a response in conscience; and doubtless it is, in part at least, ignorance of God that causes the difficulty in believing in forgiveness, which is felt when an actual need of forgiveness that shall be purely such is realised. For it ought not to be difficult to believe that, though we have sinned against God, God still regards us with a love which has survived our sins. Nay more, we cannot realise the two ideas with reference to man which we have just been considering, viz., the evil state into which sin has brought him, and the opposite good state of which the capacity has remained in him, as together present to the mind of the Father of the spirits sj of all flesh, without feeling that He must desire to bridge over the gulf that separates these two conceived condi- tions of humanity; — that if it can be bridged over He will bridge it over ; that, if that conceivable good for man is a possible good for man, it will be put within m«.n's \V reach. Therefore, the first tone that catches the ear of NJ the heart in hearing the gospel being that " there is for- giveness with God," it ought not to be felt difficult to believe this joyful sound. It ought to have, and doubtless it has, an answer in conscience. The expression once familiar to the lips of ministers of Christ in our land, and which the greater awakedness of their people's minds on the subject of sin caused them to feel the need of practically, viz., "that it is the greatest sin to despair of God's mercy," surely is a record of the inward sense of mercy as entering into our original and fundamental apprehension of God : " Unto us belong / IN THE ATONEMENT. 17 shame and confusion of face : unto the Lord our God belongeth mercy," is an instinctive utterance of the human heart. Accordingly, when our Lord teaches us to " love our enemies that we may be the children of our Father in heaven, who makes His sun to shine on the evil and on the good," He assumes, that the witness without which God has never from the beginning left Himself, in that He has given rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, has addressed something in man which could interpret the acting of love to enemies. The atonement, I say, presupposes that there is for- 1 giveness with God ; and in doing so has a response in \ conscience. But this is not the question which the doctrine of the atonement raises, neither is it because it implies such forgiveness that it has been objected to ; on the contrary, the objection has been made — but an objection that could apply only to a false view of the atonement — that that doctrine did not recognise the mercy that is essentially in God, inasmuch as it repre- ^ ; sented God as needing to be propitiated — to be made J gracious. An atonement to make God gracious, to move I Him to compassion, to turn His heart toward those from 1 . whom sin had alienated His love, it would, indeed, be difficult to believe in ; for if it were needed it would be impossible. To awaken to the sense of the need of such an atonement, would certainly be to awaken to utter and absolute despair. But the Scriptures do not speak of such an atonement ; for they do not represent the love of God to man as the effect, and the atonement of Christ as the cause, but — ^just the contrary — they represent the love of God as the cause, and the atonement as the effect, y " God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten \ \ Son, that whosoever believeth in Him, might not perish, y but have everlasting life." \ Those, therefore, who object to the doctrine of the atonement on the assumption that the atonement is pre- sented to them as the cause of God's forgiving love, are placed under a great disadvantage by this misapprehen- sion of the demand that is made on their faith. What CAMPB. c 1 8 THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED they are asked to believe has its difficulties, — and I do not wish to understate these : but they are as nothing in comparison ; and let them learn with thankfulness, that that is not the true conception of the atonement which has so repelled them. That which they are really asked to consider as what it is expected, being truly appre- hended, will commend itself to conscience in the sight of God, is the way in which the forgiving love of God has manifested itself for the salvation of sinful men. Those who, being under no misapprehension on this point, still draw back from the faith of the atonement, do so as feeling a difficulty which may be thus expressed : Seeing that there is forgiveness with God that He may be feared, and that His love not only survives men's transgressions, but can confer new gifts on those who have transgressed, why should not this love be manifested without an atone- ment ? Why should not the pardon of sin as an act of Divine Clemency be simply intimated ? Why should not this new and great gift of eternal life be simply bestowed, and presented to men as the rich bounty of God ? I have referred to the difficulty which a thoroughly awakened sinner feels in believing that God will pardon his sins, and grant to him eternal life ; and such an objector would say, " Why should he feel any such diffi- culty ? Is it not the evidence of a morbid moral state so to feel?" Now I have admitted that the feeling in question arises in part from the extent to which God has been previously an unknown God. But only in part. There are other elements in that difficulty which are con- nected with the dawn of a true knowledge of God. God's mercy has not been previously apprehended, otherwise it would be felt wrong to despair of it ; but neither have God's holiness and righteousness, and His wrath against sin been previously apprehended, and the fears, repre- sented as indications of a morbid moral state, are, I believe, in reality the effect of light visiting the spirit of the man — light as to the real sinfulness of sin, and its contrariety to the mind of God. Admitting that there is much perturbation of mind — admitting that the light that IN THE ATONEMENT. 19 is shed upon the truth of man's moral and spiritual con- dition is but partial, and that the name of God and its glory have not yet shone in upon his soul and conscience full orbed— still it is light that is visiting the man who uses language as to his own sinfulness, and the deserts of his sin, with the expression of fears as to the wrath of God, which the objector would refer to a morbid state of mind; fears which may, indeed, seem extravagant, and almost madness to others who have not yet taken them- selves and what they are in themselves, to that light of God in which he sees himself, and who can therefore speak to him of trusting in God's mercy, and rebuke his fears, so easily; not because they know more of God's mercy and forgiveness than he does, but because they have such different apprehensions of that sin as to which forgiveness is needed. Nor is the distress experienced connected with the forgiveness of past sin alone. That grace for the time to come — the gift of eternal life — which appears to the objector to the atonement what may easily be believed in is not found to be so. It may be so far conceived of by the awakened sinner, and may so commend itself to him, that he can say, " I delight in the law of God after the inward man;" and yet, to believe that the good he apprehends is freely granted to him, may prove so far from an easy act of faith in God's goodness, that the ideal which has dawned upon him is felt to be the ideal of a hopeless good. He finds " a law in his members warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin that is in his members ;" — so that he cries out, — " O wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body of this death ?" Now, we know that where, in such cases, all general urging of God's mercy and clemency, and willingness to pardon and to save, fail to give peace, or quicken hope ; the presenting of the atonement for the acceptance of faith does both. Awakened sinners (and I use the ex- pression simply as to my own mind the most accurate, while also it is the echo of the word " Awake, thou that c 2 THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED sleepest,") who are finding themselves unable to believe that God, — not because He is not merciful and gracious, and however merciful and gracious He is, — can pardon their sins and bestow on them eternal life, are found able to believe in such pardon, and to receive the hope of eternal life, when these are presented to them in con- nexion with the sacrifice of Himself by which Christ put away sin, becoming the propitiation for the sins of the whole world. This fact is surely deserving of the serious considera- tion of those whose objection to the atonement is, that it should be enough for man's peace and hope to be told, that the Lord God is merciful and gracious and ready to forgive, and to relieve all who call upon Him. Here there is manifested an inability to believe in God's forgiveness as meeting man's need, when pre- sented simply as clemency and mercy : — but, presented in the form of the atonement, it is believed in. Not surely because less credit for love and mercy is given to God now; for on the contrary the conception of love simply forgiving, and of love forgiving at such a cost to itself, differ just in this, that in the latter, the love is infinitely enhanced. An objector may reply that doubtless this is a remark- able mental phenomenon, and that he does not deny that what are called religious memoirs abound in illustrations of it ; but that he cannot assume that those who have had this history were in the light, and that he himself is in the dark ; — and that to his mind, to preach forgiveness, and the gift of eternal hfe, in connexion with an atonement, is only to increase the difficulty of faith, — for that, while he sees in both these, contemplated simply in themselves, what he receives as worthy of the goodness of God, the addition of the doctrine of the atonement introduces other, and to him, mysterious elements into the question, complicating what should be a simple matter, and, in fact, representing the love of God as not at liberty freely to express itself, but, having difficulties and hindrances to encounter, — the removal and overcoming of which in- IN THE ATONEMENT. volved such mysteries as the incarnation, and the self- sacrifice of the Son of God. It is even so : and, this, doubtless, is the difficulty, — the great and ultimate difficulty j and let its amount be distinctly recognised. That God should do anything that is loving and gracious — which implies only an act of will putting forth power guided by wisdom, this seems easy of faith. But, either that any object should appear desir- able to God's love, which infinite power, guided by infinite wisdom, cannot accomplish by a simple act of the divine will, or that, if there be an object not to be thus attained, God will proceed to seek that object by a process which implies a great cost to God, and self- .. sacrifice, — either of these positions is difficult of faith.,i// But the doctrine of the atonement involves them both f and this we must realise, and bear in mind, if we would deal wisely, nay, justly, with objectors. Yet, doubtless, the elements in the atonement which cause difficulty are the very elements which give it its power to be that peace and hope for man which the gospel contemplates, and which a simple intimation of the di\ine clemency and goodness could not quicken in him. It is that God is contemplated as manifesting clemency and goodness at a great cost, and not by a simple act of will that costs nothing, that gives the atonement its great power over the heart of man. For that is a deep, yea, the deepest spiritual instinct in man which affirms, that in proportion as any act manifests love it is to be believed as ascribed to God who is love. No manifestation of power meeting me can so assure me that I am meeting God as the manifestation of love does. Therefore they greatly err who seek an external evidence of power, instead of an internal evidence of love, in con- sidering the claim of anything to be received as from God. Accordingly, a high argument in favour of Christianity, and which has awakened a deep response in many a heart, has been founded upon this very aspect of the doctrine of the atonement, viz., that it represents God as manifesting b 22 THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED self-sacrificing love ; and so reveals the depth, not to say the reality, of love, as creation and providence could not do. And as a final cause for the permission of a condi- tion of things, giving opportunity to the divine love to shew the self-sacrificing nature of love, and to bless with the blessedness of being the objects of such love, and, as the fruit of this, the blessedness of so loving — in this view this argument is both true and deep. But the internal evidence which at the point at which we stand in our inquiry we need, must be something dif- ferent from this. The evil condition to which sin had reduced man, the good of which nevertheless man still continued capable ; these ideas in relation to man being conceived of as together present to the divine mind, it appeared to us that we could believe, that the desire would arise in the heart of the Father of the spirits of all flesh to bridge over this gulf if that could be : nay, it seemed impossible to believe that that desire should not arise. Now the gospel declares, that the love of God has, not only desired to bridge over this gulf, but has actually bridged it over, and the atonement is presented to us as that in which this is accomplished. What we seek is internal evidence — a response in our own spirits, as to the divine wisdom manifested in what is thus represented as the means by which divine love attains the object of its desire. But in this view it is not enough to say that this way is that in which the greatest proof of love is afi"orded. Love cannot be conceived of as doing anything gratuitously, merely to show its own depth, for which thing there was X\ no call in the circumstances of the case viewed in them- ^V ^ selves. A man may love another so as to be willing to \l 'die for him ; — but he will not actually lay down his life merely to show his love, and without there being anything to render his doing so necessary in order to save the hfe ■for which he yields up his own. Therefore the question remains, " How was so costly an expression of love as the atonement necessary ? " — and how costly this expression of divine love has been to IN THE ATONEMENT. 23 God we must fully recognise. For there is no doubt that a chief source of the difficulty which is felt in receiving the doctrine of the atonement is, that the atonement pre- supposes the incarnation. " God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." A man who is contented to die for another manifests his love at the greatest cost to himself. By such an illustration, therefore, the apostle teaches that the love that is manifested in Christ's dying for us is manifested at a great cost to God. Of course this assumes that Christ is God. That God should sacrifice one crea- ture for another, — subject one of His offspring to death that others of His offspring might live, — would have nothing in it parallel to a man's laying down his own life for another. To say that Christ was not after all sacri- ficed in this transaction ; — that what He endured was on His part voluntary, and endured in the contemplation of a reward, — for that, " for the joy set before Him He endured the cross, despising the shame," is no answer : for that God takes credit to Himself for the love that Christ manifests in dying for us — this is the point of the apostle's argument. As to the reward set before Christ, it is that fruit of His self-sacrifice which must be presupposed in order that the self-sacrifice should be a reasonable transaction. Self-sacrificing love does not sacrifice itself but for an end of gain to its object ; otherwise it would be folly. Does its esteeming as a reward that gain to those for whom it suffers, destroy its claim to being self-sacrifice ? Nay, that which seals its character as self-sacrificing love is, that this to it is a satisfying re-, ward. " He shall see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied." In considering why our redemption has been at such a cost, and the w^hole subject of the nature of the atone- ment, we shall be greatly helped by keeping distinctly before our minds, these two extreme points to which the atonement is related in that it refers to the one retro- spectively, to the other prospectively, viz., the condition I 24 THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED in which the grace of God finds us, and the condition to which it raises us. Christ has " redeemed us who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons " — Christ " suffered for us, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God." Both that we were "under the law " and " unjust " and that we were " to receive the adoption of sons " and to be " brought to God " may be expected to have affected the nature of the atonement as determining what it must be adequate to : more especially the latter, as the great result contemplated. Accordingly, in the writings of the apostles, we find the necessity for the atonement being what it was, connected with both — but more especially with the latter. Yet in our systems of theology the foniier, and not the latter, has been chiefly the foundation of the arguments employed. Not that the latter has not also been taken into account, and provision made for it; but it has not been regarded as shedding light on the nature of the atonement. This is certain. For however our " receiving the adoption of sons " and our being " brought to God " enter into the scheme of salvation as represented in these systems, it is in the fact that we "were under the law" and " unjust " — that is to say, that we were sinners, under the condemnation of a broken law, that the necessity for the atoneme7it has been recognised. The important consequences that have followed from this, as seems to me, departure from the example of the apostles will appear as we proceed. But with the con- clusions arrived at as to the necessity for an atonement, as arising from the fact, that we, whom the grace of God has visited, were sinners under the condemnation of a broken law, I fully accord. I believe that "by the deeds of the law could no flesh living be justified " — under- standing by the law, not the Mosaic ritual, but that law of which the apostle speaks when he says, " I delight in the law of God after the inward man "• — that is to say, the law, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and mind and soul and strength, and thy neighbour IN THE ATONEMENT. 25 as thyself." I believe that no modification of the law as a law, in accommodation to man's condition as a sinner, is conceivable that could either give the assurance of the pardon of sin, or quicken us with a new hfe ; and that all idea of bridging over, by a modified law, the gulf which^ we have been contemplating is untenable. I believe that, if this was to be accomphshed, it could only be by some moral and spiritual constitution quite other than the law ; while, at the same time, such other constitution cannot be conceived of as introduced in any way that does not duly honour the law ; or that delivers from the conse- quences of transgressing it, without vindicating the righteousness of the law, and the consistency of the law- giver. Finally, I believe that this requirement is recog- nised in the gospel, being fully met in the atonement. But I must guard against seeming to give to the reasonings by which these conclusions have been arrived at, an unqualified assent. When it is argued that the justice or righteousness of God and His holiness, and also His truth and faithfulness, presented difficulties in the way of our salvation, which rendered for their removal an atonement necessary, I fully assent to this ; — and, when it is added, as I have seen it lately urged, that the good- ness, the love of God as the moral ruler and governor of the universe, also demanded an atonement, that our salvation might be consistent with the well-being of the moral universe, — I can freely concede this also : — nay, more, I would say, not the love of God having respect to the interests of the moral universe only, but the love of God having respect to the interests of the subjects of the salvation themselves. For indeed to me salvation other- wise than through the atonement is a contradiction. But while in reference to the not uncommon way of regarding this subject which represents righteousness and hohness as opposed to the sinner's salvation, and mercy and love as on his side, I freely concede that all the divine attributes were, in one view, against the sinner in that they called for the due expression of God's wrath against sin in the history of redemption; I beheve, on ^ 26 THE ENDS CONTEMPLATED the other hand, that the justice, the righteousness, the hoUness of God have an aspect according to which they, as well as His mercy, appear as intercessors for man, and crave his salvation. Justice may be contemplated as according to sin its due ; and there is in righteousness, as we are conscious to it, what testifies that sin should be miserable. But justice looking at the sinner, not simply \ as the fit subject of punishment, but as existing in a moral I condition of unrighteousness, and so its own opposite, must desire that the sinner should cease to be in that condition ; should cease to be unrighteous, — should be- come righteous : righteousness in God craving for right- eousness in man, with a craving which the realisation of righteousness in man alone can satisfy. So also of holi- ness. In one view it repels the sinner, and would banish him to outer darkness, because of its repugnance to sin. In another it is pained by the continued existence of sin and unholiness, and must desire that the sinner should cease to be sinful. So that the sinner, conceived of as awakening to the consciousness of his own evil state, and saying to himself, " By sin I have destroyed myself. Is there yet hope for me in God ? " should hear an en- couraging answer, not only from the love and mercy of God, but also from His very righteousness and holiness. We must not forget, in considering the response that is in conscience to the charge of sin and guilt, that, though the fears which accompany that response are partly the effect of a dawning of light, they also in part arise from remaining darkness. He who is able to interpret the voice of God within him truly, and with full spiritual in- telligence, will be found saying, not only, " There is to me cause for fear in the righteousness and holiness of God " — but also, " There is room for hope for me in the divine righteousness and holiness." And when gathering consolation from the meditation of the name of the Lord, that consolation will be not only, " Surely the divine mercy desires to see me happy rather than miserable " — but also, " Surely the divine righteousness desires to see me righteous — the divine holiness desires to see me ^ IN THE ATONEMENT. 27 holy — my continuing unrighteous and unholy is as griev- ing to God's righteousness and holiness as my misery through sin is to His pity and love." " Good and right- eous is the Lord ; therefore will He teach sinners the way which they should choose." " A just God and a Saviour," not as the harmony of a seeming opposition, but "a Saviour," because " a just God." If this thought commends itself to my reader's mind as it does to mine, he will feel it to be important ; and he will see, in reference to the atonement, not that it tends to make an atonement appear less necessary, but ; that it may greatly affect the nature of the atonement \l y required : for it implies that the prospective aspect of the atonement, — its reference to the life of sonship given to us in Christ, has been its most important aspect as respects the demands of righteousness and holiness, as it confessedly is as respects those of mercy and love. This is so — while, assuredly, it is also true that the retrospective aspect of the atonement as connecting the pardon of sin with the vindicating of the honour of the divine law, is not less a meeting of a demand of divine love than of the demands of righteousness and holiness. How could it be otherwise, seeing that the law is love ? 28 CHAPTER II. TEACHING OF LUTHER. The evil of the condition in respect of which we needed salvation, and the excellence of the salvation given to us in Christ ; and the reality and exceeding greatness of the difficulties which stood in the way of our salvation, and which the Saviour had to encounter in accomplishing our redemption, have perhaps never been more vividly realised than by the great reformer Luther. And, though he does not afford much help to one seeking a clear intellectual apprehension of the nature and essence of the atonement, or of that might by which Christ prevailed ; yet that his spiritual insight into these things has been great, is implied in the depth of his understanding of justification by faith, and of the relation in which peace in believing stands to that which our Lord asserted con- cerning Himself when He said, " He that hath seen Me \hath seen the Father." I believe it will be of much advantage to us subsequently to occupy a little space here with the consideration of his teaching in relation to the atonement, and what it has accomplished. I have referred more than may meet the indulgence of some readers, though less than my own feeling of its value as a source of light would have inclined me to do, to the experience of deeply awakened sinners. The great reformer was such an one : and this part of his history has impressed a special character on his teaching more than anything else that went to make him what he was. To any who read his words, not as extravagance and fanaticism, but, — as I believe they are entitled to be read, — words of truth and soberness, his commendation TEACHING OF LUTHER. 29 of his great doctrine of "Justification by faith alone" from his own experience of its preciousness, is deeply- interesting, and, I may say, most affecting. For, when Luther speaks of the law and the Gospel, — of the right- eousness of faith, it is not as a speculative theologian, reasoning out principles to their conclusions, and arrang- ing the parts of a system in their due relations. He speaks of the law as what wrought with his spirit until it had brought him to the brink of despair. He speaks of the gospel as what had spoken peace and life to him, and, by its revelation of Christ to his faith, had raised him as from hell to heaven. Seeking to be justified by works is to him no mere theological error, as to which he can conclusively reason. The very thought of it moves him to the depths of his being ; renewing to him, with all its horrors, the past in which he had himself so sought justification, and stirring him to a vehement indignation against those who direct men's steps into that path of death. On the other hand, the righteousness of faith seems to be to him that of which he cannot speak with- out the renewed sense of his first peace and joy in beheving, and of the excellent glory of that "new world" into which "faith mounts up, where is no law, no sin, no remorse or sting of conscience, no death, but perfect joy, righteousness, grace, peace, hfe, salvation, glory." (p. 84.) The law and the gospel in their rela- tion to the human spirit, are to Luther as two spiritual regions which his spirit knows, having trembled and agonised in the one, and rejoiced and triumphed in the other ; — but the former of which has no claim upon his presence in it, and ought to be to him as if it were not ; being, indeed, done away by Christ, and having no existence now but through unbelief; while in the latter it is the will of God that he should dwell by faith ; to do which is to give God glory and be righteous in His sight. The vividness and picturing form of his speech is quite startling: yet is it in no sense figurative or rhetorical ; for he is manifestly keeping as close to the simple expression of his mental and spiritual perceptions 30 TEACHING OF LUTHER. as he can. Reading his pleadings against the law, and for the gospel, it is impossible not to feel that he who gave such a fundamental place to justification by faith, was himself the preacher of it in an altogether distinctive and pre-eminent sense. I shall endeavour briefly to. express the conception of Luther's mind on the subject of the atonement which I have received from a careful study of his full commen- tary on the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians. This epistle has had a special interest to Luther, because he recognised Paul's controversy with the judaising teachers, by whom the Galatian converts to Christianity had been seduced, as substantially the same with that which he himself was engaged with the church of Rome ; and, as is common to him with the other Reformers, his arguing on the subject of the atonement has a special character impressed upon it, by the relation \ to certain errors in the church of Rome in which he was contemplating it. Luther had not to contend with persons denying the doctrine of the atonement : what he had to contend against was human additions to the provision for peace of conscience and hope towards God, revealed in the gospel; and what we learn (bf his mind on the subject of the atonement is what he ik led to utter in pleading for justification by faith alone. I have said that no man ever more reahsed than Luther did, that there were actual difficulties in the nature of things to be dealt with in accomplishing our I redemption, — difficulties which a simple act of the divine I will could not do away with ; but which have been suc- cessfully and triumphantly dealt with in the atonement for the sins of men, made by the Son of God. His deep feeling of the dishonour done to Christ by combining any other element with our vision of Him by faith, in our peace and confidence towards God, may have, in part, moved him to the use of the strong language which he employs, both in setting forth what Christ had to accom- plish, and how He has accomplished it. But it is manifest that he could not speak of these subjects without feeling TEACHING OF LUTHER. it difficult to find language strong enough for his convic- tions. And the law, and sin, and death, and the devil who had the power of death, are set before us as awful realities against man ; and as to be encountered and overcome by Him who had undertaken to save man ; and Christ's victory over them is seen in: Luther's words, not as a simple act of divine, resistless power, but as a moral and spiritual victory, — the triumph of good as good over evil as evil, of righteousness and life over sin and death ; bringing with it all secondary external results in its train. Not that on these difficult and mysterious subjects, he does not, — as well as those who do not give the same impression of having approached them nearly, — leave us disposed to ask many questions. He, as well as others,'^ speaks of our sins as laid upon Christ, without helping us to understand what this means ; — while he is distinguished from others by the anxiety he shews to select the strongest words to express the identification of Christ with our sins ; refusing (p. 300) to understand " was made sin for us," in 2 Cor. v. 21, as meaning a sacrifice for sin (while he admits that the word used will bear that meaning), , choosing ,rather to insist that He was made sin for us in • some more absolute way of identifying Himself with us and our sin, in order that we, with whose sin He had so identified Himself, might be identified with Him in respect of His righteousness ; and that sin and righteous- ' ness meeting in Him, and righteousness triumphing over sin, we might partake in the triumph and all its fruits. — " Because in the self-same person which is the highest, the greatest and the only sinner, there is also an ever- lasting and invincible righteousness ; therefore these two do encounter together the highest, the greatest and the only sin, and the highest, the greatest and the only righteousness. Here one of them must needs be over- come and give place to the other . . . righteousness is everlasting, immortal, invincible . . . therefore in this contest sin must needs be vanquished and killed, and righteousness must overcome and reign. So in Christ 32 TEACHING OF LUTHER. all sin is vanquished, killed and buried, and righteousness remaineth a conqueror and reigneth for ever." (pp. 294, 295.) This conception of Christ as the one man, having Y present together in Himself the sin of all other men, and t. 0^ His own righteousness, Luther endeavours in all possible forms of speech to present as an actual fact, and as what justifies, and underlies such statements as that, " the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all," and that, " He bore our sins in His own body on the tree." And, what- ever difficulties the matter may have presented to Luther's own mind, or whatever difficulties his words may cause to us, attempting to attach to them a definite and con- sistent meaning, he leaves no room to doubt that what he sought to set forth he conceived of as a reality, and not as a legal fiction. For he thus illustrates the identifying of Christ with men, — " For when a sinner cometh to the knowledge of himself indeed, he feeleth not only that he is miserable, but misery itself; not only that he is a sinner, and is accursed, but even sin and malediction itself. For it is a terrible thing to bear sin, the wrath of God, malediction and death. Wherefore that man which hath a true feeling of these things as Christ did truly and effectually feel thein for all mankind^ is made even sin, death, malediction." (p. 300.) But to think of Luther as really having any unworthy conceptions of Christ would be altogether erroneous. It was, doubtless, be- cause of his great realisation of the divine and perfect righteousness which were in Christ, and which in the deepest^ and doubtless, he must have felt ojily absolute sense were alo7ie His, that he was able to use that which he thus calls an " apostolic liberty of speech " in setting forth the reality of His bearing our sins. A Such is Luther's teaching as to the retrospective aspect of the atonement. His teaching as to its prospective bearing, — the positive fruits of benefit to us through /Christ's victory, the gift of eternal life itself, — is the fol- / lowing out of that root conception of Christ's identifying V of Himself with us. In virtue of this identification, the freedom and righteousness and Ufe which are in Christ, TEACHING OF LUTHER. 33 being His own proper endowments, and of which His coming under our sins did not despoil Him, but which proved themselves mightier than all that pov>^er of dark- ness, — coming forth triumphant from the conflict, — these are all ours. As ours we are called to recognise them. As endowed with them we are called to conceive of our- selves. As the provisions of the salvation granted to us we are to use them. As the elements of our new divine life we are to live in them and by them. They are all ours as Christ is ours, — " He is made of God unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemp- tion." Christ our life is presented to our faith, that believing in Him we may live, — yet not we, but Christ in us. Faith does not make these high endowments, the ' elements of the gift of Christ, ours : they are ours by the gift of God. Faith apprehends them, accepts them, — gives God glory in accepting them ; and thus faith saves by bringing us into living harmony with the divine constitution of things in Christ; — and, come into this harmony, God pronounces us righteous, — and abiding in this faith, light and life, and joy in God abound in us, and the end of God in Christ is being fulfilled in us ; — partially now and here, — to be completely so here- after. I do not feel that I can more pointedly express Luther's conception of faith than in saying, that it lifts us into Christ and makes us one with Him, both in our own consciousness, and in God's judgment of us ; — as we were, before faith, one with Him in God's gracious desire and purpose. Luther's conception of how God is justified in "jus- tifying the ungodly who believe," we may learn from what he says, first of Faith's own nature ; and then of the results of the living relation to Christ into which it brings us. First, of Faith's own nature he says, ''Paul by these words 'Abraham believed,' of faith in God maketh the chiefest sonship, the chiefest duty, the chiefest obedience, and the chiefest sacrifice. Let him that is a rhetorician CAMPB. D 0/ 34 TEACHING OF LUTHER. amplify this place, and he shall see that faith is an almighty thing; and that the power thereof is infinite and inestimable ; for it giveth glory unto God, which is the highest service that can be given unto Him. Now to give glory unto God, is to believe in Him, to count Him true, wise, righteous, merciful, almighty ; briefly, to acknowledge Him to be the author and giver of all goodness. This reason doth not, but faith. That is it which maketh us divine people, and, as a man would say, it is the Creator of (a) certain divinity, not in the substance of God, but in us. For without faith God loseth in us His glory, wisdom, righteousness, truth, and mercy. To conclude : no majesty or divinity remain eth unto God, where faith is not. And the chiefest thing that God requireth of man is that he give unto Him His glory and His divinity ; that is to say, that he taketh Him not for an idol, but for God, who regardeth him, heareth him, sheweth mercy unto him, and helpeth him. This being done, God hath His full and perfect divinity, that is, He hath whatsoever a faithful heart can attribute unto Him. To be able therefore to give that glory unto God it is the wisdom of wisdoms, the righteousness of righteousness, the religion of religions, and sacrifice of sacrifices. Hereby we may perceive what an high and excellent righteousness faith is, and so, by the contrary, what an horrible and grievous sin infidelity is. Whoso- ever then believeth God, as Abraham did, is righteous before God, because he hath faith, which giveth glory unto God ; that is, he giveth God that which is due to Him." (pp. 250, 251.) But, secondly, because this excellent condition of faith is in us but as a germ — a grain of mustard-seed — a feeble dawn, God, in imputing it as righteousness, has respect unto that of which it is the dawn — of which, as the beginning of the life of Christ in us, it is the promise, and in which it shall issue, even the noontide brightness of that day in which the righteous shall shine as the stars in the kingdom of their Father. So he adds in reference to the words "it was imputed to him for righteous- TEACHING OF LUTHER. 35 ness," — "For Christian righteousness consisteth in two things, that is to say, in faith in the heart, and in God's imputation. Faith is indeed a formal righteousness, and yet this righteousness is not enough ; for after faith there remain yet certain remnants of sin in our flesh. This sacrifice of faith began in Abraham, but at last it was finished in death. Wherefore the other part of righteous- ness must needs be added also, to finish the same in us, that is to say, God's imputation. For faith giveth not enough to God, being imperfect \ yea our faith is but a little spark of faith, which beginneth only to render unto God His true divinity. We have received the firstfruits of the Spirit, but not yet the tenths. . . . Wherefore faith beginneth righteousness, but imputation maketh it per- fect unto the day of Christ, (p. 252.) . . . Wherefore let those which give themselves to the study of the Holy Scripture, learn out of this saying, 'Abraham beheved God, and it was counted to him for righteousness,' to set forth truly and rightly this true Christian righteousness after this manner ; — that it is a faith and confidence in the son of God — or rather a confidence of the heart in God through Jesus Christ; and let them add this clause as a difference ; which faith and confidence is counted right- eousness for Christ's sake. . . . For as long as I live in the flesh sin is truly in me. But because I am covered under the shadow of Christ's wings, as is the chicken under the wings of the hen, and dwell without fear under that most ample and large heaven of the forgiveness of sins, which is spread over me, God covereth and par- doneth the remnant of sin in me : that is to say, because of that faith whereiuith I bega7i to lay hold 2ifo?i Christ., He accepteth my imperfect righteousness eveii for perfect righteousness., and counteth my sin for no sin, which not- withstanding is sin indeed." (p. 254.) The essence of the difference between the law and the gospel, as conceived of by Luther, seems to be shortly this : — that the law reveals man himself to man, — that the gospel reveals God to man : — that the law brings man to self-despair, in order that the gospel may teach D 2 36 TEACHING OF LUTHER. him faith and hope in God. Therefore, in the gospel, and not in the law, is God to be seen and known. And this is substantially true. For, though the law, being love, may seem to reveal God who is love, yet is it rather a demand for love than a revelation of love ; and, though it might have been, in the light of high intelligence, and where there was no darkening of sin, concluded that love alone could demand love, yet does the mere demand never so speak to sinners ; — but " by the law is the knowledge of sin:" wherefore "the law worketh wrath." But the first front and aspect of the gospel is the revelation of love; then follows the end contemplated, the quickening of love in us, in fact the fulfilment of the righteousness of the law in us, — (Rom. viii. 4,) but its instrument of working is, not the law, but grace. " Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitia- tion for our sins;" "We love Him because He first loved us." — " If God so loved us we ought also to love one another." — ^i John iv. ii. Therefore, the gospel being the revelation of what God is, rather than of what He calls for, — though therein implying what He calls for, and providing for its accom- plishment, — Luther, understanding this, rests, not in the scheme of redemption as a plan, or in the work of Christ as a work, the parts of which he is careful to analyse, that he may turn them to their several uses in his inter- course with God ; but, in the scheme and the work, and shining through all the details of the work, he sees God appearing to him as He is in Himself, as He eternally is ; and he yields his heart and his whole being to the attraction of the heavenly vision. Thus he learns that " God is the God of the humble, the miserable, the afflicted, the oppressed and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to nothing ; and His 7iature is to exalt the humble, to feed the hungry, to give sight to the blind, to comfort the miserable, the afflicted, the bruised, the broken-hearted, to justify sinners, to quicken the dead, and to save the very desperate and damned. For TEACHING OF LUTHER. 37 He is an almighty Creator, and maketh all things of nothing." (p. 321.) Not that the law had not spoken truly of God, not only when it declared the will of God as to what man should be, but also when its terrors were revealed in the conscience, through its testimony of God's wrath against sin; — but it left untold, — it was not its function to tell, — what deeper thing than wrath against sin was in God — even mercy towards the sinner. So Luther, as one whom " the gospel hath led beyond and above the light of law and reason into the deepV secrets of faith" (p. 168), and to a knowledge of God to which reason had not attained, commenting upon the words — " Seeing the world by wisdom knew not God in the wisdom of God, it pleased God by the fooUshness of preaching to save them that believe," applies them as teaching "that men ought to abstain from the curious searching of God's majesty." (p. 100.) — For "true Christian divinity setteth not God forth unto us in His majesty, as Moses and other doctors do. It commandeth us not to search out the nature of God ; but to know His will set out to us in Christ. (Ibid.) . . . Therefore begin thou there where Christ began, viz., in the womb of the virgin, in the manger, and at His mother's breasts, &c. For to this end He came down, was born, was con- versant among men, suffered, was crucified, and died, that by all means He might set forth Himself plainly before our eyes, and fasten the eyes of our hearts upon Himself; that thereby He might keep us from climbing up into heaven, and from the curious searching of the divine majesty. Whensoever thou hast to do, therefore, in the matter of justification, and disputest with thyself how God is to be found that justifieth and accepteth sinners; where and in what sort He is to be sought; then know thou that there is no other God besides this man Christ Jesus. Embrace Him and cleave to Him with thy whole heart, setting aside all curious specula- tions of the divine majesty. For he that is a searcher of God's majesty shall be over\vhelmed of His glory. I know by experience what I say. But these vain spirits, 38 TEACHING OF LUTHER. which so deal with God that they exclude the Mediator, do not believe me. Christ Himself hath said, ' I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by Me,' — John xiv. 6. Therefore, besides this way, Christ, thou shalt find no way to the Father, but wandering, no verity, but hypocrisy and lying, no life, but eternal death. Wherefore mark this well in the matter of justification, that when any of us wrestle with the law, sin, and death, and all other evils, we must look upon no other God but this God incarnate and clothed with man's nature . . . Look on this man Jesus Christ who setteth Himself forth to us to be a mediator, and saith ' Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,' — Matt, xi. 28. Thus doing, thou shalt perceive the love, goodness, and sweet- ness of God; thou shalt see His wisdom, power, and majesty, sweetened and tempered to thy capacity. Yea thou shalt find in this mirror and pleasant contempla- tion all things according to that saying of Paul to the Colossians : 'In Christ are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge' . . . The world is ignorant of this, and therefore it searcheth out the will of God, setting aside the promise in Christ to his (its) great destruction, ' For no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him,' — Matt. xi. 27." (p. lOI.) " Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him. Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip ? he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." — John xiv. 8,9. i add two more quotations to the same effect. " For in Christ we see that God is not a cruel exactor or a judge, but a most favourable, loving and merciful Father, who to the end He might bless us, that is to say, deliver us from the law, sin, death, and all other evils, and might endue us with grace, righteousness, and everlasting life, spared not His own Son, but gave Him for us all. This is a true knowledge of God and a divine persuasion TEACHING OF LUTHER. 39 which deceiveth us not, but painteth God unto us Hvely (hving)." (p. 389.) " For the true God speaketh thus ; No righteousness, wisdom, nor reUgion pleaseth Me but that only whereby the Father is glorified through the Son. Whosoever apprehendeth this Son, and Me, and My promise in Him by faith, to him I am a God, to him I am a Father, him do I accept, justify, and save. All others abide under wrath because they worship that thing which by nature is no God." (p. 390.) How does this language recall that of the Apostle John, — "And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true ; and we are in Him that is true, even in His son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen." — r John V. 20, 21. One other point remains to be noticed that we may have distinctly before us Luther's teaching on the subject •V [y of the atonement, — I mean the weight which he lays on v 7 the personal appropriation of the atonement as of the ' very essence of faith. Of course, teaching as the result of the victory of Christ over all our spiritual enemies, that Christ was made of God unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, and setting forth this as a constitution of things established by God in His love to man, and revealed to be known and received by faith, he could not teach merely that men 7night appropriate Christ and His work, — that they were at liberty so to do, and invited so to do, and that Christ was freely offered to them, and would become theirs by such appropriation. He must needs teach that such appropriation was of the very essence of faith ; being impUed in the most simple reception of that which was revealed. But he has a further reason for insisting on this, viz., that in this per- sonal appropriation he recognised at once the power and the difficulty of faith. The teaching I refer to is in his comment on the words, " who gave Himself for our sins," in which, after insisting 40 TEACHING OF LUTHER. on the power of these words to destroy all false religions, " For if our sins be taken away by our own works, merits, and satisfactions, what needed the Son of God to be given for them? But seeing He was given for them, it fol- loweth that we cannot put them away by our own works," (p. 104) — he adds — " But weigh diligently every word of Paul, and especially mark well this pronoun ' lent repentance has suggested itself to him only in con- \ nexion with the manifest impossibility of such a repentance being presented by the sinner himself to God in expiation of his guilt. And in the connexion in which the idea of repentance as an expiation for sin presented itself to the mind of Edwards, his conclusion was just. A condem- nation and confession of sin in humanity which should be a real Amen to the divine condemnation of sin, and com- mensurate with its evil and God's wrath against it, only became possible through the incarnation of the Son of God. But the incarnation of the Son of God not only made possible such a moral and spiritual expiation for sin as that of which the thought thus visited the mind of Edwards, but indeed caused that it must be. Without the assumption of an imputation of our guilt, and in perfect harmony with the unbroken consciousness of personal separation from our sins, the Son of God, bearing us and our sins on His heart before the Father, must needs respond to the Father's judgment on our sins, with that confession of their evil and of the righteousness of the wrath of God against them, and holy sorrow because of them, which were due, due in the truth of things, due on our behalf tliough we could not render it, due from Him as in our nature and our true brother; — what He must needs feel in Himself because of the holiness and love which were in Him — what He must needs utter to the OF THE ATONEMENT. Father in expiation of our sins when He would make intercession for us. I have said that in approaching the deahng of Christ with God on behalf of men, we approach the region in which we should have m.^X. penal infliction as endured by Christ for our sins, had such infliction entered into the atonement ; and, as it has not, where we should see that, whatever else it was, which has been Christ's dealing with God's righteous wrath against our sins. What I believe that dealing to have been, I have, I trust, ex- pressed with sufficient clearness, — while I have laboured more to illustrate the nature of this expiation by confes- sion of our sins, than the inie?isity of siiffeiing to the soul of Christ thus made an offering for sin, which it involved. Yet is it needful that we should, in realising the elements of these sufferings, endeavour to reahse also their intensity, — that it was according to the perfection of the divine mind in the sufferer, and the capacity of suffering which is in suffering flesh. And this meditation, as I trust the reader will feel, is a very different thing from weighing the sufferings of Christ in scales against the sufferings of the damned. That belongs to the following out of the conception of the Son of God suffer- ing the punishment of our sins. But what I contemplate is the following out of the conception of the Son of God suffering in suffering flesh that which is the perfect response of the divine holiness and divine love in humanity to the aspect of the divine mind in the Father towards the sins of men. No thought unworthy of the faith that the sufferer is God in our nature, comes through exalting our conceptions of the measure of the suffering endured on account of sins, when such exalting is thus but the raising of our apprehensions of what our sin is to the heart of God. And I may here refer to what has been urged by some as a reason for holding that the sufferings of Christ were penal, viz., that otherwise there is no explanation of the sufferings of one who was without sin, as endured under the righteous government of God. Do we never see RETROSPECTIVE ASPECT V {suffering that we must explain on some other principle han this ? Surely the tears of holy sorrow shed over the '^ins of others — the tears, for example, of a godly parent bver a prodigal child, are not penal, nor, if shed before God in prayer, and acknowledged in the merciful answer of prayer in God's dealing with that prodigal, are they therefore to be conceived of as having been penal. But the fact is, that the truth that God grieves over our sins, is not so soon received into the heart as that God punishes sin, — and yet, the faith that He so grieves is infinitely more important, as having power to work holiness in us, than the faith that He so punishes, how- ever important. But there is much less spiritual appre- hension necessary to the faith that God punishes sin, than to the faith that our sins do truly grieve God. Therefore, men more easily believe that Christ's sufferings shew how God can punish sin, than that these sufferings are the divine feelings in relation to sin, made visible to us by being present in suffering flesh. Yet, however the former may terrify, the latter alone can purify, because the latter alone perfectly reveals, and in revealing vindicates the name and character of God, condemning us in our own eyes, and laying us prostrate in the dust because we have sinned against such a God. The entrance of sin has been the entrance of sorrow, — not to the sinful only, and as the punishment of sin, but also to the holy and the loving, and as what holiness and love must feel in the presence of sin. That such suffering as the suffering of Christ should have existed in the universe of God in connexion with innocence and holiness, moral and spiritual perfection, must, indeed, be felt to suggest a solemn question, and one which must receive an answer, if we are to be in a condition to glorify God in contem- plating that suffering. The answer that it was penal, is pre- cluded by the nature of the suffering itself. Yet, that it was for sin is also implied in that very nature, and for the sin of others than the sufferer, for He was without sin ; there- fore was it vicarious, expiatory, an atonement, — an atone- ment for sin as distinguished from the punishment of sin. OF THE ATONEMENT. 123 And with this distinction, how much Hght enters the mind ! We are now able to reahse that the suffering we contemplate is divine, while it is human ; and that God is revealed in it and not inerely in connexiofi with it; God's righteousness and condemnation of sin, being in the suffering, and not merely what demands it,^ — God's love also being in the suffering, and not merely what submits to it. Christ's suffering being thus to us a form which the divine life in Christ took in connexion with the circumstances in which he was placed, and not a penal infliction, coming on Him as from without, such words as, " He made His soul an offering for sin" — " He put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself," — " By Himself He purged our sins," grow full of light ; and the connexion between ^u/iat He is who makes atonement, and the atonement which He makes, reveals itself in a far other way than as men have spoken of the divinity of the Saviour, regarding it either as a strength to endure infinite penal suffering, or a dignity to give adequacy of value to any measure of penal suffering however small. Not in these ways, but in a far other way, is the person of Christ brought before us now as fixing attention upon the divine mind in humanity as that which alone could suffer, and which did suffer sufferings of a nature and . virtue to purge our sins. By the word of His power all \ else was accomplished, by himself He purged our sins, — j. by the virtue that is in what He is ; and thus is the atone- \ ment not only what was rendered possible by the incarn- 1 ation, but itself a development of the incarnation. Luther says, that all sin of man, and the eternal righteousness of God, being met in Christ in mutual opposition, the one of these must prevail ; and it must be the righteousness, for it is divine and eternal. His con- ception seems^ to have been : — sin being there present calling for judgment, and righteousness calling for life, the righteousness, being divine, must triumph. When, in explaining this presence of sin, he speaks of the con- sciousness that was in Christ in relation to man's sin, as if it were, with reference to all the sin of man, identical 124 RETROSPECTIVE ASPECT in nature with what in measure the perfectly awakened sinner feels as to his own sin, Luther certainly seems to lose the sense of the personal separation from sin of that Holy One of God, in whose inner being all the sin of humanity was thus realised. And yet I venture to think, that he only seems to do so, and that his meaning has not been beyond that sense of man's sin, and what is due to it, and of the righteousness of God's judgment upon it, of which I have spoken above. At all events, the view now taken of the way in which the Saviour met and dealt with the Father's wrath against sin, may be expressed in language akin to that of Luther, and we may say that the divine eternal righteousness in Christ used confession of the sinfulness of sin, as the weapon of righteousness in its conflict with sin calling for judgment; and so, that righteousness prevailed. The divine righteousness in Christ appearing on the part of man, and in humanity, met the divine righteousness in God condemning man's sin, by the true and righteous confession of its sinfulness uttered in humanity, and righteousness as in God was satisfied, and demanded no more than righteousness as in Christ thus presented. It might be too bold to assert that this was Luther's meaning. But at all events, — and this alone is important, — I believe this to be a conception according to the truth of things ; and that the feelings of the divine mind as to sin, being present in humanity and uttering themselves to God as a living voice from humanity, were the true atone- ment for the sin of humanity, — the " equivalent sorrow and repentance " of which the idea was in the mind of Edwards, though the fact of its realisation in Christ he did not see. But, though Edwards saw not that the equivalent sorrow and repentance, of which the thought passed before his mind, was actually present in these sufferings of Christ which he was considering, yet am I thankful that the conception of such an equivalent as the alternative to infinite i)unishment has been recognised by him. For he is the great teacher of a demand for infinite punishment as implied in the essential and absolute OF THE ATONEMENT. 125 justice of God ; and, as I have said above, in his deaUng with absolute justice and righteousness on the subject of the atonement I have much more sympathy than with the teaching that makes rectoral justice or pubhc justice the foundation of its reasoning. For of this I feel quite certain, that no really awakened sinner into whose spirit the terrors of the Lord have entered, ever thinks of rec- toral justice, but of absolute justice, and of absolute justice only. " Against thee, thee only have I sinned," is language, in using which the soul is alone with God, and thinks not of any other bearing of its sin, but its bearing on the individual in relation to God. That due repentance for sin, could such repentance indeed be, would expiate guilt, there is a strong testimony in the human heart, and so the first attempt at peace with God, is an attempt at repentance, — which attempt, indeed, becomes less and less hopeful, the longer, and the more earnestly and honestly it is persevered in, — but this not because it comes to be felt that a true repentance would be rejected even if attained, but because its attain- ment is despaired of, — all attempts at it being found, when taken to the divine light, and honestly judged in the sight of God, to be mere selfish attempts at some- thing that promises safety, — not evil, indeed, in so far as they are instinctive efforts at self-preservation, but having nothing in them of the nature of a true repentance, or a godly sorrow for sin or pure condemnation of it because of its own evil; nothing, in short, that is a judging sin and a confessing it in true sympathy with the divine judgment upon it. So that the words of Whitefield come to be deeply sympathised in, "our repentance needeth to be repented of, and our very tears to be washed in the blood of Christ." That we may fully realise what manner of an equiva- lent to the dishonour done to the law and name of God by sin, an adequate repentance and sorrow for sin must be, and how far more truly than any penal infliction such repentance and confession must satisfy divine justice, let us suppose that all the sin of humanity has been com- 126 RETROSPECTIVE ASPECT mitted by one human spirit, on whom is accumulated this immeasurable amount of guilt, and let us suppose this spirit, loaded with all this guilt, to pass out of sin into holiness, and to become filled with the light of God becoming perfectly righteous with God's own righteous- ness, — such a change, were such a change possible, would imply in the spirit so changed, a perfect condemnation of the past of its own existence, and an absolute and perfect repentance, a confession of its sin commensurate with its evil. If the sense of personal identity remained, it must be so. Now, let us contemplate this repentance, with reference to the guilt of such a spirit, and the ques- tion of pardon for its past sin, and admission now to the light of God's favour. Shall this repentance be accepted as an atonement, and the past sin being thus confessed, shall the divine favour flow out on that present perfect righteousness which thus condemns the past? or, shall that repentance be declared inadequate? shall the pre- sent perfect righteousness be rejected on account of the past sin, so absolutely and perfectly repented of? and shall divine justice still demand adequate punishment for the past sin, and refuse to the present righteousness adequate acknowledgment — the favour which, in respect of its own nature, belongs to it ? It appears to me im- possible to give any but one answer to these questions. We feel that such a repentance as we are supposing would, in such a case, be the true and proper satisfaction to offended justice, and that there would be more atoning worth in one tear of the true and perfect sorrow which the memory of the past would awaken in this now holy spirit, than in endless ages of penal woe. Now, with the difference of personal identity, the case I have supposed is the actual case of Christ, the holy one of God, bearing the sins of all men on His spirit— in Luther's words, "the one sinner" — and meeting the cry of these sins for judgment, and the wrath due to them, absorbing and ex- hausting that divine wrath in that adequate confession and perfect response on the part of man, which was possible only to the infinite and eternal righteousness in humanity. OF THE ATONEMENT. 127 I have said that my hypothetical, and indeed im- possible case, and that case which the history of our redemption actually presents, differ only in respect of the persofial identity of the guilty and the righteous. And, to one looking at the subject with a hasty super- ficial glance, this difference may seem to involve all the difficulties connected with imputation of guilt and sub- stituted punishment. Yet it can only so appear to a hasty and superficial glance. For, independent of the higher character of the moral atonement supposed, as compared with the enduring as a substitute a penal in- fliction, this adequate sorrow for the sin of man, and adequate confession of its evil implies no fiction — no imputation to the sufferer of the guilt of the sin for which He suffers ; but only that He has taken the nature, and become the brother of those whose sin He confesses before the Father, and that He feels concerning their sins what, as the holy one of God, and as perfectly loving God and man. He must feel. In contemplating our Lord as yielding up His soul to be filled with the sense of the Father's righteous condem- nation of our sin, and as responding with a perfect Amen to that condemnation, we are tracing what was a neces- sary step in His path as dealing with the Father on our behalf His intercession presupposes this expiatory con- fession, and cannot be conceived of apart from it. Not only so, — ^but it is also certain that we cannot rightly conceive of this confession, or be in the light in which it was made, without seeing that the intercession that accompanied it was necessary to its completeness, as a full response to the mind of the Father towards us and our sins. I have endeavoured to present Christ's expiatory con- fession of our sins to the mind of the reader as much as possible by itself, and as a distinct object of thought, because it most directly corresponds, in the place it occupies, to the penal suffering which has been assumed ; and I have desired to place these two ways of meeting the divine wrath against sin, as ascribed to the Mediator, ^ 128 RETROSPECTIVE ASPECT in contrast. But the intercession by which that con- fession was followed up, must be taken into account as a part of the full response of the mind of the Son to the mind of the Father, — a part of that utterance in humanity which propitiated the divine mercy by the righteous way in which it laid hold of the hope for man which was in God. " He bare the sins of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." In the light of that true know- ledge of the heart of the Father in which the Son re- sponded to the Father's condemnation of our sins, the nature of that condemnation was so understood that His love was at liberty, and was encouraged to accompany confession by intercession : — not an intercession which contemplated effecting a change in the heart of the Father, but a confession which combined with acknow- ledgment of the righteousness of the divine wrath against sin, hope for man from that love in God which is deeper than that wrath, — in truth originating it — determining also its nature, and justifying the confidence that, its righteousness being responded to, and the mind which it expresses shared in, that wrath must be appeased. Therefore, when we would conceive to ourselves, that Amen to the mind of the Father in its aspect toward us and our sins, which, pervading the humanity of the Son of God, made His soul a fit offering for sin, and when we would understand how this sacrifice was to God a sweet- smelling savour, we must consider not only the response which was in that Amen to the divine condemnation of sin, but also the I'esponse which was in it to the divine love in its yearnings over us sinners. In itself, the inter- cession of Christ was the perfected expression of that forgiveness which He cherished toward those who were returning hatred for His love. But it was also the form His love must take if Fie would obtain redemption for us. Made under the pressure of the perfect sense of the evil of our state, this intercession was full of the Saviour's peculiar sorrow and suffering — a part of the sacrifice of Christ : its power as an element of atonement we must see, if we consider that it was the voice of the OF THE ATONEMENT. 129 divine love coming from humanity, offering for man a pure intercession according to the will of God, offering that prayer for man which was the utterance alike of love to God and love to man — that prayer which accorded with our need and the Father's glory as seen and felt in the light of the Eternal love by the Son of God and our Brother. We do not understand the divine wrath against sin, unless such confession of its evil as we are now contem- plating is felt to be the true and right meeting of that wrath on the part of humanity. We do not understand the forgiveness that is in God, unless such intercession as we are now contemplating is felt to be that which \vill lay hold of that forgiveness, and draw it forth. It was not in us so to confess our own sins ; neither was there in us such knowledge of the heart of the Father. But, if another could in this act for us, — if there might be a mediator, an intercessor, — one at once sufficiently one with us, and yet sufficiently separated from our sin to feel in sinless humanity what our sinful humanity, could it in sinlessness look back on its sins, would feel of Godly condemnation of them and sorrow for them, so confessing them before God, — one coming sufficiently near to our need of mercy to be able to plead for mercy for us ac- cording to that need, and at the same time, so abiding in the bosom of the Father^ and in the light of His love and secret of His heart, as, in interceding for us to take full and perfect advantage of all that is there that is on our side, and wills our salvation ; — if the Son of God has, in the power of love, come into the capacity of such mediation in taking our nature and becoming our brother, and in that same power of love has been contented to suffer all that such mediation, accomplished in suffering flesh, implied, — is not the suitableness and the accept- ableness of the sacrifice of Christ, when his soul was made an offering for sin, what we can understand ? In truth, we cannot realise the life of Christ as He moved on this earth in the sight of men, and contemplate His mtness-b earing against sin, and His forgiveness towards CAMPB. K I30 RETROSPECTIVE ASPECT OF THE ATONEMENT. sinners, and hear the Father say of Him, " This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased," and yet doubt that that mind towards sin and sinners which he thus manifested, and the Father thus acknowledged, would be altogether acceptable, and a sacrifice to God of a sweet- 1 I smelling savour, in its atoning confession of sin and inter- ^'^ cession for sinners. I know that the adequacy of the atonement to be a foundation for the remission of sins cannot be fully apprehended, or the righteousness of God in accepting it as a sacrifice for sin be fully justified, apart from its prospective reference to the divine purpose of making us through Christ partakers in eternal life. Yet I will, even at this point, express the hope, that the purpose of God to extend mercy to sinners being realised, and the considerations connected with the name of God and the honour of His law, which had to be taken into account, being present to the mind, it will be felt, that the atone- ment, as now set forth, was the suitable preparation for that contemplated manifestation of mercy ; and I venture to express this hope here, and thus early, because, I am not unwilling that the atonement as now repre- sented, and while considered only in its retrospective reference, should be compared with the conception of the atonement as Christ's bearing, as our substitute, the punishment of our sins, — the rather, that that is a retro- spective conception exclusively. But, I repeat it, I feel that it is placing the atonement, as now set forth, under a disadvantage as to its power to commend itself to the conscience, to look at its retrospective adequacy thus apart from its prospective reference j to the consideration of which I now proceed. [31 CHAPTER VII. PROSPECTIVE ASPECT OF THE ATONEMENT. I HAVE said above, that the atonement is to be regarded as that by which God has bridged over the gulf which separated between what sin had made us, and what it was the desire of the divine love that we should become. Therefore its character must have been determined as much by the latter consideration as by the former ; and, on this ground, I have complained of the extent to which the former consideration, rather than the latter, has been taken into account in men's recognition of a need be for an atonement. Yet an atonement such as they contemplate, and con- sisting in substituted punishment, might allowably be so regarded, being like the paying of a pecuniary debt, at least as to the definite relation of the payment to the debt, the latter determining the former without direct reference to the ulterior results involved in the debt's being paid. But such an atonement as that which the Son of God has actually made, cannot be contemplated but as in its very nature pointing forward to the divine end in view. Accordingly, I have not been able now to enter freely upon the subject of that intercession for transgressors, which the prophet mentions as an element in the atone- ment, because that intercession cannot be conceived of as limited to the remission of past sins, but must neces- sarily have had reference to what Christ, in His love to us, loving us as He did Himself, desired for us. So also the confession of our sin, in response to the divine condemna- tion of it, must, when offered to God on our behalf, have contemplated prospectively our own participation in that K 2 132 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT confession as an element in our actual redemption from sin. And even the witnessing of Christ for the Father in the sight of men, as connected with the righteousness of God in the extension of the divine mercy to us rebels, must have had its place in the atonement, not merely as a light co?idenming our darkness, but as the intended light of life for us. All views of the work of Christ of course imply that its ultimate reference was prospective. Whether conceived of as securing, in virtue of a covenanted arrangement, the salvation of an election from among men, or as furnishing, in reference to all men, a ground on which God may extend mercy to them, the work of Christ has equally been regarded as what would not have been but ^\\\h a prospective reference. But on neither of these views is the justification of God's acceptance of the propitiation itself, N bound up with the question of the results contemplated. ^^ ^On the one view, the penal infliction is complete in itself as a substituted punishment ; the righteousness wrought out is complete in itself as conferring a title to eternal blessedness, irrespective of results to be accomplished in those in the covenant of grace. On the other view, a meritorious ground on which to rest justification by faith is furnished, which is complete in itself, irrespective of any effect which is anticipated from the faith of it. But, what I have now been representing as the true view of the atonement, is characterised by this, that it takes the results contem- plated into account in considering God's acceptance of the atonement. Not that the moral and spiritual excel- lence of the work of Christ could have been less than infinitely acceptable to God, viewed simply in itself; but that its acceptableness in co7i7iection with the remissio?i of sijis, is only to be truly and fully seen in its relation to the result which it has contemplated, viz. our participa- tion in eternal life — or, in other words, that the justifica- tion of God, in " redeeming," as He has done, " us who were under the law," is only clearly apprehended in the light of the divine purpose, " that we should receive the adoption of sons." OF THE ATONEMENT. 133 This di7'ect reference to the end contemplated, which; distinguishes the view of the atonement now taken, as! compared with those other systems in which that reference is more remote, I lay much weight upon. It explains, as they cannot otherwise be explained, those expressions in Scripture in which the practical end of the atonement is connected so immediately with the making of the atone- ment — as when it is said, that " Christ gave Himself for. [ » us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity" — that y " we are redeemed from the vain conversation received ' by tradition from our Fathers, by the precious blood of Christ " — that " Christ suffered for us, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God." Men have been reconciled by the seeming necessity of the case to the idea that such language is employed because these are the ultimate and remote consequences of that shedding of Christ's blood, which, it is held, immediately contem- plated delivering us from the punishment of sin by His enduring it for us. But I regard as a great scriptural argument in favour of the view now taken of the atone- ment, that it represents the connexion between these results and Christ's suffering for our sins as not remote, but immediate. While, as to the internal commendation of the doctrine itself, my conviction is, that the pardon of sin is seen in its true harmony with the glory of God, only when the work of Christ, through which we have " the remission of sins that are past," is contemplated in its direct relation to " the gift of eternal life." The elements of atonement, which have now been con- sidered in relation to the remission of sins, contemplated in their relation to the gift of eternal life, teach us how to conceive of that gift. The atonement having been accom- plished by the natural working of the life of love in Christ, and having been the result of His doing the Father's will, and declaring the Father's name in humanity, we are pre- pared, as to the prospective aspect of the atonement, to find that the perfect righteousness of the Son of God in humanity is itself Xht gift of God to us in Christ — to be ours as Christ is ours,— to be partaken in as He is par- 134 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT taken in, — to be our life as He is our life : instead of its being, as has been held, ours by imputation, — precious to us and our salvation, not in respect of what is inherent in it, but in respect of that to which it confers a legal title ; or, according to the modification of this conception, (the transference of righteousness by imputation being rejected,) our salvation in respect of effects of righteous- ness transferred for Christ's sake to those who believe in Him. Abstractly considered, and viewed simply in itself, the divine righteousness that is in Christ must be recognised as a higher gift than any benefit it can be supposed to purchase. In the immediate contemplation of the life of Christ, seen as that on which the Father is fixing our attention when He says of Christ, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," it cannot be questioned, that the choice being offered, on the one hand, to partake in this divine righteousness, or, on the other, either to have it imputed to us, and on account of such imputation, to have a title to any supposed rewards of righteousness, or to have these rewards without such imputation trans- ferred to us, there could be no hesitation what choice to make. Apart altogether from the difficulties involved in the conception of the imputation of righteousness, or the transference of its effects, it would manifestly be a dis- honour done to the divine righteousness to prefer to it any good of any kind external to it, not inherent in it but separable from it, which might be conceived of as its reward. I may be reminded, that the reward of righteousness, thus placed in contrast with the divine righteousness itself, and assumed to be a lower thing, includes spiritual bene- fits, includes sanctification ; and that this in effect is a participation in the mind and life of Christ, and might be spoken of as substantially righteousness imparted, — the purchase of righteousness imputed, or, according to the modification of the doctrine, a part of God's gracious dealing with us on the ground of Christ's righteousness : and although this is a complication altogether foreign OF THE ATONEMENT. 135 to the simplicity that is in Christ, I thankfully recognise the degree to which the elements of righteousness, — all that God delights in,— holiness, truth, love, may be the objects of spiritual desire, and be welcomed as a part of the unsearchable riches of Christ, even in connection with this system, and when not seen simply as the elements of the eternal life given to us in Christ our life, and in respect of which He is " made of God unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption." But a righteousness imparted as that to which a right has been conferred by a righteousness imputed ; — divine favour and acceptance first resting upon us, irrespective of our true spiritual state, and then a spiritual state in harmony with that favour, bestowed as an expression of that favour ; — a right and title to heaven made sure irre- spective of a meetness for heaven, and then that meetness — the holiness necessary to the enjoyment of heaven — bestowed upon us as a part of what we have thus become entitled to : —this is a complication which the testimony of God, that God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son, never could suggest. Its natural effect is to turn the mind away, in the first instance at all events, from the direct contemplation of eternal life as the salvation given in Christ. The elements of that life may come to be taken into account afterwards ; but the evil effect of the first separation between the favour of God and the actual condition of the human spirit in its aspect towards God, never can be altogether remedied ; — while this root error will always tend to develope itself in reducing the meaning of the words, " eternal life," to the conception of an unproved future endless blessedness that awaits us as those who trust in Christ's merits, not a spiri- tual state into which we enter in receiving the knowledge of God in Christ. Thus confusion and perplexity are in- troduced into the whole subject of righteousness and eternal life, when, this hfe being admitted to be given, righteousness is not recognised as simply an element in that gift, or rather an aspect of it. In tracing, in their prospective relation to the gift of f 136 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT eternal life, the elements of atonement now considered in relation to the remission of sins, we shall find the simpli- city that is in Christ delivering us from all this perplexity and confusing'complication; while the immediate and direct occupation of our spirits with eternal life itself as salva- tion, will favour our intelligent apprehension of that gift, and strengthen us in the faith that God has given it, and also in the faith of the remission of our sins as seen in connection with it, — the glory of God and the gift of eternal life in His Son, shedding back its light on the Father's acceptance of the Son when He made His soul an offering for sin. I would recall here the illustration which I have offered above, of the conception which I have sought to convey of the atoning virtue of Christ's expiatory confession of man's sin, viz. the supposition that all the sin of man had been committed by one human spirit, and that that spirit, preserving its personal identity, and retaining the memory of what it had been, should become perfectly righteous. Had such a case been possible, how would the righteous God deal with such a spirit ? In the language of Luther, sin and righteousness being thus met in one person, which would prevail ? Would the absolute repentance and sorrow for the past sin, which is necessarily implied in the present righteousness, be an atonement for that past sin, and leave the righteous God free to receive that present righteous- ness with the favour due to it, or would justice still call for vengeance ? This would be a perplexing dilemma, on the assumption of the correctness of the theory of divine justice that represents that attribute of God as a necessity of the divine nature which necessitates the giving to every spirit that which is righteously due to it, — which, in this case, would imply the necessity both to punish the past sin and reward the present righteousness, and this for ever — an impossible combination. The great advocate of that theory has, however, as we have seen, recognised a principle which would extricate him from this dilemma, \ when he recognises as alternatives an infinite punishment, or an adequate repentance ; and he therefore would have OF THE ATONEMENT, 137 consented to the answer assumed above to be clearly the right answer in the case supposed. I go back on this illustration, because, while stating it formerly, I felt embarrassed, so far as the supposition was one of present righteousness as well as of past sin. In order to the completeness of the parallel between the hypothetical case and the constitution of things in Christ which the Gospel reveals, Christ's confession of our sin must be seen in connection with our relation to the right- eousness of Christ, and the sin confessed, and the right- eousness in which it is confessed, be seen as if they were in the same person — being both in humanity ; though the sin really exists only in humanity as in us, and used in rebellion by us rebels, and the righteousness only in humanity as in Christ, " who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God." But the glory of God in this constitution of things, is only seen when the gift of eternal life to man, in the Son of God, is understood — and this gift we had not then before our minds. I admitted, in representing Christ's confession of our sin as accounted of to us, that I might, on a superficial view, seem to be stating what was open to the same objec- tions that I have recognised as valid against the doctrine of penal infliction endured by Christ as bearing our sin by imputation ; and I offered, in reply, the broad distinction between a state of mind in Christ which implied no legal fiction, no relation to our sins but what was necessarily the result of His being in our nature in the life of love, — a mind which, call it an ato?ii?ig confession of our sin or not, was most certainly a confession of our sins which must have been prese?it in His intercession for us, — the broad distinction between this and the infliction on Christ, by the Father, of penal suffering, because, by imputation, He was counted guilty of our sins. This distinction, if clearly before the mind, is too palpable not to satisfy. But still, that identifying of Christ with us, and that giving to us, so to speak, the benefit of what He was in humanity, which is implied in representing His confession of our sins as an element in the atonement, is not, as I 138 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT have now said, fully justified to the mind, apart from that further identifying of Christ with us through which His righteousness is ours. Yet, thus to speak of Christ's righteousness will as readily recall the doctrine of imputation of righteousness, as the place given to Christ's confession of our sins might recall that of imputation of sin. How wide apart the two conceptions are, and what the true vindication of the divine counsel in this dealing of the Father with Christ, as with the one man who bears the weight of all men's sins upon His spirit, atoning for them by confessing them before the Father in a divine righteousness in humanity, which the Father receives on behalf of all men as the righteousness of humanity ; — this we shall understand in the light of the relation of the atonement to the gift of eternal life. When we consider humanity in the light shed upon it by the life of Christ in humanity, we see together revealed to us the great evil of its condition as possessed by us sinners, and its great capacity of good as that capacity is brought out by the Son of God. Now, this is not the same thing with seeing the same person first sinful and then righteous ; nor is the problem which it presents the same exactly, as in that hypothetical case : — but, still, what we are thus contemplating involves a closely analo- gous question for the determination of the righteous Lord who loveth righteousness. As the dishonour done to God in humanity cries out against it, so does the honour done to God plead in its favour, — not in the way, certainly, of an off-set in respect of which the honour may cover over, gild over, the dishonour, and so humanity be regarded with acceptance as one whole; not thus, — although the honour be divine as well as human, while the dishonour is simply human, — but as the revelation of an inestimable preciousness that was hidden in humanity, hidden from the inheritors of humanity themselves, but not hid from God, and now brought forth into manifestation by the Son of God. For the revealer of the Father is also the revealer of man, who was made in God's image. OF THE ATONEMENT. 139 This high capacity of good pertaining to humanity is not indeed to be contemplated as belonging to us apart from our relation to the Son of God. For although in one sense it is quite correct to speak of the righteousness of Christ as the revelation of the capacity of righteousness that was in humanity, a capacity that remained to man although hidden under sin ; — in truth, humanity had this capacity only relatively, that is, as dwelt in by the Son of God; and therefore, there was in the righteousness of Christ in humanity no promise for humanity apart from the Son of God's having power over all flesh to impart eternal life. We cannot, therefore, see hope for man in the righteousness of Christ, apart from the contemplation of this power as possessed by Christ. Therefore, there must be a relation between the Son of God and the sons of men, not according to the flesh only, but also according to the spirit, — the second Adam must be a quickening spirit, and the head of every man be Christ. But if we see this double relation as subsisting between Christ and men, if we see Him as the Lord of their spirits, as well as a partaker in their flesh, that air of legal fiction, which, in contemplating the atonement, attaches to our identifi- cation with Christ and Christ's identification with us, so long as this is contemplated as matter of external arrange- ment, will pass away, and the depth and reality of the bonds which connect the Saviour and the saved will bear the weight of this identification, and fully justify to the enlightened conscience that constitution of things in which Christ's confession of our sins expiates them, and Christ's righteousness in humanity clothes us with its own interest in the sight of God : for thus, that divine right- eousness of the Son of God is seen as necessarily shedding to the mind of the Father its own glory and its own pre- ciousness over all humanity,— but in a way as remote from the imputation of righteousness as Christ's bearing our sins, as this has now been illustrated, and confessing them, is from imputation to him of our sins. And this, indeed, is infinitely far ; and yet some vague feeling corresponding to this truth of things, — some vague I40 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT feeling of the standing which the human spirit needs to find in another than itself — not having it in itself — and which God has given to men in Christ, has been present, working in men's minds, and commending to them the system of imputation with all its moral repulsiveness and intellectual contradiction ; — insomuch that one truly know- ing his own dependence on Christ, feels more sympathy and unity with those who in the spirit cherish that depend- ence, — though conceiving of it intellectually in the erro- neous form which it has in the system of imputation, — than with those whose sense of the moral and intellectual objectionableness of that system, is connected with the taking of a standing of independent self-righteousness before God. For, as to all whose trust is truly in Christ, and in the Father's delight in Him, spiritually appre- hended, I am assured that, however I may seem to them — as to many such I shall seem touching the apple of their eye, I am not touching that which is their life. I proceed to consider, in relation to the gift of eternal life, the two aspects in which we are contemplating the life of love in the Son of God, in His making His soul an offering for sin. I. The atonement by which Phinehas stayed the plague, prepared us for recognising the vindication of the divine righteousness in the Son's honouring the Father in the sight of man as a necessary step in the manifestation of mercy, and we see a true element of propitiation for the sin of man in Christ's glorifying God in humanity. Yet, in studying the manner of Christ's witnessing for the Father, we have the conviction continually impressed upon us, that this revealing of the Father by the presenta- tion to us of the life of sonship has as its object our parti- cipation in that life of sonship, and so our participation in that knowledge and enjoyment of the Father, and that inheriting of the Father as the Father, which fellowship in the life of sonship can alone bring. Let us mark how immediate was the relation of this hope for man to what Christ was suffering in making His soul an offering for sin. He knew that that life of love OF THE ATONEMENT. 141 which was then in Him a Ught condemning the darkness from which He was suffering was yet to overcome that darkness and take its place. His own consciousness in humanity witnessed within Him that humanity was capable of being filled with the life of love. The more perfectly He realised that these were His brethren whose hatred was coming forth against Him, the more did He realise also that hatred was not of the essence of their being, — that there was hope in giving Himself for them to redeem them from iniquity, — that there was hope in suffering for them the just for the unjust — hope that He would bring them to God. How manifestly has the joy of this hope underlain all His sorrow ! It was, indeed, the joy that was set before Him, for which He endured the cross, despising the shame. He bore the contradiction of sinners against Himself, not only in the meekness and patience of love, and the unselfishness of love, which was more deeply grieved that they should offend, than that itself was offended against j but also, in the prophetic faith of love that looked forward to yet becoming itself the life of those who now rejected it. There is hope for the future, as well as deep sadness because of the present, in the words, " O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee, but I have known thee." If the world could continue to be the world after coming to know the Father, there would have been no hope for the world. But, in the consciousness of being in a light in which the world was not was their hope to His heart for the world, — there- fore did He pray on the cross, and when the enmity had manifested itself to the utmost, " Father forgive them; for they know not what they do." I know we more frequently refer to these words, as the precious record of the perfection of that forgiveness of His enemies, which was in Him who by His life and death, as by His precepts, has taught us to forgive our enemies, to' love them, to pray for them, — and in this view the record is precious. But, there is important light in the footing on which He puts His prayer for forgive- ness to them, viz. "for they know not what they do." 142 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT Had the full power of light been expended on them, and without result, there would have been no room to pray for them, because there would have been no possibility of answering the prayer. But, let us thankfully hear Him who knew what is in man, thus praying ; and let us mark how to the close He was sustained in making His soul an offering for sin, by the consciousness in His own huma- nity of a knowledge of the Father which, being partaken in, had power to redeem humanity. " I have declared thy name, and will declare it, that the love wherewith thou hast loved me, may be in them, and I in them." I do not forget the words, " now they have no cloak for their sin," — " now they have seen and hated both me and my Father." But, however great the measure of light thus recognised as received and abused, and bringing condemnation, the possibility of a light beyond it is clearly implied in the words which I have been quoting. These evil men were of the world, of which He says to the Father, that it hath not known Him. They were included in the prayer, " Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do." And so the apostle John teaches, " He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness, even until now. He that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness^ and k7ioweth not whither he gocth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes." This our Lord knew, and He knew also, that He had come a light into the world, that he that should believe in Him should not abide in darkness, but should have the light of eternal life. The sad sorrowful work of being a light condemning the darkness was therefore cheered by the consciousness of not only being light in Himself, but " the light of the world," that is, a light for men, a light which His own human consciousness ever testified to be a light for men. Therefore was the consciousness of having glorified the Father on the earth the foundation of the prayer that the Father would glorify Him in the exercise of the power over all flesh to give eternal life to as many as the Father should give to Him, — to all who, having heard and been OF THE ATONEMENT. 143 taught of the Father, should come to the Son ; and we know that while walking in His sorrowful path, with the hope of being the channel of eternal life to those for whose sins He was making atonement, the comfort was granted to Him of being able to say of some, that the light that was in Him had in some measure been received by them; that in a true sense, however small the measure, they " were not of the world, even as He was not of the world;" that His revealing of the Father by being in their sight the Son honouring the Father, had not been in vain ; that at least it had quickened so much life in them as in Philip could say, " Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us ; " that in truth, though they so little under- stood what His living ministry of love had accomplished in their spirits as not to understand Him when He bare testimony to it, still a great result had been accomplished, for that He could say, " Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know," though they themselves were so little aware of this as to rejoin, " Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way ?" Thus, a measure of present comfort of the nature of the joy set before Him was granted to our Lord even in the time of His making His soul an offering for sin. Thus are we to conceive of Him as contented to be through suffering made perfect as the Captain of our salvation, — welcoming all by which He was receiving fitness to be to us the channel of eternal life. " For their sakes I sanctify myself that they also might be sanctified through the truth." For, He welcomed that ordering of His path by the Father, which had reference to the development of the life of love that was in Him, according to all the need of man ; not withholding His face from shame and spit- ting, when opening His ear as the learner, that in Him we might have all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge ; though a Son, yet learning obedience by the things which He suffered, that being made perfect. He might become the author of eternal salvation unto all that obey Him ; submitting to be tempted in all points as we are tempted, that, sinlessly passing through such trial, He might be 144 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT able, as our high priest, to succour us when we are tempted. In all ways of manifestation of the life of sonship, and at all cost to Himself, He declared the Father's name in life and in death, that the love wherewith the Father had loved Him might be in us and He in us. It is certain that the atonement has its right interest to us, and quickens in us the hope which it has been intended to quicken, only when that interest and that hope are one as to nature and foundation with what were present in the mind of Christ in making the atonement. We must be in the light of His honouring of His Father's name in all that He presented in humanity to the faith and spiritual vision of men. And this honouring was not only universal as to the outward form of his life, but went to the depth of the inner man of the heart, to the full extent of making His life in humanity a " serving of the living God." " I do nothing of myself: as I hear, I judge," — " My works are not mine, but His that sent me," — " The Father who dwelleth in me. He doeth the works," — " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," — " The Son doeth nothing of Himself; but whatsoever the Father doeth, the same doeth the Son likewise," — " Why callest thou me good ? there is none good but one, that is God." So deep was the honouring of the Father in humanity by the Son, when " through the Eternal Spirit He offered Himself without spot to God." Nor is it by what He presented in Himself as under His Father's guidance alone, that the Son of God reveals to us the Father. He vindicates the name of the Father, and condemns our sin as rebellious children, by all that we see the Father to be to Him through His following God as a dear child walking in love. I have, in this view, noticed above the place which our Lord's " peace " and " joy," of which He speaks to the disciples as known to them, had in His witnessing for the Father : for, in- deed, the Son would have been an imperfect witness for the Father if He was not, by those who saw Him truly, seen to have peace and joy in the Father, — a peace and a joy to which often an unclouded expression OF THE ATONEMENT. 145 would be permitted, — but which would abide in His spirit, however His sorrows from all else might abound ; and in respect of which all such sorrows, though they might be what would justify the appeal, " Look, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow," would be but the trial of faith, and the more abundant manifestation of what the Father was to the Son. Now, as to all by which the Son thus honoured the Father, we are to see that it all entered into His hope for us in His making His soul an offering for sin, because it was in humanity that He was having all this experience. I have said above that we are to understand that He who is the revealer of God to man is also the revealer of man to himself. Apart from Christ we know not our God, and apart from Christ we know not ourselves : as, indeed, it is also true, that we are as slow to apprehend and to welcome the one revelation as the other, — as slow to see man in Christ, as to see God in Christ. We have seen how much loss even earnest and deep thinking and holy men have suffered through not looking upon the life of love in Christ as the revelation of the Father ; — how it has thus come to pass that, looking upon Christ's love to men merely as the fulfilment for man of the law under which man was, they have dwelt on that fulfilment, and enlarged on the circumstances which prove how perfect it was, and yet have not read the heart of God — the love of God to all men, in that record of the life of Christ which they were studying. And so, also, these same men, through the assumption that in the life of Christ they were contemplating the working out of a legal righteous- ness for man, to be his by imputation, as they were turned away from seeing God in Christ, so have also been turned away from seeing man in Christ, seeing themselves in Christ, seeing the capacities of their own being in Christ. Not for His own sake but for our sakes did the Son of God reveal the hidden capacity of good that is in man by putting forth in humanity the power of the law of the Spirit of His own life — the life of sonship. " For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the CAMPB. L 146 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT flesh, God sending His own Son in the hkeness of sinful flesh, and as a sacrifice for sin, condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be ful- filled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit." We, then, for whose sake this has been, must learn to see in this revelation of what humanity- is when pervaded with the life of sonship that re- demption of which we were capable, and which we have in Christ, and set ourselves to the study of the twofold discovery of God and of man in Christ, with the conviction that in it are hid for us all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I have said above that the Son alone could reveal the Father — for, indeed, manifested sonship can alone reveal fatherliness, being that in which the desire of that father- liness is fulfilled, — which therefore reveals that desire by fulfilling it. Thus are we to understand the voice of the Father saying of the Son, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased " — which voice, when heard in our hearts, is that drawing of the Father through which we come to the Son. And in this light are we to receive the words, " hear ye Him," which declare the purpose of that drawing. For we are called to hear the Son that we may know the Father through knowing the Son in whom He is well pleased, and so may know what is the Father's desire as to ourselves, and what He has given to us in the Son, that that desire of His heart for us may be fulfilled in us. Let the reader examine his own heart as to the measure in which this is the ground of the interest with which he regards the divine righteousness in humanity, and the Father's testimony to the Son. For, assuredly, it ought to be so; and we ought to be jealous of every thought and view that divides attention with the gift of eternal life — ^jealous of our going out of the circle of the life that is in Christ in search of the unsearchable riches which we have in Christ ; above all, jealous of occupying our imagination with an unknown future blessedness to be bestowed on us for Christ's sake, instead of keeping to what is included in Christ, in the mind revealed in Christ, OF THE ATONEMENT. 147 and so is addressed to the will in man as what we are to partake in in yielding our will to be guided by the law of the Spirit of the life that is in Christ — the life of son- ship : which is in itself riches, unsearchable infinite riches, because it, and it alone, enjoys the Father as the Father, making us heirs of God, — heirs of God, and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. One has spoken of difficulty in joining, in anticipation, "himself and glory in one thought." The greater diffi- culty is to join ourselves and eternal life in one thought now, although God has already in Christ so connected us in the very truth of things. But, as I have said, we are alike slow of heart to receive Christ's revelation of our- selves, and to receive His revelation of God, — to believe that God has given to us eternal life in His Son, and to believe that God is love. I know, indeed, that the difficulty felt in believing that our humanity and its capacity of good in respect of the eternal life which we have in Christ, is what the life of Christ reveals it to be, is what we are tempted to excuse on the ground of the felt sinfulness of our own nature. Yet, is not the deepest knowledge of that sinfulness ex- pressed in the verses just before those in which the Apostle recognises the power of the law of the Spirit of the life that is in Christ to make us free from the law of sin and death ? Has, in this matter, experimental know- ledge ever gone further than what the words express, — " I find a law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin that is in my members. O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " This was the question, and this the state of mind in relation to which the knowledge of the power of the life of sonship in humanity moved the Apostle to thank God through Jesus Christ. We know not the truth of humanity, — we know only its perversion while we are living the life of self and enmity and are as gods to ourselves. What it is to be a man, what we possess in humanity, we never know until we see humanity in Him who L 2 [48 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God. Let us understand it. The difficulty of believing the revelation of man that is in Christ, and the difficulty of believing the revelation of God that is in Christ, is one difficulty. To believe that God is love, as this is revealed by His manifestation of love to us, is to believe that love, as ascribed to God in relation to man, means that desire for man which is fulfilled in the humanity of Christ, and can in that alone be satisfied. Therefore, those general conceptions of the divine mercy and benevolence which are formed when God is contemplated only as so feeling for our misery and desiring our happiness as that He gave Christ to die for us that we might be saved from misery and partake in everlasting bliss, although they are true conceptions so far as they go, come altogether short of the love of God to us m Christ Jesus. For the element of fatherliness is wanting — what it craves for — what alone can satisfy it. But on fatherliness, as ascribed to God, is the attention kept continually fixed in the Gospel. That God has a Father's heart, may not, indeed, be admitted as a proof that the capacity of sonship has remained to us. But at least the manifestation of that fatherliness by the Son as the light of life to us does prove it. Let us not think of Christ, therefore, simply as reveaf- ing how kind and compassionate God is, and how for- giving to our sins, as those who have broken His righteous law. Let us think of Christ as the Son who reveals the Father, that we may know the Father's heart against which we have sinned, that we may see how sin, in making us godless, has made us as orphans, and under- stand that the grace of God, which is at once the remission of past sin, and the gift of eternal life, restores to our orphan spirits their Father and to the Father of spirits His lost children. I have dwelt above on the difference between a filial standing and a legal standing. I have spoken also of what Christ's being our example in the life of faith im- OF THE ATONEMENT. 149 plies as to the footing on which we are to draw near to God, and the nature of the confidence which Christ desires to quicken in us. Yet I feel it necessary thus to insist upon the faith of the sonship in humanity, which is revealed in Christ, as the necessary supplement and complement of the faith of the fatherliness, revealed to be in God : and I must often recur to this because, in truth, my hope of helping any out of the perplexities and con- fusions which I feel to prevail on the subjects of justifica- tion and sanctification, is simply the hope of helping them to see the contradiction between coming to God in the spirit of sonship, with the confidence which the faith of the Father's heart sustains, and coming to God with a legal confidence as righteous in His sight, because clothed with a legal righteousness, or at least accepted on the ground of such a righteousness. In speaking of that which he had come to experience through knowledge of the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested in the Son — that experience into the fellowship of which he desired to bring others, the Apostle says, " And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ." " Father " and *' Son " here do more than indicate persons : they indi- cate that in these persons with which the fellowship is experienced. Eternal life is to the Apostle a light in which the mind of fatherliness in the Father, and the mind of sonship in the Son, are apprehended and rejoiced in. This teaching as to the nature of salvation is the same which we receive from the Lord Himself when He says, *' This is eternal life, to know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent ; " as also when he says, " If a man love me, he will keep my words : and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." Let the reader think of this, and take his own expe- rience to this light. To me it appears that the temptation to stop short of the light that shines to us in the com- munion of the Son with the Father in humanity is strong, and greatly prevails. But this light is the very light of I50 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT life to us ; for this communion is the gift of the Father to us in the Son. In the experience of this communion in our nature and as our brother, did our Lord look for- ward to our partaking in it as what would be our salvation. The seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of S. John most fully declares this. Indeed the evidence abounds that it was this which was ever in the contemplation of Christ in glorifying the Father on the earth ; while of anything like the consciousness of being working out a righteousness to be imputed to men to give them a legal ground of confidence towards God there is no trace. I have already referred to President Edwards' legal representation of the righteousness of Christ, assumed to be imputed in faith, as perfected in His obedience unto death, and that of which God manifested His acceptance when He raised Christ from the dead. But the testimony to the Saviour was deeper and higher. Christ was declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead. The righteousness then acknowledged was none other than what the Father had previously borne testimony to when He said, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased ; " — on the sonship, the life of sonship that was in Christ, was attention thus fixed, and not on the legal perfection of the righteousness which it fulfilled. How then can we think of the Father's testimony to the Son as other than a commending of sonship to us, or think of the Father's delight in the Son otherwise than as what justifies His imparting the life of sonship to us ? Let us in this light regard Christ's being delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification. The offences for which He made expiation were ours, — that expiation being the due atonement for the sin of man — accepted on behalf of all men. His righteousness, declared in His resurrection from the dead, is ours — the proper righteousness for man, and in Him given to all men : and that righteousness is not t\\Q past fact of legal obligation discharged^ but the mind of sonship towards the Father ; for in the beloved Son is the Father seen to be well pleased, and in our being through Him to the Father OF THE ATONEMENT. 151 dear children will it come to pass that the Father will be well pleased in us. II. All that we thus learn as to the prospective refer- ence of the atonement in considering Christ's own mani- fested life in humanity as His witnessing for the Father to men, is confirmed, and further light shed upon it, when we consider with the same prospective reference the atonement as the Son's dealing with the Father on our behalf We cannot conceive of our Lord's dealing with the Father on our behalf without passing on to its prospective reference.' We could not formerly speak freely of that intercession for sinners which the Prophet has conjoined with his bearing of their sins, because that intercession could not be conceived of as stopping short of the prayer for our participation in eternal life, to which the expiatory confession of our sins, and prayer for the pardon of our sins necessarily led forvvard, and in connexion with which alone they could have existed. We now approach the subject of this dealing of Christ with the Father in the light of Christ's own perfection in humanity, and connect His laying hold of the hope for man which was in God with the Father's testimony that He was well pleased in the Son. What we have thought of Christ as necessarily desiring for us, was the fellowship of what He Himself was in humanity. This, therefore, was that which He would ask for us ; and we can now understand that He would do so with a confidence connected with His own consciousness that hi humanity He abode in His Father's love and in the light of His countenance. Thus would His own righteousness be presented along with the confession of our sins when He asked for us remission of sins and eternal life. And this is the right conception of Christ pleading His own merits on our behalf. Our capacity of that which He asked for us was so implied in these merits, and the Father's delight in these merits so implied His delight in their reproduction in us, that the prayer which pro- ceeds on these grounds is manifestly according to the will 152 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT of the Father — to ofter it as a part of the doing of the Father's will — to offer it in the faith and hope of an answer is a part of the trust in the Father by which He declared the Father's name, and is to be contemplated as completing that response to the mind of the Father towards us in our sin and misery, which was present but in part in the retrospective confession of our sin. And these — the confession and the intercession — so harmonise, are so truly each the complement of the other, that we feel in passing from the one to the other our faith in the Father's acceptance of each confirmed by seeing it in connection with the other; that is to say, we more easily believe in the Father's acceptance of Christ's ex- piatory confession of our sins when we see that confession as contemplating our yet living to God — our partaking in eternal life ; and we more easily believe in the gift of eternal life to those who have sinned, when we see it in connection with that due and perfect expiation for their past sin. It is in the dealing of the Son with the Father on our behalf, thus in all its aspects before us, that the full light of the atonement shines to us. In the life of Christ, as the revelation of the Father by the Son, we see the love of God to man — the will of God for man — the eternal life which the Father has given to us in the Son — that salva- tion which the gospel reveals as the Apostle knew it when he invited men to the fellowship of it as fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. Proceeding from this contemplation of the light of eternal life as shining in Christ's own life on earth, to consider the Son in His dealing with the Father on our behalf, and con- templating Him now as bearing us and our sins and miseries on His heart before the Father, and uttering all that in love to the Father and to us He feels regarding us — all His divine sorrow — all His desire — all His hope — all that He admits and confesses as against us — all that, notwithstanding. He asks for us, with that in His own human consciousness, in His following the Father as a dear child walking in love, which justifies His hope in OF THE ATONEMENT. 153 making intercession — enabling Him to intercede in con scious righteousness as well as conscious compassion and love, — we have the elements of the atonement before us as presented by the Son and accepted by the Father, and see the grounds of the divine procedure in granting to us remission of our sins and the gift of eternal hfe. We are contemplating what the Son, who dwells in the bosom of the Father, and whom the Father heareth always, offers to the Father as what He knows to be according to the Father's will, which, receiving the Father's acknowledg- ment as accepted by Him, is sealed to us as the true and perfect response of the Son to the Father's heart and mind in relation to man, the perfect doing of His will — the perfect declaring of His name. In the light of w^hat God thus accepted when Christ through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, we see the ultimate ground — the ultimate foundation in God — for that peace with God which we have in Christ. I say the ultiviate ground in God for that peace with God which we have in our Lord Jesus Christ ; for, while the immediate ground is the atonement thus present to our faith, that is to say, the purpose as fulfilled which our Lord expressed, when coming to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, He said, " Lo, I come to do thy will, O God ;" yet clearly it is, that eternal will itself \Ai\Qh He thus came to do, and which by doing it the Son has revealed, even that nai?ie of God which the Son has declared^ which is itself the ultimate peace arid rest of our spirits. In this full light of the atonement our first conviction is, that in this divine transaction in humanity through which we have the remission of our sins and the gift of eternal life, there has been nothing arbitrary. We see a righteous and necessary relation bet^veen the remission of our sins and Christ's expiatory confession as the due and adequate confession of them — a perfect expiation in that it was divine, — perfect in relation to us in that it was human. We see a righteous and necessary relation between the gift of eternal life, and Christ's righteousness j 154 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT God's delight in that righteousness in humanity justifying to us the Son's offering it, and the Father's accepting it on behalf of man to be the righteousness of man. We see further that what is thus offered on our behalf is so offered by the Son and so accepted by the Father, entirely with the prospective purpose that it is to be repro- duced in us. The expiatory confession of our sins which we have been contemplating is to be shared in by our- selves : to accept it on our behalf was to accept it as that mind in relation to sin in the fellowship of which we are to come to God. The righteous trust in the Father, that following Him as a dear child walking in love which we have been contemplating as Christ's righteousness, is to be shared in by us : to accept it on our behalf as the righteousness of man, was to accept it as what pleases God in man, — what alone can please God in man,— there- fore as that in the fellowship of which we are to draw near and live that life which is in God's favour. In the light of the atonement this is seen clearly ; and the light, as our eyes become able to bear it, reconciles us to itself. We soon are thankful that what God has accepted for us in Christ, is also what God has given to us in Christ. As to our past sins, we not only see that the atonement presented to our faith is far more honour- ing to the righteous law of God against which we had sinned than any penal infliction for our sins, whether endured by another for us, or endured by ourselves in abiding misery, could have been ; but are further able to accept, as a most welcome part of the gift of God in Christ, the power to confess our sins with an Amen to Christ's confession of them, true and deep in the measure in which we partake in His Spirit. We are contented and thankful to begin our new life with partaking in the mind of Christ concerning our old life, and feel the confession of our sins to be the side on which the life of holiness is nearest to us, the form in which it naturally becomes ours, and in which it must first be tasted by us : for holiness, truth, righteousness, love must first dawn in us as confes- sions of. sin. So we welcome the fellowship of the mind OF THE ATONEMENT. 155 in which Christ, by the grace of God, tasted death for every man as the first breathing of that Hfe which comes to us through His death. As to our interest in the right- eousness of Christ, we see that God's acceptance of that righteousness on behalf of man, with the purpose of im- parting it to man, is more glorifying to the divine delight in righteousness than any other conception that has been entertained ; while we also feel the confidence toward the Father which we cherish in receiving Christ as our life to be the only confidence towards God which can meet ahke the desires of His heart for us, and the need of our own spirits as God's offspring. And thus we are in a light in which all drawing of us by the Father to the Son, — that is to say, all testifying to our spirits by the Father of our spirits that He has given to us eternal life in His Son, — comes to us as the personal application to ourselves of that eternal will of God which we have seen revealed in Christ's dealing with the Father on our behalf. This dra\nng is felt to accord with, and to be interpreted by, the oftering of the Son, and the acceptance of that offering by the Father ; and as our faith realises the work of atonement, — Christ's confession of our sins, Christ's presentation of His own righteousness in humanity in relation to us, and the Father's acceptance of both on our behalf, — we are more and more able to understand and to believe the testimony of God in the Spirit, that God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son. In proportion as the light of the divine counsel thus strengthens to us, and in proportion to the growing awakenedness of our spirits to the proper consciousness of God's offspring and realisation of what the divine fatherliness must be, — what it must desire,— what alone can be satisfying to it, — we come to see the work of redemption in the light of our ultimate and root relation to God as the Father of spirits, with whom abides the fountain of life. We see that, however we had departed from God, our true well-being continued to be, and must ever continue to be, so bound up in what God is to us in 156 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT Himself, and what the aspect of our mind is towards Him, as that nothing external to this, — nothing in God's outward dealing with us, — nothing that He can give or we can receive, — nothing that is not included in the state of our own spirits towards God, and the response in our own hearts to that which is in His heart towards us, — can be our salvation. I have noticed above how much we may deceive our- selves if we expect that light from the typical sacrifices under the law which can only be shed upon us by the antitype itself. But there is an error from which these services might have saved men, which yet has been fallen into. What these services present to us as the picture of God's spiritual kingdom is, a temple and a worship, — the participation in that worship being the good set forth, disqualification for that worship the evil, — and sacrifices, and participation in these sacrifices, the means of deliverance from that evil and participation in that good. Not to deliver from punishment, but to cleanse -fand purify for worship, was the blood of the victim shed. Not the receiving of any manner of reward for righteous- ness, but the being holy and accepted worshippers, was the benefit received through being sprinkled with the victim's blood. In the light of this centre idea of worship, therefore, are we to see the sprinkling of all things with blood, and the remission of sins to which this related. Accordingly, when we pass from the type to the anti- type, we find worship the great good set forth to us, — that worship in spirit and in truth which the heart of the Father craves for, — that worship which is sonship, — the response of the heart of the Son to the heart of the Father. We find the disqualification for worship to be not a mere fact of guilt, but the carnal mind which is enmity against God, — the law in man's members warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into cap- tivity to the law of sin that is in his members. We find that when the Son of God came to be the needed victim, and to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, He OF THE ATONEMENT. f57 indicated the nature and virtue of His contemplated sacrifice by the words, " Lo, I come to do thy will, O God;" so that by this will it is that we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Christ, — the blood shed for the remission of sins being the blood of Christ, who, through the eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God, which purges the conscience from dead works to serve the living God, Thus we are taught the strictly moral and spiritual relation of the sacrifice to the worship, we see the fitness of the blood shed to fit the spirits which shall be washed in it to partake in that worship, we see the mind of Christ, which is in that blood, to be that mind in the light of which and in the fellowship of which the worshipper will cry, Abba, Father. Finally, we see why the High Priest and the head of this worship is the Son of God ; and why His relation to the worshippers is not " the law of a carnal commandment," — not a mere insti- tution or arrangement, but a spiritual relation, viz. " the power of an endless life," — so that He is their High Priest in that He is their life. All this, while it accords with the place of sacrifices under the law, is to us, when we see it in the light of. our relation to God as the Father of our spirits, of theA nature of necessary truth ; that is to say, we see that that ^ access to God which shall indeed be to us a way into the holiest, must accord with the spiritual constitution of our being, with the nature of holiness, and with the nature of the separation from God which sin causes ; therefore, that no permission or authority to come to God can be of any avail to us, apart from the mind in which alone he who has sinned can in truth draw near to God ; and this mind we see is just that into which the sinner enters in the Amen of faith to the voice that is in the blood of Christ, viz. Christ's confession of our sins. In the faith of God's acceptance of that confession on our behalf, we receive strength to say Amen to it, — to join in it — and, joining in it, we find it a living way to God ; and at the same time we feel certain that there is no other way, — 158 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT that we get near to God just in the measure in which in the Spirit of Christ we thus livingly adopt His confession of our sins, — in this measure and no further. Permission to draw near to God, seen thus in the Hght of the mind in which to draw near, — that is to say, the remission of our sins seen in connection with Christ's confession of our sins, — this is the way of Ufe open before us ; — a way which is to our faith a part of the gift of eternal Ufe. For though the right feeUngs for us to cherish, though the suitable feelings in which to approach to God, and in truth, the only feelings in which the consciousness of having sinned can coexist with the experience of communion with God, still these feelings altogether belong to the Son of God, — to the Spirit of sonship, — and are possible to us only in the fellowship of the Son's confidence in the Father's fatherly forgiveness, being quickened in us by the faith of that fatherly forgive- ness, as uttered in God's acceptance of Christ's confession and intercession on our behalf. I have above insisted upon the importance of the difference between a legal standing and a filial standing, and on the necessity, in considering the nature of the atonement, of keeping continually in view that in re- deeming us who were under the law the divine purpose was that we should receive the adoption of sons. This necessity is becoming, I trust, more and more clear as we proceed. The virtue required in the blood of Christ is seen to be necessarily spiritual — a power to influence the spirits washed in it by faith, when our need is seen as the need of those whose life lies in God's favour, whose well-being must consist in communion with God, whose salvation is joining in that worship of God which is in spirit and in truth. And the spiritual virtue needed is determined to be the law of the Spirit of the life that is in Christ, the life of sonship, when it is understood that the worship in spirit and in truth is that which the Father seeketh as the Father, — the worship which is sonship, that of which the son is High Priest and head. But it further appears to me, that this conception of the OF THE ATONEMENT. 159 worship for which the blood of Christ is to quaUfy, sheds back a Hght on the atonement, in which we are justified in saying that Christ's confession of our sin was not only the expiation due to the righteous law of God, but also the expiation due to the fatherly heart of God. To speak of an atonement as due to the fatherly heart of God is foreign to our habits of mind on the subject of atonement. Yet I beUeve that in proportion as we see the expiation that is in Christ's confession of man's sin to be that which has truly met the demand of the divine righteousness, we must see that the filial spirit that was in that confession, and which necessarily took into account what our being rebellious children was to the Father's heart, constituted \hQ perfection of the expiation. This is no uncalled for refinement of thought. The pardon which we need is the pardon of the Father of our spirits, — the way into the holiest which we need is the way into our Father's heart; and therefore, the blood of Christ which hath consecrated such a way for us, must have power to cleanse our spirits from that spiritual pollution which defiles rebellious children, that is to say, must contain the new mind in which it pertains to rebellious children to return to the Father. And this consideration manifestly confirms the view now taken of the atonement. In proportion as it is seen that that which expiates sin must be something that meets a demand of the divine righteousness, the superiority of a moral and spiritual atonement, consist- ing in the right response from humanity to the divine mind in relation to sin, becomes clear. But that supe- riority is surely rendered still more unequivocal when, from the conception of God as the righteous ruler, we ascend to that of God as the Father of spirits. It is then that we fully realise that there is no real fitness to atone for sin in penal sufferings, whether endured by ourselves or by another for us. Most clearly to the Father's feelings such sufferings would be no atonement ; and yet are not these the feelings which call for an i6o PROSPECTIVE ASPECT atonement, — is it not to them that expiation is most righteously due ? And [ would ask some attention to this question, because I know that weakness has been supposed to be introduced into our conceptions of the divine require- ments, by giving prominence to the idea that God is our Father. Those who have this impression, and who fear the weakening of our sense of the divine authority, through giving the root place in our system to our relation to God as the Father of our spirits, would say, "It is the righteous ruler and judge who calls for an atonement, not the Father ; the Father would receive us without an atonement." Certainly, such an atonement as they have before their minds in saying this, would be no response to any demand that we can ascribe to the Father's heart, — as neither, indeed, I believe would it be to any demand which, in the light of the divine righteous- ness, we can ascribe to the Judge of all the earth. But this associating of moral weakness, and, as it were, easiness^ with the idea of the fatherliness that is in God, is altogether an error ; neither should any place be given to it. " If ye call on the Father^ who, without respect of persons, judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear." The Father's heart did demand an atoning sacrifice. Is not this clear, if the worship in relation to which the victim's blood was shed is, indeed, sonship? The Father's heart did de- mand the shedding of blood in order to the remission of sins, because it demanded blood in which justice would be rendered to the fatherliness which had been sinned against, and which, therefore, would have virtue in it to purge our spirits from their unfilial state, and to purify us in respect of the pollution that attaches to us as rebellious children. We might, indeed, say that the Father's heart asked for an atonement for our sin, simply on the ground that it desired us back to itself, and therefore, desired a living way of return for us, and one related in its nature to the nature of our departure, in order that our return might OF THE ATONEMENT. i6i be a real return; and that such a way could only be that which was opened by the Son of God, when He confessed the sins of God's rebellious children as the Son, who abides ever in the bosom of the Father, alone could: for He, indeed, alone could know the exceeding sinfulness of our sins, and feel regarding them in that mind, the fellowship of which would be to us our purga- tion from them. But this moral and spiritual impossi- bility of our returning to the Father of our spirits, except on such a path as this which Christ has opened for us through the rent veil of His flesh, and in the power of that endless life in which He is related to us as our High Priest over the house of God, — this impossibility in respect of the very constitution of our spiritual being, can only be the counterpart of a necessity in the divine nature, in respect of which, the right feelings of the Father of spirits must be conceived of as demanding that expiation which we are now contemplating, render- ing it impossible that He should receive us with welcome and acknowledgment, if coming by any other path than the fellowship of that expiation. God's righteous glory in us, no less than our special and peculiar blessedness in God as redeemed sinners, implies that in our con- sciousness in drawing near to God, our future shall not be cut off from our past. Therefore, that is not to be in time or in eternity ; nor is our life of sonship in its highest development to be without the element of the remembrance, that we did not from the first cry Abba, Father ; " Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Father ; to Him be glory and dominion, for ever and ever. Amen." We may say, that without the shedding of the blood of Christ, the Father of spirits could not receive back to the bosom of His love His rebellious children, as well as that without the shedding of the blood of Christ, it was morally and -U spiritually impossible for them to return. For these, indeed, are but two aspects of one spiritual truth. What I thus labour to impress on the mind of my CAMPB. M i62 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT reader is, that the necessity for the atonement which we are contemplating, was moral and spiritual, arising out of our relation to God as the Father of spirits ; and not merely legal, arising out of our being under the law. In truth, its existence as a legal necessity arose out of its existence as a moral and spiritual necessity ; therefore, the legal difficulty is to be contemplated as what could be, and has been, removed only in connection with, and because of, the removal of the spiritual difficulty. In other words, we have remission of our sins in the blood of Christ, only because that blood has consecrated for us a way into the holiest, and in this relation, and in this alone, can remission of sins be understood. Therefore, it is altogether an error to associate weak- ness and easiness with the fatherliness of God, and severity and stern demand with His character as a moral governor. What severity, what fixedness of righteous demand has to be calculated upon, is to be seen as first in the Father, and then in the moral governor, because in the Father. And, although there had been in the universe but one moral being related to God as each of us is, and though God should be contemplated in His dealing with that individual being as acting exclusively as the Father of that spirit, seeking to realise the yearning of His fatherly heart in relation to that spirit, — the necessity for the atonement would, as respected that individual, have been still what it has been ; nor could the fulfilment of the Father's desire for that one man have been possible, otherwise than through the opening of that fountain for sin and for uncleanness which is presented to our faith in the shedding of Christ's blood. And I never expect to see the real righteous severity of God truly and healthfully realised, and the unchangeable and essential conditions of salvation apprehended, and hope cherished only in being conformed to them, until the blood of Christ is thus seen in its direct relation to our participation in eternal life. So far is it from being the case, that giving the root place to our relation to God as the fountain of life and the Father of spirits, and subordinating the relation in which OF THE ATONEMENT. 163 we stand to Him as a Lawgiver and as a Sovereign, — so far is this from introducing weakness into our conceptions of the moral and spiritual laws of the kingdom of God, that it is the seeing the Father in the Son, and the desire of the Father for us realised in the Son, which ultimately and absolutely shuts us up to the faith, that there is for us but one path of life, because but one path to the Father. " I am the way, the truth, and the life ; no man cometh unto the Father but by me." These words of the Son, who dwelleth in the bosom of the Father, heard as shed- ding light on the kingdom of God, reveal a fixed and immutable constitution of things. No words can be more exclusive, more unbending, more remote from all opening of a door to the hope of being easily dealt with, — the hope of experiencing a soft, accommodating indulgence, that in weak tenderness woul bend the divine requirement to what we are. " No man cometh unto the Father but by me," — these words raise us up to a region in which there is, there can be nothing arbitrary. A sovereign Lord and moral governor, appointing laws and enforcing them by the ad- ministration of a system of rewards and punishments, may be contemplated as severe and uncompromising in the ex- ercise of his righteous rule, — but he may also be thought of as merciful and considerate of individual cases ; and the outward and arbitrary nature of the rewards and punishments which he is believed to dispense makes his awarding the former on easier terms, and withholding or mitigating the latter according to circumstances, — and, it may be, under the influence of mercy. — what can be supposed, and what, in thinking of God as such a governor and Lord, and of ourselves as the subjects of His rule, we can turn to the thought of with a vague hope. And such a governor and Lord God is in the ordinary thoughts of men, and such a vague hope towards God is the ordinary hope of men. And on such a conception of their relation to God have men ignorantly engrafted the gospel,— con- ceiving of it as giving a special and definite form to the indefinite combination of judgment and mercy, which has M 2 i64 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT sustained that vague hope of salvation which they had cherished. But the gospel, truly apprehended, raises us into another and a higher region, — a region, indeed, in which divine mercy or clemency, as previously conceived of, is felt to have been but as the dimmest twilight of kindness and goodwill towards men, in comparison of the noonday light of the love of the Father of spirits to His offspring, — but a region also in which no arbitrary dealing with us can find a place. In the light that shines in that region it is clear to us that the relation between the blessedness that is seen there and the rightness that is recognised there is fixed and immutable. So that the liberty which, in the lower region, we ascribed to mercy, is here found not to belong to love ; nor the discretion which we ventured to attribute to the righteous governor, found to pertain to the loving Father ; but, on the con- trary, the law of the Father — the principle on which happiness is dispensed by Him to His offspring as His offspring — is found to be fixed and altogether unbending, incapable of accommodation in a way of pity, or indulgence, or consideration of circumstances. " No man cometh unto the Father but by the Son." All modification of this law is impossible ; for sonship and fatherliness are mutually related in an eternal relation. The Father as the Father, can only receive His offspring to Himself as coming to Him in the spirit of sonship ; — neither other- wise than as coming in the spirit of sonship can they in spirit and in truth draw near to Him. I have spoken of a way into the holiest as what must have its nature determined by the nature of holiness ; so a way to the Father must have its nature determined by the nature of fatherliness. These are two aspects of one spiritual reality ; a reality, reader, which we must stead- fastly contemplate, to the certainty and fixedness of which we must be reconciled, — a reality in the light of which we must see the free pardon of sin and redeeming love, and all the divine mercy to us sinners which the gospel reveals. In that lower moral region to which I have referred, in which men are not dealing with the Father of spirits but OF THE ATONEMENT. 165 with the moral governor of the universe (but whose moral government, while thus not illumined by the light of His fatherhness, is never understood), we may be occupied with the punishment of sin and the rewards of righteous- ness, in a way that permits us to connect the atonement directly with the idea of punishment and reward, and in- vests it simply with the interest of that desire to escape punishment and to be assured of happiness, which may, even in the lowest spiritual state, be strong and lively in us. But if we will come to the atonement, not venturing in our darkness to predetermine anything as to its nature, but expecting light to shine upon our spirits from it, even the light of eternal life ; if we will suffer it to inform us by its own light why we needed it, and what its true value to us is, \hQ pufiishment of sin will fall into its proper place as testifying to the existence of an evil greater than itself, even si?i; from which greater evil it is the direct object of the atonement to deliver us, — deliverance from punishment being but a secondary result. And the reward of righteous- ness will be raised in our conceptions from the character of something that can be ours by the adjudication of the judge on arbitrary grounds which mercy may recommend, to its true dignity as that blessedness which is essentially inherent in righteousness, and in that glorifying and en- joying of God of which righteousness alone is the capacity, and which no name, nor title, nor arbitrary arrangement can confer. The atonement, thus seen by its own light, is not what in our darkness we desired ; but it soon reconciles us to itself, for it sets us right as to the true secret of well being. A spiritual constitution of things that would have been more accommodating to what we were through sin, we soon see as precluded alike by the nature of God, — and the nature of man in its relation to the nature of God, — a relation, to violate which would not be the salvation but the destruction of man. We, indeed, see ourselves encompassed by necessities, instead of flexible, compro- mising weak tendernesses ; but they are necessities to which we are altogether reconciled, for we are reconciled i66 PROSPECTIVE ASPECT, ^c. to God. One has said, " It is a profitable sweet necessity to be forced on the naked arm of Jehovah." That "no man cometh to the Father but by the Son " is the great and all-including necessity that is revealed to us by the atonement. But, as combined with the gift of the Son to us as the living way to the Father, we rejoice to find ourselves shut up to " so great salvation." i67 CHAPTER VIII. FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED A^D NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION AS DETERMINING THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT AND THE FORM OF THE GRACE OF GOD TO MAN. I HAVE said that the character of the Mosaic institutions, as commented upon in the Epistle to the Hebrews, ought to have saved us from the" direct connecting of the atone- ment with the subject of rewards and punishments, and more especially from that direct connecting of forgiveness through the blood of Christ with exemption from punish- ment which has so prevailed, seeing that the blood of the victim was intended to purify and cleanse for participation in worship. In this light as to the relation of the sacrifice to worship, and seeing the worship typified to be that worship which is sonship, we see how perfectly that which our Lord taught in saying, " No man cometh unto the Father but by me " — meaning to fix the attention of His disciples on what He Himself was in their sight as the revealer of the Father by the manifested life of sonship, — accords with the elements of confidence in drawing near to God, which the Apostle enumerates in exhorting men to " draw near in the full assurance of faith, having their hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and their bodies washed with pure water." That our Lord and the Apostle must have contemplated the same thing as the due and accepted worship we cannot doubt. But it is only when we understand that the shedding of the blood of Christ had direct reference to our relation to God as the Father of our spirits, and to the opening of a way in which we as rebellious children can return to the bosom of the Father's 1 68. FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED love, according to the truth of what the Father is, and what sonship is, that we see that " having boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He hath consecrated for us through the veil, that is to say His flesh, and having an High Priest over the house of God," is the same thing with the Son of God being to us a living way to the Father. The doctrinal form of thought which the language of the Apostle presents, would probably have been more difficult of apprehension to the disciples, who had yet to learn that " it behoved Christ first to suffer and afterwards to enter into His glory," than even their Lord's language as to their own favoured position as the chosen compa- nions of the path of Him who could say, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Yet, afterwards, they could look back and see the identity of what they subsequently learned with what had been presented to their faith in their personal acquaintance with Christ. These disciples, indeed, knew not then the form which the work of redemption must take in being perfected, but they had received under the Lord's personal ministry that spiritual teaching, for the want of which, no familiarity with the full record of the finished work of Christ can compensate, and in the absence of which, our study of that record never is safe ; for already they were fit subjects for that high testimony from their Lord, " They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world ;" they had received the Son as coming to them in the Father's name, and that was quickened in them which was according to the truth of our relation to God as the Father of our spirits. Their attraction to their Master was that they felt that He "had the words of eternal life;" — their cry was, "Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us ;" and so, when the true worship, of which their temple service had been a type, was subsequently clearly revealed to them as that worship which is sonship, and when they learned distinctly to contemplate the heart of the Father as the Holy of Holies, they were prepared to know the Son of God as both the sacrifice and the High Priest. AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 169 This unity of their recollections of the Lord as they knew Him so nearly, with the light that afterwards shone to them in His blood shed for the remission of sins, and in His relation to them as the High Priest over the house of God, is illustrated to us by that opening of the first Epistle of John which has already engaged our attention. The fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ, which the Apostle had entered into in receiving the knowledge of eternal life, we have already noticed. This divine fellowship he proceeds at the 5th verse to speak of as calling Him to declare to men as the divine message — the Gospel — " that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." This statement in the connection in which it is made has clearly the same fixedness of character, as respects the terms of grace and the way of salvation, which we have seen in the Saviour's own words, " No man cometh unto the Father but by me." For he adds, " If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we He, and do not the truth : but if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another." This is, indeed, but the same spiritual law or necessity elsewhere declared in the words, " there is no communion between light and darkness." But the experimental character of the Apostle's language as used by one claiming to have the fellowship with God of which he speaks — fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ, — claiming through knowledge of Christ both to know that God is light, and to be walking in that light, and making His own experience in this spiritual region known to us with the purpose and hope of our coming into the fellowship of it, and so being saved; — this brings the truth that " there is no communion between light and darkness" — very near to us — very home to us : the felt unity of what the disciples came to know, when they came to understand that "it behoved Christ to suffer and afterwards to enter into His glory," with what had been presented to their faith in the life of Christ, and what their Lord had commended to them as the light of life when he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life : no I70 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED man cometh unto the Father, but by me," coming fully out in the words which follow, " If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.'' Not surely — what I fear these words too often suggest — a cleansing having reference to our exposure to the punishment of sin, but a cleansing having reference to the pollution of sin itself Not, therefore, a cleansing spoken of in a legal sense, and as something over and above the spiritual cleansing implied in walking in the light of God and having fellowship with God, but a cleansing hav- ing effect in that fellowships and which is referred to as explainijig that fellowship, explaining how it comes to pass in a way that gives the glory of that fellowship to the blood of Christ in which such cleansing power is found. For we cannot doubt that the power to cleanse which here the words, " the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth from all sin," declare, is the same that is contemplated where it is said, " If the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, 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, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God ?" To say that the blood of Christ " cleanseth us from all sin," and to say that it " purges the conscience from dead works, to serve the living God, are but different ways of declaring the spiritual power of the atonement when apprehended by faith, — asserting its fitness for being partaken in by us as the mind of Christ in relation to our sin. And so the words are added in relation to our own participation in Christ's expiatory confession of our sin, " If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." So he proceeds to speak of Christ as our advocate with the Father, and the propitiation for our sins : " My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not," AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 171 for he has been shutting them up to a salvation which is walking in the light of God, and is fellowship with God. And that they may feel the reasonableness of proposing to them " that they sin not," he reminds them that " if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous ;" and that " He is the propitiation for our sins." Of course, if any man sin and then find comfort in remembering that he has an advocate with the Father, this implies that with the thought of that advocate will rise the thought of the pardon of sin ; but it is clear that the pardon of sin is here rather implied than expressed, for the value and use of the advocate directly contemplated is His value to those who are called "not to sin ;" therefore is the " righteousness'' of the advocate that on which attention is fixed : for he is made of God unto us righteousness, and righteousness is in Him for us as the sap is in the vine for the branch. On the ground of the sap that is in the vine, therefore, are the branches here exhorted to bear fruit; which also determines the hght in which the Saviour is contemplated when it is added, " He is the propitiation for our sins ;" and that this is spoken in direct reference to Christ's righteousness , and the fitness of that righteousness to meet the need ot the sinner as being deliverance from sin. In other words, Christ is the propitiation for our sins as He is the way into the holiest — the living way to the Father. And He is the propitiation : for propitiation is not a thing which He has accomplished and on which we are thrown back as on a past fact. He is the propitiation. Propitiation for us sinners, — reconciliation to God, — oneness with God abides in Christ. When we sin, and so separate ourselves from God, if we would return and not continue in sin we must remember this. For it is in this view that the Apostle, writing to us " that we sin not," reminds us of the propitiation — not a work of Christ, but the living Christ Himself: and so he proceeds — " Hereby we do know that we know Him if we keep His com- mandments :" the direct effect of knowing Christ the propitiation for sin being keeping Christ's commandments. 172 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED And because of the power to keep Christ's commandments, which is ours in Christ as the propitiation for our sins, the Apostle, in words similar to those which he had just used with reference to the claim to fellowship with God who is light, adds, " He that saith I know Him," that is Christ the propitiation for our sins, "and keepeth not his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth His word, in him verily is the love of God perfected," — the end of this gift of love accomplished. " Hereby know we that we are in Him. He that saith he abiddh in Him ought himself also so to walk even as He walked:' We need not then be uncertain what the reference is in which the " righteousness" of the Advocate with the Father is here contemplated, or doubt that, by abiding in Christ is here meant, that abiding in which the branch receives the sap of the vine, that it may bear fruit. And yet I know that this directness of relation between knowing Christ as the propitiation for our sins, and walking as He walked, some may deny, and that, retaining that meaning for the word "propitiation" which the concep- tion of an atonement as substituted penal suffering has given to it, it may be said that it is as a motive to gratitude, because of the deliverance from punishment through the sufferings of Christ, that a moral power is here ascribed to Christ's being the propitiation for our sins. The impression of directness in this matter, that is, of direct dealing with sin itself as the evil, and of recognition of Christ as the deliverer from sin, which not only the verses I have quoted but the whole Epistle gives, is, however, so strong that I cannot but hope that, in spite of associations of old standing, I may not in vain have directed the reader's attention to it. And, with a similar hope, though with the same knowledge that deep-rooted associations stand in the way, I would now take the reader to a parallel passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews. I refer to the 2nd chapter, verses 17, 18, "Wherefore in all things it behoved Him to be made like unto his brethren, that He might be a AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION 173 merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciUation for the sins of the people. For in that He Himself hath suffered being tempted, He is able to succour them that are tempted." To succour us when we are tempted is manifestly to do for us that very- service which I have just represented the Apostle John as leading those to whom he writes "that they sin not," to expect from that righteous Advocate with the Father, who is the propitiation for our sins. For this service of love, Christ is here represented as fitted, in that He Himself hath suffered, being tempted— as there by being righteous. Both thoughts are combined when it is said, that, " He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin." Now, going back from the i8th verse to the 17th (the i8th " For," &c. being given as the justification of the comfort offered in the 17th), it is clear, that "making recon- ciliation for the sins of the people," is the same thing with " succouring us when we are tempted," — in other words, is a dealing with our spirits as worshipping God — calling Him Father, in a way of merciful and faithful aid, such as the High Priest, who is related to us according to the power of an endless life — the Son of God, in whom we have eternal hfe, — has been qualified for ministering to us through having " been made in all things hke unto His brethren." I know that this view of making reconciliation for our sins as being the ministering to us a present help, according to our spiritual need, — enabling us to be at peace with God spiritually, and therefore, truly, — en- abling us to worship God, who is a spirit, in spirit and in truth — is not that usually taken. And that thus to inter- pret Christ's making reconciliation by the reference made to His experience of our conditions as what has qualified Him for this office of an High Priest, is as great a depar- ture from prevailing associations with the sacred language, as there is in the view just taken of what is taught when Christ is said to l^e the propitiation for our sins. Yet there is no case in which there is, to my mind, a more painful illustration of the power of system than in the way in 174 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED which the i8th verse has seemed to have been lost sight of in fixing the meaning of the 17th, and in which, indeed, I may say the tone of the 17 th itself as a whole has been misunderstood. If the interpretation of the expressions, *' propitiation " and " reconciliation," now adopted in harmony with the view taken of the nature of the atonement, commends itself to the reader, he will be prepared to receive a corresponding interpretation of the expression " peace," as applied to Christ, when He is said, to be " our peace," —making it equivalent to His claim to being the only " way to the Father." Eph. ii. 14. In the teaching by which the Saviour comforted the disciples in the near prospect of His being taken from them, we find Him, in words referred to already, en- couraging them by the prospect of passing through the trials that awaited them in the fellowship of the inward consolation by which they had seen their Lord Himself sustained in all they had seen Him pass through. " Peace," says He, " I leave with you, my peace I give unto you." That He could speak to them of His own peace has been already noticed as a part of the perfection of His witnessing for the Father. That He could promise to them the fellowship of that peace which He thus claims as His own has been also already noticed as one of the forms in which He made them to know that the life of sonship which they witnessed in Him was in Him the Father's gift to them. If they were to be sons of God in Spirit and in truth, the peace of the Son in following the Father as a dear child would be their portion also. Further, as they were to live the life of sonship, not as independent beings, following the example of the Son of (iod, but as abiding in the Son of God, as branches in the true vine, this peace which He bequeathed to them they were not to have apart from Himself. In abiding in Him were they to have it as a part of the fullness that was in Him for them — a part of the all things pertaining to life and to godliness. " In me ye shall have peace." Thus are we to understand the word " peace '■ in the promises of the AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION 175 Lord to the disciples before His departure ; thus are we to understand it when, on those occasions on which He appeared to them between His resurrection and ascen- sion, still further to comfort their hearts and to strengthen them for what was before them, He stood in the midst of them and said, " Peace be unto you ; as the Father hath sent me, even so send I you." Doubtless, thus also are we to understand the " peace " intended in the apostolic prayer and benediction, " Grace be unto you, and peace from God the Farther, and from the Lord Jesus Christ." Nor has the word any other meaning than this in the song of the heavenly host at the nativity, " Glory to God in the highest ; on earth peace, and goodwill toward men." Now the reader is prepared to understand that in accord- ance with the nature of the atonement as now represented, it is the same peace, the peace of sonship, the peace that is "from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ ;" being peace " in fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ," — it is this same peace that I understand to be the peace spoken of when it is said that Christ '■ is our peace." The parallelism of the 2nd chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, with the portion of the loth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, considered above, is obvious. The language of the temple service is not so closely adhered to, nor is salvation so exclusively contemplated as the condition of true and accepted worship ; for with the idea of " a holy temple," is united that of " citizen- ship," and a " household," verses 19, 20, 21, 22 ; but the summing up of the evil of the siate in which the gospel had found the Ephesians. in the words " without God in the world," verse 12, — the setting forth, as the grace revealed to them, their being " made nigh by the blood of Christ," — the purpose ascribed to Christ, to reconcile us to God, by slaying the enmity ; — all express the same conception of the evil of man's state as a sinner as con- sisting in his spiritual distance from God, and of the salvation revealed in the gospel as consisting in spiritual nearness to God. In this connection the peace which 176 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED Christ is said to be^ and which is said to be preached to men, can only be understood to be a spiritual peace with God — a spiritual destruction of the previous enmity, — a spiritual reality present in the humanity of Christ, and proclaimed to men as the gift of God to them in Christ, — one with the way into the holiest, which He has opened up for us, — the way to the Father, which He is to us. And this spiritual conception of the peace spoken of, sug- gested by the tone of the whole passage as what alone accords with the spiritual realities of distance from God and nearness to God, is sealed to us as the true concep- tion by the explanatory words of the i8th verse. " For through Him we both have access by one spirit unto the Father." " For," that is to say, because of this condition of things, viz. our having, both Jew and Gentile, through Christ, access by one spirit unto the Father, — therefore, is peace preached to us, for in this is peace for us. Looking more closely into the passage, there is a com- plication foreign to our present purpose introduced by the mention of Jew and Gentile. This has arisen from its being an Epistle to Gentiles, But we see that the Apostle is taking us deeper than the distinction between Jew and Gentile. He is taking us down to our common humanity, and presenting to our faith the Son of God by one work doing away with the separation between Jew and Gentile, and reconciling both Jew and Gentile — all humanity — unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby. Paul says to the Galatians, " We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law ; for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." So here he takes the Ephesians to the contemplation of that dealing of the Son with the Father on behalf of all humanity, in which Jew and Gentile were alike interested, and in which they must alike see their interest if they would see the veil rent that separated them from each other, and separated them AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 177 from God ; for indeed, the veil is one and the same that separates man from God, and that separates man from man. I will not anticipate that tracing of the atonement in connexion with the actual history of our Lord's work to its close on the cross which I contemplate, and by which I hope the view I am presenting of the nature of the atonement will be felt to be illustrated and confirmed. In no view of the atonement can the crucifixion be separated from th.e previous life of which it was the close. Yet, it is only the view now taken that identifies the peace to which our Lord was conscious throughout His own life on earth, and which He promised to His disciples, with the peace which He fully accomplished and vmdicated for humanity in that death on the cross, which was the perfecting of the Lord's work of redemption, the per- fected fulfilUng of the purpose, " Lo, I come to do thy will, O God," the perfecting of His declaration of the Father's name. But the gospel does not proclaim two manners of peace with God : one legal, the result of Christ's bearing the penalty of our sins ; the other spiritual, to be known in our participation in Christ's spirit. That oneness of mind with the Father in the aspect of the divine mind towards man, which was fully developed and perfected in humanity in the Son of God when His con- fession of the Father before men, and His dealing with the Father on behalf of men, were perfected on the cross, — this was that divine and spiritual peace for man in His relation to God, which is to be contemplated, first, as in its own nature and essence spiritual; and then, becaise spiritual, also legal, — a perfect answer to all the demands of the law of God, — a perfect justification of God in regard to the grace in which we stand. And thus was the atonement adequate to whatever victory of Christ on our behalf is implied in His " leading captivity captive," when " through death destroying him that had the power of death, that is, the devil ; and de- livering them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." Hebrews ii. 14, 15. The power of evil adverse to us to which this language refers CAMPB. N 178 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED we imperfectly understand. Definite conceptions of the manner of our bondage we have not beyond this, that " the strength of sin was the law." But, if the honour regarded as done to the law by the death of Christ conceived of as implying the enduring of penal infliction for our sins, have seemed a sufficient explanation of the power thus ascribed to Christ's cross, how infinitely more adequate to the results accomplished, because infinitely more honouring to the law of God, and a real living dealing with that in the heart of the Father of spirits to which the law refers, is the moral and spiritual atonement of which the cross was the perfecting ! Christ said to Pilate, " Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it Were given thee from above ;" and this we know of all subordinate power, wherever present, for " power belongeth to God alone." Therefore has the power ascribed to the accuser of the brethren — our adversary the devil — been always, and rightly regarded, as what could only rest upon the fixed- ness of that moral constitution of things of which the law is the formal expression, and our rebellion against which had given him advantage over us. But the root of that constitution of things is the fatherliness of the P'ather of our spirits : nothing, therefore, could truly honour that constitution which did not do due honour to that father- liness in which it has its root ; while that fatherliness being duly honoured, the law must of necessity have been therein honoured, and with the highest honour, While, therefore, that formal literal meeting of the 'demands of the law which men have seen in Christ has been to them the spoiling of the power of the devil, because it was a meeting of the law seen simply as the law: in the light in which we are now contemplating the work ot redemption, it is the Son's dealing in humanity directly with the fatherliness that is in God — and so dealing with the violation of the 1 iw in relation to the ultimate desire of the heart of the Father, who gave the law — by which we see ourselves, who were under the law, redeemed, that we might receive the adoption of sons ; this true doing of the Father's will by the Son, and not a mere literal ful- AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 179 filling of the law, being the spiritual might by which our captivity is seen to be led captive. This deliverance wrought out for all humanity, — the peace accomplished on the cross, — is. in respect of its being ^rj-/ spiritual, and then^ as a cofisequence^ legal, in striking accordance with the order that is observed in our individual participation in it. " Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into con demnation, but is passed from death unto life." John v. 24. But to this order men do not easi'y conform. There is a state of mind in which it will be asked, " If the relation of the atonement to our participation in the life of Christ be thus direct and immediate, — if it be such as necessitates our giving a moral, a spiritual meaning as distinguished from a mere legal meaning, to the expressions, ' peace with God ' ' reconciliation with God,' ' propitiation for sin,' — if the immediate and only natural reflection in seeing the pardon of our sins as the gospel reveals it, be, that we are free to draw near to God, to join in the services of the true sanctuary, and in the spirit of sonship to have communion with our heavenly Father, — if Christ's suffering for us, the just for the unjust, thus simply suggest the purpose of bringing us to God, — then is the gospel to us sinners the good news which it claims to be? The wrath of God has been revealed against all unrighteousness of men ; we are sinners under condemnation, — our first need is pardon, as a discharge from the sentence upon us. Granting that our true well-being is to be ultimately found in peace and reconciliation in the spiritual sense of the words, have we not at first need of peace and reconciliation in a legal sense ? Our fears of wrath may not be holy feelings, or what pertain to the divine life in man ; but are they not natural, allowable, nay, right feelings in us sinners ? And if they are, are they not to be taken account of and must not this be done in the first place ?" I have said above that what of severity is in the moral governor of the universe has its root in the heart of the Father of spirits. We cannot therefore believe in an N 2 i8o FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED atonement that satisfies the heart of the Father — we cannot beheve in blood shed for the remission of our sins, which has power to purge our spirits for that worship which is sonship, — and yet be uncertain whether partaking in the fruit of such an atonement, and joining in this worship, we are still exposed to the righteous wrath of God. If an atonement be adequate morally and spiritually, it will of necessity be legally adequate. If it be sufficient in relation to our receiving the adoption of sons, it must be sufficient for our redemption as under the law. To think otherwise would be to subordinate the gospel to the law, and the love of the Father of spirits to His offspring to that moral government which has its origin in that love. We are not under the law, but under grace. Let us receive this gra- cious constitution of things in the light of the love that has ordained it. Let us understand that He was made sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righ- teousness of God in Him. Let us conform to this purpose of God, — let us receive the righteousness of God in Christ, and ^^the righteousness of God in Him, let us be reconciled to God and we shall find all questions as to our exposure to the wrath of God to have been fully taken into account in that divine counsel which we have welcomed, for we shall understand the experience of the Apostle, — " Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment ; because as He is, so are we in this world." Surely Philip was right when he said, " Shew us the Father, and it sujjiceth us'' Surely we do not know to what we are listening when we are listening to the testi- mony of God concerning His Son, viz., that "God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son," if we can answer, " But if we receive this life to be our life, will that be enough for us ; shall we not need something besides to save us from the wrath to come ? " Oh, my brother, "there is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear." If you are " reconciled to God by the death of His Son," how shall you not be "saved from wrath through Him?" It is, indeed, unbelievable — no man can believe — that receiving Christ AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATIOi as our life, we can feel that His blood does indeed cleanse from all sin, in relation to that worship of God which is in spirit and in truth ; but that we cannot feel secure as engaged in this worship, unless that blood of Christ, under the power of which our spirits have come by- faith, speak to our consciences of penal sufferings endured for us and so assure us that the law has no claim against us. But the difficulty felt is not that of persons seeing the subject from this point of view. One once said to me, when urging on him the evidence for the universaHty of the atonement, in opposition to his own faith of an atone- ment for an election only, — " Were I to beheve that Christ died for all, it would destroy the peace which I have in the faith of the atonement, for this is my peace, — He suffered, therefore I shall not suffer." This was the same idea which we have seen urged on Arminians by Dr. Owen, in that dilemma which appears unanswerable^ on the assumption that the atonement was the enduring of penal suffering by Christ as our substitute. Yet, however inconsistently, and though not in the strong form, — " He suffered, therefore I shall not suffer," — many feel as if they were less obnoxious to suffering, because of the penal suffering which they assume to have been endured by Christ, even when their faith in the universality of the atonement necessarily qualifies their comfort from this source. I do not now recur to the inconsistency which Dr. Owen has so well exposed, but will deal directly with the state of mind which desires, if it does not quite venture to cherish, the peace of saying, " He suffered, therefore I shall not suffer." This state of mind only exists through not seeing our relation to God as a moral governor, in its true surbordi- nation to our relation to Him as the Father of our spirits. I have asked, " Can the moral governor remain unsatisfied if the Father of spirits is satisfied?" The converse of this question is, " Can the moral governor be satisfied while the Father of spirits is not?" To suppose that peace can ever be justifiable on the ground, " He suffered, therefore I shall not suffer," is to answer this question in the affirmativ-^, — it is to suppose that when Christ suffered, 1 82 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED the just for the unjust, the direct end was that the unjust should not suffer. Now we cannot doubt the pain which the exposure of the unjust to suffering was to God, or the desire of His heart to save them from suffering ; but we must not forget that the original reason for connecting sin and misery still continued, that that connexion was not arbitrary, that the wrath of God revealed against all unrighteousness of men was not a feeling that has passed, or could pass away : no revelation of the unchanging God could. Therefore when the just suffered for the unjust, it was with the direct purpose of bringing the unjust to God, — that is bringing the unjust to the obedience of the just, leaving the connexion betwee7i suffering and injustice, or sin, undissolved, the righteousness of that connexion being unchanged. Here we are met by another necessity, corresponding to that already dwelt on as declared in the words, " No man cometh unto the Father but by me." But how could it be otherwise? If departure from the Father be the ultimate root evil, which it was righteousness — the righteousness of love — to visit with wrath, how should deliverance from wrath be experienced otherwise than in returning to the Father, or mercy to those who had departed take any other form than opening for them the way of return ? I have said that the atonement reconciles us to the spiritual necessities, the laws of the kingdom of God which it reveals. We should in our darkness be willing to lose the Father in the moral governor if we could think of the moral governor in a way that would permit to us the feeling of security under His government ; and all the demand that we should make on the fatherliness of the Father of our spirits would be for such mercy as would qualify His moral government and modify it in accommo- dation to what we feel ourselves to be. /But in the light of the atonement which reveals the Father to us in the Son we bless God that not our wishes in our darkness, but God's own fatherliness and our capacity of sonship have determined the nature of the grace extended to us. AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 183 Nor would we now desire to see one terror that is connected with sin separated from it, or one token of the divine displeasure against it withdrawn. For Christ's sufferings have revealed to us the nature, and the depth, and the righteousness of God's wrath against sin, — what our sins are to His heart, and what that mind in relation to sin is to which it is His sole desire in the matter to bring us, and which mind is His gift to us in Christ, in whom it is revealed. Therefore, the pardon of sin in any | other sense than the reveahng, and the opening to us of j the path of hfe, is now to us as undesirable as, in relation i to the moral government of the Father of spirits, it is^ inconceivable. To some whose serious thoughts are occupied with the punishment of sin as an object of terror, rather than with the sin itself on which it is God's mark, this tone may seem high, and, it may be, even presumptuous, and in relation to themselves, unfeeling ; more like the self- congratulation of the pharisee, than the humility of the publican, and sounding like self-righteousness, however it may be but that " giving of thanks at the remembrance of God's holiness " of which the psalmist speaks. Others again, entirely occupied with their own newly-discovered and dimly apprehended exposure to divine wrath, will not venture to judge those on whom they look as more in the light of God than themselves, or to doubt that their professed sympathy in the mind of God towards sin, may be genuine, and consistent with humility, but they are still disposed to say, " Shew us something more suited to our present position, some ground of safety to rest upon — to trust to at once ; and then teach us to worship, and direct us to the provision for doing so in spirit and in truth ; for doubtless such worship belongs to Chris- tianity," As to the first of these states of mind, the misconstruc- tion of confounding the righteousness of faith with self- righteousness is not strange to those who are the subjects of it ; nor, as to the second, is the temptation to seek a ground of peace in relation to God's law, — thinking only 1 84 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION- OF THE FIXED of the lawgiver, and not thinking of the Father of spirits, what any one can have difficulty in understanding, who knows how much religious earnestness exists which has no deeper root than the sense of our dependence on God as our soverign Lord, the judge of all the earth. But whether judging the spirits of those who preach the true gospel of peace to them, or withholding from judging, the feeling of awakened sinners " that the ground taken is too high for them," is altogether a misconception on their part. We beseech men by the meekness and gentleness of Christ ; we are ambassadors for Him who would not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax : but our word, the word which He has put into our mouth is, "Be ye reconciled to God." Is this a hard saying, too high a demand to make on the awakened, self-condemned spirit ? It is not made except in connexion with that which God has done to make such a demand reasonable — yea hopeful, as addressed to the chief of sinners, viz. the peace for man in his relation to God which is in the blood of Christ : but in connexion with this prepared and revealed peace it is made, and we may not change or modify this demand, or in any way accommodate ourselves to a state of mind in which alienation from God is not felt to be the great, the all-embracing evil of our state as sinners, and reconciliation to God the very first dawn of light, and breathing of the breath of a new life. So that however awful our sense of all secondary evils that come in the train of men's alienation, or high our conception of the secondary good that will follow on their being reconciled to God, we must forbid all direct dealing with wrath and judgment as if these might ht first disposed of, and the?i attention be turned to other con- siderations. We have here to do with persons, — the Father of spirits and His offspring. These are to each other more than all thinqs and all circumstarices. We know that the desire of the Father's heart is toward His offspring, — that it goes forth to them directly, — that it is not a simple mercy pitying their misery, — that it seeks to possess them as dear children. We know that to be AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 185 restored to Him, and to possess Him as their Father, is to these aUenated children themselves not merely a great thing, but every thing. He, the Father, has done all towards their reconciliation in perfect fatherliness, and all the provisions of His love have been dictated, and have had their character determined by His fatherliness. They therefore must hear nothing, be occupied with nothing, but what pertains to their character as His offspring. They must see His grace as that outcoming of fatherliness, which it is, — they must see its provisions for them as what belong to the adoption of sons which He contemplates for them. And so they must hear the call addressed to them in the words, " Be ye reconciled to God," as not only a reasonable call in respect of the grace manifested, but as, indeed, the gracious invitation to the benefit of that grace, — as equivalent to, " Be saved, receive salvation." As to wrath — terror — these they have not directly to do with ; they are to think of them as connected with the region of distance from God, of alienation from God, back from which they are called : they will cease as to them in their being reconciled to God. They belong to that which is without : but the invitation to be reconciled to God is the invitation to return and enter into their Father's house, into their Father's heart. This is what is put before them, freely, unconditionally. Does the word "unconditionally" cause difficulty ? Is it said — " Is not to be recoi2ciled to comply with a condition?" Yes, such a condition as drinking of the water of life is in relation to living. Not in any other sense a condition, — not assuredly as giving the right to drink, for that is the grace revealed, the grace wherein we stand. But as to wrath and safety from wrath, if questions arise it is a proof that what is pre- sented is not understood. " He that believeth shall not come into condemnation, but hath passed from death unto life." The peace-speaking power of the blood of Christ is to be conceived of as a direct power on the spirit in its personal relation to the Father of spirits, reveahng at once 1 86 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED the heart of the Father, and the way into the heart of the Father, even the Son. The blood that reveals this im- parts peace, makes perfect as pertains to the conscience, — yea, purges it from dead works to serve the living God. Indeed, that the relation of that blood to God's law, and the honour it rendered to that law, have had, as we have seen, a direct reference to our receiving the adoption of sons implies that it has not come directly between man and judgment, or taken him, by the fact of its being shed, from beneath the righteous rule of God : and, therefore, that it ministers no peace, being rejected — but, on the contrary, only a fearful looking for of judgment, so assu- redly giving no place for the direct confidence, " He suffered, therefore I shall not suffer." But, apart from the fact that the shedding of the blood of Christ had its direct reference to the perfecting of the conscience, and the reconciling us to God truly and spiritually as the Father of our spirits, is not the idea of a direct immunity from judgment, the idea of a ground of peace in the thought of judgment which may be con- templated by us as ours, so to speak, antecedent to our being reconciled, — a legal reconciliation to be rested on antecedent to a spiritual reconciliation, — inconsistent with giving our alienation from God its true place as the great evil and what must be directly dealt with ? — And is there not, however terrible the thought, yet is there not in the very sense of gratitude for the mercy which is believed to be in such a direct deliverance from wrath to come, a source of delusion as to our true interest, our true well-being ? Does it not tend to confirm in us the tendency to lose the Father of our spirits in the moral governor, and so to misunderstand, as in that case we must do, the ends of His moral government? Does it not tend to smother in us the cry of the orphan spirit for its long lost Father ? Does it not take from God the attribute that life lies in His favour, — making Him im- portant to us because of what He has to bestow, and not because of what He feels towards us viewed in itself, and as the feelmg of the Father to His offspring ? AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 187 Nor is there any room for feeling as if some lower ground should be taken at first, and in tenderness to newly-awakened sinners. We cannot too soon present the Father to them. We cannot too soon lay their weak- ness on the everlasting arms of the Eternal Love. To furnish them, in accommodation to their darkness, with any ground of confidence towards God other than what the Son has revealed as the heart of the Father, would be to seal them in that darkness, and to counteract the end of that revelation. No doubt the words, "No man cometh unto the Father but by me," which reveal that fixed constitution of things to which our vague hope of salvation must conform, or cease, were spoken to the chosen companions of our Lord's path, and towards the close of His personal minstry, but they express the manner of Gospel which had breathed from His life all along. And so those gracious words to all the weary and heavy laden — " Come unto me, and I will give you rest," are both spoken in immediate reference to what He had just declared, " No man knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son shall reveal Him," — clearly teaching that the promised rest would be found in knowledge of the Father; and, more, are followed by the clear intimation that in their participation of Himself as their Hfe, participating in what He was, was the Son to be to men the channel of this rest-giving knowledge of the Father — " Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls." The nature of that hope which was in God for man, and which the atonement has brought within the reach of our spirits, has indeed been necessarily determined by our ultimate and primary relation to God as the Father of our spirits. And we must take all our preconceptions to this light, and more especially those thoughts of God as the moral governor of the universe, in which the divine fatherliness has been left out of account, and to which is to be referred men's listening to the gospel simply as those who were under the law, and not as God's offspring. FURTHER ILLUSTRATIOy OF THE FIXED When the Apostle argues, Gal. iii. 17, that "the cove- nant which was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, can- not disannul," he deals with the legalism with which he was contending on a principle which may guide us here. If we recognise in the words '* by the deeds of the law shall no flesh living be justified," a reference to that universal law under which all men are, and in relation to which God has concluded both Jew and Gentile alike as all under sin ; if we take this universal ground in teaching justification by faith, then must we in vindicating the superiority of the gospel ascend to our original relation to the Father of our spirits, whose law it is that we have broken, and see that gospel in the Father's heart — that promise for man — that hope abiding for man in God — which the law could not disannul. Is it not thus that we are to understand the Apostle Peter when in the full light of redeeming love he says, " Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to Him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator ?" We are justified in the ground we take in teaching justification by faith, only because in faith the hope which remained in God for man is apprehended, and, being apprehended, becomes in man a living hope towards God. I formerly complained of a subordinating of the gospel to the law. I am now contending for the due subordinatmg of the law to the gospel. When the Apostle says, " If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law," it seems to me that he is speaking in the light of the sub- ordination of the law to the gospel, for he is recognising the giving of life as what must bet he end of God ; and, therefore, that our being taken from under the law, and placed under grace, has been in order that we should be alive to God. Therefore righteousness would not have been by faith any more than by the deeds of the law, had it not been because of the life which in faith is quickened in us. " He that believeth hath passed from death unto AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 189 life." It is in this view of faith that God the father of spirits is just, in justifying the ungodly who beheve. These words I have considered before ; but, at the point at which we now stand, it seems to me that we are con- templating, as the justifying element in faith, not only not an imputation, but that which is the most absolute opposite of an imputation, viz. life from the dead. Although the expression " justification by faith " be asso- ciated in our mind with all preaching of the atonement, the teaching of Luther is that alone of all the forms of thought on this subject considered above with which that expression really harmonises, for him alone have we found teaching that it is faith itself which God recognises as righteousness : and how excellent a manner of righteous- ness faith is in Luther's apprehension, and how righteous it is in God to count it righteouness, has been sufficiently illustrated, even by the quotations to which I have hmited myself In what he so writes, the words of the Apostle, " was strong in faith giving glory to God," are the text — the axiom I should rather say — from which Luther reasons. That condition of the human spirit in which most glory is given to God he regards as self- evidently the highest righteousness, and that condition is faith. But the glory given to God in faith must be in propor- tion to the depth and fulness of the apprehension of what God is which faith embraces, and to which it responds. In proportion, therefore, as God is revealed by the atone- ment, and as, in consequence, he that believes is in the light of what God is, and by his faith trusts and glorifies God as He is, in that proportion is the righteousness ot faith enhanced and exalted. " No man hath seen God at any time. The only-begotten Son, who dwelleth in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared him." He that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father, and he who, seeing the Father in the revelation of Him by the Son, hath faith in Him as the Father, attains the highest form of faith, — a faith which is the fellowship of the Son's apprehension of the Father — indeed, is sonship, — and I90 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED utters itself in the cry, Abba, Father. This is its nature ; this, whatever its measure. But, when the subject of justification by faith takes this form in our thoughts, we have no longer any difficulty in recognising faith as " the highest righteousness ;" for how can we otherwise conceive of that which is the fellowship of Christ's own righteousness, the righteousness given to us in the gift of Christ, who is " made of God unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption ?" I have intentionally kept before the reader's mind longer than was necessary for the simple expression of it, the distinction between contemplating the blood of Christ as shed with direct reference to the purging of our con- sciences from dead works to serve the living God, and contemplating it as shed with dii-ect reference to our deliverance from the punishment of sin. In addition to the character of the whole Epistle to the Hebrews, as setting forth the well-being of man as standing in his being an accepted worshipper, and, therefore, the atone- ment for sin needed as the shedding of blood that would make perfect as pertains to the conscience, I may recall to the reader the relation to righteous judgment in which the typical and the antitypical shedding of blood are both represented in the words, ''He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses : of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden underfoot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, where- with he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?" But in dvvelHng as I have done upon the distinction between a man's not coming into condemnation, because the blood of Christ is known by him as a living way into the holiest, and, through the fliith of it, he has passed from death unto life ; and a man's not coming into condemnation because the blood of Christ was shed for him, and the punishment of his sins borne by Christ, — my great anxiety has been to get to the right point of view in considering man's AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 191 well-being, — that point from which God is seen as the fountain of life, in whose favour is life ; and, therefore, the question of salvation is seen to be simply the question of participation in that favour as it is the outgoing of a living love, the love of the Father's heart, and not as the mere favourable sentence of a judge and ruler, setting the mind at ease in reference to the demands of the law of His moral government. With this same purpose have I above entered as I have done into the questions connected with justification ; and if I have appeared to forget, as I have not for a moment done, the distinction made between justification and sanctification, it is that I have hoped that the real spiritual truth that is in justification being once seen, the subject would take its right form in the mind of itself That " righteousness" as a part of what Christ is said to be " made of God unto us," has come to be dealt with on a principle entirely distinct from that on which men have dealt with " wisdom," and " sanctification," and " redemption," has being owing to the exigencies of a legal system : but such an error has been possible only because it has not been seen that these are all alike elements of the eternal life which we have in Christ. For Christ is all these to us just in that He is o"r life, nor otherwise than as living by Him are we " righteous" any more than we can otherwise be "wise," "holy," " redeemed," tha.t is, free men, — free with the liberty wherewith the Son of God maketh free. Nothing, indeed, has done more to confirm the mind in that tendency to seek in the atonement what will come directly between us and the punishment of sin, instead of seeking in it the secret and the power of returning to God, — recognising sin and all misery as what are together left behind in returning to God, — than the distinction made between justification and sanctification, when jus- tification is connected with a demand in the mind of our judge which may be met in an arbitrary way, as by im- putation or imagined transferred fruits of righteousness, while sanctification is recognised as having its necessity in 192 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED the truth of things, in that without holiness no man shall see God ; as if righteousness in man had no such relation to righteousness in God, as holiness in man has to holiness in God. / As to the supposed necessity for God's imputing /righteousness that He may see us as perfectly righteous, / why must our participation in Christ's righteousness be the I meeting of a demand for perfection any more than our par- \ ticipation in His holiness, or His wisdom, or the freedom that is in Him ? All is perfect in Him, and He and His perfection belong to us ; but all in the same sense. But, when the righteousness contemplated is understood to be the righteousness of faith, of faith in the Father's heart as revealed by the Son, — of the faith, therefore, by which the life of sonship is quickened and sustained,- — ^this demand for a legal perfection is seen to be altogether foreign to that with which we are occupied. The feeblest cry of the spirit of sonship is sure of a response in the Father's heart, being welcome from its own very nature, as well as for that of which it is the promise, as it is also the fruit ; for it both comes from and grows into the perfect sonship which is in Christ. Confidence is of the essence of this cry, — hope in the fatherliness towards which is its outgoing. Reader, say, does it not jar with this cry, does it not mar its simplicity, its truth, to be required to pause and say, " I would cry to my Father, I see His heart towards me, — the Son reveals it ; but I must remember that to be justified in drawing near with confidence I must think of myself as clothed by imputation with a perfect righteousness, because the Father of my spirit must see me as so clothed in order that He may be justified in receiving me to His fatherly heart ?" Would not this thought mar the simplicity of tlie child's cry — would it not indeed altogether change the essence of the confidence cherished ? But the thought of the righteousness which God has accepted in accepting Christ, the righteousness to which the words, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye Him," turn the mind, altogether encourages the child's cry in us, — indeed, is its source ; for to cherish, to utter that cry, is AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION 193 the spiritual obedience the word, " hear ye Him." But I almost repeat what I said before. Only I hope that in that light of the elements of the atonement in which justifi- cation is now before us, the oneness of the confidence which the faith of Christ's work quickens in us with the confidence in which He went before us in that path of life which He has opened up for us, and which He Himself is to us, will be more clearly recognised. I have now asked, why should the divine demand for righteousness in men, which God has Himself met and provided for by the gift of Christ, giving us in Him all things pertaining to hfe and to godliness, making us complete in Him, — why should this demand of the divine mind for righteousness be seen as met on another prin- ciple than that on which the demand for holiness is met ? All these demands are truly, fully met. Christ came not to destroy the law but to fulfil. But if in connexion with all that varied perfection in humanity which is in the Son of God, all humanity may be dealt with, and is dealt with, by God, the preciousness of that perfection shedding its own glory over all humanity, and being ever to the heart of a Father a promise for all humanity, and if the heart of the Father waits in hope for our " growing up into Him in all things, which is the head even Christ," (Ephesians iv. 15,) why should a fiction be introduced to give a character of perfection to our individual righteousness before God which has no place in relation to our part in the other elements of the perfection that is in Christ ? I have already expressed my conviction that that in us which in full light welcomes this ordination of a kingdom in the hands of a mediator, is what has, in part at least, made the reception of this doctrine of the imputation of Christ's perfection to those who believe, possible. But in the light of the atonement the heart feels no need of any fiction for its peace. The confidence in the Father, which the revelation of the Father by the Son quickens, has its witness in itself, — its sanction in its own nature. Its spiritual relation to that in God toward which it goes forth justifies it to the conscience. For, in truth, it is but CAMPB. o 194 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED the due response to the Father testifying to us that he has given to us eternal Hfe in the Son, — that testimony of God in the spirit, which being heard by us in the spirit effec- tually calls us to the confidence of sonship. Therefore does one Apostle say, " if our hearts condemn us not, then have we confidence towards God," and another Apostle, " the Spirit beareth witness with our spirit that we are the sons of God." And such expressions accord with what I have urged above, viz. that our knowledge that we are justified should be of the same spiritual nature with the true knowledge that we are sinners, and not be sought in that way of inference from the fact that we believe combined with the doctrine that those that believe are justified, to which men have had recourse and on which, indeed, they have necessarily been thrown when artificial conceptions of justification by faith have been adopted. That nothing artificial, but something the deep reality of which is proved in the consciousness of the individual justified, is contemplated in the beginning of the 8th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, it is impossible to doubt. The misery recorded in the close of the 7 th chapter is not more real, more a matter of consciousness, than the salvation for which thanks are rendered ; nor is the law of sin in the members causing that misery more a thing known by the individual than " the law of the Spirit of life in Christ, which makes free from the law of sin and death." Therefore, the freedom from condem- nation, in other words, the justification through being in Christ Jesus, spoken of, is clearly one with that cleansing by the blood of Christ, that purging of the conscience, on which I have dwelt so much ; nor can it be at all separated from that " fulfilment of the righteousness of the law" in those "who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit," which the Apostle goes on to mention as the direct end which God has contemplated in sending His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as a sacrifice for sin, and so condemning sin in the flesh, The subjective character of this passage, — that is to say, the relation between freedom from condemnation and the condition AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 195 of a man's own spirit which it recognises, — and the place which it ascribes to the law of the Spirit of the life that is in Christ in connexion with this freedom, that is in connection with justification, is too broadly marked to permit its being quoted in favour of the doctrine of justification by an imputation of righteousness. But the conditions of true peace of conscience must always be the same; and therefore, although the first verse of the fifth chapter is so quoted, we must beUeve that that in Christ in respect of which thanks are ren- dered that " there is no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus," is present to the mind of the Apostle when he speaks of " peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ " in connexion with " being justified by faith." This language, indeed, occurs in immediate connexion with that reference to the glory given to God in the faith of Abraham which sheds such clear light on the righteousness of God in recognising /^///^ as idghteoiis- ness : while, in saying that faith shall be imputed to us for righteousness, " if we believe on Him that raised up our Lord Jesus from the dead, who was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification," the Apostle has brought before us that in God which the faith by which we are to glorify God must apprehend and trust. For faith, in trusting God, does so in re- sponse to that mind of God in relation to man which is revealed to us in our being embraced in Christ's expiatory confession of our sins, when, by the grace of God, He tasted death for every man, and in that perfect righteous- ness of sonship in humanity which Christ presented to the Father on behalf of all humanity as the true righteous- ness of man, and, which, in raising Him from the dead, the Father has sealed to us as our true righteousness. This gracious mind of God in relation to us it is that our faith accepts and responds to; for our faith is, in truth, the Amen of our individual spirits to that deep, multiform, all-embracing, harmonious Amen of humanity, in the person of the Son of God, to the mind and heart of the Father in relation to man, — the divine wrath and o 2 196 FURTHER ILLUSTRATION OF THE FIXED the divine mercy, which is the atonement. This Amen of the individual, in which faith utters itself towards God, gives glory to God according to the glory which he has in Christ ; therefore does faith justify : and this justifica- tion is not only pronounced in the mind of God, who accepts the confidence towards Himself, which the faith of His grace in Christ has quickened in us, imputing it to us as righteousness, but is also testified to by the Spirit of truth in the conscience of him in whom this Amen is a living voice — a spiritual mind — the fellowship of that mind in the Son of God by the faith of which it is quickened. The Amen of the individual human spirit to the Amen of the Son to the mind of the Father in relation to man, is saving faith — true righteousness ; being the living action, and true and right movement of the spirit of the individual man in the light of eternal life. And the certainty that God has accepted that perfect and divine Amen as uttered by Christ in humanity is necessarily accompanied by the peaceful assurance that in uttering, in whatever feebleness, a true Amen to that high Amen, the individual who is yielding himself to the spirit of Christ to have it uttered in him is accepted of God. This Amen in man is the due re- sponse to that word, "Be ye reconciled to God ;" for the gracious and gospel character of which word, as the tenderest pleading that can be addressed to the most sin-burdened spirit, I have contended above. This Amen is sonship ; for the gospel-call, " Be ye reconciled to God," when heard in the light of the knowledge that " God made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him," is understood to be the call to each one of us on the part of the Father of our spirits, " My son, give me thine heart," addressed to us on the ground of that work by which the Son has declared the Father's Name that the love wherewith the Father hath loved Him may be in us, and He in us. In the light itself of that Amen to the mind of the Father in relation to man which shines to us in the atonement, we see the righteousness of God i?t aecepting the AND NECESSARY CHARACTER OF SALVATION. 197 atonement, and in that same light the Amen of the indi- vidual human spirit to that divine Amen of the Son of God, is seen to be what the divine righteousness will necessarily acknowledge as the end of the atonement accomplished. I have illustrated above the distinction between the righteousness of faith and self-righteousness, and the way in which faith excludes boasting, while introducing us into the light of God's favour, and have anticipated what would have been urged with advantage here as the justification of God in accounting faith righteousness. I only add now, that, as in illustrating the elements of the atonement, I have desired that the reader should see by its own light the suitableness and adequacy of the moral and spiritual expiation for sin which Christ has made, and should see all such expressions as " A way into the hohest," — " Propitiation," — " Reconciliation," — " Peace with God," — in that light of our spiritual relation to the Father of our spirits which demands for them a spiritual, as distinguished from a mere legal meaning ; so, now, I have sought for " Justification by faith" a spiritual and self-evidencing character, and that the attitude towards God of a human spirit in the light of that will of God which the Son of God came to do and has done cherishing a confidence towards God in hannony with that light shall be felt to be the right attitude towards God of the spirit of man, — that in which are combined God's glory in man and man's salvation in God. I have sought for justification by faith this self- evidencing character, not fearing by this to open the door for a self-righteous and presumptuous confidence, — ■ believing that the true confidence alone can preclude the false in all its measures and forms. The Amen of faith, — the being reconciled to God, — peace wath God through our Lord Jesus Christ, — these, in meekness and lowliness, are known in the light of the atonement. For that light of eternal life harmonises us with itself and so with God ; and in it it is impossible to trust in self, — impossible not to trust in God, — impossible to doubt that this trust in God is true righteousness, — impossible to doubt that God is just in being the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. 198 CHAPTER IX. THE INTERCESSION WHICH WAS AN ELEMENT IN THE . ATONEMENT CONSIDERED AS PRAYER. In recognising at the outset a need-be for the atonement I sought to separate between what is sound and true in the feehngs of awakened sinners and what is to be referred to their remaining spiritual darkness. At the same time I have desired that we should be in the position of learn- ing from the atonement itself why it was needed, as well as how it has accomplished that for which it was needed. The error which in its grossest form has amounted to representing the Son as by the atonement exercising an influence over the Father to make Him gracious towards us, (but which, even when such a thought as this would be disclaimed, has still led to seeking in the atonement a ground of confidence towards God distinct from what it has revealed as the mind of God towards man,) has become very manifest in the light of the nature of the atonement as a fulfilling of the purpose of the Son " Lo, I come to do thy will, O God," — His " declaring of the Father's Name." In the light of that will as fulfilled, — that Name as declared, our faith has been raised to the Eternal Will itself thus revealed, to the Unchanging name thus de- clared : as the Apostle speaks of those that believe in Christ as those " who by Him do believe in God, who raised Him from the dead, and gave Him glory ; that our faith and hope might be in God." i Peter i. 21. Yet it seems to me that in this high spiritual region some of the difficulties which we experience in all our deeper medi- tations on the ways of (iod are more realised when we are fully delivered from the error to which I have now referred than they were before. I say this, contemplating especially THE INTERCESSION. 199 the aspect of the atonement as a deahng of the Son with the Father on our behalf — a mediation, an intercession. I have spoken of the nature and ground of this intercession, of its combination with the confession of our sins and of its relation to our Lord's own consciousness in humanity — His expeiience of sonship in humanity — His experience of abiding in humanity in the Father's favour. But a more close consideration of what is implied in intercession as intercession seems called for — a more close considera- tion, that is, of the hope for man in which the Son of God made His soul an offering for sin, as that hope was a hope in God, sustained by faith and prayer. We are so much in the way of looking on the work of Christ as the acting out of a pre-arranged plan, that its character as a natural progress and development, in which one thing arises out of another, and is really caused by that other, is with difficulty realised. Yet we must get deliverance from this temptation, — the painful temptation to think of Christ's work as almost a scenic representation, — otherwise we never can have the consciousness of getting the true knowledge of eternal realities from the atonement. All light of life for us disappears from the life of Christ unless that life be to us a life indeed, and not the mere acting of an assigned part. Unless we realise that in very truth Christ loved us as He did Him- self, we cannot understand how near an approach to a personal feeling there has been in His feeling of our sins, and of our misery as sinners. Unless we realise that His love to Himself and to us was the love of one who loved the Father with all His heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, we cannot understand the nature of the burden which our sins were to Him, what it was to His heart that we were to the Father rebellious children, or how certainly nothing could satisfy His heart as a redemption for us, but that we should come to follow God as dear children in the fellowship of His own sonship. Unless we contem- plate His sense of our sin and His desire to accomphsh for us this great salvation as livingly working in Him and practically influencing Him, we cannot understand how 200 THE INTERCESSION WHICH WAS AN ELEMENT truly He made His soul an offering for sin, when, receiving into Himself the full sense of the divine condemnation of sin. He dealt on behalf of man with the ultimate and absolute root of judgment in God, presenting the expiation of the due confession of sin, and in so doing at once opening for the divine forgiveness a channel in which it could freely flow to us, — and for us a way in which we could approach God. And, finally, unless we apprehend the encouraging considerations by which the love of Christ was sustained in making this expiatory offering — unless we have present to our minds His faith in the deep year- nings of the Father's heart over men His offspring, joined with His own conscious experience in humanity which testified that these yearnings could be satisfied, — unless we conceive to ourselves how naturally and necessarily these thoughts took the form of prayer, laying hold of that hope for man which was in God, — unless, as it were, we hear the intercession thus made for man, and see the grounds on which it proceeds, we cannot understand what is made known to us of the Name of God by the success of this pleading on our behalf, — we cannot see how this appeal to the heart of the Father becomes, in being res- ponded to, the full revelation of the Father to us ; and that in proportion as we apprehend the nature and grounds of that intercession, and realise that it has been perfectly responded to, we know the grace wherein we stand, what that faith in God is to which we are called, what the grounds are on which we are to put our trust in Him. Faith must make us present to the work of our redemption in its progress as well as in its result, so that the love which is working for us — the difficulties which that love encounters — the way in which it deals with them — the salvation which it accomplishes — all may shed their light on our spirits and be to us the light of life. But the f^iith that makes this history a reality to our spirits, while difficult as to every part of this realisation, is most difficult when we are occupied with that intercession of Christ which is the perfecting element in the atonement, — making it literally an offering. It is not so difficult to I.V THE A TONEMENT CONSIDERED AS PR A YER. 201 realise how to the perfect holiness and love which were in Christ our sins should be so heavy a burden, — nor is it difficult to realise His intercourse with the Father while He bore our sins on His spirit as that response to the Father's mind concerning them which has now been re- presented as an expiatory confession of our guilt. We also easily see how the Saviour's own conscious experience in humanity, doing His Father's commandments, and abi- ding in His love, would both determine the character of the redemption which He would seek for us and be an element in His hope towards God for us, — a hope which He would cherish in conscious oneness with His Father. But when we consider Christ's hope for man as taking the form of intercession, and see that His knowledge of the Father's will is so far from suggesting an inactive waiting in the expectation that all will necessarily be as the Father wills, that on the contrary, that knowledge only moves to earnest pleading and entreaty, — the hope cherished seek- ing to realise itself by laying hold in a way of prayerful trust on that in the heart of the Father by which it is en- couraged, — then the difficulty that always haunts us as to the ordinance of prayer — the difficulty, I mean, of the idea of God's interposing prayer between His own loving desire for us and the fulfilment of that desire instead of fulfilling that desire without waiting to be entreated — this difficulty is felt to be present with our minds in this highest region in which the Son is represented as by prayer, and intense and earnest and agonising prayer, obtaining for us from the Father what the Father has infinitely desired to give — what He has given in giving Him to us as our Re- deemer to whose intercession it is yielded. Here we have the divine love in Christ pleading with the divine love in the Father, and thus obtaining for us that eternal life, which yet in giving the Son to be our Saviour the Father is truly said to have given. The difficulty is that which haunts us in our own prayers ; but it is the same, and no other : and if we are enabled to deal rightly with it as it meets us here it will be an increase of practical freedom to us in our individual walk with God. 202 THE INTERCESSION WHICH WAS AN ELEMENT What I have now been attempting has been to see and trace the atonement by its own hght, viz. the hght of the life which was taking form in it according to the words, " In Him was life, and the life was the light of men." Proceeding in this way the intercession of Christ has presented itself as a form which His love must natu- rally take. That it would take the form of desirhig for us what His intercession asked for us was quite clear. But we could not conceive of that desire as cherished in conscious weakness and dependence on the Father and yet in conscious oneness with the Father, without con- ceiving of it as uttering itself to the Father i7i prayer. With all the weight of all our need upon His spirit — bear- ing our burden — that He should cast this burden upon the Father appeared the perfection of sonship towards the Father and brotherhood towards us. And as this inter- cession seemed a natural form for the love of Christ to take, so did it seem what must be to the Father a sacrifice of a sweet-smelling savour : and we felt that no aspect of the perfect sonship in humanity which the life of Christ presented to the Father could be more welcome to the heart of the Father than that of love to men. His brethren, as thus perfected in intercession; especially as being intercession for brethren who also were enemies, making the intercession to be the perfection of forgiving love. This indeed was to God, who is love, a sacrifice of a sweet-smelling savour from humanity which must have been infinitely grateful in itself; while as part of the perfection that was in Christ this intercession was a most excellent part of that promise for humanity in respect of which Christ's perfection is to be contemplated as plead- ing for humanity. Any father who- has ever been privi- leged to have one child pleading for forgiveness to another child for an offence which has been unkindness to the interceding child himself has here some help to his faith in his own experience. But though all this is felt by us to be natural and what arises out of the life of love which was in Christ, yet, approaching it not by this path but by the path of IN THE A TONEMENT CONSIDERED AS PR A YER. 203 meditation on Christ as the gift of the Father, — medita- tion on all that interest in us which Christ's love is feeling, and under the power of which it is interceding, as already in the Father and already desiring to impart all that Christ is asking for us — nay, as having really bestowed it in the gift of Christ — the difficulty of which I have spoken suggests itself. We ask, how has this intercession been necessary ? We ask, how Christ should have felt it necessary ? A Christian philosopher of cur own time has said that whereas once he had thought of prayer as the expression of a want of faith in God's goodness he after- wards came to understand that prayer was the highest Expression of faith in God's goodness. Assuredly He who came to make known the goodness of God and that towards us men it is the highest form of goodness, even fatherliness, which on a superficial view might seem most to supersede all prayer, — leaving room only for thanks- giving and praise — has been as distinguished by the depth and intensity of His praying to the Father as of His faith in the Father's fatherliness : nor is there any part of His testimony for the Father as He was the witness for God more marked than His testimony that God is the hearer and answerer of prayer. In Him we see that knowledge of the Father's will and confidence in His love supersede not prayer, but, on the contrary, only move to prayer, giving strength for it — making it the prayer of faith and hope and love — love perfected in thus flowing back to its own fountain. The fact of Christ's " intercession for the transgressors " accords with and confirms what we feel in meditating on the life of love that was in Him, viz. that such intercession was the fitting form for His bearing of our burdens to take, what in the light of the knowledge of the hope that was for us in God it must take ; while to give place to the thought of anything dramatic — the act- ing out of a pre-arranged part — in regard to that recorded intercession, (and the intercession indicated is infinitely beyond what is recorded,) would be to lose all sense of life and reality in Christ. But let us try to approach this great and fundamental 204 THE INTERCESSION WHICH WAS AN ELEMENT fact in the history of our redemption really from God's side. Let us try to realise what we are contemplating when we are rising to the contemplation of that hope for man which was in God antecedent to the atonement, and which the atonement has brought within the reach of our spirits. Let us see the love that man needs as in God before it has come forth in the atonement. Let us see the Fatherly heart as yet unrevealed —waiting to be revealed. Let us contemplate the Son as coming forth to reveal it. Let us distinguish between the purpose to reveal the Father's heart and a purpose to realise any predetermined train of events. Let us see, as that which is to be brought to pass, not certain facts, events, or circumstances thought of merely as such, but a know- ledge of the heart of the Father brought within reach of us His offspring, — destroyed by the lack of this knowledge but to whom this knowledge will be salvation. Let us consider in this view the Son of God in humanity bearing upon His spirit our burden, and dealing with the Father concerning it ; let us see all our need made visible to us in Christ's feeling of it, and let us listen to the cry of this need as ascending to the Father from Christ addressing itself to what the Father feels in relation to that need, and let us ask ourselves how but as the answer to that cry could that in the Father which answers that cry have been made known, or our need and that in the Father which meets our need have been revealed to us together? It is the cry of the child that reveals the mother's heart. It is the cry of Sonship in humanity bearing the burden of humanity, confessing its sin, asking for it the good of which the capacity still remained to it, which being responded to by the Father has revealed the Father's heart. Without taking the form of that cry the mind that was in Christ would have failed by all its other outgoings to declare the Father's name. There is nothing scenic or dramatic in this. Were such its nature it would be valueless. It would be nothing, and could reveal nothing. But no feeling in the Son, no desire, no prayer, is other than what is IN THE ATONEMENT CONSIDERED AS PR A YER. 205 natural and inevitable to holy love so placed. The response of the Father is in like manner a real response, and therefore the nature and character of the heart that responds is seen in the nature and character of that to which it responds. As that confession of man's sin is justly due, so the demand for it in God is real as well as His acceptance of it is gracious. As that intercession is a natural form of love in Him that intercedes, the response to that intercession is a natural form for the love addressed to take — its living and real outcoming. To say that what ascends to God from humanity has come from God, that God has Himself in the person of the Son furnished humanity with the pleading that would prevail with Him, that the hfe of Sonship is already in humanity antecedent to the atonement which it makes — this in no way aftects the truth of the atonement as indeed the due and true expiation for sin, nor the truth of the grounds of the Intercessor's pleading as really the grounds on which the grace of God is extended to men. We may indeed go further back : we may contemplate the mere capacity of redemption that was in humanity as a cry, — a mute cry, but which still entered into the ear and heart of God ; we may contemplate the gift of Christ as the divine answer to this cry ; but it is not the less true that when Christ under our burden and working out our redemption confesses before the Father the sin of man and presents to the Father His own righteousness as the divine righteousness for man, and the Father in response grants to men remission of sins and eternal life, — that confession which humanity could not have originated but which the Son of God has made in it and for it, and that righteousness which humanity could not itself present, but which the Son of God has presented in it and for it, are the grounds on which God really puts His own acting in the whole history of redemption. It is the tendency to deal with God as a fate and with the accomplishment of the high designs of His grace for man simply as the coming to pass of predetermined events which is the real source of our difficulty in regard to prayer 2o6 THE INTERCESSION WHICH WAS AN ELEMENT as a law and power in the kingdom of God ; whether we think of it contemplating its place in the history of our redemption as the intercession of Christ, or as an element in our own life of sonship through Christ. In consequence of that tendency, " asking things according to the will of God," comes to sound like asking God to do what He intended to do, — a manner of prayer for which we have no light, — as it is a manner of prayer, indeed, which would be felt to be superseded by that very light as to the future which would make it possible. But God is not revealed to our faith as a fate, neither is His will set before us as a decree of destiny. God is revealed to us as the living God, and His will as the desire and choice of a living heart, which presents to us not the image or picture of a predetermined course of events to the predestined flow of which our prayer is to be an Amen, but a moral and spiritual choice in relation to us His offspring to which our prayer is to respond in what will be in us the cry of a moral and spiritual choice. That knowledge of the Father which the prayer of Christ implied — the knowledge of the Son who dwelleth in the bosom of the Father — was not the knowledge of a certain future, predestined and sure to be accomplished, but was the knowledge of the unchanging will of the Father concern- ing man, — a will which in all rebellion is resisted, in all obedience of love is fulfilled. If we are able to see and realise this distinction we shall see the dealing of the Son with the Father on our behalf as that response to the mind of the Father in relation to us which in our partici- pation in the spirit of the Son is to be continued and perpetuated in our own prayers. And, it seems to me, that these things mutually illustrate each other to us ; I mean our own prayers in the spirit of sonship and the great original intercession of the Son on behalf of all humanity which was to spread itself through humanity and which we partake in as a part of the eternal life which we have in the Son of God. For that cry for things according to the Father's will, — that cry for holi- ness, and truth, and love, which is the cry of Christ's IN THE ATONEMENT CONSIDERED AS ERA YER. 207 spirit in us, and which is not repressed or discouraged by the knowledge that it is according to the will of God, as if therefore it was superfluous, nay, is only quickened and sustained by that knowledge, may throw light to us upon the infinite intensity of that cry as in Christ on behalfof all humanity, — enabling us to understand that in Him it was infinitely intense just because of His perfect oneness of mind with the Father in regard to what He asked, and perfect knowledge of that will of the Father according to which the cry was. While, on the other hand, nothing is such a help against all temptation to deal with the living God as with a fate, and with His will as a decree which we are passively to allow to take its course, instead of putting forth that prayerful trust which is the necessary link between His will for us and its fulfilment in us, as the believing meditation of the place which prayer had in the work of Christ in accomplishing our redemption. And it is not merely in order that we may not come short in our realisation of the large place w^hich prayer must have in our personal religion, if when we attempt to follow God as dear children we would really walk in the footsteps of the Son of God, that it is so important that we should realise the part which the intercession of Christ has in the atonement. Our doing so is, I would venture to say, even more needed in reference to the nature of our prayers, and that we may be found really praying according to the will of God, — according to the light of the gospel, — according to the knowledge that the true worshippers worship in spirit and in truth, for that the Father seeketh such to worship Him. Small as the amount of prayer is, its usual character is a still sadder subject of thought than its small amount. I mean its being so much a dealing with God simply as a Sovereign Lord, a Governor, and Judge, and so little a dealing with Him as the Father of our spirits. There is much feeling that " power belongeth to God alone " combined with the encouraging persuasion that " to Him also belongeth mercy" moving to prayer and sustaining prayer, which 2o8 THE INTERCESSION, &-c. yet is not enlightened and exalted by the knowledge of God as a Father, and the apprehension of our true well- being as all embraced in the sonship which we have in Christ. Reader, let me ask you, do you pray as a child of God whose first and nearest relationship is to God your Father, wiiose most deeply felt interests are bound up in that relation in what lies within the circle of that relation contemplated in itself? Do you pray as one to whom the mind of God towards you and your own mind towards Him are the most important elements of existence, and whose other interests in existence are as outer circles around this central interest, — so that you see yourself, and your family, and your friends, and your country, and your race, with the eyes, because with the heart, of one who "loves the Lord his God with all his heart, and mind, and soul, and strength?" Is this at least your ideal for yourself, what you are seeking to realise, — to realise for its own sake, — not for any consequences of it in time or eternity ? for whatever the blessed con- sequences of its realisation will be, they shall be far, and for ever, inferior and secondary to itself. 209 CHAPTER X. THE ATONEMENT, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE DETAILS OF THE SACRED NARRATIVE. Regarding the atonement as the development of the life that was in Christ I have now considered its nature in the light of that life, — and the unity of a life has, I trust, been felt to belong to the exposition offered. But the life of Christ had an external history and took an outward form from the successive circumstances in which our Lord was placed, from the manger to the cross, according to the divine .ordering of His path. And while this history can only be understood in the light of that inward life of which it has been the outward form, the contemplation of the outward form must help our understanding of the inward life ; and if the view taken of the nature of the atonement be the true view must both confirm it and illustrate it. We are thus prepared to find the outward course of life appointed for the Son of God as that in which He was to fulfil the purpose of doing the Father's will deter- mined by the divine wisdom with special reference to that purpose. Another condition, also, we expect to find fulfilled in the circumstances in which the Son is seen witnessing for the Father, viz. that they shall accord with the testimony of the Father to the Son. The witnessing of the Son for the Father would have manifestly been incomplete as to us without the Father's seal to it. But this sealing was an essential part of the divine counsel, — not only that outward testimony, however solemn and authoritative, which was in the words of the angel to Mary, the voice from heaven at the Lord's baptism by campb. p 210 THE ATONEMENT, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE John, and again on the mount, but that also to which these special testimonies of the Father to the Son in humanity direct our minds, viz. that testimony of the Father to the Son in the Spirit which always is, and out of which all responsibility for faith in the Son of God arises, being that on which such faith must ultimately rest. With this testimony of the Father to the Son, as well as with the witnessing of the Son for the Father, the divine ordering of our Lord's path would necessarily accord ; so that, although the aspect of that path, judged according to the flesh, might seem in contradiction to the words, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," seen in the light of God it would be known to harmonise with that acknowledgment. What would accord with the Father's testimony to the Son must manifestly be one with what would accord with the Son's honouring of the Father in our sight ; so that we have not really here two conditions to be fulfilled, but one only ; nor does the need-be that there should be fitting scope for the manifestation of brotherhood in relation to men, add any new element, seeing the unity of sonship towards God and brotherhood towards men. But it is important that we approach the consideration of the course of our Lord's life, realising that we are to con- template it in relation equally to the Father's acknow- ledgment of the Son, and to the Son's witnessing for the Father, — " No man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father ; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him." This, therefore, is the aspect in which we are to con- temi)late the actual history of the work of redemption. We are to contemplate it as the Son's witnessing for the Father by the manifestation of sonship towards God and brotherhood towards men, in circumstances which divine wisdom ordained with reference to the perfection of that manifestation, and which we are to see in the light of the Father's testimony to the Son. As our Lord "increased in wisdom and stature," so the elements of the atonement gradually developed DETAILS OF THE SACRED NARRATIVE. 21 r themselves with the gradual development of His humanity, and corresponding development of the eternal life in His humanity. The sonship in Him was always perfect sonship. At no one moment could He have said more truly than at another, " The Son doeth nothing of Himself; but whatsoever things the Father doeth, the same doeth the Son likewise." But submitting at once, both to the Father's inward guidance, " opening His ear as the learner, morning by morning," and to His outward guidance, " not hiding His face from shame and spitting," Christ's inward life of love to His Father and love to His brethren was constantly acted upon by the circumstances appointed for Him, receiving its perfect development through them : so that, tracing our Lord's life as thus a visible contact with men while an invisible abiding in the bosom of the Father, and endeavouring to realise the bearing and operation of outward things upon His inward life, we may expect the light of the atonement to shine forth to us with increased clearness, as the light of that life which is the light of men. We are not told much of the course of our Lord's life before He entered on His public ministry ; Ave may say we have its general character in the words. He " increased in wisdom and stature, a?id in favour ivith God and i?ia?z. His doing the Father's will, His following God as a dear child, had then that attraction in the eyes of men which goodness often has while it commends itself to men's consciences without making any positive demand upon themselves. And this record concerning our Lord, — that at this time, and while His hfe was to men's eyes the simple filling of His place in relation to Joseph and Mary, and His kindred and neighbours, according to the perfect form of childhood and youth in a young Hebrew, He had the acknowledgment of human favour, — should put us on our guard against hastily concluding that the favour of men may not even now, in certain circum- stances, follow the favour of God. When, however, our Lord entered on His public min- istry, and the words which He spake and the miracles p 2 212 THE ATONEMENT, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE which he wrought constrained men to attend to and consider the demand which He made for His Father, and the condemnation on men which that righteous demand imphed, — we see the darkness soon disturbed by the hght, and beginning to manifest its enmity to the hght. Yet neither was this universal — and not only did some attach themselves to Him as immediate disciples and followers, but many more rejoiced in His teaching ; and the response which His testimony had in their hearts commanded an outward acknowledgement of Him, which indeed was so general and so strong, that those in whom enmity was most moved were restrained as to the manifestation of their ill will by " the fear of the people." How superficial the hearing was with which the great multitudes that followed Him listened to His words, we know, both from His own care to warn them of the cost of discipleship, (Luke xiv. 25 — 33) which He saw they were not counting, and from the subsequent history of that favour, when the cry " Hosanna to the Son of David " so soon gave place to the cry, " Crucify Him, crucify Him." But doubtless between those who, as Peter says of himself and the rest, " forsook all and followed Him," and those who early set themselves against Him, knowing that His word con- demned them, and that the acceptance of His teaching with the people would be the subverting of their own consequence and influence, there were many shades of feeling, — the internal witness in men's hearts to the out- ward word of Him who spake as never man spake, being dealt with in many different measures of reverence and rebellion. On the whole, however, for a time the power of evil came forth but in measure ; and though He could early say, " I honour my Father, and ye do dishonour me," and though so much of even what was of another character was to Him who knew what was in man but a show of good which did not deceive Him, yet it was but gradually and towards the close that He had to taste in all its bitterness that enmity to God to which He was exposing Himself in coming to men in His Father's name. The public ministry of the Lord, with its mixed DETAILS OF THE SACRED NARRATIVE. 213 character of favour and dishonour, of loud acclamations of those who at the least believed Him to be a teacher sent from God, and secret machinations of enemies whose malice could not calculate enough on sympathy to make its expression safe, was ordered of God to continue for a time ; and " no man could lay hands on Him, for His hour was not yet come." It was, however, but a brief time, much briefer than the previous period of private life in which the favour of men was conjoined with the favour of God ; and it was followed by another distinctly marked period, of which the character is the patient endurance of all the full and perfected development of the enmity which the faithfulness of the previous testimony for the Father's name had awakened. This last is much the briefest division of our Lord's life on earth ; and its darkest portion is to be measured by days, or rather by hours : as if He who spared not His own Son, but gave Him to the death for us, yet spared Him as much as possible, making the bitterest portion the briefest. We cannot doubt the importance of that portion of the fulfilment of the purpose, " Lo I come to do thy will," which constitutes the private life of our Lord, antecedent to His entering upon His public ministry. The scantiness of the record is no reason for doing so. We know how that scantiness has been attempted to be compensated for by fictitious narratives, intended to meet the natural desire to know more of what was so large a proportion of our Lord's whole life on earth. But this has been a part of the error of not seeing that that life itself as it abides i?i Him who lived it and not the mere writte7i record of that life is our unsearchable riches which we have in Christ. When the promise is fulfilled to us, that the Comforter would take of that which is Christ's, and shew it unto us, this acting of the Comforter is not limited to what is recorded. He takes from the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, stored up for all humanity in the humanity of the Son of God, — reveaUng the life of Him who " was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin/ in its relation 214 THE ATONEMENT, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE to our individual need, with that minuteness of ap- pUcation of which that Hfe, thus revealed to us in the Spirit, is capable, but of which no written record could be capable. How many a httle child, remembering that Jesus was once a little child, and grew in wisdom, and in stature, and in favour with God and man, and looking to Him for help according to the need felt in seeking to follow God as a dear child, and be in obedience to those related to him as Joseph and Mary were to the child Jesus, has found his trust met, and felt no want of "a gospel of the infancy of Jesus." Let the divine favour, testified as resting upon that first portion of our Lord's life, sanctify to our hopes private life, — the large propor- tion of the life of all, the whole of the life of most ; and let us see that on which that favour rested, as a part of the eternal life given to us in the Son of God, which is to be God's glory in us in private life, a store from which to receive all that pertains to life and godliness as we are individual Christians, — as truly as His life as a preacher of the kingdom of God, is that to a special participation in which those who are called in this to walk in His steps, are to look, — as truly as His witnessing before Pontius Pilate a good confession, is for strength according to their need, to those who are called to suffer as martyrs for His name. As to our Lord's personal ministry, its distinguishing- character is to be seen in this, that that ministry was the oiitconiiiig of the life of sonship. By this character of a life was His ministry distinguished from that of all who were only " teachers sent from God." In this respect was it that He " spake as never man spake." What He spake, as what He did, was a part of what He was. His Avords were spirit and life, and not a mere testimony concerning life. As now in the inner man of our being, when the Son of God is known as present in us claiming lordship over our spirits, there is a testimony of the Father to the Son in the Spirit, which in caHing Jesus Lord we are welcoming, so we cannot doubt that then in Judea the man Jesus, in His living witnessing as the Son for the DETAILS OF THE SACRED NARRATIVE. 215 Father, had a testimony of the Father borne to Him, which men heard according as they welcomed the teaching of God. This testimony was a testimony to what He was, to the hfe that was shining forth in His deeds and words. x\nd the miconscious sense of this has manifestly gone beyond the intelligent recognition of it ; so that we find men unable to resist the authority and power with which He spake, even though not beholding, as the disciple did, " His glory as the glory of the Only-begotten of the Father." Unless we realise this, and that that was presented to men's faith, if they could receive it, which pertained to one who could say, in reference to His own conscious life, " I am the light of the world," we cannot enter into that immediate presenting to men of what He Himself was as the Gospel., which we have seen in the words, " Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls." And in that testimony as to who are " blessed," with which the discourse which we call the Sermon on the Mount opens, we are to recognise the same thing. All these declarations as to the blessedness of the several conditions of spirit which our Lord there specifies are rays of the light of the life that was in Him ; and will be such to us, being heard as utterances of that fife, — utterances of Christ's own conciousness in humanity, a part of His confessing the Father before men, being testimonies in humanity to the blessedness of sonship in doing the Father's will. Accordingly the whole discourse keeps the Father before us. The foundation of every counsel is our filial relation to God. All is in harmony with the prayer which he teaches, putting the words, " Our Father," in our lips, and adding, as the first petitions which we are to present, the expression of an interest in the Father's " name" and " kingdom" and " will," — an interest which, if these petitions are to proceed from unfeigned lips, must imply our participation in that life of sonship which is presented to us in Him who teaches us so to pray. 2i6 THE ATONEMENT, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE Nor are we to leave out of account, in contemplating our Lord's ministry as giving glory to the Father in being manifested sonship, that not only was this in our nature and in our circumstances, but that the consciousness of its being so, and the full knowledge of the amount of the demand made on us when called to learn of Him, is distinctly expressed, — the knowledge that to call on us to follow Him, is to call upon as to take up the cross. When we in very truth betake ourselves to Him, as to that high-priest who is " touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin," and who in that He Himself hath suffered, being tempted, is able to succour us when we are tempted, we then learn to value the tone of full conscious entering into the amount of the demand which He makes upon men in calling upon them to hate their life in this world which pervades our Lord's teaching equally with the consciousness of being Himself living that life in the Father's favour which He is commending. But that life of which our Lord's ministry was thus the living outcoming, in the consciousness of which He testified who are blessed, in the consciousness of which he declared to the weary and heavy laden what is the true rest, — speaking to us also in all this as our very brother, — that life needed, in order to its perfect development, as the light of life to us, to have the depth of its root in God — its power to overcome the world — the nature of its strength and victory — the weight of the cross which it bore in suffering flesh — revealed, as even the living teaching of the Lord's ministry did not reveal it. There- fore was that hour and power of darkness permitted which the closing period of our Lord's course presents in which sonship towards the Father and brotherhood towards man have had their nature manifested and their power displayed to the utmost. As the time drew near the Lord prepared the disciples for this hour and power of darkness. " And Jesus going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples apart in the way, and said unto them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem ; DETAILS OF THE SACRED NARRATIVE. 217 and the Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify Him ; and the third day He shall rise again," (Matt. xx. 17, 18, 19.) His own feelings in looking forward to what, as to its outward form, He thus foretold, were such as to impress their minds with the most solemn anticipations, and His words then, so far as they are recorded, remain to us a portion of Scripture on which we meditate as bringing us near to a region of feeling into which we scarcely dare to venture ; and yet these expressions of mental agony are recorded for our instruction as belonging to that life of Christ which is the light of life to us. '• I have a baptism to be baptised with ; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished." (Luke xii. 50.) " Now is my soul troubled ; save me from this hour : but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name," (John xii. 27.) And even after the conclusion which the words " For this cause came I to this hour" seem to express, when the awful hour was close at hand, it again became the subject of earnest pleading with the Father, — pleading, the earnestness of which, while it reveals to us the measure of the apprehended bitterness of the cup, and terror of the hour to which it refers, makes a demand upon our faith as to the reality of life which was in our Lord's prayers, and how truly, in dealing with the Father, He dealt with a livi?ig will and hearty and 7ioi with a fate ^ which blessed are those who are able truly and fully to respond to. "And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane : and He saith to His disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray. And He taketh with Him Peter and James and John, and began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy ; and saith unto them. My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death : tarry ye here, and watch. And He w-ent forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it w^ere possible, the hour might pass from Him. And He said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee ; take away this cup from 2i8 THE ATONEMENT, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE me, nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt." (Mark xiv. ^-^ — 36.) " And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly ; and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." (Luke xxii. 44.) In this awfully intense prayer we have to mark its alternative nature, and that the latter part was as truly prayer as the former : the former uttering the true and natural desire to which He was conscious as contemplating that which was before Him in the weakness and capacity of suffering proper to • suffering flesh ; the latter uttering the desire of the spirit of sonship, being that which was deepest, and to which the other, while consciously realized, was perfectly subordinated. After being offered the third time, our Lord's prayer was answered, and the mind of the Father, which was the response to His cry, was revealed to Him in the Spirit. He was not to be spared the dreaded hour. The cup was not to pass from Him ; and therefore, in that truth of sonship in which He had said, " Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt," the Father's will was welcomed, the bitter cup was received from the Father's hand as the Father's hand^ and in the strength of sonship the Lord drank it. "And He cometh the third time, and saith unto them. Sleep on now, and take your rest : it is enough, the hour is come ; behold^ the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sifiners. And immediately^ while He yet spake, cometh Judas one of the twelve, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders." (Mark xiv, 41, 43.) " Then Simon Peter having a sword, drew it, and smote the high priest's servant, and cut off his right ear. Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath : the cup lahich my Father hath given me to drink^ shall T not drink it?' To those who had come with Judas He said, " When I was daily with you in the temple, ye stretched forth no hands against me : but this is your hour, a?id the power of darkness.'' (Luke xxii. 53.) The precise point of time at which the anticipated hour and power of darkness had its commencement is DETAILS OF THE SACRED NARRATIVE. 219 thus clearly indiated, — the moment in which the cup, in reference to which He had prayed, was put into our Lord's hand, — the moment at which the baptism began as to which He was straitened until it should be accomplished. And I ask attention to this, because the record clearly separates between the actual experience which these expressions, "hour," — "cup" — "baptism," refer to, and the agony in the garden in which that experience was only anticipated, being still the subject of the prayer, if it were possible, that it should not be, as well as of the prayer that if the Father so willed, it should be. The history of the hour and power of darkness, now come, follows, and is given with a fulness of detail commensurate with its importance j while it is widely separated from all recorded suffering of man from man by the preternatural circumstances that accompanied it ; circumstances which, in their awfulness, accorded with that relation which the sufferings of the sufferer bore to the sin of man ; yet which, in their connexion with what was visible of Christ's bearing under His sufferings, had that character impressed upon them which drew from the Roman centurion the acknowledgment, "Truly this was the Son of God" 220 CHAPTER XL HOW WE ARE TO CONCEIVE OF THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST, DURING THAT CLOSING PERIOD OF WHICH SUFFERING WAS THE DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER. The sufferings of Christ during the hour and power of darkness have been dealt with in two quite opposite ways. I. They have been regarded in their simply physical aspect ; and aid to the imagination and the heart in realising their terrible amount has been eagerly sought in pictured representations or picturing words ; and thus a lively feeling of the pain endured by our blessed Lord under the hands of wicked men has been cherished as a help in measuring the evil of our sins and our obligations to the Saviour. I am not afraid to regard all that was attained of knowledge of the sufferings of Christ in this way as only a knowing Christ after the flesh, and therefore what had no virtue to accomplish any spiritual development in men, — no virtue to impart a true knowledge of sin, or to raise the spirits of men into the light of what our sins are in the sight of God, — what they are to the heart of God. Feelings of a strong and solemn, as well as tender character, have, doubtless, been thus cherished; and doubtless, the element of gratitude has been present : yet there was not, for there could not be, in images of physical suffering anything of the nature of spiritual light, — however such light may have been present along with them, being received otherwise. IL But there has been manifested also, and this especially recently, a tendelicy to deal with the detailed sufferings of Christ, as these were endured at the hands now WE ARE TO CONCEIVE, dr^c. 221 of wicked men, in the quite opposite way of making as little account of them as possible ; I do not mean denying their reality ,^denying that our Lord's flesh was suffering flesh, — but rashly admitting the justness of a comparison of them with other cases of suffering inflicted by man on man. Of such other cases it is not difficult to find many recorded that would bear the comparison ; cases in which the cruellest tortures have been submitted to with such fortitude and patience of endurance as, if this way of viewing the subject had been admissible, would excuse the sneer of the infidel. Indeed, dealing with the sufferings of the Saviour on this principle, those who have done so have escaped from justifying that infidel sneer only by referring the language of our Lord, in relation to the cup given Him to drink, to an apprehension of what the cup contained, altogether unrelated to His being delivered into the hands of sinful men. Nay, because of its seeming to shut us up to the view which they have taken of what that cup contained, viz. that it was filled with the wrath of God, the concession has been willingly made of the alleged disproportion between our Lord's agony in the Garden of Gethsemane in looking forward to the coming hour and power of darkness, and those sufferings which the history of that hour records. And here let me say that I entirely feel that our Lord's physical sufferings, viewed simply as physical sufferings and without relation to the mind that was in the sufferer, could not adequately explain the awful intensity of the feelings which accompanied His prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. But, on the other hand, apart altogether from the insuperable objection that presents itself on other grounds to the conception that the cup which was the subject of Christ's prayer contained the Father's wrath, it seems impossible, without putting aside the record, not to connect that cup with these minutely detailed sufferings, foretold, as they had been, to the disciples on the way up to Jerusalem, and having their commencement i?nme- diately after the answer of His prayer in the garden was 222 HOW WE ARE TO CONCEIVE OF revealed to the Lord ; being also, as we have seen, met and submitted to by Him with words which identified them with tlie cup as to which He had prayed. While John records the words already quoted as addressed to Peter, " The cup which my Father gives me to drink shall I not drink it?" Matthew gives these — " Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?" words which, as well as all else, suggest, not a wrath coming forth from the Father, but a power of evil which the Father permitted to have its course. We cannot indeed doubt what the impression on the disciples as to that to which their Lord was subjected must have been ; and accordingly, after our Lord's resurrection, in that interview of touching tenderness with the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, when he joined Himself to them and said, " What manner of communications are these which ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad " — their sad thoughts were " concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people : and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to death, and have crucified Him." On these events were their minds going back, and on these events did He give them light. " O fools, and slow of heart to believe all the prophets have spoken : ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory ? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." (Luke xxiv. 17, 19, 20, 25, 26, 27.) But both the errors now noticed, — the minute dwelling on the physical suffering as such on the one hand, and on the other hand, the turning away from it altogether, for the explanation of the intensity of our Lord's agony in the garden, and seeking that explanation in the assumption that the wrath of the Father was the bitter- ness of the cup given to the Son, — both these very opposite errors have alike originated in the root error of regarding our Lord's sufferings as penal, and so being THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST. 223 occupied with their aspect as sufferitigs merely, when they were truly a moral and spiritual sacrifice, to which the sufferings were related only as involved in the fulness and perfection of the sacrifice. In St. Matthew xvi. 21, we have the record of an inti- mation to the disciples of the sufferings to which the Lord looked forward, earlier than that quoted above. And both the outburst of natural feeling in Peter at the thought of his Master's suffering such things, and our Lord's rebuke that in so feeling he savoured not the things that be of God but the things that be of men, connected with the teaching that is immediately added, — " Then said Jesus unto them, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me : for whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it" — illustrate to us the relation of the sufferings foretold to the life which the Son of God was presenting to the faith of the disciples, and to the fellowship of which He sought to raise their desires and their hopes. The later occasion of His speaking of His anticipated sufferings to His disciples already quoted is also marked by an incident which is in its teaching to us entirely to the same effect, I mean the request of the two sons of Zebedee. They, with Peter, were the three privileged to be present with our Lord during His agony of prayer in the garden ; as they had also been to be with Him on the Mount of Transfiguration, when " as He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was altered, and His raiment was white and glistering. And behold there talked with Him two men, which were Moses and Elias, who appeared in glory, and spake of His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem." Whether the scene on the INIount, along with the words with which their Lord's intimation of His approaching suffering had concluded, — "And the third day He shall rise again," — though not fully understood, had carried their thoughts at once beyond the sufferings to the glory that should follow, and so moved the desire which the request to "sit the one on 224 //(9^r PV£ ARE TO CONCEIVE OF His right hand, the other on His left in His kingdom," expressed, we know not; but nothing can be more conclusive as to the relation — the abiding relation of the sufferings which the Lord foretold to the development of the life that was in Him, than His reply to this request. First, in accordance with the awful impression of what He looked forward to which it was His intention to convey, He says, "Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptised with the baptism that I am baptised with?" But when they reply, "We are able," He adds "Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptised with the baptism that I am baptised with :" plainly preparing them for that fellowship in His anticipated sufferings which His words on the former occasion, as to the necessity of " bearing His cross," had equally implied. For, indeed, although this period of which the distinctive character is suffer iiig in con7iexion with a per- mitted hour and power of darkness^ is so clearly marked off to us ; yet had the disciples been, as we have seen, before this time taught to see their Lord as bearing the cross, and to understand that they were called to take up the cross and follow Him. And now, when they were taught to associate a deeper meaning than it had yet to them, with their Lord's cross, it was still as that cross which they would have themselves to bear in following their Lord that they were to contemplate it. The co7itinuity of the life of sonship, therefore, is unbroken in the transition to this third and last period, the character of the Father's dealing with the Son as what related to the development of that life is unchanged, and the interest of the progress of that development to us as the development of the life given to us in the Son of God, and which we are ourselves to partake in, is unaltered. We are to meditate on the details of our Lord's sufferings with that personal reference to ourselves, and, therefore, with that expectation of light as to their nature, which is justified by the words, " Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptised 7vith the baptism that I afn baptised with.'' THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST. If we ponder these words well, they will indeed give a peculiar character to our consideration of the cup given the Son of God to drink ; and realising in their light something of the depth of our calling as a call to fellow- ship in Christ's sufferings, — as in the light of the trans- figuration we may realise something of the high hope set before us, — we shall, in our ignorance of the forms of trial which our Father's love may yet take in accomplishing in us the good pleasure of His goodness, feel it needful to fall back, as we may peacefully do, on the faith that " the height and the depth and the breadth and the length of the love of God in Christ passeth knowledge ;" for that its end is, that we maybe " filled with the fulness of God." The faithfulness of our Lord's personal ministry and the unclouded light of His life had been already the realisation in humanity of a loving trust in the Father and a forgiveness towards men, which were a victory of son- ship and brotherhood in the sight of God of great price. But the extent to which sonship could trust the Father, the extent to which the true brother could exercise forgiving love, had to be further manifested, — or, rather, this life of love had to be further developed ; and if we enter into the reason for Christ's suffering at all through being exposed to the enmity of the carnal mind to God, instead of being protected from its malice by " twelve legions of angels," we can see how it should please the Father to bruise Him, and put the Son of His love to grief, such as the restraint put upon the power of the wicked up to a certain point had not permitted. We can see how it was fit that He should be exposed to suffer at the hands of wicked men what would be a measure at once of man's rejection of God, " This is the Son let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours," and of the forgiving love of Him who could die for His enemies : and we can see how as a revealing of the Father this must take place in the power of the life of so?iship, that is to say, in the strength of the Son's conscious oneness of mind with the Father, in the strength of the life which is in the Father's favour. CAMPB. Q 226 HO IV WE ARE TO CONCEIVE OF Therefore, in following the path of the Son as the Father orders it, and keeping our ear open to the voice which says, " This is my beloved Son," we can, without feeling it a contradiction to that voice, contemplate the coming to the Son of " the hour and power of dark- ness." But we should feel very differently if called to believe in any outcoming of the Father's mind towards the Son, or any aspect of His countenance towards Him that did not accord with the words, " This is my beloved Son." For this we should feel quite unprepared. When Satan was permitted to try Job, it was with this reservation, " but save his life." In our Lord's case, it is the higher life, the life in the Father s favou7'^ that we are prepared to see untouched. That He should die, by the grace of God tasting death for every man, so dying as through death to destroy him who had the power of death, that is the devil, we can understand, seeing in this the triumph of the eternal Hfe. Whatever can have been contained in the permission of an hour and power of darkness we can believe to have entered into the divine counsel, because anything that these words can express could only prove the might of the eternal life ; — for nothing simply permitted — nothing external to God Himself — nothing that was not in the divine aspect toiuards Christ could reach that life to touch it as a life in God's favour, or suspend its flow from God. But the wrath of God as coming forth towards Christ would be indeed the touching of that very Hfe in the Father s favour, whose excellence a?id might was to be proved at so great a cost. Accordingly we have seen that it was as a cup from the Father's hand \\\'M Christ received the cup given Him to drink, and that the iinbrokeJi sense of the Father's favour w:\s expressed in the rebuke to the unbelieving, though affectionate zeal of Peter, "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me twelve legions of nngels ?" And, most conclusive of all, we have the reve- lation of the nature of the strength in which the anticipated trial was met, and in which doubtless it was victoriously borne, in the express words of our Lord in reference to THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST. 227 one most bitter element of its bitterness, — " Behold, the hour Cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave me alone : and yet I a77t not a/one, because the Father is with ?;//cJgi\ and not knowing at all: and this. OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT. 275 and nothing less, is the difference between knowing, as to their nature, the elements of Christ's sufferings, being ourselves called to the fellowship of them, and knowing nothing of their nature at all. And, assuredly, whatever elements of Christ's sufferings are still held to be what we are to understand and to share in, that special suffering which was proper to the assumed consciousness of having our sin imputed to Him and its punishment inflicted on Him, that which is represented as the personal sense of the Father's wrath coming out on Him personally, — the wrath of God coming forth on the Son of His love : this is, and must be to us, simply darkness — a horror of dark- ness, without one ray of light. The conception that Christ suffered as our substitute — so by His suffering supersedi?ig the necessity for our suffer- i?ig, itself implies that the sufferings of His which such expressions contemplate, must remain in their nature unknown to us ; an experience in our Lord's humanity which, though it has been an experience in humanity, we have not been intended to share in : a conception that seems to me improbable in the bare statement of it. For an experience of the Son of God in humanity not within reach of man's vision as partaking in the divine nature is to me what there is a strong presumption against. How much that deeply-meditating believer in Christ, President Edwards, has ventured to expect in the way of understanding the elements of Christ's sufferings, we have seen above ; while we have also seen how unsuited to his conception of their being penal sufferings the sufferings which he has specified are, though altogether in ac- cordance with the conception of the atonement now advocated. But all beyojid what he has thus specified, which the words " the Father's wrath " may be expected to suggest, however awful it must be supposed to be, must be felt to remain — necessarily to remain — unconceived of Men's minds are indeed accustomed to this darkness as resting upon the central point in the great work of re- demption. Yet surely it is a presumption in favour „of the view of the atonement now taken, that it makes that T 2 276 COMMEND A TION OF THE VIE W NO W TAKEN central point no longer darkness, but light — the light of the life of Christ concentrated in His death; or rather present in His death, in a fulness which sheds back light on all His life. 2. The life of Christ being the light of life to us, and the atonement being the form of that life, it must needs be light, and not darkness. That which sheds light on all else must needs be hght in itself, and be visible in its own light ; as we not only see all things by the light of the sun, but also the sun itself Further, that in the nature of the atonement which imparts to it this character of light, also imparts that of simplicity and unity. Although I have found it necessary to consider the work of Christ in the two aspects of a dealing with man on the part of God, and with God on behalf of man ; and in the two references of a retrospective relation to the remission of sins, and a prospective relation to the gift of eternal life ; I trust the unity and simplicity and natural character of a life has been felt to belong to all that has been thus traced. It is all grace reigning through righteousness unto ete7'7ial life. All is in harmony with the purpose " Lo, I come to do thy will, O God ;" and is its natural development terminating in its perfect accom- plishment. An unbroken testimony on the part of the Father to the beloved Son in whom He is well pleased ; an unbroken consciousness in the Son as hearing the Father's voice, abiding in the Father's love, strong in the strength of the life that is in the Father's favour, able to drink the cup of suftering given Him to drink because receiving it from His Father's hand, the last utterance of His inner life in man's hearing being the words in death, " Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit ;" from first to last the Son domg nothing of Himself, all His speaking the result of an inward hearing of the Father, all His works the doing of the Father that dwelleth in Him, all His strength the strength of faith, all His peace, all His joy, — peace and joy in conscious oneness with the Father, all His consolation in the prospect of desertion OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT. 277 drawn from the assurance, that, though all forsake Him, He is not alone, because the Father is with Him; the bearing of the heavy burden of our sins accomplished in the might of a hope sustained by the consciousness that what of pain they were to His heart, they were also to the Father's heart : that what of interest we were to His heart, we were also to the Father's heart : therefore His separating between us and our sins. His intercession, " Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do," — a separating, an intercession, in the assurance of the response of the Father's righteous mercy : — in all this I say is unity, and harmony, and divine simplicity. We can trace all this back to the purpose, " Lo, I come to do thy will." Had it been given to us to hear the ex- pression of that purpose, and were it permitted us to follow its fulfilment with a perfect spiritual vision, all would be seen to be in accordance with it, and to be made clear to us, step by step, by its light. The path thus trod we should expect to find all lying within the light of the Father's favour; and it has been so. Suffering and sorrow we should not anticipate, apart from what we might understand of the nature of sin, with which the Son of God was come to deal in the might of the eternal righteousness; but for suffering and sorrow and self- sacrifice in accomplishing the end of righteous love, we should understand that love was prepared. And if any difficulty should be felt as to suffering coming to the Holy One and the True, it must pass away, — I can only express my own experience by saying it has passed away, — in contemplating these sufferings as they arise, and in considering and apprehending their nature ; the unity with the Father out of which they spring, the unity with the Father in which they are borne ; and the justification of the Father in relation to them, in their divine fitness to accomplish the ends of the Father's love in sending the Son to do His will in humanity, and reveal His name to men, — even as they were thus justified to the sufferer Himself, " Now is my soul troubled ; and what shall I say ? Father, save me from this hour ; but for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy name." 278 COMMEND A TION OF THE VIE W NOW TAKEN What is thus seen endured in conscious oneness with the Father as a necessary element in the Son's glorifying of the Father, and in the strength and with the comfort of the Father's acknowledgment, we can believe in as a cup which the Father gave the Son to drink, and which the Son welcomed from the Father's hand. But if we are asked to see the path which the Son is treading in doing the Father's will, declaring His name, as, at a certain point, passing out of the Father's favour into His wrath, and that a demand is made on us for the faith of a con- sciousness both in the Father and in the Son, in their relation to each other, which would make this statement a reality : or if the conception be not that of transition, but that we are asked to combine with the faith of a favour always resting upon the Son, the faith of a wrath from the Father as also proceeding forth upon Him ; however other grounds for this faith may be urged, or whatever weight may be asserted for them — which question I am not at this moment considering — it is clear that the unity and harmony and natural character of what we have been contemplating as the fulfilment of the purpose, " Lo, I come to do thy will," is marred, and the commendation on this ground at least, of that which is presented to our faith, ceases. 3. This unity and simplicity and natural character of the atonement, contemplated as the form which the life of love in Christ took — the natural development of the incarnation — is still further commended to us by its imparting a corresponding unity and simplicity to the relation of the atonement to Christianity. If the atone- ment be the form which the eternal life took in Christ, that eternal life which the Father has given to us in the Son, then, as the atonement is the development of the incarnation, so is Christianity the development of the atonement ; and this is only what the words, " I am the vine, ye are the branches," express. The fitness of all the elements that have been now recognised as present in the personal consciousness of Christ in humanity in making His soul an offering for sin, OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT. 279 to enter into the experience of Christians, and be the elements of their hves, must have been commending itself to the reader as we have proceeded. These elements of our Lord's consciousness as the rays of the light of the life that was in Him, have that relation to us and our state, that, shining in us in faith, they necessarily reproduce themselves in us, that is, according to the measure of our faith ; man and God, sin and holiness becoming to us in the light of Christ what that light reveals them to be, and the confession of sin and the choice of holiness, self-despair and trust in God, springing up in us : a confession of sin in unison with Christ's con- fession of our sins, a trust in God quickened by the faith of His trust in the Father on our behalf and laying hold on that in the Father's heart on which His intercession laid hold. The atonement thus through faith reproduces its own elements in us, we being raised to the fellowship of that to which Christ descended in working out our salvation. " We are crucified with Christ" in actual con- sciousness, as we were in the death of Christ for us in the counsel and grace of the Father : " Nevertheless we live ; yet not we but Christ liveth in us." Let our minds rest on this unity between the atonement and Christianity. How natural a sequel to the atonement is Christianity thus seen to be ! Christ's work shared in through being trusted to, or rather trusted to with a trust which is of necessity a sharing in it. No need here to watch ourselves that we may not only trust to Christ, but also receive Him as our life ; for in the light in which we are, these are but two forms of expression for one movement of our inner man. For, as I would ever keep before the reader's mind, trust in the work of Christ is, in its ultimate reference, trust in that fatherly heart in God which that work reveals, and such trust is the pulse and breath of our new life — the life of sonship. But this natural relation of Christianity to the atonement, and which I believe to be a part of the simplicity which is in Christ, disappears when we would pass to Christianity from that other conception of the work of redemption 28o CO MM END A TION OF THE VIE W NO W TAKEN according to which the atonement and the hfe given to us in Christ, are totally distinct and diverse in their nature ; so that we are taught to keep them distinct in our thoughts trusting to the one while we welcome the other. To any seeking a clear, intelhgent consciousness in religion, the complexity of this teaching appears to me to involve practical difficulties which have been unaccount- ably little felt. As to the sufferings of Christ, whatever sufterings of His may still be considered as what we are to share in, (and the words " if we suffer with Him we shall also reign with Him," must be held to imply that such sufferings there are,) it is clear, that sufterings assumed to have been the punishment of our sins, endured by Christ as our substitute^ we cannot be intefided to share i?t, not even though, as to their outward form and cir- cumstances, they should be repeated in our history ; for still they would not be sufterings endured as the wrath of God and the punishment of sin, inflicted on us as having the guilt of sin imputed to us. Indeed, were we to see one professing trust in Christ, suffering with this conscious- ness, we should feel that he was therein denying Christ, and making His death for sin of none eftect. Therefore any consciousness that is ascribed to Christ, on the assumption of His being consciously bearing our sins as what the Father imputed to Him, and what drew forth the Father's wrath upon Him personally, must be excluded from what the example which Christ is to us comprises. But even as to the righteousness of Christ as that is conceived of, how was He in fulfilling all righteousness, as His doing so is represented in this system, an example to us? He is supposed as one under the law to be consciously engaged in meeting its demands, working out a legal righteousness to be imputed to us. But this is not a consciousness which we are supposed to be called to share, being not wider the law but under grace. So while His righteousness is represented as a perfect legal right- eousness, it is as such put in opposition to the right- eousness contemplated for us, which is the righteousness of faith. Now I am not at present considering the OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT. 281 objections otherwise to this manner of conception ; I here consider it only in relation to the recognition of Christ as our example^ and I request those who, while adopting these distinctions, propose to themselves to follow Christ as an example, to consider how, adhering to these distinctions, they can attempt to follow Christ as an example in relation to His inner life — the springs of His action — the conscious rightness of His righteousness — His conscious confidence towards God — His walk with God. I do not see how they can do so with conscious inward consistency. No doubt Christ did fulfil the law— did fulfil all right- eousness ; not, however, in a legal spirit^ but as the Son of God following God as a dear child. Therefore, in the true conception of this matter there is no practical difficulty, Christ's righteousness as the form of the law of the spirit of the life that was in Him, being, in the strictest and most absolute sense, an example for us who have the life of sonship in Him, and in whom the righteousness of the law is to be fulfilled in our walking in His spirit. The complication introduced in consequence of this departure from the simplicity of the truth is obviously still further increased when we add to the assumed presence in Christ of the sense of an imputation of sin, the presence in us of the sense of the imputation of righteousness ; a consciousness which could have had nothing correspond- ing with it in the consciousness of Christ. But, in whatever way these practical difficulties in walking in the footsteps of the Son of God, in the highest sense which these words can bear, may be dealt with, the fitness of the atonement, as now contemplated, to be reproduced in us, and on the other view of its nature, its unfitness to be so reproduced, are alike clear ; and, apart from other and more fundamental aspects of the subject, I certainly feel that greater simplicity, a more natural character in the transition from the work of Christ to our calling as Christians, is a consideration to which weight is due. 4. I say " apart from other and more fundamental aspects of the subject." For, while it certainly accords to \ 282 COMMEND A TION OF THE VIE W NOW TAKEN my mind with the assumption that the true conception has been reached, that the atonement is thus seen filled with the light of the life of Christ — characterised by the simplicity and unity proper to a life — and standing to Christianity in the natural relation of the life that is in the vine to the life that is in the branches ; yet these appearances are comparatively superficial, and must be delusive, however beautiful, unless the atonement which they commend is in harmony with the divine righteous- ness, and such as meets the demands of the eternal laws of the kingdom of God. Therefore an appeal to these must still remain. I have already expressed my accordance with President Edwards in his founding on the absolute righteousness of God, and my greater sympathy with him than with those who ascend no higher than what they express by the words " rectoral justice." Doubtless what meets the requirements of absolute righteousness must secure the interests of rectoral justice ; while it is not easy to see — I cannot see — how the interests of rectoral justice can be felt secure if the requirements of absolute righteousness are compromised, or even are not seen to be taken into account. But in whichever relation the atonement is contemplated, the superiority of the moral and spiritual atonement, which I have now attempted to illustrate, seems to me clear. That such an atonement lay within the limits of the principles of eternal rectitude on which Edwards builds, we have seen in the alternatives which he states. And, being contemplated as within these limits, I have no doubt that, if realised, its higher character must be recognised. I would indeed rather speak of its exclusive claim to meet adequately the de- mand of the eternal righteousness ; but its /ligher charac- ter as a meeting of that demand is beyond question ; and, if so, then also its superiority as that moral demonstration and vindication of God's rectoral government which the teachers of the modified Calvinism regard as what was called for. This much I feel justified in saying, even looking at the OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT. 283 question with exclusive reference to the honouring of the divine law. But when we consider, that the highest honouring of the law cannot be recognised as an atone- ment for sin apart from the prospective result contemplated., — as, indeed, but with a view to such a result an atone- ment could never have been, — the natural relation of the atonement to Christianity now illustrated, and which in its first aspects so commends itself to us, is seen, when more deeply considered, to be of fundamental importance. Some, I know, are so far from feeling that a natural relation between the atonement and Christianity is necessary, or to be looked for, that they draw back from the attempt to trace such a relation as what they would call reducing the work of atonement to the mere setting an example before us, — and, considering the associations which exist with making the example of Christ the sum and substance of Christianity, great jealousy on this subject may well be excused. Yet that jealousy may go too far. If to represent the atonement as what we are intended to participate in, having its elements repro- duced in us, be to lower the conception of an atonement, must it not be held also that it is a lowering of our con- ception of the divine nature to say that the gospel contemplates our participation in it — that it is a lowering of our conception of what is said when it is said " God is love," to speak of men as " dwelling in love," and so *' dwelling in God ? " I know that such thoughts of the relation of the human to the divine may be so entertained as to lower our conceptions of God, rather than to raise our conceptions of that to which God calls man ; but that the latter, and not the former, ought to be their operation, is unquestionable. So of the atonement as now represented, if it has been a form which the eternal life took in Christ, a form determined by the nature of that life and the circumstances in which it was developed, it follows, that in the measure in which we partake in that eternal life, we shall partake in the atonement, and have it reproduced in us : though not with the same personal consciousness as in the Saviour, who, as I have 284 COMMEND A TION OF THE VIE W NOW TAKEN said, came down in saving us to that to which in being saved we are raised. But so to conceive is surely not to have our conceptions of the atonement lowered, but only- cur conceptions of Christianity exalted. And let not the expression " example " turn us away. For as to the dignity that may belong to an example let us remember the exhortations " Be ye therefore followers of God as dear children," " Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." But, indeed, apart from this, the truth is that the use of the expression " example" is misleading. The relation of our participation in the atonement to the atonement is radically a different thing from what the words " following an example" suggest. Each slender branch, each leafy twig of the tree, with its fruit-blossomed or ripened fruit, may recall the plant in its first form as a single stem, yet with all its proper nature and beauty already visible in it, with that richness of leaf, and blossom, and fruit which belongs to the first developement of the life of plants; but these reproductions of the original plant in its branches are not individual, independent, self- reliant plants. It drew, as it draws, its life from the ground ; they draw their life from it : Christ is the vine ; we are the branches. As it is no depreciating of the life seen in the plant while yet a single stem, to say that that same hfe is the contemplated life of its future branches ; so neither is it a depreciation of the atonement to say that that eternal life, which glorified God and wrought redemption for man, in the personal work of Christ on earth, is the same that is to be seen bearing fruit to the glory of God in us in our participation in redemption. Such conceptions neither depreciate the atonement nor affect the absoluteness of our dependence on Christ ; on the contrary, the relation of tlie branch to the vine alone represents that dependence adequately. And this will, I trust, meet a difficulty which really arises from feeling the expression " example " suggestive of individuality, and individual independence, as if we were to to be indi- vidually each another Christ, and our participation in the OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT. 285 atonement itself an atonement, our participation in the propitiation itself a propitiation. But, it is not only that this recognition of a natural \ relation between the atonement and Christianity is in '. itself no objection to the view which implies it, and can only under misapprehension of what is taught, be re- garded as reducing the work of Christ to a mere example. The truth is, that the discernment of this natural relation becomes essential to on?' faith in the adequacy of the atojie?7ient in proportion as we see the subject of atonement in the light of God. No doubt the perfect response from humanity to the divine mind in relation to our sins, which has been in Christ's confession of our sins before the Father, has been the due and proper expiation for that sin, — an expiation infinitely more glorifying to the law of God, than any penal suffering could be ; but that confession, as it would not have been at all, but in con- nexion with that intercession for the transgressors which laid hold of the divine mercy on our behalf, so neither would it have been the suitable and adequate atonement for our sin apart from its fitness to be reproduced iji us, and the contemplated result of its being so reproduced. No doubt the perfect righteousness of Christ seen as the perfection of sonship in humanity, and acknowledged in the words, " This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased," is a higher righteousness than obedience in any legal aspect of it ; and, if fruits of righteousness could be dispensed to us, either in connection with imputation, or without imputation, on the ground of the righteousness of another, otherwise than in the reproduction of that righteousness in ourselves, here was the highest righteous- ness, the divine righteousness in humanity : but that righteousness could never have been accounted of in our favour, or be recognised as " ours," apart from our capacity of partaking in it ; that is to say, apart from its being a righteousness in humanity, and, therefore, for all partaking in humanity. In order that the importance of this natural relation between the atonement and Christianity may be clearly 286 COMMEND A TION OF THE VIE W NOW TAKEN seen, the relation in which the joy of God in Christians stands to his perfect deUght in Christ must be understood. I have already had occasion to express my objection to what is held on this subject in connexion with imputation of righteousness, or the transference of the fruits of righteousness, assumed to be implied in justification by faith. There has been in this matter a subverting of the natural relation of things which has caused much dark- ness. The end has been represented as valued for the sake of the means ; not the means for the sake of the end. The very excellence inherent in the means has partly led to this. When we look at the work of Christ, viewed simply in itself, it is seen filled with a divine glory, and a moral and spiritual excellence is felt to belong to it so great that God alone can perfectly appreciate it. To say that it is the Eternal Will of God fulfilled, is to say that it is in itself infinitely acceptable to God. When, then, the remission of our sins, and the gift of Eternal life, are preached to us in connexion with that excellent glory to God in humanity, we feel that any acknowledgment of it that can be, is to be looked for ; and, also, that nothing granted on the ground of it can be otherwise than safely granted, for that mercy flowing through such a channel must be holy : so that we easily receive the statement, that pardon of past sin, and prospective blessings, are all given to us for Christ's sake, and because of the perfect atonement which Christ has made for our sin, and God's perfect delight in him ; and this if we are in the light of God in the matter, we cannot do too readily or too con- fidently. And yet our lack of spiritual discernment, and of participation in the mind of God, combined, also, I would say, with our unenlightened sense of the evil and danger of our condition as sinners, may lead to our rest- ing in notions of the meaning of the expression " for Christ's sake," which are superficial and even erroneous. And this is sure to be the case if we enter not into these two great truths, viz. I. Though, in a true sense and one which it is most important that we should apprehend, remission of sins, OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT. 287 and the gift of eternal life, are presented to our faith as resting on the atonement, and as the redemption which Christ has accomplished for us ; yet is the ultimate ground of these, and of the atonement itself in its relation to these, to be seen in God, who is to be con- ceived of, not as moved to give us remission of sins and eternal life by the atonement, but as self-moved to give us remission of sins and eternal life, and as giving them through the atonement as what secures that what is given shall be received, o?i the ground of that in God which moves Him to this grace, and in har?no??y with His mind in bestowifig it. So that to stop at the atonement, and rest in the fact of the atonement, instead of ascending through it to that in God from which it has proceeded, and which demanded it for its due expression, is to misapprehend the atonement as to its nature, and place, and end. It has been truly said, that men have per- verted creation, and instead of using it as a glass through which to see God, have turned it into a veil to hide God. I believe the greater work of redemption has been the subject of a similar perversion. It is the commenda- tion of the light in which Christ's doing of the Father's will, Christ's declaring of the Father's name, has now been contemplated, that, as I have said, it ever raises the mind to the Eternal Will, the Unchanging Name. 2. As it is thus necessary, in order that we may not misunderstand the expression " for Christ's sake," that we ascend from the work of Christ, and through it, to that in God because of which that work has itself been, and to which, therefore, we must refer all that springs out of it ; so is it necessary that, on the other hand, we descend from the work of Christ to its results, and, viewing these as its fruits, see that work as means to an end, and, therefore, as having its ultimate value in the sight of God in the excellence of that end, and its adequacy to accomplish it. This going forward to the result is inevitable if we go back to where redemption has its origin in the divine mind. We cannot stop between. For the work of Christ, while of infinite 288 COMMENDATION OF THE VIEW NOW TAKEN excellence in itself, has its special value as the work* of redemption in the excellence of its result. If Christ were a mere man, His excellence in Himself, could such excellence have been in a mere man, would have been enough to satisfy the mind as to God's glory in Him : but, seeing the perfection of soJiship — like the perfection of fatherliness— as divine, and eternal, and, as respects the Son of God, only manifested in humanity and not then come into existence, this divine excellence in humanity in the person of Christ is seen as in humanity with a view to results in all humanity. Therefore these results are not to be regarded as excellent in the sight of God, and justified because of that divine excellence in hu- manity ; but rather the existence of that divine excellence in humanity is to be seen by us in the light of these results, and God's ultimate glory in it is to be seen in them. This is saying no more than what our Lord plainly teaches when He says, " I am the vine, ye are the branches. Herein is 7ny Father glorified that ye bear much fruit." Now the origin of the atonement in God, and its result in man, have been kept constantly before the mind in the view now given of the nature of the atone- ment; and any misconception of the expression "for Christ's sake " has been precluded : as it is also obvious, that all practical using of the atonement as now repre- sented — all turning the knowledge of it to account in our personal intercourse with God — must be in the way of an ascending through it to that in God from which it springs, and a yielding ourselves to God to have that which it has contemplated accomplished in us. This movement in our inner being — this moulding of us to itself — the atonement, apprehended by a true and living faith, necessarily accomplishes ; and its tendency to secure this result, is one element in our faith, when we first believe ; as also the experience of this power in it is the great subsequent strengthening of our faith: Ascend- ing upwards to the mind of God, into the light of which the atonement introduces us, and descending again to OF THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT. 289 the ultimate fulfilment of that mind in men washed from their sins in the blood of Christ, and made kings and priests unto God, and reigning with Christ, we not only feel a harmony and simplicity and beauty in the natural relation of the atonement to Christianity, but we are also conscious to finding in that natural relation a chief and most sure ground for our faith in the atonement, and in remission of sins, and eternal life, as presented to us in connexion with it. Every time we are enabled, in spirit and in truth, through participation in the spirit of Christ, to confess sin before God, and meet His mind towards sin with such a response as, in the faith of pardon and liberty of sonship, we are enabled to give, we have a clearer glimpse of the excellence of Christ's expiatory confession of our sins, and of the righteousness of God in accepting it on our behalf, to the end that we might thus share in it. Every time we lisp, in whatever feebleness, the cry, Abba, Father, having that cry quickened in us by the revelation of the Father by the Son, we see with the peculiar insight which the experience of the fulfilment of the divine counsel in ourselves can alone give, the excellence of that kingdom ordained in the hands of a Mediator, according to which eternal life in the Son is the Father's free gift. But this direct occupation of our own conscience with the elements of the blood of Christ, and with the nature of the hope in God in which He tasted death for every man, is a source of deep certainty as to the glory of God in our redemp- tion through Christ, which exclusively belongs to the view of the atonement, according to which our trust in it is necessarily fellowship in it — that fellowship a light in which the sure grounds of our trust are ever more and more clearly seen. For this character can only belong to an atonement whose nature admits of its reproduction in us, so that its elements become matter of conscious- ness to ourselves. CAMPB. 290 CHAPTER XV. THAT GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, THE ULTIMATE TRUTH ON WHICH FAITH MUST HERE ULTIMATELY REST. That natural relation of the atonement to Christianity on which so much weight has now been laid is the full meeting of a demand which must be more or less felt in any deep realisation of the divine righteousness; the demand which is so far met when those who represent our acceptance with God as turning upon our trust in the merits of Christ's work are still careful to illustrate the moral tendency of such trust, founding systems of " Christian Ethics" on the atonement ; the demand which is recognised when those who regard the actual imputation of Christ's righteousness as what justifies us in the sight of God are careful to deny the character of justifying faith to any faith that does not sanctify ; for Luther alone have we found setting forth the excellent righteousness which is in the faith which justifies viewed m itself In truth, all care to exclude antinomianism, in whatever way that care is expressed, is an indication of the depth and authority of the feeling which forbids our ascribing to the righteous Ciod any constitution of spiritual and moral government, which does not contemplate results in harmony with the divine righteousness, and which has not its justification in these results. So that, though, in form of thought, a near ap])roach is made to saying, that the great husbandman values the fruitful branch, not because of His delight in the fruit it bears, but because of His delight in the imputed excellence of the vine; still the real feeling of the heart is in harmony with the words of our Lord, " Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS. 291 much fruit." But, as these words " Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit," indicate, we find that it is only in the light of the relation in which the scheme of redemption stands to the faiherli7iess of God that the necessity for a natural relation of the atonement to Chris- tianity can be adequately conceived of The great and root-distinction of the view of the atone- ment presented in these pages is the relation in which our redemption is regarded as standing to the fatherliness of God. In that fatherliness has the atonement been now represented as originating. By that fatherliness has its end been represented to have been determined. To that fatherliness has the demand for the elements of expiation found in it been traced. But the distinction is broad and unmistakeable between simple mercy proposing to save from evils and bestow blessings, and finding it necessary to deal with justice as presenting obstacles to the reahsation of its gracious designs, — which conception is that on which the other view of the atonement proceeds ; and this of the love of the Father of our spirits going forth after us, His alienated children, lost to Him, dead to Him through sin, and desiring to be able to say of each one of us, " My son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found." Not, indeed, that supposing the only elements of the divine character concerned in determining the nature of the atonement to have been mercy and righteousness, the conception to which I object would meet the requirements of these attributes more adequately than that which I offer instead. On the contrary, the moral and spiritual expiation for sin which Christ has made, has dealt with the justice of God, whether contemplated as absolute or as rectoral, in a way infinitely more glorifying to the law of God, and more fitted to open a free channel for mercy to flow in, than an atonement consisting in the endurance of penal sufferings by the Son of God as our substitute would have done. But while this lower ground is tenable, we should not be jus- tified in coming down from the point of view to which the gospel raises us, to what, while true, is not the ultifnafe truth revealed. So to do, would be to forget that the u 2 292 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, gospel, and not the law, affords us full light here; the law being subordinate to the gospel, as our relation to God as our righteous Lord is subordinate to our relation to Him as the Father of our spirits, — the original and root-relation, in the light of which alone all God's dealings with us can be understood. How far, indeed, this subordinating of our relation to God as we are the subjects of His righteous rule, to our relation to Him as we are His offspring, is from depreciating that which is subordinated, has, I trust, been made abundantly manifest, seeing that it is the law of the spirit of the life that is in Christ Jesus, that is to say, sonship, in which alone the power is found to accomplish the fulfilment of the righteousness of the law in us, and that our being reconciled to God, whose law we have violated — the writing of His law on our hearts, so that it becomes to us a law of liberty — is the result of revealing to us our Father in our Lawgiver, and shewing us the law of the Lawgiver in its fountain in the Father's heart. But while to reveal the Father in the Lawgiver is that which reconciles us to the Lawgiver, the only adequate statement of the high result accomplished, is, that it is reconciliation to the Father, — the quickening in us of the life of sonship. However high a conception it is that the " disobedient should be turned to the wisdom of the just," that alone is commensurate with the excellence of the salvation granted to us which is conveyed by the words *' Following God as dear children walking in love." As to the place now recognised as belonging to the fitherliness of God in the history of our redemption, viz. that it is the ultimate ground for faith, I would add to what 1 have urged above these two considerations : ist, It is a special glory to God that the fatherliness which originates our salvation and determines its nature — tliat it shall be the life of sonship — is itself \h-Ai in which the savi?ig power resides. For, as we have seen, the Son of God saves us by a work whose essence and sum is the declaring of the Father's Name. A result so high, accomplished by the power over our spirits found to be in the Name of God, — that is to say in what God is, is manifestly the highest AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 293 glory to God. No result referable to simple Almightiness could be the same glory. That God should by a miracle change a rebellious child into a loving child would be no such glory to God as that the knowledge of the father- liness rebelled against should, by virtue of the excellence inherit in that fatherliness, accomplish this result. " We love him because He first loved us." The power to quicken love in us is here ascribed to the love with which God regards us, considered simply as love. For it clearly is not the meaning, that, because God loved us, He wrought, a miracle of Almighty power to make us love Him. And do we not feel a special glory to accrue to the divine love from this, as the history of our love to God ? a special glory which vanishes, whatever other manner of glory may be supposed to remain, the moment the fact of our loving God is resolved into a miracle of Almighty power, 2nd, But not only is this history of our being reconciled to God what is full of glory to God. If we consider well we must see that our being reconciled to God imist have this history. We have seen that the words " Lo I come to do thy will, O God," indicate the difference between that blood of Christ which cleanseth from all sin and the blood of bulls and of goats which could not take away sin. And so the i Apostle, when illustrating this, goes on to say, " By the \ which will we are sanctified^ through the offering of the ' body of Jesus Christ once." Our sanctification therefore is accomplished by the will of God as actiiig on our will by the 7noral and spiritual power of what that divine will is in itself. For the will of God, in order to be welcomed with that welome which is holiness, i. e. the free consecration of our will^ must be welcomed yV/j/ because of what it is. This is a point which it is most important that we should see clearly. JVbthing extraneous to the nature of the divifie will itself to which we are to be reconciled, can have a part i?i recoiiciling us to that will. Fear of punishment, hope of reward, have here no place. However they may have been included in the history of our awakening to the importance of the relation in which our will stands to the divine will, they must go for nothing — they have ever been 294 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, found to go for nothing — when the soul is alone with God, feeling itself under His searching eye, all its self-con- sciousness quickened by the realisation of the divine knowledge of its thoughts " when yet afar off." Simple earnestness, intense desire to be safe and assured of happiness, is then valued only at its true value ; neither is it self-deceivingly supposed to generate anything better than itself In the light of God, all that springs from the desire of safety and happiness is seen to continue but the desire of safety and happiness still ; and this, though not wrong, — nay, though in a lower sense right, as the working of an instinct in our being which God acknow- ledges, and which God addresses, — yet assuredly is not holijiess^ nor any approach to a delight in God's holy will. Nor, if we should, on any ground, have come to conclude that we are assured of the safety and happiness which we have desired, and, in consequence, should feel grateful to God for this great boon, is such gratitude, though a higher feeling than mere fear, or hope, to be recognised as holiness, or as what implies our being reconciled to God spiritually and truly. At how great a distance from all oneness of will with the Holy God a human spirit may still be, even when esteeming itself saved and thanking God for salvation, is most instructively illustrated by President Edwards, in his analysis of delusive appearances of conversion which had come under his own observation, occuring under the awaken- ing power of much urging of the importance of salvation. But, indeed, clearly understood, the statement is felt to be self-evident, that the will of God must reconcile us to itself by the poiuer of what it is, or not at all. Therefore that the Son reconciles us to the Father by revealing the Father is not only a way of salvation full of Glory to God, but is, in truth the only possible way. So that our salvation would have been impossible had there not been in the heart of the Father what, being revealed to us, and brought to bear on our spirits, would reconcile us to Him, making His condemnation of our sin to become our own condem- nation of it, His choice for us our own free choice for AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 295 ourselves, His love the light of life to us, His fatherhness the quickening of sonship in us. There being that m God which was adequate to this result, our salvation was not only possible, but the way and manner, as well as the nature of our salvation, were thereby fixed and determined. The Apostle John says, " And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world." i John iv. 14. I have had occasion above to notice the way in which the Divinity of the Saviour has been contemplated in relation to the atonement in the two forms of Calvinism ; in the one as implying a capacity of infinite suffering, adequate because infinite ; m the other, as giving infinite value to any suffering in respect of the dignity of the sufferer ; instead of recognising the divmity of the sufferer as what has determined the nature of His sufferings, and has given them their moral and spiritual fitness to expiate sin and purge it away. There has not been the same result of positive error, but there has beyond doubt been great loss of light of truth, through an unwise restmg of attention on the simple fact of the divinity of Christ, which has veiled the teaching of the words " the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world," chosen by the Apostle to express that light of eternal life in which He consciously was. Labour has been bestowed on proving the divinity of the persons thus spoken of in connexion with our salvation, — that the Father is God, that the Son is God ; and the excellent dignity and importance of salvation have doubtless been in this way magnified. But the special teaching in- tended by the Apostle is clearly that which is received in contemplating the Father as the Father, and the Son as the Son. Thus considered, the statement that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world, sheds light on the whole scheme of redemption, its origin, its end, and that by which that end is accomplished. Exclusive occupation with the personal dignity claimed for the Saviour by the name "the Son of God," has, indeed, had the general result of causing men to lose the teaching contained in that name, so that it has suggested 296 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, the greatness only of the love of God to man revealed in Christ, and ?tot its manner and nature ; and yet neither is its greatness known while its nature is not understood. " In this was manifested the love of God towards us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him ;" let the name *' Son " here suggest to us what it has been intended to suggest, and the nature of the life which it has been intended that we should "live through Him" will be taught by it. " Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the pro- pitiation for our sins:" let the name "Son" here teach us what it should teach, and it will shed light upon that propitiation for sin which Christ is, and illustrate to us the relation of the life of sonship to the atonement, — the relation of the revelation of the Father by the Son to our being reconciled to God. Fatherliness in God originating our salvation : the Son of God accomplishing that salvation by the revelation of the Father; the life of sonship quickened in us, the salvation contemplated ; these are conceptions continu- ally suggested by the language of scripture if we yield our minds to its natural force ; and they are conceptions which naturally shed light on each other, and which in their combined light, and contemplated together, so illustrate the nature of the atonement, as to impart a conviction like that produced by tlie eternal light of axiomatic truth. Our Lord complains that he had come in His Father's name and they had not received Him : yet as coming in the Father's name must He be ultimately received ; any other reception is not the reception of the Son of God by which we become sons of God. " He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to be the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name." This those understand whose deepest conviction of having found salvation in Christ is as the experience of orphans who have found their lo?ig-h)st Father. For, corresponding to the yearning of the Father's heart over AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH, 297 US while yet in our sins, is the working of the misery of our orphan state as the ultimate contradiction to the origifial law of our bei?tg: some measure of conscious reahsation of which misery is the truest preparation for receiving the gospel, being the first yielding to the teaching of the Father drawing us to the Son who alone reveals the Father, — that in articulate groaning of our spirits to which Philip gave expression in saying, " Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us." It is justly held that the faith that there is a God, has a root in us deeper than all inferential argument, a root in relation to which all inferential argument is but so to speak, complemental ; owing its authority rather to that root than that root at all to it, though being what that root demands and prepares us to expect. And surely those who deal with men who are attempting to be atheists act most wisely when they throw them back on this root of faith in God in their own inner being, instead of per- mitting a course of argument which allows their thoughts to run away to find without them what unless found within them will never be found at all. That this God, in whose existence we necessarily believe, is the Father of our spirits, is to be regarded as a further truth, the faith of which has a correspondittg depth of root i?t us : and this I understand the Apostle to recognise in the use he makes in preaching to the Athenians, of the expression as used by one of their own poets, " For we are also His offspring." That one of their own poets had said so would have been no reason for assuming that they ought to have believed that it was so, and to have determined their manner of worshipping God accordingly, unless these words of the poet had been the utterance of a truth that was deep in all their hearts. In assuming, as I have been doing, a relation of men to God as the Father of spirits, antecedent to, and to be regarded as underlying their relation to Him as their moral governor, I have, in like manner, been calculating on a response from the depths of humanity. And it is in the hope of awakening that response into a distinct consciousness that I have 298 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, proceeded in treating our relationship to God as the Father of our spirits, as the ultimate truth, in the light of which we are to see the scheme of our redemption, the Father's sending the Son to be the Saviour of the world. If we are in very truth God's offspring, if it is as the Father of our spirits that He regards us while yet in our sins, it accords with this that the Father should send the Son to save us, that the Son should propose to save us by the revelation of the Father, and that our salvation shall be participation in the life of sonship. There is a corresponding witness of truth in the results which the faith of the atonement accomplishes. These in being the truth of sonship towards God and the truth of brotherhood towards men deepen the conviction that it is the very truth of God that our faith is receiving. I. Sonship quickened in us by the revelation of the fatherliness that is in God is sonship in the true and natural sense of the expression. If our redemption has its origin in the feelings with which God regards us as the Father of our spirits, if the Son of God accomplishes our salvation by revealing the Father to us, then is our salvation necessarily the truth of sonship. In living harmony with the light of life, drawn by the Father to the Son knowing the Son as He is present in our inmost being — our true life, and ever seeking to be our actual life — yielding our hearts to Him to reign in them, " receiving with meekness the engrafted word which is able to save our souls," we call God " Father ;" and the utterance is from us a true and natural and simple approach to the Father of our spirits, such as He desires, a speaking to Him according to the truth of what He is to us, the cherishing of an immediate direct confidence in His fatherly heart. For indeed our right confidence in the Father is direct, and is confidence in His fatherly heart towards us, as also is our confidence in the Son direct, viz. a direct confidence in Him as our proper life ; which several manners of confidence we are to discriminate and to realise. For in the Son it is, and not apart from the Son, that we have the life of sonship ; and as to exercise confidence in the Father is to confide AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 299 in Him as our Father, so to exercise confidence in the Son is to welcome the hfe of sonship which we have in Him. And this is the manner of our being aUve to God through Jesus Christ, and it is self-evidenced to my mind as the truth of sonship, as what and what alone we can believe to meet and satisfy that fatherliness in God which presupposes, and by the revelation of which to our spirits by the Son it is quickened. I cannot recognise this truth of sonship, in what, in con- nexion with the other conception of the atonement, is held as " adoption ;" of which I desire to speak plainly, yet warily, knowing how much more difficult it is to do justice in the choice of one's words to the faith of others, than to one's own faith ; and having, also, the awe on my spirit of the true savour of the life of sonship, which it has been my privilege to meet in connexion with the form of thought on this subject which yet I feel constrained to reject. The adoption of us as sons, as superadded to justification by faith, no element of sonship being present in the faith that justifies us, nor exercise of fatherliness contemplated as an element in the divine acceptance of us, the adoption itself a boon bestowed upon us in connexion with the imputation of Christ's merits to us, — this is a manner of sonship as to which it is obvious that the confidence with which we may so think of ourselves as sons of God, and draw near to Him expecting to be acknowledged as such, is no direct trust in a Father's heart at all, no trust i?t a7iy feeling in God of which we are personally the objects as His OFFSPRING, but is in reality a trust in \h.Q judicial grounds on ivhich the title and place of sons is granted to us. I know that it is held that, when in connexion with the faith that justifies God bestows on us the adoption of sons, He gives us also the spirit of sonship, that we may have the spiritual reality as well as the name and standing. But the spirit of sonship is the spirit of truth, the Son himself is the truth — " I am the way, the truth, and the life." That the Son should say, " I am the way " — " no man cometh unto the Father but by me," teaches us that sonship alone deals with fatherliness as fatherliness ; that 300 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, we must come to God as sons, or not co7?ie at all. On this co-relativeness of sonship and fatherliness I have dwelt above. So also that He should say, "I am the life',' fixes our faith on Him us our proper life, according to " the testimony of God, that God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son," — but that He should say, and say in hiima7iity, " I am the truth^' teaches us, that not only is it the case that to come near to the Father we must come near in the Son, and that the life of sonship is the life to which we are called, but, besides, that to come to God in the Son, and so to come to Him as sons, is, and alo7ie is, in harmony with the truth of our relation to God. I have in some measure anticipated this contrast between sonship towards God as quickened in us by the revelation to us of the Father by the Son, and sonship conceived of as added to our legal standing of justified persons through the imputation to us of Christ's merits, when noticing above the practical difficulty of harmonising in conscious experience two manners of confidence so opposite in their nature as a legal confidence on the ground of the im- putation to us of a perfect righteousness, and a filial con- fidence such as the faith of a Father's heart is fitted to quicken. In truth the assumed filial confidence being cherished in this dependence on the legal confidence, and the fatherliness conceived of being, not a desire of the heart of God going forth towards us as His offspring to which sonship is the true and right resp07ise, but the divine acknowledgment of a standing granted to us according to the arrangement assumed, though our conception of the mercy and grace of which we assume ourselves to be the objects may still be high, the t7'ue a7id si7)iplc feeling of dcaVuig with a Fatho-'s heart is altogether precluded. But thus to think of the intercourse with God which eternal life implies as resting for its peace and security on another ground than its own essential nature ; — to think of sonship as cherished freely otherwise than as the natural response to the Father's heart, to think of the Father as rejoicing in this sonship as present in us otherwise than as the Father ; — to feel that the prodigal son feels secure AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 301 in the welcome of his forgiving father on any other ground than the fatherly forgiveness itself which has embraced him, falling on his neck and kissing him ; — to feel that the Father is justified in his own eyes, or would justify himself in the eyes of the rest of His family, in the gracious welcome which he accords to the returning prodigal, on any other ground than that which he expresses when he says, " My son was dead, and is alive again ;" — to suppose that the filial standing must rest on a legal standing, and that all this intercourse between the Father of spirits and His redeemed ofi"spring must be justified by the im- putation to them of Christ's righteousness, and that this reality of communion with the Father and the Son must be reconciled, in this way of at least seeming fiction, with the moral government of God, instead of recognising that communion itself as what is the highest fulfilment of moral governmejit, and the ultimate and perfect justification of all the means which God has employed in bringing it to pass : these are thoughts which can have no place in the light in which the Apostle says — " It became Hi7n for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, i7i b?'i?igi?ig many so?is imto glory to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings." The natural character now claimed for the consciousness of sonship as belonging to our communion with God in Christ, — that is to say, that it shall be felt the due response to the Father's heart, and not the mere using of a privilege and right graciously conferred upon us, corresponds with, or, I should rather say, is one with the self-evidencing character claimed above for justifying faith. The liberty to call God Father, which we feel in the light of the revelation of the Father to us by the Son, we in that light cannot but feel : for in that light we not only apprehend the divine fatherliness, through the perfect response of sonship yielded to it by the Son of God in humanity, and, at the same time, the sonship itself, which is that response, but we have this apprehension neces- sarily with a personal reference to ourselves. How important this statement is — assuming its truth — 302 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, those will feel who are acquainted with the questionings on the subject of adoption by which the most earnest and deeply exercised spirits have been most tried, while their right to call God Father has been conceived of by them as turning upon the previous question of their justification through imputation of Christ's righteousness, and that again upon the soundness of the faith from which justifi- cation has been expected. What is here taught is that to call God Father, and draw near to Him in the confidence of sonship, is simply to conform to, and walk in, the light of life which shines to us in Christ. Assuredly that word from heaven — " This is my be- loved Son, in whom I am well pleased : hear ye Him " — each man that hears is called to hear as a word addressed to himself, — a revelation of a will in God in relation to him. This is not to be questioned. Why is this divine sonship manifested in humanity? Why, brother man, is our attention called to it ? Why are we told of the Father's being pleased in the Son and in this connexion bade to " hear the Son ?" Surely the fatherliness thus presented to our faith is fatherliness in which we are interested, for surely it is interested in us — has desires with reference to us ; and surely the sonship on which our attention is thus fixed concerns us, yea, can be nothing else than the very condition of humanity which these desires of the Father con- template and seek for us. Therefore when we are turned to the ki?igdo7n of God within us^ — when that spiritual constitution of things, which the words that have raised our eyes to the Father and our hopes to sonship have pre-supposed, is revealed to our spiritual apprehension ; — when we know " that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world," as these words state a condition of things with the advantages of which we are encompassed, and the truth and reality of which is to be known by us in our own inner being ; — when that testimony of the Father to the Son, and of the Son to the Father, which pervades the Scriptures is known by us as also in ourselves^ then what is contemplated by the call addressed to us — " Hear ye Him," is understood by us ; — we understand how, in the AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 303 love of the Father of our spirits, the Son, in whom the Father is well pleased, has in Him the life of sonship for us, and how, through Him, and in Him, we also may be sons in whom the Father shall be well pleased. Thus are the outward preaching of the kingdom of God, and the revelation of that kingdom within us, known in their unity, in the experience of salvation ; and the light shining in the scriptures and the light shining in man are known as one light, — at once universal and individual, as is the nature of light. When I hear, in the most general reference to men, the words " God has given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son," — " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased : hear ye Him," — I hear what connects me in my own thoughts, as by a i-evelatioji oftruth^ with the fatherliness that is in God the Father, and the son- ship that is in the Son of God : and so, still, as the light of life dawns on me and brightens, and I become a child of light and of the day, when I know, in my own inner being, the Father drawing me to the Son, and the Son moving and quickening in me the cry, Abba, Father, and have the illustration of a personal experience shed upon the words of Christ — "No man knoweth the Son but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and He to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him ;" still the fatherliness that is thus calling me to sonship, the sonship that is enabling to respond to that fatherliness, I know as one receiving k7ioiu ledge of the truth ofthi?igs; my experience is that of conforming to what is a revelation to me at once of 6^^// and of7nan, — that is to say, as I am a man, of ??iyself In obeying, I am obedie?it to the truth. I do not, I should say, I dare not, doubt the voice of that fatherliness by which I am drawn to the Son, or doubt that the Son is revealed to me by the teaching of the Father for this very end, that I may know the desire and choice of the Father of my spirit for me. I do not, I dare not, doubt the light of that sonship, or that the Son is truly teaching me, as well as lovingly teaching me, how it is right for 7ne to feel towards the Father of my spirit — the response to His heart \N\i\c\i accords with the truth of what that heart is in relat'.on to me. I do not 304 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, ask, " Have I exercised a faith in Christ which has justified me, and am I certain that that faith is so sound as to warrant me to beheve that now I am a child of God, and entitled to call Him Father ? I am exercising a faith to which it is a contradiction to doubt the fatherliness of my Father, or the welcome that awaits me in coming to Him as a child. I am exercising a faith in which it is impossible for me to be disobedient to the Son, quickening the cry, Abba, Father, in my spirit. I have been at pains, in relation to justification by faith, to shew how faith excludes boasting ; not by any artificial arrangement, nor at all by denying to the faith itself the attribute of righteousness, but, on the contrary, because it is itself the true righteousness, and that boasting is im- possible in that light of the truth into which faith introduces ; for in faith we are beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and no flesh shall glory in His sight. I would add here, that the life of sonship, as now represented as quickened in us, excludes boasting. That faith is trust in God, as He is revealed in Christ, excludes, as we have seen, boasting, and makes the right- eousness of faith to be the opposite of self-righteousness ; that this faith apprehends the fatherliness of God, and that its responsive trust is sonship, this yet more and more excludes boasting. The trust of a child in a Father's heart is just the perfect opposite of a self-righteous trust ; for it is a goijig back to \ki^ fountain of our beings — a dealing with that interest in us which was before we did good or evil ; and, as cherished by us sinners towards God, against whom we have sinned, such trust deals with fatherliness as what has survived our sins ; so that our trust, so far from being self-righteous, implies, commences with the confession of sin. Doubdess this trust is in itself holy — the mind of the Son ; but it is not on that account less lowly — less remote from boasting. Are we not, in cherishing it, " learning of Him who is meek and lowly in heart?" There is indeed a further exclusion of boasting, in the consciousness that it is in the Son that we are approaching the Father, — that He, who made atonement for our sins AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 305 and brought into humanity the everlasting righteousness of sonship, is not the mere pattern of our Hfe, but is Himself that life in us in which we are able to confess our sins, and to call God Father ; that He is the vine, that we are the branches. But I feel it important that we should realise that in its own nature, and apart from its derived character as existing in us, the confidence of sonship is essentially and necessarily the opposite of self-righteousness. I the more insist upon this, while also desirous to fix attention on that deepest sense of dependence on Christ, which, in knowing Him as our life, our spirits prove, because I believe, that the whole attraction to conscience which has been found in the conception of an imputation of Christ's merits to us, has been its seeming fitness to secure the result of a peace with God free from self- righteousness, and which shall be really a trust in God and not i?i ourselves; the doing away with what Luther calls, *' The monstrous idea of human merit, which must by all means be beat down;" and in reference to which he values the law as " a hammer with which to break it in pieces." This right result, essential to the glory of God in us, and to our being in harmony with the truth of things in the attitude of our spirits towards God, the truth of the life of sonship in us secures, and alone can secure. Nay more, the life of sonship is not only the purest and simplest trust in the heart of the Father, but its nature is, because of the experience which it implies, to be a con- tinually growing trust in God. I must see a Father's heart in God towards me before I can call Him Father; but, in calling Him Father, the consciousness which comes with so doing is itself a fresh proof to me that He is my Father, and that in so believing I am not welcoming a cunningly devised fable ; and thus progress in the life of sonship is not the coming to have a new ground of con- fidence towards God, but an experience which enables us to "hold fast the beginning of our confidence" more and more firmly. Experience, in calling God Father in spirit and in truth, becomes a source of increased freedom in doing so; not because it has created any further or CAMPB. X 3o6 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, fresh title to do so, for it has not, but because the rightness that is in this mind towards God, its harmony with the truth of our relation to Him, and the glory which it gives to Him, become clearer to us in that increased light as to what it is to follow God as dear children which is implied in the experience of doing so. And, as this holds true as to our trust in the Father, so also, as to our trust in Christ as our life, all experience of life in abiding in Him as a branch in the vine, only developes into deeper consciousness the sense of depen- dence upon Him, shutting us up to so abiding for all expectation of well being ; for the more I know what it is to be able to say, " I live, yet not I, but Christ in me," the more simple, and absolute, and continuous will be my living by Him. The mystery of God both of the Father and of Christ, being thus experimentally known as our fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ, abounds, the fulfilment of God's purpose in us enlightens us more and more in that purpose, and thereby deepens our faith in it as His purpose. I do not feel that the grcnmd for faith, which is thus found in the experience of faith, has been sufficiently valued, especially when the object has been to save us from looking for a ground of peace in ourselves. We cannot be too jealous of looking to self, if we rightly discriminate. But beyond all question, eternal life ex- perienced must have its own proper consciousness ; and the apprehension of it as given in Christ, and the conscious- ness of receiving it and being alive in it as a conscious life, must be trusted to to exclude self-righteousness as light excludes darkness, and not otherwise. It seems to me that Luther, notwithstanding his high estimate of the righteousness that is in faith, and notwith- standing the power to prevail with God which he recognises as being in the feeblest utterance of the cry " Father," has not given its true place to the subjective experience ot the life of sonship. I have felt justified in saying above, that the great Reformer was the preacher of justification by fiiith, according to a truer and stricter AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 307 meaning of the expression than it has had, or could have had, in the teaching of those who have not understood as he did, either that condition of things which the gospel reveals to our faith, and which by its very nature excludes boasting, or that excellent glory which God has in the faith which apprehends and trusts God, according to the revelation of Himself which He has granted to us in Christ, and in the exercise of which our souls "make their boast in God." The difference is indeed broad and unmistakeable between the faith that would correspond with the revelation of a work of Christ performed on behalf of an elected number, by which he purchased and secured for them certain benefits to be in due time imparted to them, — according to the teaching of Dr. Owen and President Edwards ; or the faith that would correspond with the modified Calvinism, which preaches a work of Christ for all men, by which a foundation has been laid on which God may righteously proceed in dispensing benefits to those who will receive them on that footing ; and that faith to which Luther called men, when he proclaimed a work of Christ by which He had redeemed us, even all men, "from the law and death and all evils," and procured for us the adoption of sons, so that we are not under the law, but under grace, and are called to believe, direcdy and personally, and with appropriation to ourselves, because it is so in truth, that Christ is the Father's gift to us, that He is made of God unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. For, however far Luther is from shedding light on the nature of the atonement, however little of the spiritual light which he had himself he has imparted to us in an intellectual form which we can understand, and however startling, and incapable of acceptance according to their sound, are the expressions of which he makes choice in speaking of the relation to our sin, into which Christ came in working out our redemption : these things in him are very clear, viz. that he saw the Father in the Son, and therefore had confidence towards God, because of what he thus saw God to be ; and that he saw Christ, X 2 3o8 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, and in Him all things pertaining to life and to godliness, as the gift of God to men, to all men, to every man : — so that he neither spoke of God as having come under an obligation to do certain things for an unknown some ; nor as having put it in His own power righteously to extend mercy to all who would receive it on the ground on which it was offered ; but as having already done the greatest thing for all men^ and as calling upon all men to beheve and enter upon the enjoyment of what He had done. Yet while Luther's teaching has all the superiority which is implied in a truer conception of what is presented to our faith, as well as the advantage of a juster apprecia- tion of the excellent nature of faith viewed in itself, it seems to me, as compared with the teaching of the Apostles, wanting in its setting forth of that to which the gospel calls man ; a defect which, in reference to the two- fold revelation in Christ, the revelation of fatherliness and of sonship, may be expressed by saying, that his preaching- is more a setting forth of the fatherliness in which we are to trust, than of the sonship to which we are called. Luther keeps before the mind God as He is revealed to be trusted in, — trusted in at this moment by those who have never trusted in Him before ; rather than the com- templated life of Christ in us, in the conscious experience of which we are to grow day by day in the assurance of fLiith and free life of sonship. I do not at all mean that Luther would deny the soundness of all such increase of freedom, assuming it to be indeed that which has now been spoken of, viz. increased trust in God, and in His Christ, through the experience of trusting ; but that this he does not set forth or dwell on. Therefore, while the history of his own first peace in God is, most profitably for us, present in all his commending of the gospel and putting away of the law, there is still in his renewed urging of the difficulty of trusting in Christ in seasons of deep realisation of our sins, a contrast — and, to my mind, an instructive contrast — to the calm consciousness of being living tlie new eternal life which breathes in such words as these, " We know that the Son of God is come, AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 309 and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal hfe." There is a state of mind in relation to the view now taken of the sonship quickened in us in faith, which it is right here to notice. The character of salvation as now represented, as what is accomplished in us by our being " brought out of darkness into God's marvellous Hght," it is felt difficult to harmonise with the greatness of the change which has come to pass in those who are saved, both as respects the condition of their own being, and their relation to God. It is asked, "If God is the Father of our Spirits antecedent to our faith in Christ, and that the gospel reveals Him as our Father, how does the Apostle say — ' In this are the children of God manifest, and the children of the devil ?' And how, when the Jews said, ' God is our Father,' did the Lord seem to deny that it was so ? — ' If God were your Father ye would love me ... . ye are of your father the devil.'" The harmony between the abiding truth of our relation to God as we are all His offspring, and the oppositeness of the con- ditions of our being, which are by choice of our own will, according as we receive the light of Christ or believe the devil's He, not being understood, it is felt that the expressions used in relation to those who are alive to God through faith in Christ cannot have their truth simply in the spiritual conformity of these individual men with a relation of all men to God, and a constitution of things in Christ which embraces all men ; and therefore the gospel is received only as a revelation of a willing- ness in God to become our Fathe?', and so a manifestation of the highest benevolence, but 7iot the revelation of the interest of the Father of our spirits iji us as His offspring. In consistency with this conception of the gospel, it is held that in such discourses of our Lord as that recorded in the 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, the use of the name " Father'' on which I have dwelt above as a part of our Lord's coming to men in His Father's name, is not to be understood as a claim 3IO GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, made for God, and the setting forth of the conception of God with which men ought to approach Him, but as assuming faith and justification and adoption ; so that to say, " When ye pray, say. Our Father," was not to teach men what they were to beHeve God already to be, but what He would becojue if they believed : so also that to say, " If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more will your heavenly Fatlier give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?" was not intended by our Lord to be understood as the proclaiming of a will in God to impart His Spirit to all because He Avas the Father of the spirits of all flesh, but only of such a will as to those who had become His children by faith. If it were only meant that our acting on such teaching implies faith, and that we only truly pray the Lord's prayer in the measure in which we receive the Son to reign in our hearts, there would be in this no more than a most needed warning, — seeing the great self-deception connected with the use of that prayer in a way of mere fleshly repetition of it, void of all life of sonship. But this is not what is meant; and so the parable of the prodigal son, on which so much weight has now been laid, is denied to be a preaching of the gospel, or a revelation of the interest with which God regards men — all men — while yet in their sins; its comfort being reduced to what, in consistency, can only be offered to men on the assumption that they have been adopted through faith, and are such as only need to be en- couraged to return to their first love. But while I notice this state of mind, and do so in much sympathy with the deep sense which it implies of the great issues involved in passing from death to life, I do not do so with the purpose of attempting to offer any help in relation to it that has not been presented already in these pages. To my mind the expression of which I have made so much use — " J/y Son was dcad^ and is alive again',' both accords with the great change that faith implies, vindicating the strongest language in which its A iV UL TIM A TE TR UTH FOR O UR FA ITH. 3 1 1 important results are ever expressed, and also fully recognises our original and abiding relation to God as the Father of our spirits. But while some feel as if it were taking from the sense of salvation with which they themselves call God Father as believing in Christ, thus to regard Him as the Father of the spirits of all flesh, others can testify, that the perfect freedom of sonship has only been attained by them in seeing the heart of the heavenly Father towards all men, to be revealed in Christ, and the life of sonship manifested in Chrisjt to be the fulfilment of the divine purpose in themselves, because it is the fulfilment of the divine purpose in man, I have just noticed the increased freedom in living the life of sonship, and increased assurance of being in the light of God, which comes through the actual experience of a true and living Christianity. Now, while this is, in one Y\Q\y, personal^ it is in another view only a deeper certainty of knowledge as to the will of God in relation to all men, and the " common salvation." It is the record that God has given to lis, that is, to men, eternal life, and that this life is in His Son, which he that believeth hath hi himself. Therefore is the Christian a living Epistle of the grace of God. The progress of mind often experienced in relation to the gospel is very instructive. Some who have at one time contemplated the atonement as having reference to an elected number, and have then felt that their own personal hold of salvation would be weakened if Christ had died for all men, have afterwards come to see, that they could never have felt intelligently certain that Christ had died for them, excepting as that fact was included in the fact that He had died for all men ; and the unsatis- factory shifts had recourse to, in the attempt to combine a free preaching of Christ with a limited atonement, have become very palpable to them, and they have wondered how, saying that, " though Christ had died only for some, He was freely offered to all," could ever have been received by them as an adequate foundation for an 312 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, appropriating and personal faith. And so, as to the results of the work of redemption, — what we are called to apprehend as true ankxcdeiit to our faith — what the state- ment " that God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son," amounts to, — many are for a time satisfied with the apprehension of a mercy in God embracing them, such as Christ's death for their sins implies, — a will in God to bestow benefits on them through Christ, who afterwards come to see, that a relation to them more internal to their own being is alike implied in the language of Scripture, and required by their need, — if indeed they are to be alive to God through faith in Jesus, Christ. They, therefore, welcome that fuller light of truth which at once reveals to them a gulf as left between them and Christ by the simple fact of an atone- ment external to their own being, and that gulf as done away with in the actual nearness of Christ to their spirits, — His presence in them as their true life. For they now understand the teaching of the Father, and His drawing of us to the Son, as what is in the Spirit, and not in the Scriptures only, and as what directs us to Christ, as he is present in our inner being, there where the sap of the vine passes into the branch — a present life to be welcomed or rejected — the ingrafted, in-breathed word, which is able to save our souls. To this presence of Christ in us is the testimony of God " that He has given to us eternal hfe, and that this life is in His Son," now known to refer. And as now the Hteral spiritual truth of the testimony that God has given this gift, and brought it into the needed ncarjiess — and if He had not, how should we? — is apprehended, so now also the manner of the teaching of the Son, the manner of His shewing us the Father, is understood. For it is found that, according as we receive the testimony of the Father to the Son, and in obedience of fiith, receive the Son as our true life, and in Him call God Father, the divine fatherliness becomes known by us as it can be known to sonship alone. For, as in respect of the natural relation which typifies the spiritual, where a father and his children are present A AT ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 313 together with others also not his offspring, the children alone, yea, the children who know that they look upon their father, see — with the eyes of the heart — see a father; so also in the higher region in which we now are the Son enables us, God's offspring, to see our heavenly Father, when, receiving Christ as our life, we in Him raise to the Father the eyes and the heart of true sonship. In thus receiving and obeying the testimony of the Father to the Son, and, in consequence, knowing the Father as the Son knows Him, and gives us to know Him, is the deepest manner of experience of that word — " The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him and He will shew them His covenant." But let us be clear as to the elements of our conscious- ness when this is our conscious history. We have not by any movement of our own being caused this drawing of the Father ; we have only yielded to it ; — neither have we by any movement of our being brought the Son thus near to us. He was thus near to us even when we knew it not. Only under the teaching of God we have Christ revealed in us the hope of glory. The mystery hid from ages and generations is made known to us. Therefore, under- standing the nature of the grace of which we find ourselves the objects, we recognise it as that gracious kingdom of God within us which the gospel proclaims. We find our feet in a large place, — we are consciously in circumstances to receive and obey the word of Christ " Abide in me ; " the personality of these circumstances in relation to us not being less, nor the importance of the issues that depend on the faith of them less either, because the grace in which we stand is the " common salvation." And, like the man who at one time felt that to believe that Christ had died for all would weaken His own conscious hold of salvation, but who has subsequently understood that unless Christ died for all there was no certainty that He had died for him ; so, if we ever felt a distinctive and elective character in the divine drawing which draws to Christ, and a dis- tinctive and elective character in Christ teaching us to call God Father, an element in our religious peace, we 314 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, now find the stability and depth of that peace to consist in the unindividual, the universal character of that testimony of the Father to the Son, and of that testimony of the Son to the Father, in which we are rejoicing with an individual and personal hearing and obedience of faith. Surely that others refuse God's teaching no more affects my certainty that I am receiving the light of truth in welcoming that teaching, than that others are refusing Christ, for whom he died as truly as for me, affects my peace in trusting in His death for me. Nay, that the voice of the Eternal Wisdom to which I listen is " unto the sons of men," and to me individually, just as I am one of the sons of men, is one element in my certainty that it is the voice of God. It is a remarkable and instructive fact, that the ex- perience that the faith of a work of Christ without us, which left us without the knowledge of a presence and power of Christ within us, was inadequate to sustain the intelligent purpose of living the life of sonship, — and that the recognition of a nearer relation to Christ was needed, — has been to some the attraction of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration ; the spiritual change in our inner being, so conceived of, seeming to supply that living link with Christ which has been felt to be necessary to our living by Him, and which the fact of the relation of Christ's work to all men did not provide. Yet the difference between a spiritual relation to Christ as our life, revealed in the preached gospel, and made known to us as a spiritual reality in our own inner being by the divine teaching, (the drawing of us to the Son by the Father,) and such a relation as coming into existence in connexion with the ordinance of baptism, and subsequently assumed in a way of faith in that ordinance, is one of the greatest possible amount and greatest possible importance. Christian baptism is into " the name of God, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit." It relates to a gospel proclaiming that name. It is administered to those capable of intelligent apprehension of the gospel, as believing in that name as the true name of God, and AN UL TIM A TE TR UTH FOR O UR FA ITH. 3 1 5 that in the hght of which they see their relations to Him. Its administration to infants is only understandable on the assumption that they are already interested in that name of God, and that parents and ministers of Christ know them to be so, and are justified in bringing them up in the faith of that name as the true name of God. But that we should find in our baptism more t/ia?i is in the na?ne into which we have been baptised, and t/iaf " more," that spiritual relation to Christ in the light of which we can alone hear and respond to the call to follow God as dear children ; this is in effect, to believe about baptism that which would make it a contradiction of that name of God into which we are baptised. For to say that baptism brings us into the needed spiritual relation to Christ as our life is to say that we were not in it antecedently to baptism, that the grace which the gospel reveals to our faith has not amounted to this j that is to say, that we might know the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and yet not feel in possession of the light of life. I would not have risked any distraction of thought by the notice of this subject here, were it not for the pre- ciousness in my apprehension of that sense of the need of a personal relation to Christ with which to begin to live to God, which the doctrine of baptismal regeneration at once recognises and misdirects. As to the more usual objection to the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, viz. that it hinders the sense of the necessity of being person- ally alive to God as alone a condition of justifiable peace ; I do not see how it is possible for any thoughtful mind to feel at rest in the contemplation of a fact of this kind, whatever it may be believed to have implied, while that fact has been commoii to the history of all the baptised^ and has not hindered any subsequent manner or measure of evil. No man can believe that baptism has secured his salvation : at the utmost it can only be conceived of as placing the human spirit in a higher spiritual condition ; which if it implies the capacity of higher good, implies also that of greater evil — a deeper fall, And so all who 3i6 GOD IS THE FA 7 HER OF OUR SF/R/TS, believe in baptismal regeneration, whether Romanists or Protestants, would speak of it. 2. What affects the conception we form of the sonship towards God to which the gospel calls us, must in a cor- responding way affect our conception of that consciousness of brotherhood with man to which we are also called. The light of truth in which I see God as my Father is the light in which I see men as my brethren. If, on the other hand, the gospel does not reveal God to me as my Father, neither does it reveal men to me as my brethren. I have considered above that fulfilment of the righteous- ness of the law, which takes place in us when we walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit, and w^hich the Apostle represents as the result which God contemplated when He sent His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as a sacrifice for sin, and so condemned sin in the flesh ; and I then illustrated its relation to sonship as the law of the spirit of the life that was in Christ, in which the power was found to make free from the law of sin and death. The righteousness of the law is to love men as well as to love God ; and its fulfilment therefore implies love to men as well as love to God. But the life of love which we have in Christ, which is sonship towards God, is, in being so, brotherhood towards men ; and as it is in being son- ship that it fulfils the first commandment, so it is in being brotherhood that it fulfils the second commandment. Therefore, as it is true that until Ave know God as our Father we cannot love Him with all our heart, and mind, and soul, and strength ; so is it also true that until we know men as our brethren we cannot love our neighbours as ourselves. We know when the question was put to our Lord, by one willing to justify himself by the law, " who is my neighbour ?" how our Lord answered. Let us not under the gospel be found asking, "who is my brother?" or coming to conclusions as to the answer of that question which will leave us in the position of finding that some are our neighbours who are not our brethren : for to find a neighbour who is not a brother, is to find a neighbour AiV ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH. 317 whom I cannot love as I love myself; for unless I can feel towards him as towards a brother, unless in the life of brotherhood given to me in Christ I can see him with the eyes of a brother, and love him with the heart of a brother, I cannot love him in spirit and in truth as I love myself. It thus more and more appears that the question as to the nature of the atonement is in truth nothing else than the question ' what is Christianity ?' It is so, as we have seen, as to the God-ward aspect of the eternal life given to us in Christ. It is so, we now see, as to the man-ward aspect of that life also. In contemplating the eternal life in Christ as taking the form of the atonement, the outcoming of love has been seen to be one and the same thing as son- ship towards God and brotherhood towards man ; and all that has been presented to our faith as entering into the work of Christ has appeared to have been equally called for by love to God and by love to man, — a self-saadfice which was at once dez'otedness to God and drootedness to man. The eternal life being unchanging in its nature, it follows, as urged above, that what it was in Christ as an atonement, it will be in us as salvation. Therefore Christ, as the Lord of our spirits and our life, devotes us to God and devotes us to men in ih^ fellowship of His self-sacrifice. This He does in giving us to know God as our Father and men as our brethren. Seen in the light of God, our state of sin and life of self is solitary in all aspects of it. In it we are " orphans of the heart," brotherless as well as fatherless ; for in it the life of true brotherhood is as unknown in relation to man as that of true sonship is in relation to God. " God setteth the solitary in families." This is accomplished for us spiritually in our passing from death unto life, " for by this we know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death." Christ gives us to possess not God only, but men also as our riches, the unsearchable riches which we have in Him. But, I say in doing so He is, at the same time, devoting us to God and to men, in the fellowship of His self-sacrifice. He thus calls us to poverty, in caUing us to the true riches ; 3i8 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS, calls US to have nothing, in calling us to possess all things ; and thus the pearl of great price, which is given us with- out money and without price, while it is above all price, is yet that of which it is said, that a man must sell all that he has, that he may buy that pearl. If I am to be rich in the consciousness of having God as my Father, this must be in that entire devotion of my being to Him which is in loving the Lord my God, with all my heart, and mind, and soul, and strength. If I am to be rich in the consciousness of having men as my brethren, it must be in loving my neighbour as myself. Here it may occur, that though to say that Christ gives me God as my Father has indeed a gospel sound, this is not felt equally as to the statement that He gives me men as my brethren. Yet are the gifts related, inseparably connected ; their bond being the relation of the second commandment to the first. No doubt the difference, and more especially the immediate difference, between these gifts is very great in all views, but especially in this, that, by the latter, Christ lays a weight upon me, the burden of others ; while, by the former. He lays my burden on God, enabling me to cast all my cares upon Him, knowing that He careth for me. Yet it is an obvious comfort here that the burden of others, which He lays upon me, being truly borne by me, becomes a part of that burden which He enables me to cast upon God. But that we may see the whole transaction in both its parts, that which refers to our relation to men, as well as that which refers to our relation to God — as one grace, we must see it in the light of that word, " He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ?" In the life of love which we have in Christ, not only will God have His proper pre- ciousness to us, but men also will have theirs — as was Christ's own case. Love will go out to men as well as to God, though its goings out may be, in the one case, with sorrow and anguish of spirit, while in the other, it is with peace and joy. Neither can we know the fellowship of our Lord's peace and joy, as what belong to the life AN ULTIMATE TRUTH FOR OUR FAITH, 319 ■which we have in Him in the one aspect of it, while we refuse to share with Him the sorrow and anguish which pertain to His hfe in the other aspect of it. If we refuse to be in Christ the brothers of men^ we catinot be in Christ the sons of God. This is in another form of words our Lord's teaching, when He says, "If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive you your trespasses." We must die to self in the fellowship of the death of Christ, if we would live to God ; and, so dying as to live to God, we shall live to each other also. Self is essential and necessary solitude, with whatever society, and shew of social life it may encompass itself. In the inmost circle of our being we abide alone, until, in the death of self, the life of God is quickened. Then God becomes the centre which self was while yet we were as gods to ourselves, and then the harmony of the first and second commandment is known by us. We find that Christ, in reconciling us to God, has reconciled us to men ; and though comfort, and peace, and joy alone come out of the former of these results of His love, and sorrow, and vexation of spirit, yea, fellowship in Christ's own sorrow, may come abundantly out of its latter result, yet, even as to this latter, the sorrow is not unmixed. If the afflictions of Christ abound in us, our consolation, even as respects men, shall also abound through Christ ; and if men are a weight upon our spirits, and a deep and con- stant sorrow as they never were before, yet shall we know now, as we could not before, the fellowship of the joy that is in heaven over sinners that repent; and, in the communion of saints, shall know what man can be to man when met together in the pure light and life of the divine love. While as to the hope set before us we know, that united to men by the bond of that love in which Christ died for them, our fellowship in His death will prove the seed and earnest of fellowship in His joy in that ultimate result in which He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied. Self is most unwilling to die, and can gather around it so many sweetenings of hfe in the form of social relations. 320 GOD IS THE FATHER OF OUR SPIRITS. which give a certain superficial sense of communion of heart and mind without touching its (self's) life at the core, that we need not marvel that the call to deny self, and take up the cross of Christ, is resisted so long as only the sacrifice required is realised, and not also the exceeding gain that is to come through that sacrifice ; and of this gain nothing is, I think, less anticipated than what is found in the new aspect which our brother men will present to us, and the sense of eternal life that accompanies that new interest of love which they will have to us in the fellowship of Christ's love to them, and which will take the place of that self-reference with which they were formerly regarded ; — though broken, it might be, by occa- sional outbursts of kindly and generous feeling — grapes, as it were, from the land of promise tasted in the wil- derness but yet their promise not believed. Would that these outcomings of a better nature were traced up to their ultimate source in the depths of our being, and, instead of the passing comfort and satisfaction which in their present form is all they usually yield, were employed as threads to lead us back, through the labyrinth of our outward life, to meet and know Him within us — the Lord of our spirits — who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and give His life a ransom for many, and who would teach us the life of self-sacrifice, with all its peculiar and proper sorrows, doubtless, but also with all its pecuhar and proper joys. Nay, have not the bitterest sorrows proper to that life a root of sweetness in them which renders them better, more to be chosen than other joys ? 321 CHAPTER XVI. CONCLUSION. Having in this attempt to illustrate the nature of the atonement insisted so much on the application of the words, " In Him was life, and the life was the light of men," to the whole work of Christ in making His soul an offering for sin, I am anxious not to be misunderstood as to the aspect of the subject of the atonement, in which it has appeared to me reasonable to expect it to be light to us, and not darkness ; and that, in closing this volume, the reader should carry away with him a distinct conception of the limits, which, in writing, I have realised, and kept in view. I have not attempted to divest the subject of the atone- ment of all mystery. I have not cherished the hope, or in truth the desire of doing so. The self-righteousness that takes the form of a submission of faith to mysteries, I, indeed, feel to be altogether a delusion. The assumed merit of a blind faith, in addition to the error implied in all idea of merit on our part in relation to God, involves the absurdity of expecting to please God by exalting one of His good gifts, to the depreciation of another gift, equally to be traced up to the grace of the Father of light?. Any manner of subordinating of reason to revelation must be wrong, in which it is forgotten that we honour God in assigning to reason its due place, as truly as we do in assigning to revelation its due place ; for to be jealous for reason is to be jealous for God, as truly as to be jealous for revelation is to be jealous for God. If self comes in, and forgets that reasoD is a gift as well as revelation, and, claiming reason as its own, is puffed up on behalf of CAMPB. Y CONCLUSION. that which we have thus identified with ourselves, the temptation that thus arises to exalt reason and depreciate revelation is obvious, and the evil consequences to be anticipated great. But the remedy, the true and the only- remedy, is, that we should hear the voice of God in reason as well as in revelation — that God in whose presence no flesh shall glory. But as to mysteries, reason has 'its mysteries as well as revelation ; and to shrink from mysteries, is to shrink from all deep thinking on any of the high problems of our existence. The practical question for us, as God's think- ing, intelligent offspring, always is as to the limit of light and darkness ; which practical question we are to enter- tain under the sense of this twofold responsibihty ; that, as it would be wrong to attempt to push beyond that limit, or to be impatient of its existence, so would it be also wrong to fix it more near to us than it is in the truth of things, or at least in relation to the dispensations of light vouchsafed to us by God. For would not this be to refuse to use a portion of the grace of God to us, and be one form of folding in a napkin and hiding in the earth a talent of which an account must be rendered ? Therefore, under the sense of a responsibility of which the twofold aspect has appeared to me thus unquestionable, I have now considered the elements of the work of Christ as what His participation in humanity, and our partici- pation in the divine nature through Him, seemed to place within the limit of the light of life that shines for us in Him ; while I have simply recognised, abstaining from all attempt at explanation or elucidation, the underlying and deeper facts of the relation of man to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, implied in the relation of the work of Christ to all men, and in the spiritual reality of that which is stated when it is said that " this is the testi- mony of God, that God has given to us eternal life, and that this life is in His Son." As to these deepest facts of our being and of our relation to God, I have not even attempted to determine the line that separates the darkness and the light now ; or at all to say what its eternal dJ!\dL CONCLUSION. 323 necessary place is ; while neither am I to be understood as passing any judgment on attempts to do so, or on the going of others nearer to that awful line than I have done. But I am anxious that the reader should realise how much on the light side of that line I have kept, having deter- mined to approach it no more nearly than an attempt to illustrate the nature of the atonement required me to do. Reason has its mysteries as well as revelation, the mysteries of deepest interest to us being, indeed, common to them both ; though, inasmuch as revelation carries us further into the region to which mystery pertains, the sense of mystery in occupation of mind with the discoveries of revelation is greater. But the aspect in which the atone- ment has now been contemplated does not belong to the proper region of mystery at all. That region, whether as respects reason or revelation, is the divine and the infinite ; and the atonement has now been considered simply as a transaction in humanity, contemplating results in man, to be accomplished by the revelation of the elements of that transaction to the spirit of man, and in a way of partici- pation in these elements on the part of man. It is not in this transaction, vieiued m itself, that mystery was to be expected, or could exist, but in that relation of the Son of God to man which this transaction presupposes. This relation, whether we contemplate it as participation in our flesh, or as that relation to us in the spirit in respect of which Christ is our life, having power over all flesh to this end, is indeed a mystery as to its nature and vnm?ier, and to be known by us only in its results. And this is true, whether we contemplate the personal work of Christ in making His soul an offering for sin, or His work in us in respect of which it is true, that when we live to God we must say, " Yet not we, bat Christ liveth in us." The divine perfection of sonship in humanity, presented in Christ to our faith, is, in respect of its per- fection, what leads us up to the mystery of the divinity of Christ as truly as His power to quicken and sustain son- ship in spirit and in truth in us does. I can realise neither V 2 324 CONCLUSION. without feeling shut up to the faith of the divinity of the Saviour ; while that faith so accords with the facts the contemplation of which thus leads directly to it, that, being received, it sheds light on them. For, believing in the divinity of Christ, we see how the atonement has that commensurateness with the infinite evil of sin, and infinite excellence of righteousness, which imparts to it its peace - giving power ; we see how Christ is near to us in that nearness that accords with His being our life, and has that power in relation to us which justifies the con- fidence that through Christ strengthening us we can do all things. But viewed in itself this faith has in it the deepest mystery ; but it is mystery in the region in which we are prepared for mystery, being, first, in the manner of being of God, and then, where the line of meeting is between God and man. For here, also, we are prepared for mystery ; and while we expect to understand what per- tains to the hiwimi side of this line and to the divine nature as in /nwiafiify, we do not expect to understand what is on the divine side, and pertains to the acting of God as God. As to that ultimate mystery which our faith receives in believing in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, while in itself eternal, and irrespective of all finite existence, we can only be called to the study of it in its mariifcstation in connection luith man. But even in this manifestation there remains a necessity for recognising the distinction now made. What the divine sonship is in its spiritual essence and consciousness, as presented to our faith in Christ, and as that to the fellowship of which we are ourselves called in Him, this the very nature of the divine purpose in relation to us prepares us to expect to understand. But the nature of the relation of the Son of God to humanity, whether we contemplate His own per- sonal work in making His soul an offering for sin, making an end of sin, and bringing in everlasting righteousness, or His work in men as putting forth the power in them which is implied in His being their life; — this belongs to the acting of God as God, and to the divinity of the Son of God, in CONCLUSION. 325 an aspect of the subject which all experience in thinking of our relation to God prepares us to find ourselves unable to understand. Nor is the question of how this can be, or what the manner of the divine acting is which it implies, the only- mystery here. The faith of the divinity of the Saviour, while in one view it affords light and explanation as to the facts which constitute the gospel, in truth involves and deepens all the moral and spiritual mysteries of our existejice. I believe, as I have said, that the faith of the atone- ment, and the faith that we have eternal life in Christ, is more easy to us when it rests on the faith of the divinity of Christ. Indeed, apart from that previous faith, the faith of what the gospel reveals Christ to be to us would be to me impossible. I cannot believe in one as my life, of whom I am not warranted to think as God ; while, remembering that in God I live, and move, and have my being, I seem prepared to be told — I had almost said to understand — that the divine life of sonship is what I am to live in and by the Son of God as 7ny life. The uni- versal relation of men to the one Son of God, as He in whom they all have the life of sonship, accords as perfectly with the divinity of the Son of God, as it con- tradicts every lower conception of His being ; and the Apostle, who preached to the Athenians, in relation to the unknown God whom they ignorantly w^orshipped, that "in Him they lived, and moved, and had their being," must be regarded as only presenting to our faith another part of the truth of man's mysterious relation to God, when He makes known the mystery hid from ages and generations, — the mystery of " Christ in men the hope of glory." Nay, how closely the one revelation is related to the other, we must see, if we connect the use which the Apostle makes of the recognition of man's relation to God by one of their own poets, "For we are also His offspring," with our relation to Christ in respect to that life of sonship in which alone men can call God Father in spirit and in truth. Surely the parallelism of these relationships to the Father and the Son is a help to 326 CONCLUSION. our faith in the divinity of the Son, as it also explains the fact that this mystery of the divine existence is 77iade known to us. But still, as I have said, this mystery, apart altogether from what men have felt of its intellectual difficulty, deepens the previous mysteries of reason with which all thoughtful minds have been exercised from the beginning. Thus the great mystery of combined dependence and independence, as presented by our relation to God, — the mystery implied in the fact that in God we live, and move, and have our being, and yet that we may be the opposite of what God wills us to be, — this is not re- moved, but only deepened by all the thoughts of our relation to God which are connected with our relation to the Son of God. If we think of the matter in the way of considering how in the nature of things the spiritual constitution of humanity can be a reality, there is no question that a manner of nearness to God and to goodness, is suggested by the statement that " God has given to us eternal life in His Son," — understood as implying an actual relation of our spirits to Christ as present in us, our true and proper life — which it is still more difficult to reconcile in our thoughts with the fact of sin than even our "living, and moving, and having our being in God" is. If, again, we look at the subject in relation to the divine will as a will concerning us, the choice of God for men, in proportion as the gospel reveals the love in which the law has its root, and shews the demand for love to be the demand of love, the difficulty that exists in the fact of our being other than that love desires that we should be is increased, and reaches its maximum of difficulty when the love, which is seen seeking our well-being, is seen as the fatherliness that is in God, and its choice for us is seen as participation in the Hfe of sonship, and the provision for the realisation of that choice is seen in the gift to us of this eternal life in the Son. Assuredly the mystery, the moral and spiritual mystery, is here in- creased in proportion as it is seen to be a mystery thus CONCLUSION. 327 involving infinite love. But, though increased by all that magnifies God's unspeakable gifi;, let us not forget that it is not less truly the mystery of reason than the mystery of revelation. Doubtless it is with a sense •of mystery, often alto- gether oppressive, that we look upon human sin and degradation, and then pass upwards to the Father of the spirits in whom the sin and degradation present them- selves and meditate on the thoughts of that Father in relation to them, and on all that our faith apprehends of what He has done, and is doing, to accomplish in them the good pleasure of His goodness. But though this mystery is greatest in the light of the gospel, it is great, very great, in the light of all those witnesses for His goodness towards men, without which God has never left Himself; and in respect of which the charge is just, that, in not being thankful, men were refusing to glorify God as God Some would cut this knot by saying that all contradic- tion between what God is, and what God wills, is but apparent ; that nothing is, or can be, other than what God wills it to be ; and that facts in the moral and spiritual region, even those that seem most contrary to the mind of God, are really related to Him just as physical facts are — hatred and love as much as cold and heat. Hatred may believe this, but love cannot Self may believe that there is an end present to the divine mind which all moral events equally and necessarily subserve, and with reference to which it is that God wills them to be, and which it may call the divine glory. But love cannot believe that the divine glory is of this nature, or that that will, in respect of which God is love, and the manifestation of which must be His glory, can, in respect of moral beings, be fulfilled but in theij- lovi?ig. The existence of a contradiction between what man is, and what God wills him to be, is indeed a mystery. The faith of the fact, however, is demanded by what is highest and deepest within us, which forbids our grasping at a seeming intellectual consistency of thought, at the 328 CONCLUSION. expense of denying this contradiction, and accepting all the fearful moral and spiritual results which such denial involves. And even as to the intellectual relief sought, in denying that contradiction between man and God, which all ascription of goodness to God, and all hope of goodness for man alike imply, (for if evil be not contrary to the will of God, what hope of deliverance from it ?) this seeming intellectual relief is but such in seeming ; for it is but the removal of the contradiction, from where conscience recognises its existence, to place it iti God Himself, by representing Him as what the Apostle so solemnly disclaims His being — a fountain giving forth at the same time sweet waters and bitter. Nor can we be otherwise than thankful for the utter failure of all attempts made in this direction to solve this great moral and spiritual mystery; for its weight is nothing in comparison of what would be laid upon us by taking away the faith that God is love which involves that mystery, and representing the great First Cause as at the most only an intelligent fate. Nay, we may surely say, that what of mystery in relation to the actual facts of human existence, as it presents itself to us, the faith of love involves, the faith of love will itself enable us to submit to in the patience of hope. But if the love of God to man presents deep mysteries, and mysteries that deepen to our apprehension as our faith that God is love is real, having also more claim on our attention in proportion as they are not intellectual, but moral and spiritual ; and, more especially, if that sjjiritual constitution of the kingdom of God in relation to man, which the gospel reveals, be the deepening to the utmost of that mystery which the contradiction between what man is and what God wills him to be presents, how have I now attempted to illustrate the nature of the atonement, without entering upon the consideration, either of this moral and spiritual mystery, or of the intel- lectual mysteries to which the atonement is related ? Because none of the mysteries which encompass the atonement are so related to it as that we musty^rj-/ solve CONCLUSION. 329 them before we can understand it j a course the opposite of this is rather that to which we are called ; and whether we would ascend upwards to questions connected with the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or meditate on the present or future of man, the due pre- paration for these regions of thought is the exercise of faith in the actual condition of things which the gospel reveals, and which, in the light of the kingdom of God within us, and in the measure in which we are taught of God, w^e know as the truth. I have, therefore, felt at liberty to consider the nature of the atonement, without first considering the mysteries which encompass it. Nay, what I have just said imphes that I must have begun with this subject, had my ultimate purpose been to consider these mysteries ; so that even with regard to those questions in relation to God and man, which take us most to the verge of light, the inquiry, which has now engaged us attaches to itself all the interest and importance which may be felt to belong to them. But while I hope for good only from all holy and reverent meditation on any of the deeper subjects of thought to which I have now referred, my immediate purpose has not been to offer help towards such medita- tion, though I should be thankful to be found to have actually done so, — as doubtless much of what has now been presented to the reader's consideration has been such help to myself, — but my immediate object has been the urgent practical one of illustrating that spiritual con- stitution of things in which, in the grace of God, we have a place, and to which we must needs be conformed if we would partake in the great salvation. Such conformity, that Amen of faith to the atonement which I have sought to illustrate, is that to which our Lord calls us when He says, — " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness," — adding, in order that we may be altogether free to give heed to the call, the assurance " and all other things will be added unto you." All inquiry as to what is truth is solemn, and the sense of CONCLUSION. responsibility that belongs to it, weighty. But, manifestly, that inquiry becomes more solemn, and that responsibility more weighty, in proportion as the answer to the ques- tion, "What am I to think? — What am I to beheve?" becomes one with the answer of the question, — " What a?n I called to beT And this is the solemnity, this the importance that belongs to the question of the nature of the atonement. The reader who has accompanied me to the close of this volume, in the fair mind and with the patience of love, has I trust felt that throughout I have simply sought to awaken a response in his own inner being, — whether in this I have succeeded or have not, — and that I have written, not with the interest of theological con- troversy, but as a man communing with his brother man, and giving utterance to the deep convictions of his own heart as to the spiritual need of humanity, and the common salvation. For I have written as seeming to myself to hear, and as desiring to be used to help others to hear with personal and practical application, the Son of God saying to us, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life ; no man cometh unto the Father but by me," the Father saying to us, " This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him." 131 NOTES. NOTE TO INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. ON THE TENDENCY TO RESOLVE RELIGION INTO LOVE OF MAN TO MAN. It has been said that the teaching of a religion which is not morality has led to the teaching of a morality which is not religion. What- ever causes have contributed to so evil a result, there is no doubt that our time is characterised by an ideal of the bond which connects man with man which is being raised higher, combined with a waning sense of the bond which connects man with God. Men seem as if they were awakening to the due feeling of the beauty and of the obligation of love to man our brother, but not as what is quickened by the faith that One is our Father, nor as a natural development of love to Him. I say not how far it is possible to understand and obey the voice that bids us love one another, while that voice is not yet recognised as the voice of God who is love, and has made love — the law of His own being — the law of our being also. The light is shining in dark- ness — darkness which yields to it but gradually and perhaps we may say in no fixed order ; so that some points it may illumine while other remain invisible. In the full clear light of life, the first and great commandment — love to God — is seen as such ; and the second— love to man — which "is like unto it," is seen as a corollary to it, a necessary development of it. In that light also, it is seen that all intelligent peace in the discernment and choice of goodness implies the faith that God is, and that He is good, and that all goodness is of Him. Apart from this faith the vision of goodness would indeed be as the vision of a light, which, for all we knew, might at any time be extinguished in eternal darkness. In the light of goodness we feel its supreme excellence because of what it is in itself, and irrespective of all considerations exterior to itself : so that, were existence limited to a moment, we should prefer goodness as the life of that moment. But that any man contemplating goodness while not seeing it in God its fountain can do so peacefully, or can hopefully choose it as life while not discerning it to be eternal life, must, I believe, imply the working of a deep spiritual instinct which makes it impossible to feel goodness to be but a passing self originated phase of a perishing mind. I know how plausibly, but most superficially, men have spoken of 332 NOTES. love of man to man as what has its purity and disinterestedness marred by a reference to the will of God in cherishing it. Such a reference as a mere sense of personal dependence, and of the importance to us in our weakness of the favour of the Almighty, may, viewed in itself, be thought to have this tendency, and, doubtless, cherished alone, would have this operation ; though it cannot be otherwise than healthful to realise our dependence on God simply as dependence, and as a part of the truth of things. But reference to God's aspect towards us, when God is known as love, while He is felt to be the searcher of hearts who sees us just as we are, can have no other operation than to cherish and develope that life of love in us which we are knowing as the divine life. But however great the value of the first and great commandment in its relation to the second, its importance in itself— that in its own nature because of which it is the first and great commandment — is its highest importance to us. It is not merely, nor chiefly, because in order to our dwelling together as brethren it is necessary that we shall know God as our Father, that the knowledge of God as the Father of our spirits is the first and highest knowledge for man. " Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us that we should be called the sons of God." Could men attain to a perfect brotherhood in relation to each other, while putting from them their high birthright as God's offspring, what remained to them of the privilege of existence would be small indeed in comparison with that which was lost. Low conceptions of salvation, which have been possible only when man's root relation to God as the Father of spirits was left out of account, and God has been thought of only as a sovereign Lord and righteous Judge, have hindered occupation of men's spirits with the life of sonship which we have in Christ, as being the highest aspect of our existence. But, in proportion as faith in the incarnation strengthens, and the atonement in both its retrospective and prospective aspects is understood as the develop- ment of the incarnation, Christianity will be more and more seen as a life of sonship in the fellowship of the life of the Son of God. This will be to return to what Christianity was at the beginning ; and I believe the words which the Apostle addresses to us as indi- vidual Christians may be heard as addressed by our Lord to the church, — " Hold the beginning of^your confidence stedfast unto the end." Men still regard as a part of the ideal contemplated in the early Church, and in measure realised, that men should love one another, and dwell together as brethren : but not less unmistakably, was it another and a higher part of that ideal, that men should love God and follow Him as dear children. Man's relation to God was as truly the practical interest of life as was man's relation to man : Christ as the Son of God was no less the example and pattern studied than Christ as the Brother of man. If I say that the contrast between this latter aspect of Christianity, as presented to us in the early Church, and the ever-lessening interest NOTES. 333 in the first and great commandment, and the merging of religion in obedience to the second, indicates a putting from us of the hfe of son- ship towards God, that is, of our birthright as heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ, many readers knowing that they are not in their own thouglits Atheists or Pantheists, or in any form theoretically losing a personal God in the reign of law will feel as if my words did not touch them. Still less will they be felt to apply to themselves by those whose occupation with the duty man owes to man has a certain habitual reference to God as a moral Governor. I am not to be regarded as making no distinction among these classes of men. Nevertheless my conviction, even as to the latter, is that Christianity as a fellowship in the Sonship of the Son of God has still to be revealed in them. Yet what I thus place in contrast with primitive Christianity is, I fear, the conscious position of some, and is regarded by them as differing from that taken by the first Christians only in being higher ; the transference of the relationship of father and child to our relationship to God being looked on by them as only an anthropomorphic form of the religious instinct, to rise above which belongs to philosophy. But very few comparatively, recog- nising Christianity as a gift of God and the highest hitherto known, will thus regard philosophy, in this development of it, as a higher gift still — the latest and the best. Those few can speak of Christian- ity passing into a philosophy, but the multitude of those who believe in Christianity as of God, if they recognise at all the fact of the present absorption of practical religion in obedience to the second commandment, will see in it, not progress, but a fearful depai'ture from the first principles of Christ. Our highest relation, that in which we stand to the Father of our spirits, can no more pass away in a philosophy, and from a life of love become a form of thought, • than any other relation of which love is the essence. NOTE TO CHAPTER II. LUTHER'S TEACHING OF JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE. I believe that I have truly expressed Luther's personal faith and consciousness in his contending for Justification by Faith ; that which also was the secret of his power and the value of his work. Faith is the right attitude of the human spirit towards God — the due response to His revelation of Himself to us, in rendering which our hearts are right towards God. "Justification by faith alone" means that in pronouncing us just God regards only and exclusively the attitude of our spirits towards Himself. What elements will be present in the response of faith must depend on the elements present in the revelation of God to which it is a response. As a preacher of Chi-ist, Luther insists on a response to the revelation of God, in 334 NOTES. Jesus Christ. Of that revelation he conceives as necessarily inspiring confidence and love, entire reconciledness to God. These he expects to abound in the spirit of him that believes, in proportion to the simplicity and exclusiveness of the occupation of his spirit with that which his faith is apprehending. Therefore, he permits no division of trust. Such division is to him a hindrance to the soul's life in God's favour. Hence it is that we see him placing together in one category things so different as penances and good works ; whereby he has exposed himself to much reproach ; many, while rejecting the former as pertaining to superstition, being jealous for the latter as belonging to morality, and what to undervalue is Antinomianism. But, if we would do justice to the great Reformer, we must read his pleadings for faith as we read St. Paul's commendation of charity. The place which the Apostle claims for charity, or love, accords exactly with the place which Luther claims for that faith which worketh by love. Good works are related to charity as its proper outward form. They are related to faith as its proper outward fruit. Being really good they mar not the purity of the love which they ex- press, while they are an outgoing of its life, which tends to the developing and strengthening of that life. Being really good they mar not the simplicity of the faith of which they are the fruit ; rather, as an experience of the Divine Power of faith, they strengthen faith, deepening, as by a special additional evidence, the confidence with which it is held. " He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself," viz., a witness " that God hath given to us eternal life," in addition to the witness of God which is presupposed, and which faith accepts. But good works of which the praise is not thus given to God, and which are contemplated, not as adding to our obligations to God, but as bringing Him under obligations to us, only hinder faith as they must also hinder charity. To this light it is that we must take Luther's teaching if we would understand his including good works with penances in his denunciations. Even the more refined teaching " that faith to be accepted must be per- fected by charity," he saw to be still a marring of the simplicity of faith — a distraction of the regard of the spirit from the object of faith. The faith whose power to inspire confidence towards God is sus- pended, waiting for the consciousness of a supplement of feeling, is not that faith of love which quickens love. Of this Luther had the clearest discernment in the light not of a severe logic, though it is consonant with the severest logic, but of a deep personal experience — the experience first, of the mental agony he endured while engaged in the anxious attempt to perfect faith in the use of all the discipline prescribed for that end ; and then, of the happy emancipation of his spirit as soon as he had fixed his exclusive regards on the Cross of Christ : an experience identical with that which Bunyan gives as that of his pilgrim when he came in sight of the Cross and the burden which he bore fell of itself from his back. The divine acceptance of faith has as its counterpart in him that NOTES. 355 believes peace with God and joy in God, a peace and joy propor- tioned to the simphcity and strength of the faith from which they spring. This aspect of Luther's teaching we must realise if we would understand its power. God as revealed in Christ asks our undivided trust. But may this be an assured personal trust ? Luther's reply was Yes — a trust, the personal assurance and peace, and joy, of which has no limit in its object, but only in the clearness and stedfastness of the faith with which that object is regarded. Hence the attraction of his preaching. It drew men by the promise of perfect peace with God — a true and holy peace in harmony with the character of God. For, however much Luther's seeming depre- ciation of good works has been urged against him, I have no doubt that in reality his great power was that, like St. Paul whose disciple he specially claimed to be, he commended himself to every man's conscience in the sight of God. The testimony of conscience was on his side in showing how empty of any real righteousness were men's endeavours by mortification and penances to commend them- selves to God. The testimony of conscience was also on his side in setting forth the true righteousness that is in faith, because faith gives His true glory to God. The conception of faith working by love is exceedingly simple — love believed operating in him who believes effects according to its own nature ; the measure of the result of good being the strength and stedfastness and purity of the faith. Self-consciousness is necessarily present and is. an element in our understanding of the love revealed. It is love to us taking its form from what we are. " God commendeth His love towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." But our self-consciousness is simply that of recipients of love, helped to understand love by what they feel themselves to be, while all our feelings towards God are unmix- edly what His love quickens. Any element of confidence or hope originating otherwise, originating in anything individual, anything because of which a man separates himself from others is a foreign admixture, hindering the purity of faith, and so weakening its power for good. Here let us realise that the exclusiveness of the mind's regard as fixed on God's revelation of Himself in Christ being preserved, no measure of personal confidence towards God can be too great, and all jealousy of such confidence, as if it were inconsistent with humi- lity is only possible when that which is so judged is not understood. We cannot be too jealous of foreign elements mingling with the confidence of faith, but this, and this alone, is here a legitimate jealousy. As, in the light of God in Christ, we cannot be uncertain whether it is the light of truth : so also, when we are yielding to that light the obedience of faith, we cannot be uncertain as to whether that is Eternal Life which that faith is quickening in us. And just as, being in the light of the Truth, we refuse the demand made in the name of the church that we should suspend our confi- 336 NOTES. dence that it is the truth, until the church has sealed it with her authority ; so, in experiencing the power of the Truth to inspire confidence towards God, we refuse the corresponding demand that we should suspend our confidence in God's acceptance of us, until we have availed ourselves of the church's help and guidance for the perfecting of faith. "Where is there room for the grace of humility ?" is the question urged, when our obedience to divine light is regarded as presumptuous confidence in our own judgment. This question is repeated, when our joy in that personal assurance of God's acceptance which accompamies the response of faith to the divine love is assumed to be an unwarranted self-complacency in our own conscious state before God. But, as it is true humility to believe, so is it true humility to rejoice in that which we believe. " My soul shall make her boast in the Lord : the humble shall hear thereof, and be glad." I have said that, if we would do justice to the great Refoi-mer, we must look at his commendation of faith as we do at St. Paul's com- mendation of charity. Commendations of faith have not that ready response which commendations of charity, at least of charity as love of man to man, seem to command. I believe that this is so because we are more alive to what is wanting in the feelings of man to man, than to what is wanting in the feelings of man to God. It is not indeed in the pure light of the love due from man to man that men are speaking, when they are able so readily and almost self- complacently to praise charity ; for in the light of love the sense of short-coming and self-condemnation would be their prevailing feeling, yet there is no doubt that the obligation of love to man is more generally felt than the obligation to faith in God, or love to God either. But what I feel is that, as in the light of love, i.e. of love as love to God and love to man, we assuredly feel that St. Paul's teaching in chapter xiii. of his first Epistle to the Corinthians is so full of self- evidencing light that we regard it as giving him a claim on our faith as far above that of the miracles which he wrought as he himself places charity above miracles, so also the true teaching of faith has upon it as unmistakeable a divine mark as the true teaching of love. The attitude of the spirit towards God in faith is so truly its right and most excellent attitude — the higliest, purest, and most perfect consciousness of being in one possessing a derived being — that the demand for it is felt to be made in pure light, and he wlio makes it is felt to be holding forth the word of life. " God raised Christ from the dead and gave Him glory that our faith and hope might be in God ;" and though charity l)e greater than faith or hope, being fellowship in what God is, for God is love, yet are faith and hope precious in themselves, as well as in their relation to the charity which they feed (and which doubtless feeds and strengthens them in return), and we can no more doubt that we are hearing the very truth of God wlien we are being taught faith in God and hope towards God, than when we are taught love to God. NOTES. 337 I, therefore, feel Luther's teaching of faith to commend Luther as a true \vitness for God, as Saint Paul's teaching of charity is felt to commend him : which is indeed, to claim for St. Paul, whose disci- ple Luther was, the same acceptance on account of his teaching of faith which we accord to him on account of his teaching of charity. In considering the present reaction against the Reformation and movement towards Romanism, no conviction is more strongly im- pressed on my mind than that, if we would deal with it hopefully, we must revert to the Reformation controversy in its pure essence — I mean, the teaching of Justification by Faith truly understood. And we shall revert to it with the greater advantage if we have advanced in the true understanding of the faith to which the Gospel calls us. There is no doubt that the forensic character of the systematic theology of the Reformers is to be traced to inadequacy in their conception of the grace which the Gospel reveals ; to their not understanding that the Son reveals the Father in order that the faith of the revelation may quicken in us the life of sonship ; that the faith of Christ is subjectively the fellowship of Christ's own faith ; that the footprints of Christ in which we are to tread are the footprints of His faith ; and that it is thus that we are to understand the ex- ample which He has set before us that we should walk in His steps. But here the words suggest themselves, * ' First cast out the beam out of thine own eye ; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." If the church before the Reforma- tion marred the doctrine of Justification by Faith by that teaching which contemplated the perfecting of faith by charity — practically sealing the fountain of love by demanding the consciousness of love as a prerequisite to opening it ; the Protestant portion of the church since the Reformation has not less certainly hindered the true life and power of faith by demanding charity and other Christian graces as fruits of faith, the consciousness of which is made a prerequisite to the free breathing of the assured life of faith in its personal confi- dence towards God. The Schoolmen could not trust faith to produce charity : the Divines of the Reformation schools can trust it as little, though the form of system in which they have severally manifested their distrust be different. Distrust in the power of faith to produce love is distrust in the power of God's revelation of Himself in Christ to renew us after His own image — distrust, therefore, in the spiritual process of which the Apostle speaks : " But we all, with open face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to gloiy, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." Such distrust, however impossible to us while in the exercise of living faith, is nevertheless what we are constantly tempted to when objects of faith become forms of dogmatic thought, and when, further, the holding of dog- matic truth takes the shape of a religious duty, and stedfastness in so holding it and zeal in contending for it come to be to us as our great debt to the truth. Nothing is more marvellous than the CAMPB. Z 338 NOTES. ])ractical powerlessness of truth so held, and I have often felt how- one tear of Jesus traced by faith up to its fountain in the heart of God would have a power to inspire confidence towards God which the mere reception of the fullest doctrinal conceptions of His atoning sacrifice for sin has not. The present wide spread awakedness of mind on the subject of religion may ultimately result in men's reverting to the simplicity of faith ; but this is not its immediate operation. The first effect of an increased sense of the importance of our relation to God is usually practical. That we are not enjoying peace with God, — are not having as sure hold of His favour, suggests a doubt not as to our knowledge of God but as to the use we are making of that know- ledge. We assume that we have faith, and we go on to add to it wdiatever we are tauglit is needed for the completeness of our cha- racter as Christians. The practical work thus engaged in can in no measure supply what is all the while really lacking in our faith. The best result that can arise from our activity will be the experience of disappointment, the finding that all our doings are not bringing us nearer to that peace with God die desire for which first moved us. How should they ? Not what God is to us or feels to us has been occupying our mind, but what we are presenting to Him — our measure of response to the demands which we understand him to be making on us. If disappointment have the result of sending us back to reconsider what we call our faith, to look stedfastly at the great facts which the Gospel professes to reveal to us, and to examine ourselves as to our realisation of them, and of the light they shed on our relation to God, on his mind towards us and on the response to that mind due from us — if Ave thus come under the power of the love of God, we enter into the peace and joy of believing, and reach at once that rest in God, the pursuit of which by exertions of our own has been so vain ; while at the same time we receive light and strength for a true devotedness to God and to goodness in the fellow- ship of the life of Christ. This or some measure of this result will be our true gain. Some measure, I say, for it is not always the case that the full and clear understanding of what has been wanting in our faith is the result of the honest endeavour to add to our assumed faith good works. Our awakening to the sense of our actual igno- rance of the mind of God towards us, and the dawning light of what that mind is, may be very partial and at broken intervals and pure trust in God and deliverance from self-righteousness may be but very gradually developing in us ; but the measure of our gain will clearly 1)6, not the measure \\\ which we have accumulated acts of outward goodness, but the measure in which we have been attaining to a pure and childlike trust in the Father of our spirits. But other results of the disappointment experienced in our blind attempts at building a superstructure of religion without a foundation of living faith may ensue ; and we are not to be surprised if among these we meet on the one hand conversions from Protestantism to NOTES. 339 Romanism or on the other departures to infidelity. The question What is religion doing for you ? when the answer is not one that can satisfy, may either turn us for hope to all the appliances by which the older church has supplemented its dogmatism, promising from submission to its guidance the comfort and peace which all it has taught concerning Christ has not imparted ; or it may lead us to question the truth of the creeds which, held so long without ques- tioning, have done so little for our spirits. And here I feel the importance of the original protest of the first Reformers against the "general and doubtsome faith" of the Church of Rome. I have said that the Divines of the Reformation have not proved more able than the Schoolmen to trust the native power of faith, — that devices have been had recourse to to secure that faith shall be of the right kind, which in effect hinder the simple exercise of faith as much as the Schoolmen's demand for a faith perfected by charity ; while practically the general and doubt- some faith protested against prevails in Protestant as well as in Roman Catholic countries. Yet that protest is an important gain, and the system in which it has been a starting point has an im- measurable superiority over that which made a ' ' general and doubtsome faith " not only permissible, but alone logically possible. I refer to the doctrine that the atonement had special reference to original sin, while satisfaction for personal sin remained to be made in the form of penance — personal sin calling for personal satisfaction in some form or other ; for this doctrine precluded the possibility of peace with God as an immediate result of faith. Original sin usually is present to men's minds, if thought of at all, as a dogma, not as a consciousness. It is to actual personal sin that the rebukes of con- science and the feeling of the need of forgiveness refer. This remains true even when actual sin most reveals to the sinner the corruption which it indicates. And, therefore, all the interest of the desire for pardon and for peace with God is by this system diverted from Christ and the forgiveness preached through Him to the forms of personal satisfaction for personal sins which the church prescribes. That penances, or any other means of peacemaking prescribed, are repre- sented as accepted for Christ's sake, and so have their virtue con- nected with the merits of His great sacrifice for sin, does not alter the case. Whatever has been done for him, the anxious awakened sinner's interest is absorbed in what remains to be done by him ; and, as the strength of a chain is measured not by its strongest but by its weakest link, so here does the measure of actual peace turn, not on the faith of which Christ is the object, but on the personal satisfac- tion rendered, whatever its form. I use the word '''' logically'''' because I wish to be understood as speaking of the system, and not as questoning the reality of pure faith in God and joy in Christ attained to by so many, the form of whose religion has been determined by that system, but the essence of whose religion has in truth contradicted it. An early member of Z 2 340 NOTES. the vSociety of Friends, writing to a brother who was a Roman Catholic says, "Your religion and my religion must be the same in so far as we have religion, for there is but one religion." This true and deep word we are gradually learning to understand. NOTE TO CHAPTER VI. ** MEDIATORIAL RELIGION " — National Review for April 1856. Those of my readers who are acquainted with this able review of the first edition of this book will expect some notice of it in a new edition. The reviewer quotes (p. 495) my words (p. 137 of this edition), "All the elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin of man — a perfect sorrow — a perfect contrition — all the elements of such a repentance and that in absolute perfection — all — excepting the personal consciousness of sinP He proceeds to add, "This ex- ception however contains just the essential element of the whole." That which is thus excepted is indeed an element necessarily present in a personal repentance for conscious guilt ; and had I represented what Christ felt and confessed to the Father as a substitute for repentance in us, offered to the Father to save us from the necessity of repenting, as Christ has been represented as bearing the punishment of our sins as a substitute to save us from punishment, the reviewer's question " Is vicarious contrition at all moi-e conceiv- able than vicarious retribution ?" would have been apposite, and a fatal objection to my whole conception of the atonement. But this is not my teaching ; and all that I have represented as the atonement remains untouched by his question. I will not repeat what I have stated so fully in the text as the elements of the atonement. Is what I have ascribed to Christ truly and justly so ascribed ? And, if so, is what is thus truly and justly ascribed to Christ to be regarded as an atonement for the sin of man ? Both questions maybe answered affirmatively, or the former question may be answered in the affirmative and the latter in the negative, or both may be answered negatively, according as I have commended my own faith to my readers entirely, or partially, or not at all. But the objection of the reviewer is ratlier to my use, thouq;h guarded, of the word repentance, than to the view I have taken of the nature of the atonement. That word will have its full meaning in the personal experience of every one who accej^ts in faith the atonement (as now represented) ; for every such individual sinner will add the " excepted'''' element of ' ' pcrsotial conscioiistiess of sin^ But, if the consciousness of such repentant sinner be analysed, it will be found that all that is morally true and spiritual and acceptable to God in his repentance is an amen to Christ's condemnation of his sin, and that all the hope towards God, because of which his repentance is free and pure and NOTES. 341 imbued with the spirit of sonship, is equally traceable to the revela- tion of the heart of the Father in his acceptance of the Son s confes- sion and intercession on man's behalf. In his next paragraph the reviewer goes on to say, — " Further : it seems a paradox to say with our author, that true repentance is impossible to man, who alone needs it : and can be realised only by the Son of God, in whom there is no room for it. It would indeed be a hopeless realm to live in, which should annex to all sins both an imperative demand and an absolute disqualification for adequate contrition, and first open the fountain of availing tears in holy natures that have none to shed." I have said that a true and adequate realisation of sin and confession of its evil in perfect response to the divine mind and in perfect accordance with the moral truth of things has existed in humanity only in the divine mind itself, as the mind of the Son in humanity. I have not said that repentance, including the personal element which I have excepted, has been present in the mind of the sinless one or was possible to him. As to the other part of the paradox ascribed to me, I have not spoken of repentance as impossible to the sinner absolictely, but only apart from Christ. To man as related to Christ repentance is possible, just as holiness, and righteousness, and love are possible. " I am the way and the truth and the life : no man cometh unto the Father but by me." Surely in this living way repentance is a step — the first. The spirit of the Son is in the purpose "I will arise and go to my Father." To conceive it a hardship that repentance should only thus be possi- ble is to conceive it a hardship to exist in a world in which it can be said, " There is none good but one, that is, God " — a hardship to exist where fellowship in the divine mind implies participation in the divine nature. As my use of the word repentance, however guarded, has come to suggest a seeming objection to my conception of the atonement, which yet does not touch that conception at all, I may here give the history of my using it. It is about forty years since the moral and"^ spiritual nature of the atonement first dawned on my mind. What Avas then prominent in my faith and in my teaching was the Univer- sality of the Atonement, and the assured peace with God which is quickened by the faith of the forgiveness of sins revealed in the Gospel. But my attention was drawn to the nature of the atonement in tracing out the moral and spiritual power of faith in it, and in considering its immediate and direct object of bringing us to God. This element in my teaching, however, Avas not included when that teaching was called in question. But subsequently it more and more occupied my thoughts ; gradually, through many years, taking the form which it presents in this book, viz. a moral and spiritual atone- ment, and which was such in itself — not simply accepted as such because of the moral excellence manifested in Christ in making it. J St. Bernard speaks of the merits of Christ's death being the mind in which He died : and recent Roman Catholic writers dwell on the 342 NOTES. merits^ of Christ's satisfaction and sacrifice for sin, speaking of the relation of the excellence that was in Him to ns and our demerits in a way that tliough free from the charge of legal fiction, has in it the essence of that imputation of righteousness with which they reproach the divines of the Reformation, 1 have not thus conceived of merit counter-balancing demerit, any more than of penal suffering substi- tuted for punishment. That the self-sacrifice present in it has been the atoning virtue of Christ's sacrifice is a form of this conception of merit which commends itself to some ; though perhaps rather as a part of the j/ian-wai'd aspect of the atonement, than as its power to prevail with God. Love is the life in which the atonement was made, and self-sacrifice, which is of the essence of love (though " self- sacrifice " is not an adequate definition of love), is the fomi in which love is seen in the atonement. But the atonement is such, not because of the self-sacrificing love manifested in it, but as that love taking a form determined by our need as God's offspring alienated from Him by sin. A continually deepening sense of the importance of the con- clusions at which I had arrived on this great subject at last induced me to write on it. And as a preparation for this task, I thought it right to acquaint myself as much as possible with the state of mind on the subject of the atonement in which I might expect to find religious men. In the reading which had this object I was led to consider more closely than I had previously done that teaching of Luther, of the older Calvinists, and of the modern Calvinists, to the consideration of which I have devoted three chapters of this book. My endeavour was to discern any element of truth present in what I read, and to separate it from the error with which it might be combined; and thus, the words of President Edwards, "either an equivalent punishment or an equivalent sorrow and repentance," suggested to me that that earnest and deep thinker had really been on the verge of that conception of a moi-al and spiritual atonement which was occupying my own thoughts. Hence the use I have made of the thought of the alternative of repentance as it passed before the mind of Edwards ; not for a moment forgetting the absence of the sense of personal guilt in all that I ascribed to Christ, but seeing that this took not from the adequacy of the atonement which I conceived of Him, as making ; while the presence of such a consciousness, had it been possible, would have altogether changed the character of His work as a suffering, " the just for the unjust." I did not anticipate misconception. Both my positive statements as to the response of the divine mind in the Son to the divine mind in the Father in relation to our sins, and my distinct recognition of the absence of the element of personal consciousness of guilt, made it impossible for me to do so. The reviewer regards me as, while rejecting legal fictions, myself introducing a moral fiction. Of this I certainly had no conscious- ness or suspicion ; nor docs the fairest weighing of what he has NOTES. 343 written of which I am capable enable me to see that to this I have made any approach. I can see no moral fiction in my conception of the divine mind in Christ in His response to the divine mind in the Father in relation to our sins, for it implies no fictitious consciousness in Christ, as if He were feeling our sin personally and literally His own. I can see no moral fiction in the response to the Son's confession of our sins and inteccession for us which I have ascribed to the Father, as if, while so responding, He were not seeing the Son in His personal separation from sin, or were hearing His confession as the confession of personal guilt. Any such fictions conceived of as in the mind of the Son or of the Father, would destroy my whole conception of the atonement. I can see no moral fiction in the consciousness of the believing recipient of the grace of God ; for the ' ' forgiveness that is with God that He may be "feared " has come to him in the form of divine light, — a revelation of the Father by the Son, reconciling him to God by the power of what was in the Father's heart towards him while a sinner. The reviewer says (p. 497), in reference to personal repentance, "In proportion as the soul is pierced with a sharper contrition, and attains a deeper and clearer insight into her own unfaithful disorder, will the in- herent impossibility of any foreign exchange of righteousness become apparent, and the desire to be shielded from punishment will pass away : nor is the conscience truly awakened M'hich does not rather rush into the arms of its just anguish than start back and fly away." The reviewer will be prepared for my disclaiming the faith of "any foreign exchange for righteousness." As to the "passing away " of the "desire to be shielded from punishment," I seem to myself to enter into both the words, " I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against Him," and the words, "If Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?" But if the " just anguish " of " the conscience truly awakened " be what the reviewer contemplates as the "punishment" from which to be "shielded," the repentant sinner, whose repentance is, in the language of ordinary religious speech, not legal but evangelical, assuredly does not " start back and fly away " from it, although he does not " rush into its arms," as if his hope, under the quickened sense of sin, were from the anguish of his repentance, and not from the forgiveness of sin in which he believes. Whatever quickening of conscience he may have attained antecedent to faith, it has been as nothing in comparison with what, in the light of redeeming love, he is now experiencing ; light which at once reveals the evil of sin and gives strength to look stedfastly at it. I should have been tempted to regret my noticing at all the idea of an alternative repentance, as it passed before the mind of Edwards, could I refer to my doing so any obscuring of the per- ception of my view of a moral and spiritual atonement for sin to so acute a mind as that of this reviewer, as I should also regret what I have said of Luther's teaching could I accept, as I cannot, the 344 NOTES. reviewer's theory of his so insisting on the use of the pronoun ^'' oiirP But any inadequacy in his apprehension of my view of the atonement I rather refer to a condition of his own mind which makes the great measure of his understanding of what I have Avritten surprising, as well as his patience in labouring to understand it M'hat gives him a claim on my thanks. He says (p. 497) "we are firmly convinced that the doctrine oi viediation, — in the strict sense implying transac- tions with God on behalf of men, as well as in the opposite direction, — cannot be harmonized with the modern ijidividitalismy Under- standing, as I do, what he thus designates as the modern indivi- dualism as a form of metaphysical or psychological thought on the subject of personality accepted by the reviewer, which precludes the possibility of a dealing with God on behalf of men by Christ, my endeavour to shed light on the atonement has been to him the attempt to illustrate and commend an impossibility. I do not know enough of the nature of the difficulty which his conception of individualism placed in the way of his receiving the full impression of what I have written to attempt to deal with that difficulty directly. In reading the latter part of his review, I have felt that the *' individualism " and the " realism " of which he speaks have been to me a Scylla and a Charybdis, between which I have steered in the dark, unconsciously, while I trust safely. I have had no con- ception of an " individuahsm " which made my personality so cut me off from Christ that I could not, except by a moral or legal fiction, represent Him to myself as under the pressure of my sins, both confessing them before the Father, and pleading with the Father on my behalf. I had no conception of a "realism'" which represented humanity as one whole in such a sense as would have lost to me my personality, or would have helped me to the faith of an atone- ment by justifying me in looking upon Christ as " realism " appears to the reviewer to have led Luther to do, as literally " the one sinner," chargeable, therefore, with all the sins of all partakers in humanity. The reviewer believes that, if I ** follow out the natural tenden- cies and affinities of my faith I must rest exclusively at last in the other half of the doctrine which exhibits the dealing ivith man on behalf of God^ The other half of the doctrine has not to my mind that adequacy as a witnessing for God to man apart from the first half which it has to the reviewer's mind. In meditating on the perfection of humanity in Christ, I have often felt as if that very perfection was a pleading, ez>en 7vere it silent, with God for all humanity, — a manifestation of a capacity in humanity having infinite preciousness in the sight of God, and the purpose and desire to realise which would necessarily have been present in His heart, even had not that purpose and desire already existed and manifested itself in the incarnation of which that perfection was the result. But 1 liave not conceived of this ]->erfection as what coi/ldhe silent. On the contrary, I have conceived of it as what must have NOTES. 345 moved Him in whom it was a consciousness to all that I have re- presented as the atonement. Were, however, individualism that cutting off of Christ because of His personality from us, the other partakers in humanity, of which the reviewer conceives, the holy fountain of tears, which the divine mind in Christ opened in His humanity, might still have flowed, as when He wept over Jerusalem or at the grave of Lazarus ; but His tears would have had no ascending form of intercessory prayer, reaching to the heart of the Father. His consciousness of individuality would have as to our sin imposed on Him silence towards God, forbidding Him to plead with God for men, though it might have left Him free to witness to men for God in His personal bearing towards men. But, in that case, even the witnessing to men for God must have been imperfect, must have left untold all that mind of God which Christ's making His soul an offering for sin, and the Father's accepting thereof, have brought into manifestation. As spirits, our spiritual cleansing can only be through the power of spiritual light, entering into us in faith : and whatever spiritual element in the blood that cleanses, or whatever ray of the light of the mind of God shining in the death of Christ for our sins is left out, must take so much from the cleansing power of faith. As to the "tendencies and affinities of my faith," I have no response to the impression expressed by the reviewer ; while any development of my sense of personality into his conception of individualism would, I feel, take from me, not only all that is retrospective, but also all that is prospective in my faith in the atonement, — my faith in Christ as my life as well as my faith in Christ as having died for me. He speaks (p. 498) of us as "break- ing through the restraints of the modem individualism " when we " strive to enter into that literal identification of Christ with Christians which is so frequent with St. Paul." In the words of St. Paid, " I am crucified with Christ : nevertheless I live ; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me : and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me," the assumption of the relation of Christ to humanity along with a recognition of our personal individuality, presents to my mind no aspect of contradiction ; while my sense of the redeeming love for which I am a debtor requires for its fullness, alike the personal consciousness of the words " Who loved me and gave Himself ^r Wd'," and the faith of personal union with Christ of the words *' I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." All St. Paul's representations of our relation to Christ are pervaded by the same element of what, in the light of modern individualism, would, it appears, be regarded as a contradiction ; and this the reviewer seems to recognise as the fact. It is a natural result of recent modifications of men's conception of inspiration that criticism is seen passing from the zuords of inspired writers to their thoughts. Whatever abuse may be connected with 346 NOTES. this change, it is not without some advantage ; in as much as the words of the sacred writers now run less risk of being twisted or distorted. So long as Ave contend for the divine truth of the words, there is a temptation to force them to say what we are willing to believe, and resistance to light may take this form. But this temptation ceases if men feel at liberty to receive their natural meaning without being obliged to receive it as absolute truth. And this liberty those critics obviously reach who feel that an Apostle may have meant what he seems to mean, but may have been mis- taken because of the limits within which he thought. This new freedom in criticism removes questions of truth from the realm of philology to that of psychology and metaphysics. While we are detained in the former, our Lord's words, "I am the vine, ye are the branches : . . . without me ye can do nothing," could be emptied of their literal meaning only by being read as what might express our obligations to our Lord as a teacher, and not o,ur relation to Him as our life. But now the latter may be recognised as the meaning with which they were written, while still it may be refused as, if not implying an error in our Lord's own thinking, at least im- plying such an error in St. John ; whose conception of his Lord's teaching, it will be said, is all that remains to us, while that con- ception may have been affected by any such ignorance of the true nature of personality on the part of St. John, as the realism ascribed to Luther, So also as to St. Paul's saying, " When it pleased God. who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace, to rrueal His Son in w^," his words may be received as mean- ing what they seem to mean, while that meaning itself may be refused because in contradiction to modern individualism, and no presence of Christ in St. Paul be conceived of but as men might speak of a presence of Socrates in Plato. With a due sense of our intellectual limits, a due reverence for conscience, and the faith that spiritual things are only spiritually discerned,! should have no fear of psych- ology or of metaphysical thought, even in its most difficult region of ontology, any more than I have of scientific investigation, so long as it is realised that, "through faith we know that the worlds were framed by the word of God." Science venturing beyond its due limits, may seem to itself entitled to sweep away our faith in the supernatural, and so speculation, in the region of mind, going beyond its due limit, may preclude faith in the atonement by the assumed impossibility of such a thing in consistency with the manner of our being as persons. But, as Science never can reveal the living God to us, nor by its analysis reach to anything visible or invisible, — a palpable material substance, or a force of which our senses can take no cognisance, and the existence of which is to us inferential, — of which it can say, " This is God ; " so neither can metaphysical thought reveal to us the manner of our own being as God's offspring, who live and move and have our being in Him, or the relations to us into A\hich the Eternal Son has come that He might be in us the life of Sonship. NOTES. 347 NOTE TO CHAPTER XIII. THE DEATH OF CHRIST. I have endeavoured in this chapter to express what I am able \o see of h"ght in Christ's tasting death — for our sins — in the eternal hfe. The sinless dyifigfor si7i is that in the history of Christ's suffering, the just for the unjust, which most approaches the conception of the innocent being punished for the guilty. We feel also that His tast- ing death, the 7oages of sin, is that in the experience of Christ in His bearing of our sins which is most out of sight to us. In those elements of the atonement which were purely conditions of the mind of Christ, however much we must feel that we come infinitely short in our real realisation of them because we come infinitely short of the mind that was in Him, yet, partaking in it at all even in the smallest measure, we know as to its essence what that mind was : — just as when we say "God is love" we, if in any measure dwelling in love, use the words in true light, though the love of which we speak is infinite and passeth knowledge. But there was that in Christ tasting death the wages of sin as to which we have not the same consciousness ; while we understand how this was a perfecting of the divine response in humanity to the divine condemnation of sin. Yet whatever remains dark to us as going beyond our conscious- ness, our attention is kept ever fixed on the death of Christ, as it is on His resurrection from the dead ; the one in relation to the remission of sins, as the other in relation to the gift of eternal life. I have ventured to speak of what the atonement might have been had we been only spirits, and how Christ's bearing of our sins on His Spirit before the Father, confessing them and making interces- sion for us according to the will of God, needed to be perfected in His death for our sins because of the manner of our being as partakers in flesh and blood (Heb. ii. 14). Our redemption has two aspects — distinct, while inseparably related. It is the history of spirits, God's offspring, alienated from Him to whom the light of life has come in the revelation of their own evil state, and of the holy love of the Father in what that love has felt regarding them in their alienation ; the knowledge of themselves and of their God shining to them in the mediation of the Son of God, and quickening in them the life of sonship in raising them to that eternal life which is communion with the Father and the Son in the Spirit ; — this, if we may venture to contemplate it apart, is the aspect of our redemption as spirits. The other aspect of our redemption is that which it presents to us when we take into view the whole of our composite being, and the meaning in relation to it of the words " The wages of sin is death ; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." " For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead." This looking at the history of our i-edemption first as 348 NOTES. we are spirits, and then in the totality of our being as men, I feel to have some help in it in considering the death of Christ for our sins and our resurrection from the dead through Him, as also our present relation to Him as having died in him and having our lives hid with Christ in God. We see on the one hand sin and death, on the other righteousness and resurrection from the dead. We see ourselves related to both ; to what is on the one side in being sinners, to what is on the other side as partakers in redemption. We pass from the one to the other through the death and resurrection of Christ, Thus our individual existences and histories are not, so to speak, a number of parallel lines, each first in darkness — the darkness of sin and death, and then in light — the light of righteousness and the resurrection life ; on the contrary, the lines of our being converge in Christ's death and radiate from Christ's resurrection. This is a very imper- fect image, but may help us in conceiving our relation to Christ as distinguished from a manner of being in which we would be all separate individualities, each having its own history of first tasting sin, and sorrow, and death : and then righteousness, and a resurrec- tion life. The distinction which I am trying to mark becomes more palpable if we contrast the idea of each individual man as passing through his successive stages of being in the isolation presented to us in the history of the insect which we see as a caterpillar, a chry- salis, and a butterfly, with that relation to Christ in which we exist, — sin and death ours — righteousness and life His, — and He coming into such relations to our sin and death as issue in our partaking in His righteousness and life. I know that the former conception has found more acceptance with some men in their speculative thinking on the subject of humanity. The latter, however, is what the Scriptures present to us. It is very clear as also very practical in the teaching of the first founders of the Church, and has continued to be the teaching of the Church all along, though presented in various aspects, and often representing our relation to Christ in a way that has been artificial and forensic — a mere arrangement, and not what affects the manner of our being to its inmost depths. I have used an image for illustration, from which I expect some help, but which is indeed very imperfect, A part of its imperfection lies in this, that our relation to Christ does not heg'ni in resurrection ; for He who is the resurrection and the life is present in us, our true and proper life from tlie first, and is to be known by us as our life now in the spirit ; while the perfecting of our participation in Him waits for our resurrection from the dead in spiritual bodies like to His glorious body. Now we know Christ as our true life, as it is written *' God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath life," while our faith and hope embrace the perfecting of the gift of eternal life when this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and this mortal immortalit)'. We must l)e tliankful that a deeper understanding of our relations to Christ, and conviction that the manner of our being can only be NOTES. 349 understood in their light, is taking the place of fonner superficial and merely forensic representations of these relations. This is a fruit of that change in our faith in the divinity of Christ which I have noticed above (Introduction), viz., the change of regarding the incarnation not so much as a mystery, the faith of which tests the humility of our reason, as rather light in which to exercise our reason in all our thinking regarding our relation to God and the manner of our being as His offspring. Approaching from this side the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and the relation of His death to our sins and of His resurrection to our participation in His righte- ousness, we come to see these events in the development of the incarnation in our redemption as the first Christians saw them, and to understand the constant references to them which meet us in what w^e possess of the teaching of the Apostles, and the practical nature of these references, and the imtfiediafe and direct paiver which the faith of Christ's dying for their sins, and being raised again for their justification, have had in determining the manner of their religion, and causing it to be a fellowship in the mind of Christ. ' ' Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves like- wise with the same mind." " For in that He died. He died unto sin once : but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." In tracing our Lord's life on"to its close as the two threads of sonship tow^ards God and brotherhood towards man, I have marked, as the last ray of its light as brotherhood to man, the prayer in death *' Father forgive them for they know not what they do ;" the light in this prayer being bright to us in proportion as we realise the shame of the Cross, and all He suffered at the hands of wicked men. In like manner, the eternal life in which He tasted death as it was sonship towai-ds the Father is last visible to us in the prayer " Father into thy hands I commend my spirit." The trial through which the faith which these words express had borne the Son of God, in that tasting of death by which death has been abolished, rests in part to us under the " darkness which was over all the land " from "the sixth hour unto the ninth hour" while the intensity of that trial is indicated by the cry ' ' My God my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" I have gone (chap, xii.) to the Psalm from which these words are quoted for what Jight it may shed on this most solemn darkness ; and I appear to myself to have found help in it. But even if my readers feel otherwise, and that my understanding of the Psalm has not commended itself to them, they may still feel that, whatever remaining darkness we may be conscious to, even when most light falls for us on the death of Christ for our sins, we must guard against the temerity that would put into that darkness what is not revealed to have been in it, and what is not in harmony with what we are enabled to see in it. With this temerity those, surely, are chargeable who have placed in that darkness an experience on the 350 NOTES. part of the Son of wrath from the Father either commensurate with or an equivalent for the everlasting torments regarded as the punish- ment of the wicked. Apart from other objections, we must feel that such an element in the cup given to Christ to drink would have overborne all other elements, and made the place given to these by the sacred writer inexplicable (Heb. xii. 2). But the expressions, Cross of Christ, blood of Christ, death of Christ, could never have been read as covering such a meaning were it not for the error of thinking of death the wages of sin as death temporal, spiritual and eternal. Let any one weigh the words " He tasted death for every man," and then ask himself "does death here mean death temporal, spiritual and eternal," and he will feel it impossible to give an affirmative answer, Mr. Oxenham says in reference to the teaching of the Refonners on the subject of the atonement (p. 119). " It was but the natural and logical inference from this strange notion of vicarious substituted punishment, that Christ endured in His Passion the pains of Hell ; and this blasphemous corollary is distinctly put forward by Quenstedt, Gerhard, and Calvin, as a necessary part of the idea of satisfaction. Well might Bellarmine call it a new and unheard-of heresy !" New in this definite and repulsive form it may have been ; yet the language used in connection with the idea ot Christ's paying the debt we owe to the divine justice, and the earlier idea of His paying a ransom for us to Satan, may well have prepared the way for the conception thus denounced. Besides, men's occupation of mind with the recorded sufferings of Christ had been so much with their physical aspect and simply as sufferings, without the discernment of any higher nature in them in respect of which they were a sacrifice for sin, that there was no protection from any exaggerated form of thought on the subject of Christ's sufferings for our sins : while the difference of view between the church and the Reformers as to the relation of the atonement to sin — the former limiting that relation to original sin, the latter holding it "to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt, but also for the actual sins of men " — naturally tended to the ex- tremest conception on the part of the Reformers of what was implied in Christ's paying the debt we owe to the justice of God. The Reformers felt that a divided confidence, resting in part on the atonement, in part on what we did ourselves to obtain remission of our actual sins, could never be a true peace with God. For they felt that the part thus assigned to man himself was one as to which it was impossible to be assured that it was adequately performed ; nay, as to which it was self-ignorance ever to hope for such an assur- ance, seeing that all increase of true self-knowledge deepened the conviction that we could In-ing nothing to God in this way worthy of His acceptance. Even the love to Christ which men's occupation with His sufferings for them was fitted to quicken they found to be hindered by the motive for cultivating it, viz., the perfecting their faith by charity (Note H). On the other hand tiiey found that in NOTES. 351 looking for forgiveness of sin exclusively to Christ and His sacrifice for sin, they tasted at once the liberty of the faith of forgiven sin, and entered into a peace with God of which these were the elements, a sense of His infinite love and fi^ee grace, and of their own utter unworthinesss. A sense of the infinite love and free grace of God and of our own sin as what casts us altogether for hope on that grace, and a conse- quent exclusive trust in Christ, — these were the living elements of the faith of the Reformers. And we cannot allow that faith or their work to be depreciated because in their conceptions of the sacrifice of Christ for sin they developed the idea of Christ paying the debt which we owed to divine justice in a form the repulsiveness of which we do not deny, or because the doctrine of merit in Christ compen- sating demerit in us was developed by them into that of imputation of rigliteousness. I have said (Note II.) that a successful dealing with the present reaction in favour of Romanism can only be through our reverting to the Reformation question of justification by faith alone ; and that it should be more easy for us to occupy that ground in proportion as W'e may have attained to a higher and truer conception of Salvation — of that grace of God in Christ which faith apprehends. A moral and spiritual atonement stands in direct relation to a moral and spiritual salvation, Christ's giving Himself for our sins to our having in Him the life of Sonship. This directness in the relation of the remission of sins to eternal life accords and alone accords with the language of scripture. The death of Christ has been "the opening of a way into the holiest." " The blood of Christ, who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purges the conscience from dead works to serve the living God." "We are brought nigh to God by the death of His Son." " Christ suffered the just for the unjust that He might bring us to God." This direct reference of the sacrifice of Christ to our participation in the divine life contrasts strikingly with the conception of that sacrifice as having as its first and immediate object the bearing as our substitute the punishment of our sins. And it is because of the judicial and forensic character of the question of peace with God as that question was regarded by the Reformers that I speak of faith in the grace of God as being now cherished in a purer light, rendering faith more truly what the Apostle contemplates when he says, " We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord , are changed unto the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." When 1 say ncno, of course I only mean a more perfect return to faith as it was at the beginning than the Reformers attained. We do not retrace their steps ; for, still less if possible than they can we allow penances or, mortifications or deeds of any kind, even deeds of charity, to be any element in our confidence towards God. To know Christ as our life and that life as the life of sonship more completely shuts out from our trust in Christ all foreign elements 352 NOTES. than any meaning of the expression "trust in Christ" short of this ever could. I may here add that as a moral and spiritual atonement is directly related to a moral and spiritual salvation, so its value is proved only in the experience of such a salvation. It is in coming to the Father by the Son that we know Christ's preciousness as the way, and the truth, and the life. Hence it follows that the habit of turning to the thought of the atonement for comfort under the sense of distance from the Father when the comfort sought is, as I may say, rather judicial than filial is injurious and to be guarded against. Such comfort is always unhealthy and foreign to the life that lies in God's favour. I hope that some help has been added for the understanding of the immediate relation of the atonement to the life of sonship, in what in the introduction to this edition I have said of religion as the occupying of our right place in the kingdom of God. Help to occupy that place aright, not solace ' in not occupying it, is the bread of life that came down from Heaven that a man might eat thereof and not die. Philosophy has been called a homesickness, Christianity places us in our true home. "Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations." The knowledge that in God we live and move and have our being is the conscious peace of home to our spirits when we know God as revealed in Christ. THE END. rniNTED UY wn.r.rAM cr.owr.s and sons, stamford street AND CHARING CROSS, ^v><^ DATE DUE PRINTED IN U.S.A.