V. Atonement.

I shall not detain the reader long with the discussion of our author's objections against the great central doctrine of Christianity, commonly called the Atonement, and against the doctrine of the Second Advent of Christ. That the death of Christ on the cross had, in the counsels of God, some necessary connection with the putting away of sin—a connection such that the latter was impossible without the former, is the clear and unmistakable teaching of the Scriptures, not only of the New Testament, but also of the Old. What that connection exactly was, and how the teaching of Scripture on the subject should be formulated, is a question on which there have been great diversities of opinion among theologians of all ages since the time of Christ. Our author indeed states that three distinct theories of the Atonement have prevailed, and states the order in which they have arisen. Perhaps he has read up the history of doctrine more thoroughly than I have, but, if so, it is a pity he did not state more fully when, and by whom, the three several theories have been put forth. That none of the various theories upon the subject has fully expressed the teaching of Scripture upon it I can readily admit, but I entirely deny his unfounded statement that one or any of them was "resorted to in order to maintain that doctrine in some form or another." The fact is that theology is always changing while Scripture is always the same, and earnest students of Scripture are always more or less correcting their theology by a return to the study of Holy page 24 Scripture—often, I admit, under pressure from independent human thought. Whatever be the connection between the death of Christ and the pardon of sin, it must be the same as is shadowed forth in type and symbol in the sacrificial rites of the Old Testament. To deny this is to impugn, not the teaching of the Old Testament alone, but the teaching of the New Testament and of Christ himself. Christ himself resorted to the Temple, where these sacrificial rites were daily observed, and called it "My Father's House; "He partook of the Passover, and conformed to the requirements of the Ceremonial Law; in short, He testified in every possible way by His example to the Divine origin of that system of symbolic religion which the Jews of His time had inherited from Old Testament times. To treat the Jewish sacrifices, therefore, as of human origin is to impugn Christ's teaching as really, if not as directly, as the teaching of the Old Testament. Christ taught with sufficient clearness that the shedding of His own blood had to do with the actual putting away of sin, as much as the Temple sacrifices and the blood of the Paschal Lamb had to do with the symbolic putting away of sin. He has taught this in the rite which He himself instituted at the season of the Passover, and just before His own death. "This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins." How could our author forget these words, spoken on such an occasion, when he penned the statement, "All through the various histories of the sayings and teachings of Jesus there is not one word to be found either directly or indirectly bearing" upon the doctrine of the Atonement?^*

The great fault in most of the orthodox teaching on the subject of the Atonement is, that divines have contented themselves with using the Jewish sacrifices, to interpret by them the meaning of Christ's Atoning Death, as if these sacrifices themselves did not equally stand in need of being interpreted. The subject has been treated, in my humble judgment, too much from an Old Testament point of view. To minds thoroughly habituated, as the minds of Jews were, to the idea of sacrifice and offering for sin, this treatment might have been sufficient. They saw in the death of Christ what they had been taught to look for in the death of sacrificial victims. But to Gentile, and especially to modern minds, the whole subject should be treated from a different point of view. page 25 Some theologians have tried to do this, and, it may be, have partially succeeded. It is not to be expected that any one of them, or even that all together, should be able to look at all the aspects of this many-sided truth. The great difficulty of the doctrine is precisely the same as the difficulty of the existence of moral evil in the world, a difficulty of which our author, as we saw before, appears to be sublimely unconscious, and therefore we are not surprised that he cannot in the least appreciate the doctrine of the Cross—that he cannot in the least sympathize with the feeling of the Apostle of the Gentiles, "God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ."

The fact is, there are many aspects of this great sacrificial work, each one of which may be illustrated in some small degree by facts with which we are most familiar, but every one of which is insufficient to give more than a partial reflection of the great central truth. The aspect of self-sacrifice, for example, was illustrated the other day, when a brave and generous Englishman laid down his life in the attempt to rescue from destruction thousands of poor Egyptians. The aspect of sinbearing is illustrated whenever a benevolent rich man pays a fine for a guilty poor man. The aspect of imputed righteousness is illustrated whenever a youth gets a situation, not for his own merits, but for the sake of the merit of his father or his elder brother. And so we might go on, showing everywhere, in the most ordinary facts of life, dim reflections of particular sides of this great mystery. But my present purpose is not to discuss doctrines, it is merely to show that the great distinctive features of Christianity are not to be obliterated with the flimsy tools which our would-be iconoclast applies to them.