SReVaise nine cary, Aa sue a, ae ew ~ gn ey Pt 3 = ‘< "e ee Be ta" i xs rh = Leer rc an vias Keir Eyaehy Fae es a : Ss re oy aret i Pan ee < fa Lapis oa re pai AN, Ny Fatt 3 jah CS Bathe, SS aeeies ot oer Sm : ? Be fae aes Pea aE aS ashe} ao. saute Wy eae a x eigen tae 5 eee: Pas Bock =o ae EN Saree se f ie i se eet, 8 ky sy ae NY ats Sart a Zs aes # =! Loaf ty sy re ert ont ‘a $e = t) Sige Tharp ts Mires Ses rel Pie ees trie’ ee SSiTielata es ee * see anny SO Wee 7 4 6 es, | Gee ees Leas 2 fie OS THE RELIGION OF REDEMPTION. i U fle s rf i} i? ied . A ye aN j Phy Rae es peu ; 1g mel ‘ THE RELIGION OF REDEMPTION. A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PRELIMINARIES OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGY. BY Rea MONS La) See AL LATE PASTOR OF THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF NEUFCHATEL, SWITZERLAND. Beds nv ev Xpiore Kécmov KatadX\acowy EQUTO. The vight of translation is reserved. LONDON : Web LAM UNE AUN DD” C:O1M Bea Nov: HOLLES STREET, CAVENDISH SQUARE. MDCCCLXVII. TO THE REV. MAURICE FITZGERALD DAY, OF ST. MATTHIAS’, DUBLIN. My dear Maurice, Many years ago you advised me to undertake some such work as this of which I now bring you the first instal- ment. You have therefore a claim upon it independently of that which you would have already possessed had no sugges- tion of the kind been made. I am happy to iow you that your advice has borne fruit, though it be late in autumn,— happier still to be able thus imperfectly to intimate my grateful sense of the value of your long-tried Christian friendship. Most Affectionately Yours, R. W. MOoNSELL. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/religionofredempOOmons Drekuce. Tus essay is intended to serve as a contribution to the pre- liminaries of Christian apology. There are now unfortunately in the world several very different Christian societies, and conflicting schemes of Christian doctrine and practice; and it seems but reasonable that any one who ventures to take upon him the responsibilities of an apologist should clearly explain what he means by Christianity, and should present it in the shape in which it has justified itself to his own mind. JI am the more encouraged to do so that I am per- suaded there are at the present day sincere doubters, whose difficulties I hope to lessen without setting before them a Christianity in any the least degree abated or explained away. I shall endeavour to avoid as much as possible professional subtleties, but it is also necessary to guard against misunder- Vill PREFACE. standings which have repeatedly occurred, and are still prevalent. No justification of Christian doctrines will be attempted, except an occasional indication of the direction in which it is to be sought, or that indirect and preliminary kind of justification which is involved in their very explana- tion. I believe however, with John Newton, that the doctrine of the Cross is both seen by its own light, and throws leht on all other objects. It is impossible even to register its principal statements without feeling that it recommends itself to the mind and conscience, as consistent with itself and with all that we know of ourselves, as worthy of God, and consonant to the wants of man. The best confession of faith would be the one in which the greatest possible number of earnest Christians would concur. I have therefore borrowed the thoughts or used the very words of writers of many different ages and schools, so far as my acquaintance with them admitted of it. I have even acted on Justin Martyr’s principle, that Christians have the right to appropriate the elements of truth floating in all minds and systems, and to connect them in their true place with the centre of all truth, doa of» rapa nao: kados eipyray ypey rev Xpiotiavev éovi. In order not to incumber the text, the names of authorities are put in the margin. One among them occurs much oftener than any other, but for this I owe the reader no apology, since it is the name of that PREFACE. iX ereat Christian critic, apologist and moralist, Alexander Vinet.* This may seem an unpropitious time for fresh attempts to present doctrinal formulas and supernatural facts with a clean and sharp outline ; for our generation certainly takes a dreamy sentimental delight in the vague and undefined. But I believe this to be a mere momentary disease,—a reaction against the over-judicial element in the theology of the seventeenth century. We are made for faith, rather, as we are made for action ; we are made to believe, as we were made to love and to will. Genuine human nature yearns for positive truth such as it can grasp, such as it can build upon, and that will never give way under any weight that can be laid upon it. He who has felt the Gospel to be such, may boldly set it forth. The necessity of condensation has made the treatment of many sections deplorably inadequate, and it has given to the whole work a disagreeably sententious and oracular tone, which * The published works of Vinet now amount to about twenty volumes, including several posthumous collections. My friend Professor Astié, of Lausanne, has published, under the title Hsprit d’ Alexandre Vinet (Cherbuliez, Paris and Geneva), a methodically arranged series of deliverances on the most various subjects, religious, philosophical and literary, selected from these works and from inedited sources. Vinet himself somewhere intimates that prudent people will always be slow to praise ; and I hardly dare say all I think of the character and the amount of the Christian thought contained in these two small volumes. xX PREFACE. I have been myself the first to perceive and to regret. Resi- dence in a small continental town has moreover put it out of my power to Gone many works of which I should have been glad to avail myself. This is said rather to explain than to excuse the deficiencies of the book, for if a writer undertakes a task beyond his strength and opportunities, and upon a plan attended by disadvantages, he does so, of course, at his peril. Should the reader meet with solecisms or gallicisms, his kind indulgence is requested for one who has been for a quarter of a century speaking, preaching, writing, and even thinking in a foreign tongue. Neufchatel, October 27th, 1866. Gowtents. Section Page 1. Of Religion in general - - - - - i! 2. Christianity is properly the Religion of Redemption = - 2 3. Of the order in which its facts are to be stated . - 5 BOOK THE FIRST. HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 4, Man created in the image of God - 7 5. Called to self-determination - - - - “ 6. The possibility of evil involved in freedom - - See 7. The substantial unity of mankind - - - 14 8. ‘The first generation the organs of the race - - 7) REO 9. Speculative difficulties to be held over for the present - 18 10. The fall consisted in man’s becoming his own centre - 20 ll. Bondage - - - . - - - 22 12. Indigence and selfishness = - - : - - 24 13. Self-contradiction and suffering - - - - 26 14, An evil conscience - - - . - ees) 15. Self-deception - . - - - - 30 16. Our remaining virtues : - : - - 33 17. The heart’s last secret thought, enmity against God - 36 18. Penal suffering inevitable - - - - 39 19. Man incapable of change or repentance - - - 43 20. His will beyond the control of Omnipotence - - 46 21. Obligation not the less persistent —- : - 45 22. Penal suffering endless, hopeless - . - - A? 23. Fatal circle 5 : = - - : 49 Xil CONTENTS. BOOK THE SECOND. REDEMPTION. Section Page 24, The incarnation of a Redeemer - - - - Ol 25. Union of the Divine and the human in one person “ 52 26. The Divine organ and representative - - - 64 27. The organ of the human race by birthright - - 50 28. His very presence a pledge of Redemption - : - 69 29. His ministry and his ideal humanity - - : 60 30. Necessity of a positive act of expiation - - - 68 31. Christ’s appropriation of our sin - - - - 65 32. His experience of evil gradual - - - “Sy $67 33. Death the specific punishment of sin - - - 69 34. Inadequate conceptions of the atonement - - = al 30. The relation of the death of Christ to his own life, and to ours - : - - - - : 74 36. The theory of a mystical death . - - - 76 37. Our Lord’s own explanation - - - - 80 38. The atonement coincident with martyrdom - - - 83 39. Suffering in the abstract not meritorious - . 86 40. ‘The real expiation moral in its essence - - - 89 41. The Divine severity not to be confounded with implaca- bility - - - - - - - #91 42. Connection of the incarnation with the atonement - 95 43. The connection of Deity with his suffering humanity - 97 44. The hiding of the Father’s countenance - - - 99 45. The Lord’s death penal - - . - - 101 46. His person no object of Divine wrath - - - 103 47. In what sense he was our substitute a sa - 106 48. No change wrought in God - - - - 107 49. No legal fiction : - - - - - 109 50. The resurrection - - - - - - 110 51. Different aspects of the resurrection - - ~ dit 52. Redemption universal in its aim - - - . 114: 53. A collective Redemption - - - - ~ diy 54, A new humanity - - - - : - 118 55. In what sense a generic restoration - - - - 120 06. The glories of redeeming love - - - - 122 57. All things become new - - - - - 126 Section 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. CONTENTS. The gift of Christ the crowning work of creation - The purpose of creation exhibited in Christ = - . The purpose of creation carried out by Christ - The primordial affinity of human nature with the Divine Word - - - - - - Of the incommunicable glory and son-ship of Christ The new song before the throne - - - Note A. on the late F. W. Robertson’s view of the atonement BOOK THE THIRD. APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. Necessity of a personal appropriation of Redemption - The Holy Spirit - - - - - Received by Jesus for himself and us - - . The operation of the Holy Spirit - : - Divine grace and human freedom - - - Grace does not act mechanically, but morally - And that, through the Christian’s whole career : Repentance and conversion - - - - None can glory before God - - - - Grace can be resisted - - - - The idea of the irresistibility of grace the weak point of Protestantism - - . - - Of the efficacy of prayer for others - - Of Scriptures that seem to limit the love of God - The true sense and place of election - - The revealed motives of redeeming love - : Augustinianism alters the aspect of the Gospel, and is constrained to be inconsistent with itself - - The conviction of sin - - - - Of morbid self-inspection and false repentance - - Various forms of this unhealthy tendency - - Of faith in the abstract - - - - - Of faith in Christ - - - - - Faith culminates in a moral process” - : Faith does not create the right it uses - - Salvation by faith a doctrine peculiar to Christianity - Xiil Page 128 133 136 138 144 146 148 154: 156 158 160 163 166 171 172 LG 182 187 191 193 197 202 205 210 212 215 219 223 225 228 230 XIV Section 88. 89. 90. Ol; 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. CONTENTS. Justification a Divine anticipation - =—- - Simultaneousness of justification and commencing sanctification - o e : E Faith and works” - - : J : Justification immediate - - - - No imputation of Christ’s obedience . : Justification in no respect arbitrary or fictitious The love of God shed abroad in the heart - Joy and assurance . : é : Fear and vigilance - - : z Note B. A confession of the Synod of Dort - - - Note C. Calvin on the simultaneousness of justification and EEE 98. cae 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. A¥1-: 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. sanctification - E i ‘ BOOK THE FOURTH. INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. Sanctification and Christian life’ - . - The growth of the Divine life - - - - The austere side of Christian life - - The Tempter - . - Of the foundation of morals - . - The central attribute of Deity - - - Excellence rather than happiness the ultimate aim of creation - - - - - : Of good and evil - - : - - The sense of right and wrong : - Of the relation of Christianity to morals - A holy example - - - Of Christian appeals to self-love - Self-love at once purified and satisfied - - Of true liberty - - - . - - The Christian’s household - - - There are Christians of all statures - The final test of personal religion - - - The use of suffering = - - - - No room for asceticism - - - - Bearing of the Incarnation and of Redemption upon asceticism - - - - - - Page 232 235 237 240 242 244, 246 250 252 254. 204 259 209 260 263 265 271 272 274: 276 278 283 285 289 293 297 302 305 307 313 319 Section hy: Ge 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149, CONTENTS. Of false spirituality and of the true . : Various forms of the Manichean principle - Of prayer - - - . - - The Lord’s Prayer : : . “| F An overruling Providence - : - - The intercession of Christ ; - - His human sympathies - - : - Reality of his human experience . His invisible presence - Union with his person - : - - : He quickens soul and body in their order - Man’s individuality indestructible - For ever, members of Christ and of each other BOOK THE FIFTH. COLLECTIVE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND HISTORY. The preparatory stage of faith in Redemption - The principle of division of labour in history The relation of Christianity to other religions The Religion of Redemption at once primitive and positive - - - - Therefore it enables mankind to retain their re- membrances, and gives them unity - The Theocracy - - - - Mosaic symbolism - - : The law of religious evolutions - : - Parallel phases of the Religion of ¢ Redemption Its universality - - - - Its perpetuity - Its total emancipation from theocratic principles Especially from priesthood - - - - A spiritual kingdom - . The Church transcendent and the Church militant The Church no substitute for Christ - - - Particular Churches, meditate creations - : An open ministry - - - The first step towards its organization = - - There is no generic perfectibility XV Page 323 327 332 395 338 341 343 345 349 302 356 359 362 365 369 372 376 378 379 383 387 390 392 394 396 400 402 405 409 412 414 419 423 xvi CONTENTS. Section Page 150. The Church begun, and to be continued by individual confession - : 2 - - 424 151. Of Church government - - - - - 428 152. The first supposed traces of episcopacy - - - 432 153. The symbolical ordinances of ame - - - 404: 154. Of baptism - - - - - 44.0 155. The Lord’s Supper - - - - - - 446 156. Elasticity of the Christian principle - - 450 157. Gradual convalescence of the race - : - - 452 158. History repeated over again by the Christian world - 456 159. The Roman and the German - - - - 458 160. Conditions apparently contradictory realised - - 460 161. Medisval society in its infancy - - - - 461 162. Medieval society in its prime - - : - 464 163. Its old age and decay” - - - . - 469 164, Preparation for a revival - . - - - 473 165. The blessed Reformation - - - A7 4 166. The method of Jewish and Christian here - - 477 167. The effect of compromise with antagonist principles - 478 168. Evil never necessary and never justifiable - : - 480 169. It is tolerated only to be the better crushed - : 483 170. The respective missions of Pagan and Christian Rome - 487 171. The experience of the Reformed Church more complete than that of the Lutheran - - . - 490 172. The character of a people determined by its conception of God - - - 5 - - - 491 173. Our modern liberties - - - : - 493 174. Relative finality of the modern world - - - 497 175. Of Church and State since the Reformation - - 500 176. Of Church and State in the abstract - ; - 604 177. Religion and art - ° - - - - 510 178. The philosophy of history - - - - - 515 179. The reign of righteousness - ; - - 520 180. The new heavens and new earth - - - - 0265 Index of Passages of Scripture - - - . 53315) Index of Writers and Authorities - - - - 645 Page 17. 24. > The reader is requested to excuse the many errors of the press, which the author’s inexperience has allowed to subsist. INOtCimee: Aap os 15th line from bottom Note > 33 a ss ae 10th line from bottom Middle ... 5th line ... 10th line, after order Margin ... Note Line 19... 1ith line from bottom Margin 4th line Text and margin 10th line from bottom 9th line from bottom Margin ... Middle ... 12th line Margin ... 1st line ... 9? for jom possessions honines neminen necessasrium Cdvatov prayers aquiescit membrarum Christi cels materialist ... Cairns G)anec- when then they Chemens consumation month Origin change seemed read jam. possession. homines. neminem. necessarium. Oavarov. prayer. acquiescit. membrorum. Christo. Cels. materialistic. Caird. (;) when they. Clemens. consummation. months. Origen. charge. seem. * : are Brey was ya 7 Oey 4 5 me . by ; i wth » j = ' , Can! BES rae R ; a) , aa 4 7 On j a 7 4 . oe t sae wil ! Let i ‘ Fs b Aw i eae! ” ; , ; oe . ‘, 4 nt ‘e . ‘ a i ‘ : : > P 5 \ i . 7 . é " ‘ i ¢ - , ‘ ‘ . ‘ f e : 4 « i \ r ; s £ A ‘ r ' ' tod Y . ~*~ ‘ | ao) is * THE RELIGION OF REDEMPTION. Sutroduction. § 1. Att religions have to do with the feelings, the hopes and the fears awakened by a supposed relation to an in- visible and higher world. Considered as a feeling in the mind of the worshipper, religion may be defined a sense of dependence and obligation, varying in clearness and inten- Sity, and in its action upon life, according to the worshipper’s conception of the Divinity he adores. Considered in them- selves, religions are so many schemes of our relation to the Divine, involving various conceptions of the character of the object or objects of worship, of his or their attitude towards man, of the feelings and the acts which are therefore re- quired at our hands. Many writers, from Lactantius* to John Wesley, have looked upon our capacity for religious ideas and emotions as the great distinguishing peculiarity of man in contrast with inferior creatures, and an eminent naturalist has recently expressed his concurrence in this opinion. The characteris- tics of the human kingdom, according to Monsieur Quatre- fages, are the moral and the religious sense; and it is by them that the empire man exercises over other animals is justified. Animals exhibit distinct acts of elementary in- telligence, but man is alone in the consciousness of right “Summum igitur bonum hominis in sola religione est ; nam ceetera, etiam que putantur esse hominit propria, in ceteris quoque animalibus reperiuntur.—Instit. iii. 10. B Of Religion in general. Quatretages. Lactantius. Christianity is properly the Reli- gion of Redemp- tion. Romans i. 16. 2 Cor. iv. 6. 2 Cor. v. 19. Schieiermacher. 2 INTRODUCTION. and wrong, and alone in referring whatever he believes to be right, for both its source and its sanctions, to a supreme legislature and an invisible tribunal. § 2. It is evident that particular religions are to be cha- racterised by that which is peculiar and essential to each in this their common sphere; that is to say they are to be characterized, subjectively—-by their several modifications of the sense of dependence and obligation ; objectively—by their several conceptions of the Divine Being or beings, and of our relation to the Divine. Now, considered in the mind, Christianity professes to be “the power of God unto salva- tion,” the reception of a life resting upon the consciousness of Redemption, and flowing from the person of a Redeemer. Considered in itself, it is the revelation of God in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, and communicating a new spiritual life through faith in that reconciliation. Unit- ing both points of view in one, and defining Christianity by that character from which all the others are derived, we shall call it THE RELIGION oF REDEMPTION. Redemption implies the transition from a state of con- demnation and bondage to one of reconciliation and freedom. All religions betray a more or less vivid consciousness that man is a sinner, and that his relation to that higher un- seen world is one of danger; but Christianity stands alone in its deliberate, far-reaching and self-consistent statements of our moral degradation, our self-determination to evil, and our alienation from God. This religion is equally peculiar in its offers of deliverance. No other scheme ever professed to the same extent to give peace to the conscience, or to communicate the love of holiness; it alone really claims the thoughts and intents of the heart. Expiations and lustrations there have been, indeed, in every temple; and notions of capricious powers to be made placable by various agencies ; but they have been isolated institutions, fragmentary expressions of religious INTRODUCTION. 3 instinct, partially or wholly uninterpreted, and occupying only a secondary rank in the system of doctrine and ritual as a whole. In Christianity, on the contrary, Redemption is the original idea, creating, pervading, and constituting the unity of all the rest. This religion exists as a realization of redemption. More peculiar still, altogether without analogy or precedent, is the relation of the members of the Christian communion to its Founder. The old Pagan religions were all, so to speak, anonymous, having each of them for its author the imper- sonal genius of an entire people. Later positive systems of belief, Buddhism, Mahometism, etc., represent their founders as highly favoured but more or less passive organs of revelations, which might have been communicated through others as well as through them, but the Gospel makes Jesus of Nazareth the very object of our faith and worship. God does not merely reveal himself temporarily to him or through him ; his person is the permanent manifestation of Deity, he that hath seen him hath seen the Father. This religion alone claims to bring men into living relation with a Redeemer who has put away sin by the sacrifice of himself, who lives to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by him, who imparts his own life to the soul, and shall one day transform body and soul together into his own glorious image. Thus Christianity is the religion—and the Bible is the history—of Redemption: the Old Testament of its prepara- tion, the New of its virtual accomplishment. § 3. But we must not remain satisfied with a general for- mula. A system which bears upon the whole range of human thought, feeling and history, must be set forth in detail, if its truth or falsehood is to be made manifest. A knowledge of the way in which the leading idea of Redemption is carried out is indispensible to any close investigation of its nature and claims. Neither must the apologist confine him- John i. 18. John xiv. 9. Heb. ix. 26. Heb. vii. 25. Gal. ii. 20. 1jevil, san, PA). Of the order in which its facts are to be stated. Ernest Naville. Ullmann. A. Vinet. John xiv. 6. 4, INTRODUCTION. self to the great fundamental points upon which all com- munions are agreed; he would thereby give up his right to exhibit the admirable order and harmony with which the principal facts and doctrines of the religion of Redemption group themselves and crystalize around its central thought, converging upon the restoration of lost sinners to God, and in the process helping us to understand ourselves. It is not in any vague abstract shape that Christianity ever presents itself practically to the consciences of men. It is as a complete and consistent scheme of doctrine and life that it is most easily brought home to human experience and apprehension. The idea that Christianity consists in a life or form of feeling in any such sense as to exclude a positive creed, can only be entertained from a secret wish to escape its power, or from a frivolous ignorance of the necessities of the hu- man mind. “There cannot be breathed a pious word but it supposes a doctrine, nor is there any practical truth with- out its theoretical side. The very simplest elements of religion,—those that make their way without effort into the soul of the little child, the poor woman, the illiterate labourer—do not the less contain the germs of a systematic conception of the universe, and answer the most momen- tous questions that speculative thought can put.” On the other hand, the believer in Christianity is not obliged to present it as a mere series of propositions. Were it this, our Divine Master would have founded a school, and not a religion and a Church. The objects of our faith were facts before they, and the consequences deducible from them, were thrown into the shape of doctrines. Redemption pur- ports to be a succession of saving acts resolving themselves into one; and this act with the person of the Divine Agent are the starting point, the substance, and the end of all Christian teaching: Christ did not say, “I show you the way, I teach the truth, I communicate the life;” he said, INTRODUCTION. 5 “T am the way, the truth, and the life.” When we love one of our fellows, what we love is not the conception that we have formed of him, but his own living person; it is thus that all Christian doctrine practically amounts to the manifestation of a person in whom to trust, and all Chris- tian morals to the manifestation of a person to be loved, adored and imitated. Revelation is a history, not a cate- chism, and should be treated as a history. We propose, therefore, to attempt at least a rapid sketch of the facts of human guilt and misery which Redemption presupposes ; the facts of the appearance and sacrifice of the Holy One by whom Redemption is effected; the facts of individual religious life through which Redemption is appropriated ; and the facts of that collective life in which the results of Redemption are exhibited to the world, and the new creation carried out in History. They can thus be developed in their organic connection, in the order in which they spring from each other, into which they gather up, and in which they contain all the facts of human experience. There is an inevitable combination of the affirmations of the religion and the experience of its disciples, which can- not be fairly and adequately stated apart from each other. We shall try to be as brief as is at all consistent with the purposes of the earnest inquirer, and avoid touching upon matters controverted between different Christian schools and churches, except so far as any given view or practice may tend to mar the consistency, and thereby weaken the self- evidence of the Gospel. The absolutely fundamental facts of the following sum- mary are recognized by all classes of positive Christians, the leading forms of doctrine connected with them take their place upon the platform of reformed theology, and are intended to approximate to its purest type. With Schleierma- cher, we believe that this type has not yet been completely elicited, and that every essay of this kind must contain at Schleiermacher. Matt. xiii. 52. 6 INTRODUCTION. once elements that are common, and elements that are special. The aspect of moral and religious discussions changes with every phase of the human mind; every age requires to have the truth stated in its own language, treated from it own point of view, drawn out, developed, and ap- plied to its peculiar wants and difficulties; at the same time, the truth so presented must—in its essence—be the faith of all ages; the scribe instructed unto the kingdom, must bring out of his treasure the old things as well as the new, or be punished for his presumption by the utter and deserved failure of the attempt. Hook the Hist. Fluman Guilt and Misery. § 4. Accorpine to the Christian Scriptures, no creature existences were necessary to call forth the Divine pertec- tions, or to minister to the Divine happiness. There was no solitude in heaven; but, throughout all eternity, a my- terious plurality of persons afforded room for the exercise of infinite mutual love in the bosom of the ever blessed God. Angels and men were therefore made for their own sakes, through free creative grace; God no longer so filling the universe as to exclude subordinate wills,—no longer sub- sisting as the only Holy and Happy Being. “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” That is to say, creature intelligences were made capable of recognizing and adorning Almighty Wis- dom; creature affections were made to resemble and to re- spond to the outgoings of infinite,and eternal love; creature wills were called into existence in the presence of the Divine Will, subjects of his government, bearing in their own im- mortality and moral freedom the likeness of his self-exis- tence. Man’s whole spiritual being, in harmony with itself and with external nature, was destined to be attracted to- wards God by its every capacity, as towards the source of all existence, of all excellence, and of all happiness; every power within him crying out for the living God, the loving and serving whom would have kept every separate part of his nature in harmony with every other part, and the whole in harmony with Him. He was capable of feeling complacency Man created in the image of God. Gen. i. 27. J. Harris. Wardlaw. Bonaventura. 1 John iv. 8. F. Godet. R. Hooker. 8 BOOK THE FIRST. in the Divine character, gratitude for the Divine goodness, and delight in the Divine blessedness, capable of enjoying eood- ness and truth, holiness and beauty, in their ineffable source and centre. Thus was man placed within reach of the fulness of creature life and happiness; for life consists in the putting forth of every power and capacity towards their proper object, and happiness consists in the consciousness of free- dom, harmony, and truth, in the exercise of this abound- ing life. The soul was made to aspire after God as the eye of an infant does after light: and as every sense seeks that object which is appropriate to it with longing, finds it with delight, and recurs to it without weariness, as g, nor the ear filled with Oo? the eye is never satiated with seein hearing, so did God make the rational soul that it might praise him, that it might serve him, that it might delight and rest in him, by virtue of that love in which he who dwells dwells in God and God in him. The perfection of a being is the love he is capable of feeling, the glory of a being is the love of which he is the object; in neither re- spect can we add anything unto God; love had already in- finite subjects and infinite objects in the mystery of his Being, without us. But we can fall in with the infinity that we cannot enrich, we can reflect it, as the drop of water does the heavens. Love being the highest perfection and supreme bliss of God, the loving him, and being loved of him, was to be the highest perfection and supreme bliss of his image. The love of God cannot be conceived as really existing in his creatures, without being the highest function of their spiritual being, as well as their supreme end,—that which is most human in man, because it answers to that which is most Divine in God. | God is that last Good of all, which is to be desired alto- gether for itself, and alone may be infinitely desired; and because desire tends unto union with that which it desires, ————— ee ee caesar aaa mma mE TEE HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 9 so the soul, as it is active, was to be perfected by the pur- suit of that infinite Good, as it is receptive, was to be per- fected by the enjoyment of that infinite Good. Then we are happy, says Richard Hooker, “when we fully enjoy God, as an object wherein the powers of our souls are satisfied, even with everlasting delight: so that although we be men, yet by being unto God united, we live as it were the life of AS OULet tom. Capable are we of God, both by understanding and will: by understanding as he is that Sovereign Truth, which comprehends the rich treasures of all wisdom: by will, as he is that sea of goodness, whereof, whoso tasteth, shail thirst no more.” In this first draught of creation to live was to be blessed. Man was at home in a noble, faultless form,—adequate in- strument and expression of his intellectual and moral per- fections; he could love his fellows; he was at peace with the universe. § 5. But, since creation in the image of God included moral freedom, man was called upon to become by his own choice that which he already was virtually by the Divine appointment. As each particular act of human life becomes moral only by being voluntary, still more must its general primitive determination. God is what he is by his own eternal choice, and man could only reproduce his image by willingly becoming like him, by his own voluntary develop- ment of the capacity of moral excellence.” The heavenly bodies revolve mechanically in their ap- pointed orbits; the bird of passage instinctively pursues the path traced out for its migrations. Man was intended to obey as certainly, but morally, and therefore freely, intelli- gently, and happily. He was created his own master that he might give himself unto God. It was his privilege and b Paradisus est locus inchoantium, et in melius proficiscentium, et ideo ibi solum bonum esse debuit, quia creatura a malo initianda non fuit, non tamen summume Called to Self- determination. C. Secretan. Hugo de St. Victor. Saint-Bonnet. A. Vinet. 10 BOOK THE FIRST. his peril to be the child in his Father’s house, capable of yielding willing obedience, and for that very reason capable also of refusing his allegiance, and of turning away from his destined blessing and supreme good. Determinable to either good or evil, he was not yet determined. 'To create man free was to give him the power of realizing or for- feiting his liberty; it was a summons to make. himself actually what he was potentially, and by the deliberate agree- ment of his will with that of God, to take possession of his own being, to constitute his moral personality. “God created man as little as possible,” says a thinker, meaning thereby that we were endowed with the germ and crude capacity of that state for which we were intended, but that the exercise of our freedom was necessary to raise us up to the positive attain- ment of the dignity and bliss of perfect moral being. Mere animal natures are finished from the first, God took every thing that concerned them upon himself, and left them nothing to do, but it was his will that man should be his fellow-worker in the great feat of his own creation, and thereby in the completion of all creation; the Father left the mighty work unfinished, so to speak, until the child should set his seal upon it. | This assertion will not appear exaggerated, if it be ad- mitted that creation could not attain its end until man became what God wished him to be, and that man could become himself only through loving obedience, and finally, that obedience, to be really loving, to possess any moral value, must be his own act. The world is full of analogies illustrating this obligation to self-development: the growing child does in a very real though subordinate sense create its own body: our every property and every power are upon probation, since nothing becomes really ours except by experience and use. If, as a race, we have no longer the great initial step to take, it is still in a measure in our own power as individuals to make or to spoil our own characters. HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. AL | In existing human life not only does virtue tried and trium- phant rank above innocence, but innocence cannot be pre- served without being transformed into virtue. Man’s singular helplessness for the first years of childhood ‘teaches him dependence, inspires him with family affections, and thereby fits him for society, becoming one condition of his greatness. Creatures that only exist for the sake of others are spared all long or painful discipline, but it is otherwise with those that exist for themselves and for God, that are to live in very deed and for ever. Even in relation to this life, says Bishop Butler, “man is left by nature an unformed, un- finished creature, utterly deficient and unqualified, before the acquirement of knowledge, experience and habits, for that mature state of life which was the end of his creation.” And again, “the general conduct of nature is not to save us trouble or danger, but to make us capable of going through them, and to put us upon doing it.” Doubtless had man chosen from the first the path of willing and happy obedience, he would soon have trans- formed mere innocence into perfection. In metaphysical language he would have passed into that state of real free- dom—that final choice of good, of which mere formal freedom was the condition. As God wishes irresistibly to be what he is, and to be loved as he is, so his rational crea- tures growing up in the nurture of a higher life, gently inducted into the habit and accepted practice of all holy obedience, would have at last attained a freedom lke that of blessed spirits,—a state of excellence beyond reach of fall or failure, irresistibly self determined, without effort or hesitation, to all holy affections, the tendencies of their perfected natures coinciding with the claims of moral law, just as the attraction of the globe and the weight of terres- trial bodies are one and the same force. S$ 6. As the possibility of disease is involved in the Bishop Butler. Julius Muller. Malebranche. Johannes Erigena. The possibility of evil involved in existence of healthy organs, so is that of evil involved in /740m. C. Secretan. G. J. Holyoak. Origen. Ly BOOK THE FIRST. freedom. Wherever there is organization, there may be disorganization; wherever life begins, there death may enter. In our very calling to fellowship with God and with each other lay the possibility of the fall—that is to say, of selfish refusal to love God with all our heart and soul, and our fellows as ourselves. Primeval man found himself in circumstances from which human nature was to issue perfected or corrupt, his formal freedom disappear- ing and passing over into a holy, or else a selfish and per- verse will. This was indeed a fearfully solemn dispensation which put our history and our happiness—the fate of the world— in our own power. It was the daring of all-wise and all- powerful love sure of its own resources. Man may blas- pheme it now that he has used his freedom, so far as in him lay, for his own destruction. He may compare the Almighty to the unnatural parent, who placed his child “near a fire at which he knew it would be burned to death, or near a well into which he knew it would fall and be drowned ;” and yet he cannot himself conceive any meaning or any glory in an allegiance against which there were no power to rebel. God chose to have persons in his house, and not things only; the child who is capable of doing his father’s will from the heart, must, for that very reason, have it equally in his power, if he please, to resist and to disobey. However en- compassed with peril his capacity of moral character may be, 1t 1s his glory, the honor that God has put upon his nature,—the condition of participation in his own divinity and bliss. That God should not wish us happy is impossible; that he should separate our happiness from the indwelling of holy love is equally impossible: but what would our love be worth to God, to our fellows, or to ourselves, if it were a mere instinct like that by which bees make honey? “Take away from virtue the element of will,” says the greatest of HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. de early apologists, “and you take away its very essence.” * A being determined from without or from above, hedged around by materially resistless laws, or guarded by special interven- tions,—such a being were not free, the higher his conscious- ness the greater his bondage ; he would remain a stranger to the feeling of obligation, and his acts would have no moral value. In short, holiness cannot be communicated from without even by God himself, or it ceases to be holiness : God himself cannot create a matured intelligence, and super- cede either experience or will. The sort of passive perfection which men could have at birth, or struck out at a beat by a miraculous illapse of grace, would make a world of “ virtuous mechanisms,” wound up like a clock, so as not to clash with each other, and incapable alike of moral evil and of excel- lence. It was not for so poor a result that the Holy One and the Blessed came out of his place and became a Creator. He seeks from his rational creatures a higher service, a nobler, dearer relation : therefore it was that he renounced doing everything by his own immediate and absolute causa- tion, and that the goodness he bestowed’ upon man was more properly the capacity of acquiring goodness. “Tf there was to be such a thing as love in the world,” writes a pious Roman Catholic, “it was necessary that there should be free beings. Without liberty the creation was physical, silent, inert and insensible, but not moral, but not intelligent; without liberty the creation were heartless, mindless, soulless; consequently without any beauty, and without a purpose...... Such then is the grandeur of the free creation that came forth from the hands of God. The Father of men loved us enough to give us being, knowing that he would have to solicit our love, without being able always to obtain it.” Nor is this the language of Christian writers only, it is © *Aperns tay avédns TO Exovotoy, dverys av’tHs Thy ovordy (contra Cels. iv. 3.) Julius Muller. De Gasparin. A. Gratry. Dollfus. Hegel. Rousseau. The substantial unity of mankind. 14 BOOK THE FIRST. that of every thinker who is not a conscious and deliberate materialist. A living philosopher, who has made a sincere though of course unavailing attempt to make Pantheism religious, confesses that “man’s greatness and dignity rest upon the very possibility of his fall and degradation.” According to Hegel himself “the state of innocence, the paradisaical condition, is that of the brute.” Rousseau expresses himself with his usual warmth, “to murmur be- cause God has not hindered man from doing evil is to murmur at his being made of an excellent nature, at his actions being clothed with the moral character which enno- bles them, at his having obtained the right to be virtuous. What! To hinder man from becoming wicked, must he needs be reduced to instinct and made a brute of? No, God of my soul, I shall never reproach thee for having created me in thine image, that I might be free, and good, and happy like thyself.” If freedom be indeed the condition of the existence of a conscience, and if that again be the condition of morality and love, of all excellence and of all happiness, then the possibility of evil is a postulate of our calling to harmonize dependence and freedom; it is a fruit of the love of God; it is involved in the creature’s greatest good. § 7. The foregoing conception of our original constitution and vocation is based upon the idea of a fundamental sub- stantial unity of mankind as one vast organism. Christian realism substitutes the dynamic for the atomic theory of the relation of individuals to the species. In contrast with Pantheism it asserts the infinite importance of individuals, their responsibility and immortality ; it makes every pos- sible progress or blessing for the race to be but a mean of accomplishing the great purpose of Divine love—the culture and perfection of immortal souls. In equally strong contrast with the superficial Deism that treats men as a heap of sand without any organic connection, it maintains the unity of HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 15 the race; the tree is one, though its leaves are distinct, and the tree determines the nature of the leaves, although they only are of value. The relation of mankind to God, as it is the reason of all creation, has given creation its form. It pleased him that man should be a father, because he was himself a Father,— a privilege which, according to the Bible, would seem to constitute the specific difference between man and other intelligences, and was certainly a condition of superiority, because it was God-like, leading to closer ties and deeper affections, but which also, like every other privilege, was attended by proportionate responsibility and peril. To this law of paternity we owe the family, with all the varied relations, the tender and sacred affections, as well as the cares, and the increased liability to suffering that it creates. Through it we owe to others our life, our temperament, the first direction of our heart, and mind, and hands; we awake to self-consciousness in their arms, grow up under their influence, and receive from them the language we speak, the civilization we inherit, and the level at which we start in life. Through the operation of this law mankind are but a more extended family, “made of one blood...members one 99 of another;” we have an instinctive conviction that what our fellows do concerns us, that the history of past genera- tions is our own, and that we owe ourselves to our successors. Again, as external circumstances are so disposed as to cor- respond with our nature, we are engaged towards the whole human race by common participation in a vast system of mutual dependence; and we profit by the labours of all ages as well as by those of contemporaries. “The substantial unity of mankind explains the solid- arity of its destinies. It is a fact that the gain of one man is the gain of all, that the loss of one is the loss of all, even though it may happen to be the gain of another in par- ticular. Private virtues concur to the ennobling of the See 3 111. Matt. xxii 30. Acts xvii. 26. Ephes. iv. 25. C. Secretan. 16 BOOK THE FIRST. human race, and private vices to its degradation. All the actions of individuals have their causes partially in the society around them, and in their turn act upon this sur- rounding medium; and the society of a given time and place is the product of the whole course of history.” Doubtless in a normal state of things, the hearts of all would testify to their oneness with each other by unspeak- able mutual affection. If it be our duty to love our neigh- bour as ourself, it must be because our neighbour is ina ~ very real and intimate sense our other self. The moral law must express the plan of God, the secret of the universe and of our being. If the moral oneness of the species, realized by the free affection of its individual members, be the end we should pursue, it must also be involved in the C.Secretan. original principle of our nature. Hence “the doctrine of the substantial unity of mankind explains at once fact and right, that which is and that which should be; it renders intelligible that law of the conscience which sums itself up in love. If there be any one palpable truth, which must be admitted upon a moment’s reflection, and needs no proof, it is this—that a being can only be called upon to realize his own nature, to become in fact what he is already in prin- ciple. But it is evidently our oneness that is realized in the charity that tells us to live for each other, to find our happiness in the happiness of others. The law peculiar to the human species,—moral law,—has oneness for its ulti- mate end, it follows that this unity is a constitutive feature of the very nature of man.” ration the ons ~=©6-§ 8. Our first parents, by virtue of the fact that they eee were the ancestors of every several lineage, constituted the race in their own persons; and again by virtue of the common collective life as of one moral subject determinable in a good or a bad direction, they constituted the organs of the whole human family, so that they could draw it down with them to ruin, or else set it in the path of secure and HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. en blessed obedience. It follows that the relation of individuals to mankind is of such a nature that they are involved in the results of its past determinations as if they were their own, without ceasing to be personally under obligation to all well-doing. It is not that there is any confounding of persons, or that the acts of our ancestors are immediately and directly imputed to us, in the same sense in which they were imputed to themselves, but the under current of being is one, our existence was virtually contained in their’s ; there is that in us that lived and acted in them. As St. Augustin puts it,’ “We were all in that one man, when he, though being but one, corrupted all...That form in which we were severally to live had not yet been created and distributed to each, but the seminal nature from which we were to spring had been.” The connection is closer than in any case of mere outward dependence, as when the lives of sailors are trusted to a pilot’s keeping, or the interests of working men bound up with the success of their employer: we are the present organs of that nature which was determined without our conscious personal concurrence ; it manifests its tenden- cies in us, and we are reckoned,—nay, we reckon ourselves to be what these tendencies proclaim us. The possibility of such a relation of the individual to the species can only be denied from the stand-point of the vulgar sensuous metaphysics that refuse to recognize any reality which the imagination is unable to represent, and should therefore in consistency disbelieve in God. That the phenomena of human life are what they should be on the hypothesis of the actual existence of such a relation is patent to all sincere observation. Character is hereditary in lineages and in entire peoples; the generations are linked 4 Omnes enim fuimus in illo uno, quando omnes ille unus corrupit...... Nondum erat nobis sigillatim creata et distributa forma, in qua singult viviremus, sed jom natura erat seminalis, ex qua propagaremur, (De civit. Dei., L. xiii, c. 14.) C Augustin. B. Jowett, com- ment on Thess., etec., li. 187. Speculative difi- culties to be held over for the pre- sent. C, Seeretan. 18 BOOK THE FIRST. together, directly by descent, and indirectly by institutions and remembrances; the present is the product of the past, and the individual the nurseling of that division of mankind to which he belongs. From this point of view alone does history assume the dignity of a science; indeed it is thus alone that history exists, and that the human family boasts a collective, progressive development. Moreover the law of dependence with all its consequences is exhibited in the sphere of morals as completely as in any other: the pre- disposition to certain vices is hereditary, and the comparative facility of good or evil courses depends upon the circum- stances and the state of culture into which we enter by birth and education. But for Revelation we should not know how it came to pass, but we feel that our nature has lost the power of conforming itself to its laws, we have glimpses of a life beyond our present strength, accompanied by a conviction that it ought to be within our strength. That facts are so is confessed by many who are little disposed to adopt the theory. Dr. Jowett, for instance, tells us to “reflect on ourselves not as isolated independent beings ;— not such as we appear to be to our own arrow consciousness ; but as we truly are—the creatures of antecedents which we can never know, fashioned by circumstances over which we have no control.” The last clause goes even too far, for man never receives momenta altogether like inert matter, he can in a measure react against the very current of which he is a part. § 9. How individual responsibility is to be reconciled with the prior determining power of the race, is the gravest pro- blem that human thought can set to itself; one, the solution of which would perhaps involve that of every other mystery that now throws its awful shadow across our path; since “we cannot flatter ourselves that we have the final reason of anything, until we have the final reason of everything.” The Christian apologist must not shrink from examining this HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 19 dread problem ; if he is unable to furnish a final and com- plete explanation of its difficulties, he can nevertheless cir- cumscribe them within certain limits, and lessen the horror of the darkness that must still remain. He can at least show that Christianity opens out such views of God, and of his ways, that we may wait with all confidence for the last word upon this matter, and upon every other. We cannot, however, enter upon this great question at the present stage of our undertaking. We have now to do simply with facts; and however embarrassing the specula- tive aspect of the facts may be, however hard it may prove to reconcile to the satisfaction of reason our responsibility and our dependence upon the past, there can be no doubt of the reality of both as facts. I may be unable to explain why I should reproach myself for any shape of innate base- ness which has grown up with me from the cradle, but no healthy conscience has any doubt that it should do so, or will admit of any hesitation or perplexity upon the matter. Conscience is essentially the capacity of feeling obligation ; and when that feeling is awakened, the obligation is not impaired by our ignorance, or our inadequate knowledge of the mysteries of our being. Even when we resist the claims of right upon ourselves, we continue to enforce them upon others ; and the injustice, the perfidy, the cruelty by which we sufier, do not seem to us the less guilty because their authors can plead that they are innate. We naturally aspire to form a complete scheme of moral obligation; we wish to be able to justify, intellectually, both the Divine Government, and the utterances of the Divine voice within us; and the mind may so fasten upon its desire of a satisfactory theo- dicea as to suffer acutely from its absence; but its struggles arise from the being obliged to content itself with an un- finished theory; no immediate witness of conscience has suffered any violence or contradiction. The man who has made the pre-existing evil tendencies of The fall consis- ted in man’s be- coming his own centre, Rom. iii. 23. B. Pascal. 20 BOOK THE FIRST. his lineage his own, by voluntarily allowing himself in them, is guilty. We see this occurring continually in the cases of persons in whom evil acquires a preponderance which it did not exhibit during their childhood. Such persons are less guilty than they would have been had the evil originated altogether with themselves. How much less, is known only to Him who can judge all hearts, weigh all motives, and estimate the countless influences that bear upon character. It may be, that one of the reasons determining the actual scheme of creation, and the circumstances which rendered the early triumph of sin possible, was the Creator’s merciful wish to render the guilt of a foreseen apostacy less heinous, and our recovery not wholly impossible. In any case, Chris- tianity has not created the obscurities amid which we walk, nor added to them, except in so far as it has given more intense and thrilling interest to everything connected with man and his destiny. It has, on the contrary, exhibited, in the very law of dependence which exposed the race to early shipwreck, a provision for its subsequent Redemption. § 10. From what has been said, it follows that the en- trance of sin into the world was a fall from a state of innocence, rather than from a state of perfection already attained. It was properly a deviation, the perversion of a process of development, an absorption of the freedom which should have been confirmed, a coming short of the glory of God—that is of the high spiritual state—blessed ideal for which man was destined. The nature of the fall necessarily corresponds to the character of man’s primitive calling, as its formal contradic- tion: it therefore consisted in putting self instead of God,— the selfish will of man, instead of the order of the universe. “God created man with love of a twofold kind :—7. e., with the love of God, and the love of self; but with this law,— that the love of God should be infinite, or should have no end but God; and that the love of self should be finite, and HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. ra | bear a constant reference to God. Man in this state not only loved himself without sin, but would have sinned could he have ceased to love himself. By the entrance of sin man lost the former of these affections; and his soul, which was still great and still capable even of an infinite passion, retaining only the latter, this immediately diffused itself and overflowed all the void which the love of God had left ; and thus we came to love only ourselves, and to love all things with respect only to ourselves, that is without limit.” Thus man attempted to secure by disobedience that posi- tion of freedom, dignity, and bliss, which should have been his as the fruit of obedience, and of victory over temptation. He made himself his own centre, which was virtually an attempt to make himself God,—the basest ingratitude, and the grossest folly, or rather the only folly in his power; for it was only as priests of God that we were kings; it was only when in conformity with the Supreme Will that our wills could enjoy their subordinate royalty. That the ra- tional creature whose dwelling-place had been prepared throughout innumerable ages—the only being upon earth capable of knowing God—should pursue a phantom of happiness without God, and against God, was at once a monstrous aberration from the reality of things, and a mortal outrage upon his own nature. “There is a natural divinity belonging to the human spirit, apart from which we cannot conceive the ungodliness and unhappiness of fallen man.” To understand aright the wretchedness of this discrowned king, we should know the greatness to which he was born. To measure adequately the extent of our misery and degradation, we should first be able to appreciate the glory of the calling to which we have been unfaithful, and the ineffable charity to which we have not responded. Of course none can know it; the great mass of mankind do not even surmise it; but all feel the conse- quences of a state of alienation from the life of God. C. Emi. Nitzsch. Ephes. iy. 18. Bondage. Chavannes. John viii. 34. pid BOOK THE FIRST. § 11. Theoretically the first sin should not be considered exclusively, and without reference to the subsequent deve- lopment of the selfish principle, accelerated as it must have been by other sins, and appropriated as it is by each of us in our personal history. Practically, however, the very first sin was a leap over the precipice, determining the whole headlong plunge, with its momenta increasing through the successive stages of our fall, until human nature had become what it remains. Its immediate effects must have been such as to surpass all present power of conception, because we have never known a state of absolute innocence ; and the saddest examples of sudden degradation that can occur to our thoughts—that of a fallen woman, for instance—are but the passing from sleeping to waking evil. The first act of conscious rebellion must have exerted with awful intensity that power to modify the moral being which is still exercised in an infinitesimal degree by every voluntary act. There is in the rational creature a tendency to strive after agreement with itself, which was intended to secure the formation of holy character by habits binding the present to a righteous and a happy past, but which by its perversion makes every successive sin at once the punishment of preceding sins and an incentive to continue inthem. The fall has thus in- troduced into our nature an element that contradicts its destination : the results of our false self-determination have become a foreign and fatal power that weighs us down: we feel within us the antagonism of our own will and of a higher law: we feel at once that we ought to be free, and that we are not. Our will cannot break the yoke that it has forged for itself, because holiness has lost its power of attraction, “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin;” what had been a free choice has fixed itself in the organization and become another nature. The heht within, never wholly extinct, only serves to make this darkness visible, enabling us partly to sound the depths i) HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 23 to which we have fallen, but not helping us out of them. Deserters from eternal life, seeking to become our own Ge. 1h 5 God, we have not indeed succeeded in making ourselves in- dependent of Him, and we have become dependent upon all manner of shameful and hurtful idols—losing ourselves in the world of which we ought to be masters, and proving that he who will not belong to God cannot belong to him- self, and must needs serve them that are no Gods. Hemmed Gal. iv. 8. in on all sides, by all sorts of limitations and circumstances, —now summoned into life with its manifold harsh necessities, now resistlessly shut out from its enjoyments, we are in a condition of the most paralyzing and’ exasperating contra- diction, because our sin has become our punishment,—our seducer has become our tyrant. The attempt to dethrone God was practically a blind effort towards our own annihi- lation; we can neither realize that guilty wish, nor reach the fatal term to which we unconsciously tended, and so we remain hopelessly chained to the existence we have per- verted. If the consequences of evil only involved those who had voluntarily chosen evil, and in proportion to their love of C. Secretan. it, then we might attribute to individuals, taken separately, the origin of all the evil we find in the world. But the sin that reigns in us presents this fearful character,—that before conscience has awakened—before the mind has become alive to its responsibilities, the selfish principle 1s already mistress there, and its propensities are already imperious. Nor is this all, “the evil in the world bears witness with the 8. Jowett. evil and sorrow in our own hearts ;” the corrupting influence of the natural and social mediums in which we live work along with the internal predisposition. Even climates pre- sent their snares and their obstacles, but still more does life as we have made it; in all circumstances we can find tempta- tions and accomplices, but there are conditions of existence C. Seeretan Indigence and Seljishness. Jansenius. 1 John ii. 16. A. Vinet. 24 BOOK THE FIRST, among the most favoured nations in which the grossest im- moralities are imposed upon men almost independently of their choice, in which, at least, it is hard to will what is good—easy, frightfully, fatally easy, to will the evil. The consequences of the fall weigh upon men independently of their own choice, and even when they would choose what is good and right, and sometimes all the more painfully in proportion to their choice of good. § 12. The self-love which was to stand men in stead of God could not for one moment keep its promises. The bright vision held out before the infancy of our race has disappeared, leaving in its place an abyss of indigence which we endeavour in vain to fill up with what surrounds us, and which ever calls for its first object. There is a great void within, where God should have dwelt, and man is con- strained to feel his utter poverty. Then, having shut against himself the source of true happiness, he seeks for it around and beneath him, and throws himself with passion upon creature goods, with which he would fain satisfy his soul’s hunger. Aspiring to be happy with all the energy of an immortal being destined to the possessions of an infinite good, he has to put up with mean and wretched substitutes, which he clothes with the colours that rightfully belong to higher objects, and tries in vain to make a heaven of earth, —a heaven without God! Lusts of the flesh, lusts of the eye, pride of life,—pleasures of sense, pleasures of imagina- tion and of ambition, and the lofty self-assertion of a mind not yet wholly bereft of native nobleness,—all are so many vain attempts, in different directions, to find what creature goods can never provide. He who has turned away from the centre of order, from the source of light, and love, and Joy, must sit down in darkness and sorrow, or in a state of short-sighted, frivolous, and superficial contentment, worse than any sorrow. What men vulgarly call happiness is but ignorance of their misfortune, HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 25 “ Mankind, as a whole,” writes a leading champion of un- belief, “is an assemblage of mean, selfish beings, superior to the animal in this only, that their selfishness is more intelli- gent. But in the midst of this uniform vulgarity, there are columns that rise up towards heaven and attest a nobler destiny.” That there should be this difference of moral level only makes the common ruin more striking, for the destiny of the very highest should be the calling of all. “In that inanimate scenery which is but the faint and secondary reflection of moral qualities, there is on every line, and on every feature, the vivid impress of loveliness and glory.... How comes it then that in the midst of living society, where we might expect to meet with the originals of all this fasci- nation, we find scarcely any other thing than a tame and uninteresting level, of the flat and the sordid and the ordi- nary?” Alas, a blight has come over the face of creation which has left it in a great measure untouched materially, while it has inflicted on mana sore and withering leprosy. The openness and benignity that sit on the brow of nature reproach him for the narrow and creeping jealousies that are at work in his selfish bosom. Deprive the material universe of the great principle of attraction, and its several parts will be left, not merely dis- joined from the centre, but in a state of repulsion from each other; they will be given over to outer cold and darkness, to isolation, or else to fatal shocks against each other. Such are the present tendencies of human nature. When God has ceased to be, for heart and mind and will, the all- attracting, all-enlightening, all-fostering centre, every pos- sible relation of men to the material universe and to each other must be in proportionate disorder. He that has refused to love God cannot, as a rule, be otherwise than selfish toward his fellows. He that has loved himself more than God,—how can he love any one holily, purely, per- fectly? The savage license of hateful and insolent selfish- M. Renan. Chalme:s Julius Muller. Plato. Self-contradic- tion and Suffering Dr. Arnold. H. Taine. 26 BOOK THE FIRST. ness, which some ages, and some men in all ages, have exhibited, is but the uncorrected operation of the poison that is working in the veins of all men; and even in happier cases it is too often only the conflict of our mutual selfishness that for the present keeps us from the extreme of evil as well as from good, not in the least correcting the principle, but restraining its manifestations. The humbling fact did not escape the searching glance of Plato, “in truth,” he says, “the principle of excessive self-love is the cause of all the sins into which every man continually falls.” (70 6¢ dhyOela ye Tavtwr amapTnmatwv dia THY oodpa Eavtod didéav dUTLoV exdoTw yeyvetat €xagTOTE. ) § 13. The natural man has not reached the infinite ex- treme of alienation which is involved in principle in the fall: he is hurrying in the wrong direction; and certainly the time is drawing near “when those who do not love God will love no one at all, nor be loved by any one;” but man is as yet near enough to feel something of the attraction from which he breaks loose. Hence he is not consistent in either good or evil, but his whole nature is full of contra- dictions. He can neither give up his sins, nor yet excuse them to his own conscience ; he can neither live with God, nor do without God; he can neither worthily love his neigh- bour, nor be wholly indifferent to his welfare. He is inca- pable of attaining truth, and cannot cease withal to sigh for it. He trifles life away, and does not wish to leave it, He so far forgets himself at times as to dream of happiness, but that after which he yearns 1s unreal and impossible, for it would be happiness without God. Nature and society exercise an inordinate and injurious influence over him, because the supreme influence has lost its power. The body violates the contract that associated it to the soul; it refuses to obey, or rather it serves, but serves the law of sin, and the soul is degraded along with it. “Each of us carries a God and a brute within him,” says a modern HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. rere atheistic writer. We have transformed the law of labour into that of toil, and given death the strange and terrible character it bears; in giving ourselves over unto evil, we find that we have given ourselves over to disease and death. Not only is evil in contradiction with good, but particular evils are in contradiction with each other, for sin 18 necessa- rily irrational; it hinders the reduction of all things to unity and harmony; it has brought discord and anarchy into every sphere. It has given birth toa false nature which only exists on condition of transforming itself incessantly, and ever tends to transform itself for the worse, bringing out into more and more painful evidence the invincible con- tradictions which are at its root. Our individual selfishness comes into conflict with that of others, our reason rebels against God, our senses against our reason, and our organs against the supremacy of the vital principle, until the pre- sent phase of existence ends in death and decomposition. We are at war with God, with nature, with one another, and with ourselves. We do involuntary homage to the law of our being by the countless forms of suffering, physical, mental, and moral, which its violation has drawn down upon us; and we inflict these sufferings unceasingly and unsparingly upon each other, not only upon the battle-field and in the slave-market, but in all the relations of life, and in the very sanctuary of the family. Pain is the dark shadow that everywhere waits upon sin, and to which it is bound by a terrible—an irrevocable necessity. We are reluctant to confess that we are not in our native element, but all experience and all history are everlastingly proclaiming it. The confession 1s written in blood, it is repeated in all the woes of mankind. Every domestic bereavement, every public calamity, every eroan for himself or for others, that ever was uttered by man,—all are evidences that we are not in the state for which we were designed. Chavannes. W. A. Butler. A. Vinet. 2 Esdr. iv. 12. M. Miller. An evil conscience. 28 BOOK THE FIRST. “Woes inflicted by nature, evils that man owes to his fellows, national and individual calamities, diseases of the body and the soul, torments of the heart and of the mind, —there is no scientific nomenclature go rich as that of our iniseries. Their number, their gravity, their perpetual recurrence leaves meditative minds no choice except between two equally terrible suppositions: either some malevolent genius disputes with God the possession of this world, or else there has been at the origin of our history some frightful catastrophe. The painful impression is aggravated, for each of us by the weight of his personal sufferings,—each of us has sorrows without compensation, and losses for which nothing can console him. Time indeed may blunt their edge, but only by blunting our affections; and this very capacity for forgetting is a new and a poignant misery.” “It were better,” exclaimed a Jewish writer in his despair, some eighteen centuries ago, “it were better that we were not at all, than that we should live still in wickedness, and suffer, and not know wherefore.” One of the oldest existing words for man is the Sanskrit marta; meaning, “he who dies:” our own mortal. “It ig remarkable,” says Max Miller, “that where every thing else was changing, fading, and dying, this should have been chosen as the distinguishing name for man.” The early patriarchs of the Indo-European races must have felt man was not originally made for mortality, § 14. The universality and persistence of sin would make it pass for a fundamental principle of our nature were it not for the struggles it occasions ; the soul resisting this strange and accidental element as the body would try to get rid of a foreign substance. As our freedom when transformed into a habit of good would have been felicity, so when transformed into a habit of evil it has become misery ; for selfishness can never become our real nature, the temple can never be brought to look as if it was originally built for the idol. HUMAN QUILT AND MISERY. 29 Thus the soul determined to evil cannot rest, but is pursued by perpetual disquietude, driving it from one shape or from one refuge to another. We no longer aspire after God as beings who already filled with his presence, continue to increase at once their capacity and their desires, but as beings who strive in vain to lessen an infinite—an aching void. Our privileges have issued in the anguish of a culty conscience. The radical principle of our personality,—the power to appreciate supreme goodness and to be like it— only serves to condemn our perverse refusal to be lke it. We have learned to know good and evil, not by the healthy process of willing and filial obedience, overcoming and ren- dering us gradually insensible to temptation, but by the triumph of sin estranging us from God. We know evil experimentally,—not as a matter of observation, or as a metaphysical possibility, but as that under the empire of which we groan; we know good as the opposite of what we are,—as a lost blessing that testifies against us; It still exhibits the authority of law, but of a law alien to our perverted nature, contrary to us, and armed with penal sanctions. Our fatal choice to live for ourselves has set our wills in antagonism to a necessity which 1s invincible, because it is Divine and eternal. Our hearts are shut against the sympathies of heaven: we cannot love God, for we have sinned against him, and are obscurely conscious that our impunity would be inconsistent with the honour of his character, and with the stability of his government. That which is Divine in us, instead of being the organ by which we respond to the attraction of supreme holiness, is felt as an accuser and present avenger. That law of our being which should be our glory and our bliss, pursues us with a sword turning every way, remembrance of sin and menace of punishment. Even the most frivolous and thoughtless are conscious of A. Vinet. Charlotte Bronte De Gasparin. Dr. M’Cosh. Self-deception. 30 BOOK THE FIRST. a secret uneasiness, an instinct of insecurity, that they care not to interpret, but which is really the low, confused, indistinct echo of the murmurs of conscience. A nameless sorrow underlies all those that we are able to name, as the back ground upon which particular shapes of suffering stand out in relief. There is a sinister shadow that darkens the lives of all men, even of those who contrive to take no notice of it; and if the world will not allow such questions to be mooted, it is because it shrinks from speaking of the sorrows for which it has no cure. It is sin that gives its sting to every thing that pains us, to every uneasiness, or difficulty, or disappointment, or lassitude, or heartbreaking ; nay, sin mingles a secret bitterness with our most sacred joys. The peace of God is wanting in the hearts and in the lives of men. “The very Name of God is associated in the human mind with fear.” Hence the instinctive cowardice which fills every sudden blank in the universe with fancied evil rather than good. Vague, formless, infinite terror, fills those places in the heart which should be taken up by infinite trust. § 15. It is not that conscience of itself gives man a clear view of his fallen condition and of his wretchedness. Con- science being properly but the capacity of feeling obligation, requires to be enlightened; and the great mass of mankind have so completely lost all idea of their primitive calling as to know but very inadequately what they should be towards their neighbour, and not at all what they should be for God. However, as men never act up even to the light they have, partially informed consciences should be enough to convince them of sin; the more go that there is a general conscious- ness of the want of harmony and parity between our facul- ties and our lives, and there is an instinct that suffering is a warning of something essential being out of place. Experi- ence of the unsocial passions, — ambition, envy, avarice, pride, lust, contributes more than anything else to make HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 31 men conscious of the sinfulness of human nature in the abstract, and all, except those who he to their own con- sciousness for controversial purposes, are ready to confess it. « All sins are in all men,” writes a pagan moralist, “ though they do not appear in all men. He that hath one sin hath all. We say that all men are intemperate, avaricious, luxu- rious, malignant,—not that these sins appear in all, but because they may be, yea, are in all, though latent.” But while ready to confess the sinfulness, or at least the imperfections of the race, we are unwilling to recognize the extent and the signification of our personal shortcomings. “Our acknowledgment of sin in the abstract, is more willing and hearty than the recognition of particular sins in our- selves, or even in others nearly related to us.” Again, we deceive ourselves as to our moral state, by dwelling upon particular points with respect to which we can justify our- selves, without considering that the really fatal—the dam- ning sin of every member of the human family, is the alienation of the heart from God; so that if a man could pass through life without having to reproach himself with a single evil act, or secret feeling, the simple fact’ of indiffe- rence towards God, would constitute him a sinner utterly unfit for the glory and bliss of heaven. Our real disease 1s the paralysis of the moral man—want of heart for God ; and though the secondary symptoms through which it may betray itself are important for others and for ourselves during our earthly career, they are of little moment for eternity in comparison with the fearful fact that the disease exists. There are multitudes of men and women everywhere who have no peculiarly Christian feelings, though with a fair average sense of truth and right. “ They die without any ereat fear or lively faith ; to the last more interested about the concerns of this world than about the hope of another. .... They have seldom experienced the sense of sin, they Seneca, Ep. 50. Dr. Jowett. Dr. Jowett. Jer. xvii. 9. Du-Plessis Mor- nay. - A. Vinet. A. Vinet. ayy BOOK THE FIRST. have never felt keenly the need of forgiveness.” They know they do not love God as they ought, but they say so without anguish or remorse, they feel no horror at the ingratitude to which they plead guilty. Alas, they can thus look upon their state with complacency, because the lofty ideal of man’s destiny is altogether absent from their thoughts. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked : wHo CAN KNow Ir?” The heart is a forest full of wild beasts, cried an energetic huguenot of the 16th century, and that we know it not is the strongest proof of our corruption. “There is a calamity that has engendered every other, and, no sooner are they born, than it arms them against the soul with their most cruel edge. Sin is the open and running sore of individuals and of peoples, the poison of institutions and arts, leprosy of the earth, heritage of ages, disease of society, misfortune and death in the midst of happiness and life. The last triumph of sin is when it succeeds in getting its own existence contradicted. It is to this, that, by count- less means, it tends without ceasing, and succeeds but too well. Man, who in matters of detail complains so readily, and makes of his tears a cup of intoxication ; man revolts against the thought of a radical evil, of which he bears within him the principle, and not the remedy,—of which he is at once the author and the victim. He will not own that he has fallen ;” or owns it as a mere theological dogma of no prac- tical interest. He lives estranged from the source of life without perceiving it, or grieving over it. The vast variety of external attractions helps to hinder us from perceiving that we are our own idols. The soul lives abroad, out of itself Man has lost the way to the sanctuary in his own bosom, and more or less consciously and voluntarily abstains from trying to recover it. He con- fessedly finds reflection melancholy, and takes pains to amuse himself. “What if there were a world where there would be no need of this,—a world in which happiness HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 33 were so indigenous and native, that everything invented elsewhere to invite it were only proper there to banish and destroy it,—a world where amusement would distract the soul’s attention, not from its wretchedness, but from its bliss ; which of these, I pray you, would be the world of joy, and which that of gloom?” The confession of human wretch- edness can be wrung from literary creations, the authors of which were all unconscious of its meaning. What do we learn from heroes dying of ennui, after the fashion of Don Juan and Faustus? These are characters which could only be created in an age which had exhausted every refinement of sensual and intellectual gratificationm—an age, for that very reason, more dissatisfied and sick at heart, more weary | of itself, more desponding in the midst of bustle and appa- | rent energy, than any other since the one immediately preceding the Christian era. In a state of imperfect civilization man sits lightly to the claims of his fellows. In a state of high civilization he understands his dependence upon his fellows, and has learned to respect them, but he continues to think lightly of the claims of God. And, as he is impatient of all incon- venience or uneasiness, as all things around him are softened, and their asperities rounded off, to suit the needs of an ‘artificial life, so is it with his judgment upon his own moral state. His definitions of excellence are all negative ; he wastes his precious affections, and lays out his rich capital of faith, and hope, and love, upon the poor precarious invest- ments this world offers; and cannot be brought to feel the usurpation, and robbery, and folly, of which he is guilty in attempting to enjoy all without gratitude. It is only in moments of great joy or sorrow that the true man reappears, and that we catch a passing glimpse of the realities that soar above our present vulgar existence. § 16. Much that is relatively good still survives in the natural man; things true and venerable, to speak with the D W. A. Butler. Our remaining virtues. ei eivens. 34 BOOK THE FIRST. Apostle,—things just, pure, lovely, and of good report. He is capable of self-respect, of integrity and domestic affec- tions, of friendship and patriotism, of kindly sensibilities, and a genial helpful sympathy. Man is not such as sin has made him, but as sin has left him. There is still a glory shed around this sun, preparing though it be to sink below the horizon. The soiled and torn garments of this discrowned king are still of regal purple. Every time that the heart has a generous impulse, at every sacrifice that it makes for the sake of truth, justice, or compassion, man seems for a moment to recover something of his primitive nature, and catches a gleam of unwonted joy. But these moments are short and intermitting; these acts, however excellent in themselves, cannot be considered apart from the moral state of the agent generally; these good impulses are not held together, and their renewal secured for ever, by proceeding from the love of God as their common and all-sufficient seed- principle. They are branches severed from the parent trunk, retaining sap enough to produce leaves for one season, but having no root in themselves, and condemned at last to wither away. | The human character may be compared to some great city with magnificient streets and noble monuments, but present- ing in the back ground masses of wretched dingy tenements, the abodes of poverty and filth. Nay, the comparison is inadequate, for it is upon the very centre of the moral struc- ture, upon the very heart and arteries of the city, that the hand of the destroyer has passed. Sometimes unselfish in little things, we are unfaithful in the supreme relation, and inferior classes of motives habitually rule the man to the exclusion of the highest. That is not true goodness which is unable to overcome evil; that is not true virtue which allows the radical principle of all vices to subsist beside it without a struggle or even a protest. Indeed, so complete is the disorder of our moral being, that some of our best disposi- HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 35 tions occasionally offer aliment to some of the worst : “there are peculiar vices which seem to belong to, and depend upon, peculiar corresponding virtues for their growth and even existence.” He that knows his own heart is conscious that he does not bring into any of the relations of life the holy, unselfish feelings that should belong to them; his affection is faint, or inordinate, or capricious; ever and anon selfishness rises and shatters the brittle crust with which amiable feelings and conventional morality have covered it over; and even when it is otherwise, the excellence that has no heart for God, and no recognition of God, is just the most startling evidence that man is a moral ruin. . “ That the murderer, the adulterer, the thief should disclaim subjection to his God is sad, but scarcely surprising; the depth, the universality of the rebellion, is seen in the inde- pendence of our very virtues upon God; in the vast sphere of moral excellence, into which God never once enters; in the amiability that loves all but God; in the self-devotion that never surrendered one gratification for the sake of God; in the indomitable energy that never wrought one persevering work for God; in the enduring patience that faints under no weight of toil, except the labour of adoring and praising God. This it is which really demonstrates the alienation of the world from its Maker, that.its best affections should thus be affections to all but him; that not the worst alone, or the most degraded, but the best and loftiest natures among us should be banded in this conspiracy to exile him from the world he has made; that when he thus “comes to his own,” “his own” should “receive him not;” that he should have to behold the fairest things he has formed—kindness, gratitude, and love—embracing every object but himself; the loveliest feelings he has implanted taking root, and growing and blossoming through the world, to bear fruit for all but him!” Baden Powell. W.A. Butler. The heart's last secret thought--en- mity against God. Rom. viii. 7. 36 BOOK THE FIRST. § 17. The thought that is at the bottom of man’s heart,. with respect to God, is this:—we can do very well without him, then why should not he do without us?—why create us under this dangerous obligation to obey,—why force us to the alternative of submission or resistance, instead of leaving us to ourselves to enjoy the world with a good conscience ? This is the question of a being already fallen, and in its dire ingratitude given over to senseless cravings. It were equally impossible for God to create material being such that it could exist independently of his power, or to create moral beings such that they could be happy independently of his fellowship. It is as impossible with any reason to suppose God filling the universe, and man in the same universe not standing in living and supreme relationship with him, as to suppose the child at his father’s board and not conscious of any relation of duty, nor exchanging any feeling of affection. The very fact of such independence were itself a disorder, equivalent to a fall, and would be a mean of misery similar to that which has invaded our world. To say that man was created having his relation to God paramount over every other, is but another way of saying he was created with the right and the power to be happy. Our obligations were our privilege, and our charter of blessedness; it should have been our glory to be the children of such a Father ; it should have been our liberty to do his will from the heart. Man would now fain propose a treaty of reciprocal indifference, but God cannot entertain such a thought; he would cease to be Love if he resigned his right to our best affections, and to our entire obedience ; he would cease to be holiness if we could be happy after withholding our allegiance. If man be bent upon achieving a state of independence, and if God cannot possibly permit it, the result is inevitable : “the carnal mind is enmity against God : for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” One need not be a profound psychologist to perceive that there is a kind eh ae ee a a ee eo S. e . HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 37 of moral alienation, which is equivalent to the fiercest outbreaks of anger. In the intercourse of men with each other, passion is often transformed into habit; there are no more fits of passion, but a deep-rooted, settled enmity. He who is thus disposed avoids the society of the hated person, will not give credit to any professions of benevolence on his part, misinterprets all his acts, and will undergo any suffering rather than seek areconciliation. In such a case, hatred has become an instinct ; it is true the man knows the origin and the history of his resentment, and its object is visible and positive, but he does not know the kind of power it exercises over his mind, the extent to which it distorts realities, perverts his judgment, and makes him guilty of the greatest injustice almost involuntarily. He is conscious of the feeling of enmity, but not of all its effects. When God is concerned, the heart might well detect in itself a state of habitual instinctive enmity; but then this habit has never passed through the phase of passion,—man does not know its origin and history, nor does he distinctly define its object to his own mind,—he shrinks from analyzing his feelings. There is a vague impression of uneasiness with respect to the things of eternity ; religion is pronounced to be the gloomy side of life; there is a decided want of spiritual sympathies ; but then it has been always so, and attention is turned to the affections only when some change takes place in them. It is the beginning of every passion that determines its registration upon the tables of conscious- ness, just as an abrupt transition from one level to another strikes the traveller, who remains insensible to a much greater change when the slope is gradual. Thus it is that man is not conscious of a positive feeling of enmity against a God whom he does not see, nor know, and of whom he seldom thinks. Such a feeling has never had a beginning in his remembrances ; its effects, however, are not the less legible upon his heart; the thought of God Seneca. 38 BOOK THE FIRST. importunes him; every excuse to get rid of it is good; and in every controversy he is disposed to take the adverse side. Were one to violate his duties towards his fellows while pretending to serve God, every conscience would cry aloud against him, but it is looked upon as natural and excusable to forget one’s obligations toward God, provided there is no wrong done to one’s fellows. That is to say, the claims of God are not as valid as those of our neighbour,—any sort of half-recognition is good enough for him. In short, God is outlawed ; his rights appear to us so many attempts upon our freedom, so many menaces against our happiness. For the reality of this startling and suggestive fact, we may once more appeal to the impartial testimony of a pagan observer ; Seneca tells us the philosopher finds many just towards men, but towards the gods—nobody. Man. is religious,—that is to say, he has never been able to do without a religion of some sort,—a proof that he was indeed made for God; but all the religions of his invention have been of such a nature as to show the frightful disorder of this his supreme relation. Moreover, when the superior races found themselves in possession of a religion which represents God as exhibiting the most amazing love, and accomplishing for our sakes a sacrifice beyond expression or conception, the greater number remain indifferent, looking askance upon this Divine love as a new claim put forward against them,—a new danger to their independence. They welcome every insinuation against its truth, distrust the sincerity of those who profess to be affected by it, and boast that they are not hypocrites—(ze.), that they do not profess to love him who gave himself for them,—as if ingratitude were not vile, more hideous, in this case than in any other. Hatred is not in the state of passion here. It is metamor- phosed ; it exists as water ‘does in steam,—ainvisible, subtle, but not the less mighty. Man is not conscious of the e / . ° A . ~ Multos invenit equos adversus honines, adversus deos, neminen.—Ep. 95. « eer Se ee eee HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 39 feeling, nor of the passion of which it is the equivalent,—he knows not whither his tendencies would lead him; but in truth the fury of the cataract slumbers in the deceitful current of the seemingly sluggish stream. ‘Why go ye about to kill me?” said Jesus to the Jews: they thought the accusation unjust, but it was fearfully justified a little later. How often, since then, has the chronic hostility of the carnal mind toward God passed out into unbridled rage? Of how many martyrs could not earth uncover the blood ? § 18. “We see the whole world, and each part thereof, so compact,” writes the greatest of English divines, “that so long as each thing performeth only that work which 1s natural unto it, it thereby preserveth both other things, and also itself. Contrariwise, let any principal thing, as the sun, the moon, any one of the heavens or elements, but once cease, or fail, or swerve, and who doth not easily conceive that the sequel thereof would be ruin, both to itself, and whatsoever dependeth on it? And is it possible that man, being not only the noblest creature in the world, but even a very world in himself, his trangressing the law of his nature should draw no manner of harm after it? Yea, tribulation and anguish unto every soul that doeth evil.” The consciences of Socrates and his great interpreter taught them the same lesson. The former is made to affirm in one place: “Neither God nor man dare say that he who commits an injustice should not be punished.” Elsewhere, ereat part of a whole dialogue is devoted to the demonstra- tion, that wrong unpunished would be the greatest of evils, a violation of the sublime geometry that presides over the harmony of being. If, after the disorder of sin, we could witness that second and greater disorder—peace and happi- ness without God, what would become of the universe ? But it is impossible; the living God cannot allow his sanctuary to be profaned with impunity; the King of heaven can sign no treaty of peace, except a glorious one. John vill. 19, 20. Penal suffering inevitable, R. Hooker. Rom. il. 9. Plato, Hutyphron. Plato, Gorgias. A. Vinet. eh abe Coleridge, Michel de ’ Ho- pital. A. Vinet. Theodore Par- ker. Theodore Par- ker. Compare $ 41, 40 BOOK THE FIRST. When He forgives, it may not be at the expense of his justice or his holiness. The assertion of the possibility of creature happiness without God was the first great lie, and belief in it continues to be the supreme manifestation of human guilt and folly. Man is anxious to represent God to himself as a hard Master, but a weak and lenient Judge. Divesting himself as much as possible of the deep and awful consciousness of the holiness of God, he wishes to regard his Creator as “a good-natured pleasure-Giver,’ whose benevolence radiates alike upon the evil and the good by a necessity of its nature, and who only cares to produce enjoyment while indifferent as to the means. This imaginary God, this “God made of wax,” who does not punish sin, evidently does not hate it, and consequently cannot love good; he is not even merciful, for mercy presupposes justice. We could not respect the amiable weakness of such a being, and therefore we could not love him, for respect is an essential condition of real love. Kven a man when domineered over by his heart, without Justice or wisdom, “what is he,” asks Theodore Parker, “but a lump of good,—partial and silly ?” And yet those who would wrest impunity from God are unable to forgive themselves. Whenever we allow the voice of conscience to be heard, it protests that our state is the consequence of our deserts. We cannot succeed in per- suading ourselves that this voice is a delusion, that it has nothing corresponding to it in the character of the supreme Legislator, or that it is a pious fraud of the Creator, wishing us to be angry with ourselves for that with which he is not anery. Indignation at the evil doings of others points in the same direction as remorse for our own. “The wrathful emotions are also an integral part of humanity,” says the writer who has just been quoted, and who has very little sympathy with our conclusions, and he adds, they “have an HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. Al: indispensable function to perform—that of self-defence.” Now, every emotion of generous and legitimate anger suggests the existence of its counterpart in God. What is self-defence with us, or at best defence of the weak, becomes with him vindication of the order of the universe, and that not as a matter of utility simply, but as the assertion of the supremacy of right. When we turn from the examination of internal to that of external facts, from the utterances of the inner man to the evidence of history, personal or general, it 1s easy to recognize the working of a law of retributive justice in the lives of men and in the careers of nations. It is such as to exhibit the spirit of the Divine government, and to be a pledge of the future exercise of absolute justice; but for the present it is partial, unequal, in every sense irregularly distributed, as if to hinder us from mistaking it for final, adequate retribution, and to teach us that it is only a warning. Good follows unto all things by observing the course of their nature, and evil by not observing it; but in the case of irresponsible agents we do not call that good reward, or that evil punishment; man’s observation of God’s laws alone being righteousness, man’s transgression sin. Thus moral obligation and moral government are correlative, and man’s suffering for sin is a penal infliction. But we are not therefore to suppose it arbitrary, the laws of the universe are such as to execute themselves upon the offender, or rather he is constrained to execute them upon himself. The real evil of our state is not that we are visited by the effects of sin, it lies in the sin itself, in estrangement from our heavenly Father, and could it be possible to suppose a formal decree of forgiveness registered in the Divine chancery, but leaving us still in that state of estrangement, it would only mock our wretchedness. The desire of our Father’s heart is toward us, not with simple mercy pitying our misery, but R. Hooker. Bishop Butler. Macleod Camp- bell. H. LL. Mansel, 42 BOOK THE FIRST. seeking to possess us as dear children; and even he cannot hinder us from being wretched when we refuse to be chil- dren, not as a matter of mere external chastisement, but through an inward necessity: “God himself,” says the old Welsh triad, “cannot procure good for the wicked.” God’s holy will, the principle of universal order, must be realized in the free submission of moral beings, or else in their rebuke and sorrow; the evil and the good alike must praise it, every knee must bow. Hence all penal suffering, present or future, is the law reasserting itself against the transeressor, and honoring itself upon him, since it is not honored by him, repairing out of itself, and at the transgres- sor’s cost, the breaches it has suffered. The infraction of law must demonstrate, not its weakness, but man’s. Earthly kings may exercise a prerogative of pardon, because with them it is only the remission of an external chastisement, but the pardon of the supreme Monarch is a welcome to his heart, and this cannot be granted unworthily. “The duty of man to forgive the trespasses of his neigh- bour rest precisely upon those features of human nature which cannot, by any analogy, be regarded as representing the image of God. Man is not the author of the moral law: he is not, as man, the moral governor of his fellows: he has no authority, merely as man, to punish moral transgressions as such. It is not as sin, but as injury, that vice is a trans- gression against man: it is not that his holiness is outraged, but that his rights or his interests are impaired. The duty of forgiveness is imposed as a check, not upon the justice, but upon the selfishness of man: it is not designed to ex- tinguish his indignation against vice, but to restrain his tendency to exaggerate his own personal injuries. The reasoner who maintains, “it isa duty in man to forgive sins, therefore it must be morally fitting for God to forgive them also,” overlooks the fact that this duty is binding upon man on account of the weakness, and ignorance, and sinfulness ee HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 43, of his nature; that he is bound to forgive, as one who himself needs forgiveness; as one whose weakness renders him liable to suffering ; as one whose self-love is ever ready to arouse his passions, and pervert his judgment.” In a word, we may forgive those that trespass against us, because we are not the representatives of absolute justice, but God cannot do so without denying himself, he cannot separate his person and his will from the law of the universe. § 19. Can our suffering at least become a remedial disci- pline, reconstruct the original harmony of nature, and so turn back its current of penal disaster ?—can it be hoped that the retributive agencies now at work may exhaust their own cause, and bring about a statein which they shall disappear? Alas! this is equivalent to asking if experience, independent of all saving grace, can render us unselfish. No, where the very principle of life is affected, there is no help in any regimen. Fallen man centres in himself, gravitates down- ward, collapses into self; “he could as easily leap out of the maelstrom, as set himself in the true liberty and seed- principle of holiness.” He cannot by any effort of reason or will cure the mortal disease that lays him low,—he can- not by any strength of his own re-ascend the steep down which he has plunged. The consciousness that we ought to love God only makes us the more incapable of doing so, for love cannot come by constraint. It ought to be the indul- gence of the soul’s most pressing desire, forshadowed by the delight with which a child exercises its young powers upon all the objects adapted to call them forth. Our own domes- tic relations might teach us that to give oneself to another may be unspeakable happiness,—that to be most implheitly at another’s command may be a high form of freedom. But in the human nature that we know, we can discover no germ of renovation, no possible element of change God-ward ; man’s heart is in a state of final, fixed, unutterable dis- agreement with his lot. Even Seneca says, “our corrupt Man incapable of change or re- pentance. H. Bushnell. Seneca, Ep. 52. Macleod Camp- beil. Whitfield. 44 BOOK THE FIRST. nature has drunk in draughts of iniquity so deep, and so incorporated with its very bowels, that you cannot remove it, save by tearing them out.” Trial is indeed often a mean of strengthening character, of teaching hardihood, vigilance, and self-restraint, above all it is a precious agent of religious culture. But it is the Redemption we are to speak of that has made this possible ; we have, all of us, seen enough of ourselves to be taught that if God were only looked upon as the Holy One against whom we have sinned, suffering would never bring us back to his bosom, or restore our lost sensibility of heart and conscience. Real repentance makes the soul sympathize with the law that condemns it, take God’s side against itself, and hate the sin still more than it fears the punishment. Adequate repentance would judge the subject's own shortcomings by the same measure that a perfectly holy being would. Now it is characteristic of present human nature that it is much more sensitive to suffering than to sin, and 1nuch more ecare- ful to escape punishment than to avoid sin; the burden of life or the terrors of law might drive it to despair, but not win it over to the sympathies of heaven. Hence our abso- lute inability to do or to become what is right before God, and the pitiable helplessness of the man who is honestly set to make himself so. Our attempts to secure our own safety are not evil indeed, in so far as they are instinctive efforts at self-preservation, but they are wanting in godly sorrow for sin, and pure condemnation of it because of its own hatefulness. Every Christian tells us that he himself at- tempted repentance as an essay toward peace with God, and that the longer, the more earnestly and honestly he perse- vered in the attempt, the more hopeless it became, until he learned to exclaim with Whitfield: “our very repentance needeth to be repented of, and our very tears to be washed in the blood of Christ.” HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 45 § 20. Such was the awful greatness of the human calling, that the fall has put man out of reach of any direct saving intervention of Omnipotence itself; for man belongs to the realm of powers, not to that of things; particular acts of volition may be obtained from him by the adjustment of circumstances and influences, but the will itself is mnacces- sible. Man as a power is self-determined by the dread privilege of his creation,—that is to say, he is under control as to what he does, but not as to what he ws; his will is free without being sovereign. Were God to force the rational creature to a mechanical obedience, or to accomplish a mechanical change of disposition, such a change would have no moral value: but it is impossible : it would be contra- dictory to the very purpose of man’s being; it would be simply equivalent to annihilating him, and putting another in his place. In the creation of man God condescended to limit his own omnipotence,—to bring a spirit into existence that was to love and serve him by its free choice, or not at all. Thus, what man has done, God himself cannot undo by a mere fiat of sovereign will. He can neither change mankind by a direct exertion of Almighty power, nor yet abandon moral law to the caprice of the creature. § 21. Shall it be suggested that God may in mercy lower the requirements of Law to our condition, and that even in justice he ought not to ask of us any more than we are able to perform? This sophism, common as it is, and plausible as it seems to the interested and the unreflecting, cannot stand a moment’s analysis, at least in the shape that would be necessary to still our fears. It is the original, rather than the actual powers of the fallen creature, that should measure its guilt. Law may not be annulled nor altered by the rebellion of the subject ; sin cannot become its own excuse on the ground that it perpetuates itself, and renders us un- able to destroy it. To say so, would be to affirm that the claims of God must sink with the increasing depravity of His will beyond thecontrol of Om- nipotence. Obligation net the less persistent, Wardlaw. Himmanuel ant. Psalm eciii. 14. IeLim a. 13: Luke xii. 48. 46 BOOK THE FIRST. man, until at last utter degradation should have attained to total irresponsibility. If our own conscience can never be brought to remain altogether silent, can we suppose that he by whom we have been go fearfully and wonderfully made, will give up his righteous will concerning our moral state ? The great philosopher of K6ningsberg observed, that our obligations towards our fellows are not founded upon our empirical knowledge of them as they are, but on the ideal of their being; and so persuaded was he that obligation generally remains undiminished by the moral inability which consists in sinfulness, that he fearlessly proclaimed every bad act must be judged as if man fell into it imme- diately from a state of innocence. This assertion is not as absolutely true of the agent’s responsibility, as it is of the character of the act in the abstract ; the Psalmist took a more indulgent view when he said, the Lord “remembereth that we are dust:” and St. Paul, after reminding his young disciple what a blasphemer and persecutor he had been, adds, “but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.” The Apostle, however, does not consider that the plea of ignorance altogether removed his guilt ; he does not put it forward to justify himself so much as to explain that his conversion was easier than if he had resisted conviction. The very economy of mercy which pardons involuntary transgression and failure, as well as conscious guilt, thereby affirms the entireness of the obligation. The very state- ment that the servant who knew not his Lord’s will, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes, implies at once that he is guilty, and yet less guilty than if he had sinned consciously. Doubtless, the problem of the adjustment of individual responsibility, and of that high ideal of the human calling which we dare not lower, is utterly insoluble by our present faculties. It involves the relation of the individual to the Species, and to the whole sum of circumstances, lineage, HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 47 physical constitution, education, country, etc., which consti- tutes for each individual a new standpoint in the life of the species, and of the bearing of which upon character the sole competent Judge is the “only wise God.” But the world is not to be saved by casuistry: as has been already said, we are not in the habit of excusing offences committed against ourselves on the ground that their authors are false, or base, or ungrateful, or selfish, or violent, by nature ; and even did we excuse them, the inward necessity for the unhappiness of the wicked, just because they are wicked, would still subsist. It is at our peril that we would take advantage of our ignorance and evil dispositions to suppose our obligations lessened. They who attempt to entertain the supposition show but too plainly that no self-originated change for the better is to be looked for from them; and they who give up , the attempt in despair do thereby confess that our state is hopeless. § 22. All attentive observers of human life and character are convinced that our every act, our every allowed thought of any moral significance, exercises a certain amount of permanent influence upon the inner man. The more we learn to know ourselves, the more we understand the im- portance of the present for the future, just as naturalists, In proportion to the progress of zoology, are coming to deter- mine their classifications by embryonic development. Day by day we are engaged in writing our own history upon ourown souls, and, according to Christianity, the time will come when that history shall be read of all men; a time when every sin shall receive its name; when all that we hide from our very selves shall be laid bare to assembled heaven, and to ourselves, in the presence of God; no one shred left to shelter our secret corruption; every artifice of self-deceit exposed and spurned. In the very being, writes Archer Butler, “the rational and moral being that God has given us, he has interwoven the future judgment; he has con- Fenal suffering endless, hopeless. W.A. Butler. A. Vinet. Compare ¢ 41. Ernest Naville. A. Gratry. AS BOOK THE FIRST. structed our nature so that it demands this award as its necessary completion. Our daily life is one long prophecy of that day.” The moral being is the same in time and in eternity ; and if we are conscious that we do not grow better as we oTow older, what can a future life be but the development of what we are? Death cannot change the heart; if incapable of living with God here, we must be unfit to bear his presence hereafter ; if our life be all with which we have to confront death, we never can enjoy the sinless glories of his kingdom. For anything that appears to the contrary in ourselves, we must remain for ever that which we have become by our own act ; God cannot save our sins along with us, he cannot provide to all eternity for the amusement of sin. Dare we hope that the punishment can ever wear itself out?.... Not unless the sinfulness should wear itself out. We are compelled to retract sin from its very beginning and principle by adequate repentance, or else to persevere in it for our own punishment; and we are unable and un- willing to retract it. God has already let enough of his Justice appear to prove its existence——he knows our mise- ries, he looks upon our sorrows, and he allows them to be ; God is here, and we suffer in his presence! The heart trembles, reason is appalled, yet reason itself, taught by ex- perience, forces us to conclude that where rebellion against the light lasts for ever there darkness can never end. Were it otherwise, the most opposite ways of employing our freedom would have finally brought us to the same end; every road alike would lead to supreme happiness; vice and virtue, sloth and labour, selfishness and love, would be identical at bottom, since their results prove to be the same. But it cannot be so. “Whence can he draw life who has refused to draw it from the heart of God?” Holy love itself would condemn the creature to suffer for ever rather than try to make it happy in sin. Holy love must ES ee, HUMAN GUILT AND MISERY. 49 exclude from its presence those that are its opposite. God cannot withdraw from his universe in order to leave sin unrebuked and unpunished. Hell is involuntary self-punishment, as distinguished from repentance, which is voluntary. It is the manifestation of what a man has done through that which he is in himself,i— the obligation to unveil himself—the necessity to be clothed with that form of existence which corresponds to-the state of the soul. Hell was not made at first, but began with the devil and his angels, and grows out of evil as naturally as the glorified body out of the glorified spirit : the worm that never dieth is bred out of the dead soul upon which it feeds. Christianity does not make hell an exclusively retro- spective satisfaction for the violation of law; the sinner is not condemned irrevocably for what he has done and is, without any reference to what he may remain or become. The sentence is prophetic as well as retrospective; it pronounces the eternal punishment of guilt eternally renewed, and of which the renewal is foreseen. God does not wish the death of the wicked, still less does he wish that death eternal,—but the smner puts himself beyond reach of repentance, and therefore of pardon; he judges himself unworthy of everlasting life, and thus the privilege of immortality issues in never-ending death. § 23. Thus we are shut up in a fatal circle, from which there is no escape. We must be changed, or remain hope- lessly and for ever unhappy. We cannot be saved by a grace that should not change us; but in order to change I must love God, and to love God I must be conscious that he loves me, and how can I feel myself loved when I am lying in evil? Man, such as he has made himself, cannot really love God, or trust in God; nor is there in his nature any redeeming principle to produce restoration to spiritual health. We look around in vain for any remedial agency E Matt. xxv. 41. Ezek. xviii. 32; > O:O-gbb ls Bl. Acts xiil. 46. Fatal circle. DOn ea BOOK THE FIRST. that can bring about those results of happiness and order, that must have been purposed by God in the act of creation. No process of recovery by any natural means can be con- ceived. It is in the deadly mysterious nature of sin to render itsvictims insensible to its ravages,—enmity producing sins, and sins strengthening enmity—until they awake in despair. They are generally blind to their real state and dispositions, but those who do awaken in any measure to the terrible reality,—who penetrate to that inner chamber which is the hiding-place of their own “dark self,” so long as they remain strangers to faith in redemption, are certainly not attracted to God. Man, in short, fluctuates between a state of careless indifference on the one hand, and on the other, the terrors that have produced his countless devices for appeasing his gods by anticipating their vengeance upon himself; and in either state he is unfit to live with God. The only salvation possible in-a universe where the holy and blessed God is Master, would be a change in the inmost mind and being, brought about with its own hearty con- currence; and where are the motives for such a change to , be found, when even the claims of a Creator upon the creature’s obedience and gratitude have lost their power ? Whithersoever we turn, the sword of the cherubim flashes against us. How shall we recover ourselves and our God? Who shall deliver us from the body of this death? Selfish and guilty, unable to change, and surrounded by others who make me worse, who shall raise me up and make me holy ? What power can save us from ourselves? Oh where, in the midst of fallen and helpless humanity, are we to find any one possible centre of healing reaction, any one sound spot from which life and health can radiate to the rest, any one untainted member, by whom the others can be brought into saving contact with God? Rook the Second. Redemption. § 24. In reply to the anxious questions to which we have 7, srearnation been led at once by our own experience, and by the Christian “*7"’" interpretation of it, the religion of Redemption points to Bethlehem and Golgotha. It tells us that mankind have not been finally given up to the consequences of their apostacy, but that the incarnation, death, resurrection, and intercession of Jesus Christ are the inseparably connected parts of an all-sufficing, redeeming process, that is to put every willing child of man in possession of more than his forfeited birthright, setting him ina higher and closer relation towards God, in a dearer and more intimate union with his fellows. It tells us that the eternal plurality in the bosom of Deity made it possible to create within our race the healing centre that it could not naturally produce. The Father sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world,—to live our life, and to die our death. To accomplish our Redemption, the Son associated himself inseparably with the destinies of the human race. He became the Son of man, subject to every condition, physical, moral, and intellectual, of a true human development. He assumed into his eternal personality the very first original element of our nature, as it existed in the virgin’s womb, before it was come to have any distinct personal subsistence, —thereby taking upon himself all the rights and all the responsibilities of man. Sinless member of a lost and apostate family, he was a man in the image of God,—a man in Union of the Divine and the human in one person. John i, 1—14. 1 John iy. 1—15. 52 BOOK THE SECOND. whom the Father was well-pleased, in whom the depths of human intelligence and affection were filled with all the fulness of God, yet voluntarily identifying himself with the fate of his guilty and suffering fellows. Like them, he bowed beneath the law of labour; like them, he knew — fatigue, and sorrow, and weeping ; more than they he suffered, being tempted; finally,—crowning labour of Redemption, for which he came into the world, and of which he alone was capable,—at Calvary he confronted violated law with absolute sympathy for its claims, and with the awful, un- mitigated consciousness of the guilt and ingratitude of man. In him, for the first and only time, a man was found capable of estimating in all its horror the enormity of man’s departure from God ; so that the humar race, self-condemned by the conscience of its only holy organ, made atonement in his person, and satisfied the righteous judgment of God. § 25. That the Word should be made flesh was a miracle recalling that by which the Creator, at the first, drew from his own being the spiritual principle of his rational image. But it was an infinitely greater condescension of divine and holy Love, involving the intimate, inseparable, and everlast- ing union of the Divine and human natures in one person. It is the fact of the incarnation that is the object of the Christian’s faith; the manner of the co-existence of the human and the Divine he can make no attempt to explain, except so far as experience has taught him to recognize and repudiate those forms of speculation which invalidate the reality of the fact, and obscure the object of his faith. Thus we do not hold the mere juxtaposition of the two natures in such a way as that one should but serve as a veil for the other. As the human soul and body make one man, so God and man united make one Christ. His Deity and humanity are to be considered simultaneously, not alter- nately, and the one is as real as the other. Neither are we to attribute distinct personality to the REDEMPTION. 53 Divine and human natures, or anything approaching to such a conception, for then God would not have become man, and man would not have been taken into Deity, each person would have falsely assumed something of the character of the other, and the supreme object of Christian affection would be no longer simple. On the contrary, the personal being which the Son of God already possessed, hindered the substance which he took from attaining distinct per- sonality. He assumed rather into his pre-existing Divine personality, a human soul and body; the Divine self- consciousness going over into the human, leaving its infinity in abeyance for a time, and lending itself to human con- ditions of experience, and growth, and of suffering, as a discipline of the will; the human soul, the instrument of his Deity in the labours, trials and humiliation of his earthly pilgrimage, as it is still the shrine of his Deity in elory. We remain intelligences even while we sleep, and he remained God even during his voluntary abasement. Nor has there been any such communication or mutual infusion of the essential properties of Deity and humanity as to make of the Redeemer an intermediate Being, no longer altogether God, and not exactly man. He is “made known in two natures without confusion (écvyx¢7ws), without conversion (dper7@s), indivisibly (4éapetws), inseparably (axwpiotws).” He is very God and very Man, and that equally, simultaneously, and for ever, without any confusion of the essential characteristics of either nature, however frequently they may concur to one effect. “As oft as we attribute to God what the manhood of Christ claimeth, or to man what his Deity hath right unto, we understand by the name of God and the name of man neither the one nor the other nature, but the whole person of Christ, in whom both natures are.” Just as we say with equal propriety, that man walks, or thinks, or moves, or loves; though one set of these acts belong more properly to the body, and the Kahnis. R. Hooker. Philsiinse Luke ii. 52; aut, Gye, Heb. ii. 10, 18; v. 8. Council of Chaleedon. R. Hooker. Dr. Angus. W. A. Butler. The Divine organ and representative Dr. Guthrie. A. Vinet. ‘A. Vinet. 54 BOOK THE SECOND. other to the soul. Thus, without parting with one ray of that transcendent essence by which he is before all things, and all things consist in him, the Son of Man has “so pre- sented himself to us, as to encourage even the faintest as- pirations of the feeblest heart to repose in the bosom of a Brother.” § 26. The holy love of God toward man, the purest love of man for God, absolute filial devotion, absolute self- — sacrifice,—all were now united in the bosom of One who, by the prerogative of his Person, was to be henceforth the organ of God in all his dealings with mankind. The well- being of the universe, the Divine glory, the highest revela- tions of holiness and love could now be intrusted’to a man. It could be proclaimed without profanity or phrenzied audacity, that he by whom the worlds were sustained, who could blot them from existence at his will, filling himself the whole tremendous solitude,—that he was One whose infant arms had clasped a mother’s neck. God had become man. The Eternal had subjected himself to the conditions of time and space. The High and Holy One, before whom angels veil their faces, had become the august, but intimate, familiar Friend of sinners. Hitherto the soul, though living, moving, and having its being in God, was practically at an infinite distance from him. It would have been awed and chilled by the immensity of the heavens, and the invisible presence of the Absolute, the Almighty, the Impassible, even were it not fatally estranged by sin; but now the vast, cold wilderness of the Infinite was warmed and animated. God was within reach, teaching us to pronounce the name of Father, pointing to the sacred shores of our native land, the Father’s house lit up, and seen from afar through intervening night. Henceforth we could commune with him face to face, as a man speaketh with his friend; we could maintain with him direct and daily intercourse; we could confide to him with assurance of being heard, the wants REDEMPTION. 5D of every day, and the sorrows of every passing hour. Ina word, we could know him, and love him, and learn of him, as a manifested person, though still remaining, for our thoughts and conscience, the infinite, the dread, the holy God. Henceforth God, whether as a Father or a moral Governor, was only to be known in the Son, and to act through the Son. In him he was to be seen, by him to save, by him to judge. Incarnation of redeeming love, our salvation was to be accomplished in his Person, it was to be found in the confession of his Name, and in the loving abdication of self at his feet. The Son was to judge the race in himself and in others. So long as this creation was 1 Cor. xv. 2. to be the object of any special Divine dispensation, he was to be the sole organ of all revelation and of all government. § 27. Man, from the moment he appeared in the world, 2he organ of was the pontiff and lord of all creation, by virtue of his native ®y birthright. superiority ; and similarly the Son of man, by a natural right, became the organ and the Lord of all nature and of the John v. 27. human race. The one member of the human family who was really and truly man, because he alone, in his living relation to the Father, realized the vocation of man, he be- caine at once by birthright the elder son and representative of the entire family, warranted to do and to suffer in behalt of all, whatever was to be done or suffered, in order to raise them up along with himself from that moral death in which he had found them, under the consequences of which he had been born, and continued voluntarily to bow himself down. Able to “sum up” (recapitulare) the human race In Tenens. himself; the very Prince of the race in the powers of suf- fering and enjoying, which he was to exhibit by turns, he had come down into our ruined humanity, sharing its agonies without participating in the principle of its fall, claiming to be its centre, and, like the sun, making his title good by his all-sustaining and all-quickening power. In weakness, humiliation, and death he proved “that he could deliver pp, sauce. Matt. xx. 28. Luke xxii. 27. 56 BOOK THE SECOND. the spirit of man out of its fetters, that in owning him to be its Lord, it attained the freedom it was sighing for.” Could we for a moment suppose the human family, made as they are “of one blood,” to have attained to moral per- fection, it is evident that the relations of the individual and the species would be constituted differently from anything we have experienced. Of one mind, one heart, one soul, each of these happy beings would be ever ready to act, within the limits of his capacity, for the good of all, and all would be ever ready to recognize the acts of each. Of course, as in every living organism, there would be parts of unequal importance, the leaf of a tree occupies a humbler place in its economy than some giant branch, yet every part would concur harmoniously to the hfe and beauty of the whole. The individual in his own sphere, whether lowly or exalted, would really be the legitimate representative of the race, and never be disowned in any thing he did. At the same time the privilege, the royalty of the very highest would consist in his being able and willing to do most for others, that 1s to say in being the servant of all. Something of this mutual dependence, this community of feeling and interest, this recognized activity of one for many, does appear in this present world. It is the principle of family and national and human sympathies. It has made of the family the kernel of the State and the type of the Church. The labourer in every department of industry or science contributes to the welfare of his fellows in general, and whatever is done or discovered by any one people is ultimately done or discovered for all the earth ; every good deed, on. what scale soever, is a part of the life of the world. Indeed the degree of reality and consciousness with which we proclaim ourselves “members one of another,’ is the measure of our civilization. The father is intrusted with the interests of his family,—the statesman, in some critical period, with those of an entire people. If some live ina REDEMPTION. 57 narrow horizon, and hardly understand themselves, others can read and minister to the wants of multitudes. The liberty, mental and moral culture, social progress and hap- piness of myriads may depend upon the way in which the responsibilities of a few are discharged. There is a kind of natural right, says Aristotle, in the noble-minded, the wise and the virtuous to govern those that are of a servile dispo- sition. He might have added, that the right exercise of this natural prerogative involves a spirit of self-sacrifice, as the Chinese emperor, Wou-wang, is reported to have said: “T would that the faults of all the people fell on me only.” The poet that expresses the thoughts that are struggling for utterance in other minds,-—the thinker that leads the activity of his fellows,—the prophet that animates a whole people with one spirit, and unites nation in brotherhood with nation,—the high-souled man that comes forward from time to time, heroic representative of a people or of an age, bent upon doing some great work which is in the heart of all :-— The pillar of a people’s hope, The centre of a world’s desire, — all such men are really, in the great purposes of their lives, the organs of the millions that profit by and sympathize | with their efforts. Such facts may illustrate, however imperfectly, the relation of the Saviour to the human race. In the midst of this diseased and mutilated humanity, the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the strong hand are, by a natural right and a Divine appointment, the organs by which the whole man sees, hears, and acts. The difference between the Saviour and the heroic figures of history is that the latter represent an age or a people because they are its noblest children ; they serve mankind with the powers they have inherited from man- kind itself, while Jesus brought his powers from above. No sooner however was he one with us, than all the trea- Aristotle. Polit i. 4. Confucius. PUNY Weekes i Cor. xv. 45. Deut. xxv. 6. C. Seeretan. F. D. Maurice. 58 BOOK THE SECOND. sures of his being became ours, as much as if he had drawn them from our own nature. The Holy Scion belongs to the tree as completly as if it were a natural branch; nay, it now constitutes the tree, since it alone fulfils the end of the tree by bringing forth fruit unto God. Jesus Christ loved to call himself the Son of man; he was a second Adam, entitled to raise up seed to the first. The past of the race was explained, its future contained in him. It was born over again in his Person, and in him it abandoned its attitude of revolt and selfish will. The moral life of humanity was concentrated in him, just as its civilization and progress have hitherto been concentrated in minorities. In a certain sense humanity is present in each of its mem- bers, but it is summed up and represented completely in One, whose holy love could go forth towards all men, infold- ing in its embrace themselves and their miseries, as the peasant noble of Unterwald gathered into his bosom the lances of all the foe. When Jesus appeared in a sinful world, there was there, in the midst of men, a perfect, holy, loving man, entitled by that which was in his heart towards God and towards his fellows, to be the representative of both. Here was a com- petent Agent for everything concerning our highest wants and our eternal interests. Here was One born to feel, to act, and to suffer for his brethren,—One in such relation to the race, that his acts became theirs, unless formally repudiated. Of course he was repudiated at first. Men could not but reject the faithful and true witness. Were they otherwise disposed his incarnation would not have been necessary. But he is not the less ours for ever: he has accomplished in our nature that which changes the relation of the race collectively towards God. ‘He, as a man, has exercised dominion over the powers of nature; as a man wrestled with spiritual evil; as a man triumphed over death; as a man ascended to the right hand of God;” and through the ee REDEMPTION. 59 record of his life, and the agency of his Spirit, he pleads with every successive generation, until every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess him Lord, to the glory of God the Father. § 28. While we thought of God as an exactor and a hard creditor, he was preparing to show himself a rich Giver, —more generous than even in creation,—and a forgiving Saviour. “What does he give? Not empires merely, not a world full of silver and gold, not heaven and earth only, but his Son, who is as great as himself—that is, eternal and incomprehensible ; a gift as infinite as the Giver, the very spring and fountain of all grace; yea, the possession and property of all the riches and treasures of God.” Who but the Son could reveal the Father, and teach ‘us to say, “ Our Father”? Who could restore the lost communion between God and man, save One in whom its principle abode in purity, and in whose soul was shed abroad the blessed quickening consciousness of the grace, and truth, and love, of Almighty God; One who could inspire his brethren with his own filial confidence and holy joys ? Before the coming of Christ, profound thinkers might have been able to find in their hearts and consciences, in their own experience and in history, some reasons for hoping that a remedy for the evils of sin might yet be revealed,— some remedy not concealed in man, but of God’s providing. They might have observed that man himself could, under certain circumstances, righteously exercise the lofty preroga- tive of forgiveness; that in the course of nature provision is made for the remedy of many ills; and that in the human constitution, individually and socially, provision is made for the partial removal of the consequences of moral wrong. If the simple consideration of the contradictions between our condition and our aspirations might drive them to despair, the fact that there were traces in all religions of faith in an original promise of Divine intervention might, on the con- Phil. ii. 10, 11. His very pre- sence a pledge of Redemption. Luther. IM Ghints 2a XK J. H. Godwin. P. Goy. Athanasius, de incarn. ix. John xvii. 19. His ministry and his ideal humanity. 60 BOOK THE SECOND. trary, suggest the hope of a salvation to be accomplished, they knew not how, of which Judaism contained the distinct. assurance consistently developed throughout the prophetic utterances of twenty centuries. Now, however, the presence of a perfectly Holy Being in the world was in itself a prophecy of another order, gather- ing these hopes and surmises to itself as their nucleus, giving them body and substance, showing that Redemption had its place in the plans of God, and would surely be realized in the world. The awful gulf between a holy impassible God, and his sinful suffering creatures, was already bridged over. Eternal light and truth had entered into humanity, with its capacities, concerns, and circumstances, as a divine healing power, so that henceforth there was to remain in man some- thing greater than man. When a mighty king enters into a city, though he only inhabits one house, the whole city is honoured by his presence. It was even so with the Incar- nation; in the mysterious union of his Divine and human natures, the Son consecrated the one by the other, and for ever reconciled both in himself, in order that he might after- wards do so in us. God and man were pledged to each other in his Person. Jesus Christ accomplished in his own human development that normal progress from simple innocence to perfection which had failed in us, sanctifying himself that we also might be sanctified through the truth. He altered the relation of mankind in the abstract to God: the op- posing wills of heaven and earth meeting in one free godly _ will, there was now a common tie,—there was a member of the race well-pleasing in the Father’s sight, a holy sorrower over sin, who did not isolate himself, but identified himself with his brethren. § 29. Taking his place in the immense interval which separates the wretched from the source of bliss, and sinners from eternal holiness, Jesus brought God nearer to our hearts, and put him within reach of the humblest amongst us. He REDEMPTION. 61 preached to the poor and the uncultivated, he blessed the little children. His love was not an occasional impulse, but a principle of constant unwearied devotedness ; no service was too hard or too humble for it, no sacrifice too great, no suffering too infamous ; for the sake of others he preferred poverty to riches, toil to ease, reproach to honour, and death to life. In him the poor found a Protector, the afflicted a Comforter, the degraded a Restorer. The greater the degra- dation of the outcasts of society, the more tender his com- passion. He suffered with those that mourned more intensely than themselves, because he only could measure the distance between the glory of their calling, and the wretched reality. He bled with all the wounds of mankind, gathered up and quenched in his own bosom every scattered affliction and humiliation, wiped away every tear, opened his heart to every feeble cry that would have been lost for other ears amid the tumult, the immense incessant roar of this surging ocean of human life. His bodily presence was a foretaste of what his presence and agency in heaven was yet to be, of the pardon of which he was to be the instrument, the grace of which he was to remain the permanent source. His lordship over the world of spirits was a pledge that he would overthrow the kingdom of darkness. His miracles in general exhibited at once a fitting attendance upon his person by the powers of a higher world, and types sugges- tive of the great miracle he came to accomplish. He re- lieved the distressed because he was sent to hush nobler, deeper sorrows; he fed the hungry, healed the sick, raised the dead; he changed the banquet spoiled by human poverty into a real feast, because he was to do all this ina higher sense, and with everlasting efficacy. From the moment that he was manifested, faith in him became the immediate practical form of faith in God. He appeared amid the ruins we had made, re-opening the long forgotten ways of communion with heaven, and the channels J. H. Godwin. Dollfus. John xiv. 1. Ernest Naville. Augustin. Dr. Jowett. H. Bushnell. 62 BOOK THE SECOND. of Divine life that had been choaked up, or rather he was himself the way. | All philosophy, as exhibited in its noblest representatives, is but one long effort to raise ourselves to the possession of that supreme good, of which we bear within us the desire and presentiment. We crave it, as if we had seen it somewhere, and yet we do not personally remember where or when. ‘The restora- tion of the ideal of human life and happiness has been the secret wish and aim of every great soul and every lofty intelligence. And this ideal it is that Jesus made to shine before our eyes, as a state of bliss from which mankind had fallen and must now recover. He proclaimed the character of God; he asserted the principle of absolute moral ex- cellence, the duty of entire and willing obedience to the living Source of all goodness and blessedness,—obedience in which the creature is to find its joy and its rest. His teaching was not so much a doctrine as a life, truth and love walking the earth, his utterances going forth as a feeling and a power breathing into all hearts. “The life of Christ is the life of One who knew no sin, on whom the shadow of evil never passed,—yet One to whom all men would soonest have gone to confess and receive forgiveness of sin. It is the life of One who was in constant communion with God as well as man, who was the inhabitant of another world while outwardly in this. It is the life of One in whom we see balanced and united the separate gifts and graces of which we catch glimpses only in the lives of his followers.” We are so conscious that it is not for us to judge him, even in reverence, that we forbear to praise him. “All the con- ditions of our life are raised by the meaning he has shown to be in them, and the grace he has put upon them. The world itself is changed, and is no more the same that it was; it has never been the same since Jesus left it. The air is charged with heavenly odours, and a kind of celestial REDEMPTION. 63 consciousness, a sense of other worlds is wafted on us in its breath.” § 30. But it was not enough to have a Holy One in the midst of us, and belonging to us, with a universal mission, so loving and serving God, as to begin a new period in our history, and to constitute a new element in our collective being. If the work of Christ had been confined to a life in sinless human nature, he would never have been a Saviour. It was necessary that there should be an act that could be matched against all the accumulated disobediences of men. The first want of the sinner is reconciliation with God, and therefore that reparation without which reconciliation would be impossible. He who has taken upon him to stand forth in our place, clothed with our responsibilities, must make an atonement for what we have done, and for what we are, or his personal holiness will only repel and condemn by its contrast those who are enemies in their mind by wicked works, will only make the voice of conscience more terrible, without making it more attractive. He must not come by water only, “but by water and blood.” We dare not lay claim to what he is and does until the great previous question is settled. We are in our sins so long as they are not expiated, and we cannot really love God, or serve him, or avail ourselves of the presence and agency of our sinless brother. The Gospel is therefore the triumph of mercy, but not the setting aside of justice; it is no declaration of a mitigated law, and of terms of acceptance lowered to our infirmity ; it is no amnesty without an atonement. On the contrary, in the very act of forgiveness it sets in relief the perfection that forgiveness might otherwise seem to contradict. It was due to the Divine Holiness “that in the very medium of pardon there should be some signal and awful fact, of a judicial and penal kind, to record and render memorable the righteous God’s estimate of the sin he pardons.” The Necessity of a positive act of ea- piation. Colsia2w 1 John v. 6. J. Foster. A. Vinet. A. Vinet. A. Vinet. 64 BOOK THE SECOND. obstacle to the sinner’s reconciliation with his offended God did not consist exclusively in the sinner’s present alienation of heart, it lay also in God’s holy abhorrence of the past. Sin is not only depravity, but guilt; not only moral deformity, but legal desert of punishment. The most noble, and when we come to feel it distinctly, the most imperious and profound of man’s wants is the satisfaction of moral law. The man to whose conscience it has been brought home, that he has been basely and guiltily ungrateful to those whom he loves and honours here below, feels within him a stern necessity of reparation; and the more lofty his character the greater his torment, until he has done everything in his power to manifest his sorrow and self-reproach. But in no other sphere has this want of reparation exhibited itself with the depth and intensity it presents in the sphere of our relation to the Divine. No penances, no tortures have proved too dreadful to be eagerly embraced, even by cold and unimaginative minds, if they could only hope by such means to fill up the great gulf that violated law opened at their feet. During thousands of years, and under the most various religious systems, the heart of mankind has been beating under the weight of its self-reprobation, understood and avowed by the noblest and the purest, implied in the instincts of the multitude. The torment of the conscience is all the greater that it is felt to . be vain, and that the satisfaction we can offer exhausts our strength without exhausting the evil. We dare not accept any rehabilitation, unless it contains a reparation of the disorder of which we feel ourselves at once the accomplices and the victims. Were an awakened soul to be presented with a pardon pronounced by sovereign grace at the expense of righteousness, she could not believe in it, could not trust to it, could not ratify it, but would remain forcibly implacable towards herself, continuing to avenge upon the inner man the law that had abdicated its own claims. REDEMPTION. 65 § 31. It was as members one of another, inheriting the dispositions of our forefathers, and influenced by the moral state of those around us, that we found ourselves aliens from the life of God, and obnoxious to his wrath. Sin had so penetrated the common being of mankind as to make them one in their spirit of selfish rebellion, as they were one in its commencement, and it could be truly and sadly said, “the whole world lieth in wickedness.” But it was also through the organic unity of the race, and through the principle of joint responsibility, that our salvation was to come. Ordinary sympathies can in a measure make the suffer- ings of others our own; those of noble characters do more: —every true, loving heart does really, though obscurely, impute to itself somewhat of the faults of those it loves, and thinks it would willingly atone for them. Indeed, he has no right to pray to have a punishment spared his brother, who would not be ready to take it upon himself. This is the secret of what has been called the second-sight of tragedy ; its consciousness that where there is sorrow in any circle it sits heaviest upon the truest heart, that when there is a curse upon a family it often falls upon a relatively innocent member. A sympathy, carried to the holiest extreme of self-sacrifice, exhibited itself in all those men of God who of old identified themselves with their guilty people in the hour of its judgment. “This people have sinned a great sin,” said the man by whom God accomplished the deliverance of Israel, “yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin ;—and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” When Jeremiah looked upon the desolation of his city, “there sat upon his soul a weight of sorrow and evil, as if he were representing his whole people, as if there were no wrong which they had committed, no evil habit which they had contracted, which did not cling to him, for which he was not responsible.” ‘We have transgressed and F Christ’ s appro- priation of our sin, 1 John vy. 19. C. Secretan. J. P. Lange. Ex. xxxii. 31, 32 F. D. Maurice. Lam. tii. 42. Daniel ix. 20. Ver. 5. Ver. 9. Romans ix. 3. F. D. Maurice. 66 BOOK THE SECOND. have rebelled,” he cried in his anguish, “ Thou hast not pardoned.” There was a man walking about in the deserted city, who really, like a true priest of God, bore the iniquities of the children of Israel upon his heart. The same feeling is expressed more fully—it could not be expressed with more depth and tenderness—by the prophet Daniel, in that intercessory prayer which he thus characterizes himself: “I was speaking, and praying, and confessing my sin, and the sin of my people Israel.” It began with these words,—‘ We have sinned, and have committed iniquity ;” and it continued in the same strain throughout: “To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him.” And in the New Testament, St. Paul writes to the Romans: “I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” :; ; It was the privilege of these holy men to feel deeply the unity of the favoured race to which they belonged: they identified themselves with even the least worthy of its members, and, at least in rare moments of sublime self- devotion, did really love their people as themselves. Of course they could not offer, even for their own souls, still less for others, an adequate, acceptable atonement: they were sinners, rightly recognizing in their own hearts the germ of the evil that they deplored in others. But they exhibited beforehand, in an imperfect degree, and upon a reduced scale, the feelings which the sense at once of the unity of the whole human race, and of its sinfulness, should produce in a perfectly holy and devoted human spirit. And the effect which the sight of such self-devotion works upon the mind proves its predisposition to experience judgment and redemption in a great, holy act of self-sacrifice, accom- plished by a man and a brother. But there was to come a moment “when all the subor- dinate actors in God’s drama should give way to the one REDEMPTION. 67 central hero of it, when all its preparatory conflicts and crises should be gathered up into one, which he should carry on alone, having of the people none with him.” Jesus alone possessed the absolute and adequate consciousness of the unity of the human family, and therefore his strong sympathies could completely make our sins as well as sorrows his own. ‘The reality of his organic connection with us gave him the right thus to appropriate our sin, while the sinlessness of his being made him alive to its horrors. He who steps forth before God as a priest to make atonement for man and for his sins, must see them as they are before the eyes of the holy God, must measure our de- pravity in its whole depth, in its full extent, and in all its ramifications. No one can truly know what darkness is, but he who stands in the light; and he alone was capable of sounding the depths of our guilt and wretchedness, who could take meet cognizance of the glorious destiny to which the Creator had called mankind, the blessed end it should have attained. A soul under the empire of sin can never do entire justice to the holiness from which it has severed itself. However tormented by remorse, a measure of rebellion and of renewed guilt must mingle with its self-loathing ; being without heart for God, it is only susceptible of a sterile and godless sorrow. Not so the Lamb of _ God, who taketh away the sins of the world. His righteous sympathy with God was commensurate with his compas- sionate sympathy toward man. It was with a godly sorrow that he who knew no sin clothed himself with ours. § 32. The incarnation itself was a sacrifice of which the strong crying and tears of Gethsemane, and the agony of Golgotha, were the highest term. “During the whole time of his life upon earth, but particularly at the close of it, he bore upon his body and upon his soul the weight of the wrath of God against the sins of the human race.” His passion and his death began with his life in a world W. F. Gess. Johni 29. Mis experience of evil gradual. Catechism of Heidelberg, Quest. 37. A. Vinet. Luke viii. 3. Dr. Angus. John ii. 25. Mark vi. 6. Mark vii. 34. viii. 12. ix. 19. F. Godet. B. W. Newton. 68 BOOK THE SECOND. where sin and its consequences reign. Born in a stable, supported by alms, partaking of his last meal in another man’s room, buried in another man's grave,—these outward humiliations were merely the badges of his character as a stranger on the earth, who died daily to his own will in the company of simmers. All through his life he must have felt with grief and shame the alienation of his brethren from God, but it was a necessary consequence of the reality of his human nature that the consciousness of our sin should grow upon him gradually. He could not effectually atone for it until he had become experimentally acquainted with its depths. It was after thirty years of such experience that it was said of him, he “needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man.” And yet, even later, we are told that it was with a sense of painful surprise he beheld certain manifestations of unbelief; and in the shortest record of his life we can trace successive mo- ments of sorrow over the sadness of man’s condition, and the hardness of his heart, sighs that are ever deeper, until at the foot of the mount of transgression he breaks out—“ O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you?) How long shall I suffer you?” Parallel with this melancholy study of the human heart and life must have been his meditations over the prophetic Word that contains the presentiment of his Being, and the picture of his work, The Scriptures were for him “like a letter of instructions, the seal of which he oroke open when already out at sea, and which he read amidst the storms and tempests of life.” Of course it was at the closing crisis—that moment which was also the great crisis of human history—that the conduct of both friends and foes led him to make his last and f See many passages to the same effect from Calvin, Witsius, F. Turretini, Bishop Horne, and the Helvetic Confession, in Christ our Suffering Surety, by B. Wills Newton. P. 16, 17, 18. REDEMPTION. 69 bitterest discoveries of the abyss of enmity and baseness that separates man from God. Yet even this final agony was prepared by successive paroxysms ever increasing in intensity, on the last journey to Jerusalem, and in the midst of his triumphal entry, and in the garden of Gethsemane. § 33. As has just been intimated, it is one of the condi- tions of human existence that the mind only realizes that which it has practically known; an idea must become fact, and matter of experience, if it is to be livingly lodged in our consciousness. Thus, it is only when man has actually undergone the fatal consequences of sin, even to the very worst, that he can do justice at once to its hateful and its tragical character. Death is for all men a last experience, Mark x. 32. John xii. 23—-32. Luke xxii. 39— 46. Death the specific punishment of sin. and a dread revelation; the illusions of time disappearing ~ as the soul passes through the portals of eternity into the immediate presence of the Holy One. Now the Son of Man had no illusions to unlearn, but he too had a last ex- perience to pass through. There came an hour in which he had nothing more to learn of the evil, the selfishness, the godlessness of the race with which he had identified him- self, but in which he had still to undergo the specific punishment inflicted on the sinful creature. After suffering for sin throughout his whole human career, enduring the minor ills by which God manifests his displeasure against it, he endured at last the sense of that displeasure as it 1s conveyed in death,—a revelation which could be made in no other shape to his consciousness such as it had become since he was made man. “So that by what death was to him, Christ could completely realize what sin was to God.” Bowing down voluntarily under our curse—abhorring sin, yet clad in its weeds—appropriating the guilt of the world at the moment that guilt was greatest—he received into his own soul the full sense of the condemnation that was merited by us; and in so doing and suffering accomplished his atoning work, overcame death by submitting to it, over- F. Godet. Macleod Camp- bell. Augustin. F. Godet. Heb. ix. 26. Bishop Pearson 70 BOOK THE SECOND. came sin by judging it upon himself, and offered unto God a proper sacrifice, holy and acceptable. In that hour of sorrow unto death the moral life of the race concentrated in him, as we have seen, pronounced its amen to the judgment of God upon the sin of man, and in that response absorbed it. He bore our death, says St. Augustin, and in the abundance of his life he slew it. “The death of Christ takes that place in the history of fallen humanity which would be taken in the life of one of us by an instant of perfect holiness and miraculous lucidity, enabling him to pass upon his sin precisely the very judg- ment that should be consummated at the last day.” Bearing sin in this sense, and bearing it away, are identical. Christ did not merely put away the penalty; he put away SIN by the sacrifice of himself. As he alone among the sons of men had known what it was truly to live, so he alone properly tasted of death, realized it in its dread meaning. The one sound limb of the whole organism felt the pang of the whole, to which the rest were insensible; on him, and in him, was the sin of the world judged. And, “if the true contrition of one single sinner bleeding under the sting of the law only for his own iniquities, all which notwithstanding he knoweth not, cannot be performed without great bitterness of sorrow and remorse,” what bounds can we set unto that grief, what measures to that anguish? Were another to die for his fellows he would only hasten a death which was already inevitable, but Christ took upon him a death to which he was not exposed. He loved us more than we love our sins, for he must have shrunk from the hiding of his Father's countenance more than the vilest among us would shrink from renouncing his selfishness. Thus the Son honoured the law in his agony as he had honoured it by his obedience. Justice was satisfied, the order of the universe recognized and vindicated, the con- ———— REDEMPTION. EL troversy between earth and heaven settled in the person of One who belonged to both; forgiveness, and the communi- cation of a new life, were secured for man. At the cross God had in his presence a holy humanity acquiescing in the punishment of human guilt. All mankind were repre- sented and borne about in that august Person,—in him fainted under the weight of the cross, in him climbed the mount of Calvary. He passed through the states of mind through which we should have passed. His passion was the passion of all his kindred. Humanity had now accom- plished, once and for ever, through her only perfect member, such atonement for her rebellion as could serve the purposes of God’s mercy consistently with his holiness; “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Rom. iii. 26. Jesus.” § 34. Conceptions of the atonement which fall short of — tmadequate con- recognizing it to be an expiatory sacrifice, may contain Seo partial truth, but they exclude its all-essential element. It has been said, for instance, that our Lord died in order that he might share in all our sufferings, even to the last. But if that were all, his object would have been best attained by a natural death, which is the lot of the greater number. The crucifixion is sometimes represented to be a provi- dential arrangement to give the teaching of Jesus the con- secration of suffering and martyrdom; he was given over to death in order that his doctrine might live. But the violent death of the Founder of a religion is no proof of its truth; the immediate pretext of Jesus’ enemies for putting him to death was his claim to be the Son of God, and that claim would have been better substantiated by paralyzing them, than by letting himself be crucified before the mul- titude, to rise again, and be seen by his followers onlys 7 if Jesus did not die to be our ransom, he left behind him no peculiar doctrine whatever, either to be sealed by his blood, or to become the object of our faith, The immediate Dean Stanley. Dr. Jowett. R. Hall. Vp BOOK THE SECOND. meaning he gave to his death remains a part of the fact itself, and we are assured by the whole spectacle of his passion, that we have not misinterpreted his words. The dif- ference between his death and that of the rest of the noble army of martyrs is, that it furnished them both with the truth for which they were to die, and with the faith that sustained them. He encountered a death of agony, internal horror and heart-shrinking, that they might face death calm and triumphant. A somewhat higher view is that which understands the death of Jesus to be the end necessary to crown a whole life of filial submission and self-sacrifice; “the perfect surrender of a perfect will and life to the perfect will of an all-just and all-merciful God.” It was obedience unto death, obedi- ence perfected in suffering, and glorified by it; “the fulfil- ment and consummation of his life, the greatest moral act ever done in this world, the highest manifestation of perfect love, the centre in which the rays of love converge and meet, the extremest abnegation and annihilation of self— a death in which all the separate gifts of heroes and martyrs, are united in a Divine excellence.” All this is part of the truth ; if it were the whole, Calvary would prove a sort of stage for a grand religious and sen- timental exhibition, the death of our Lord would be a sublime display intended to work upon the imagination a vivid and salutary impression, a touching spectacle offered to our admiration, and if necessary to our imitation,—but it would not be the object of our faith, we should not be saved by it. Now, on the contrary, there hung a real victim—there was wrought out a real salvation—upon that Cross, which “stands, amidst the lapse of ages and the waste of worlds, a single, solitary monument.” There breathes in that holy passion an awful earnestness. The New Testament attributes to the Redeemer’s death a significancy altogether distinct from that of his life; it is REDEMPTION. io the specific act of redemption: “ye were not redeemed with 1 Pet.i 15, 19. corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain con- versation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.” And again, “in whom ye have redemp- Ephes.i.7. tion through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.” The beloved disciple saw the representatives of saved sinners, standing before the Lamb “ag it had been slain,” and heard their song of adoration,— “Thou hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood.” Paul Apoe. v. 6,9. summed up ina short formula the Gospel which he preached, and by which his believing hearers were saved, even this,— “That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures ; 1Cor *v 1+ and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day.” | Were Jesus merely a righteous sufferer, why did he not display the undaunted bearing of which so many others, women as well as men, have shown themselves capable in like circumstances? And why did he expose himself to danger that he might have avoided? On that memorable night of the Last Supper there was just one spot in the world where there was any likelihood of his being seized, and to that spot he went, knowing what was before him. The supposition this was a superfluous sacrifice makes his death to be just that sort of gratuitous selftorment, the spirit of which was to be at the root of all the false asceti- cism of the middle ages, which was discountenanced in his own teaching. The self-devotion which would exist only yy. 03 for the sake of exhibiting itself, which would court martyr- dom merely in order to leave a good example, would not be genuine, nay, it would be immoral. To bea sood example, either of firmness in testimony, or of surrender of self-will, his death must first have been necessary; to be a proof of real love, it must have been such as to procure for US SOME . Secretan. substantial good. Were it anything less than the procuring The relation of the death of Christ to his own life, and to ours. Dr, Jowett. Augustin, Luther. W. F. Gess. 2 Cor. v. 2—4. 74 BOOK THE SECOND. cause of our salvation it would become a mere ornament of the Divine structure, an interesting episode in a dispensation of mercy, which would have been substantially the same without it. § 35. It has been asserted that Christ died for us in the same sense that he lived for us,—“that “Scripture affords no hint of his taking our place in his death, in any other way than he did also in his life.” The statement is true or false, according to the construction put upon it. He was one with us in life and in death; and in both he accom- plished the holy will of God, in the conditions which its violation had brought upon mankind. But then death is for us something more than the last act of life, and specifically different from every other trial: emphatically “the wages of sin,” it bears an awful, penal character. Without the fall, our earthly existence would doubtless have ended in a blessed transformation ; we should have been “clothed upon” instead of being unclothed, as we are now. Our Lord’s whole career may be said to have constituted from first to last, one redeeming, atoning life ; but for him, as for us, the last act was specifically different from all the rest. As our deaths are the final visible expressions of God’s displeasure with sin, and bring us into that immediate contact with his judgment, of which the trials of life were only a prelude, so the Prince of Life had to pass through death with the full consciousness of its loathsomeness and its horrible meaning ; and this was in a peculiar sense the great atoning act,—his final, immediate meeting with our condemnation, and ex- hausting of it upon his own soul. No one moment in any of our lives can be compared to that of death, neither can any moment in the hfe of Jesus, or in the life of the race, be compared to that of his death,—peerless sacrifice, that could never have been anticipated, and can as little be repeated. It has been said that his sufferings were not in their REDEMPTION. "0 nature essentially different from ours. This again, according to the way it is taken, is either a truth which may be mis- interpreted, or an error which looks like truth. It was indeed our suffering that he took upon him from the manger to the cross; but then, even among ourselves, minds of rare power and refinement are susceptible of higher joys and deeper sorrows than the crowd: as Pascal says, “in a great soul every thing is great.” Jesus brought into the suffering he had taken upon him, a moral truth and delicacy, a holy union with God, heavenly sympathies, and apparently heavenly remembrances, which immeasurably increased its intensity at every stage, and alee it into unutterable agony at the close. Tn the experience of our suffering, the Saviour transformed it, and made it henceforth harmless for all who come unto God by him. Death buried its sting in his wounded side, and left it there,—becoiming “a tame and harmless thing, a thing we dare not fear, a porter to the gate of life.” The believer indeed enters into the fellowship of his Master's sufferings ; he too bears a cross, carries about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, mourns over sin, learns to look upon others with the sympathies of Christ, and accepts his own share of human sorrows in the Spirit of Christ, ex- periencing from him “the same kind of support as from the sympathy and communion of an earthly friend.” But there was in the cup drained at Gethsemane and Golgotha, an essential element, that entered into it just in order that it might not enter into ours. He went through expiatory suffering, that we might know it only as a discipline. He measured by night the road that we pursue by day. He knew the hiding of the Father’s countenance; he cried— “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,” that we might be allowed to cry, Abba, Father! He received the cup of trembling, and exhausting all its agony, has passed it on, the memorial of unutterable and abiding love. B. Pascal. John ii, 13; XVilaOs Jeremy Taylor. Phil. ii, 10 Heb. xiii. 13. 2 Cor. iv. 10, 11. Dr. Jowett. Mark xv. 34. Rom. viii. 15. Gal. iv. 6 Evangelical Christendom. Dr. Jowett. 1 Peter iii. 18. Anselm. Athanasius, TEeNl THS Evav- Opwricews TOU NOyov. John xii. 32, 33, The theory of a mystical death. Schleiermacher. & 76 BOOK THE SECOND. “Everywhere St. Paul speaks of the Christian as one with Christ. He is united with him, not in his death only, but in all the stages of his existence ; living with him, suffering with him, crucified with him, buried with him, rising again with him, renewed in his image.” But these blessed words are not mere metaphors: the disciple’s mystic union with his Lord begins with the believing recognition of the power of the act in which he reconciled the race to God. He “suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God;” then, when we claim him and his work as ours, we are one with him in reality, by those communi- cations of his grace which enable us to carry on that conflict with evil, the triumphant end of which is anticipated and secured in his life and death. The Church was slow to appropriate the doctrine of St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John, and to complete the scientific exhibition of the relation of the Lord’s death to his work and to our salvation. The term satisfaction was confessedly first used in its present theological sense by Anselm. Never- theless, the most important features of the scheme, minutely delineated by the great Archbishop of Canterbury, were anticipated in a special treatise by Athanasius, and they were contained in germ in the instinctive faith of all Christians. Hence the veneration of the cross, degenerating as it did into superstitious abuses. The Saviour knew that it was with the cross that he should subdue the world :— “ And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. This he said, signifying what death he should die.” § 36. Among inadequate views of the atonement, one of the least unsatisfactory, because it contains most truth, is that which originated with Schleiermacher, and has since been repeated, with various modifications, both in Europe and America. According to this theory, humanity accom- plished a mystical death to sin in the Person of Christ. The REDEMPTION. Th atonement was the painfully-accomplished triumph of the Divine principle, newly introduced into human nature, over the law of sin that had hitherto prevailed. Hence the necessity of suffering: the principle of health came to its last struggle with the principle of disease, and gained the victory; so that the power of sin and death being once broken by Christ, can henceforth be broken, with his help, by all that call upon him. Humanity in him accomplished the sacrifice of its false and accidental nature; it died that the power of sin, incorporated in that nature, might be destroyed, and that it might be quickened to a new life. The transformation of our nature has death for its con- dition (continue the divines of this school): sin has so laid hold on man that he cannot kill it without dying along with it. Man cannot be put in possession of life without killing the nature that the fall has given over to selfishness. If we are to be cured, nature must be persuaded to die: but such a sacrifice as this can only be accomplished by God indis- solubly united to human nature in the Person of Jesus Christ. He died first, that he might become the Author and Leader of our emancipation ; and this mystical death, of which we become partakers by fellowship with him, has annihilated the consequences of our rebellion. At the cross God and man met in a double sacrifice—man renouncing his self-will, and Divine justice extinguishing its thunders. “Love found itself in the presence of love, and then it no longer appeared as justice, but as immense, profound, un- speakable delection.” What is wanting here is the sense of the necessity of satisfaction. This conception does not meet the wants of a conscience groaning under the burden of sin. The awakened soul does not only seek to change,—she feels that she ought to be punished, that the thunders of Divine justice ought not to be extinguished; in her eyes Redemption is not merely the re-discovery and re-assertion of her high origin and Dr. Nevin. Trottet. De Pressensé. De Pressensé. 1 Pet. ii. 24. De Pressensé. John xii. 27. Luke xxii. 53. Bunsen. 78 BOOK THE SECOND. ultimate destiny, it is the recovery and saving of the lost. In Christ the world not only entered into life through death, but it made that death an atonement,—it appropriated the righteous judgment of God upon its own sin. That was indeed an act of supreme obedience, of holy and voluntary self-sacrifice; but the bitterness of the sacrifice consisted precisely in the consciousness of our sin, and of its guilt. It was not God meeting us in Christ; and refusing to punish, — giving up his right in order to forgive,” * it was an act of stern and yet more loving devotedness :—“ He bare our sins in his own body on the tree.” Had that been merely “the ineffable embrace of God pardoning humanity, and of hu- manity giving itself to God in the holy Person of Jesus victorious over evil,” Jesus would never have been tempted to say, “Father, save me from this hour;” it would have been an hour of unspeakable joy, instead of being that of the “power of darkness.” The same observations apply to the shape given to the mystical theory in the writings of Bunsen,—viz., that the Lord died to inaugurate the conflict with the temptation to live for ourselves, by a first complete victory over it. This is to make him the great Initiator, rather than the Saviour: moreover, if in him we were merely to give ourselves to God, without feeling the weight of God’s protest against sin, that was already accomplished in his living person, On this hypothesis he needed not to die a violent death, nor to die at all; nay, more—he ought not to die. So true is this, that the above-mentioned attempts to account for the cru- cifixion without admitting it to have been a vicarious sacrifice intrench upon the sinlessness of our Lord’s humanity. Assuredly it was our real and actual nature that he took in the virgin’s womb, but there was nothing in him that & We quote from a work published many years ago. It may be that this eminent writer’s views have since been modified. In any case, the conférences of 1849 contain an able, though summary, exposition of the theory here criticised. REDEMPTION. 79 needed to be persuaded to die. It is true temptation was a cause of suffering to him; but the account of his special temptation shows that it could be so through the effect of circumstances, without any natural disposition to evil. There could be such a thing as an innocent antagonism of flesh and spirit; his will could even find itself strongly solicited in a sense contrary to that of the Father, yet without sin, as when he called out, “ Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” In a word, he had no selfishness to overcome. We are ready, with Augustin, to speak of the Lord’s “mortal body,” both because every thing capable of nutri- tion and growth—every organization that is to say—is also capable of waste and decay, and for the higher reason, that he was “like unto his brethren,” and therefore “compassed with infirmity.” But Bishop Pearson probably goes too far when he asserts that the Son “had in his nature, not only a possibility and aptitude, but also a necessity of dying.” Our Lord insists upon the voluntary character of his death : —“No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” The letter of his words may relate exclusively to the violent death before him, but the moral reasons against its necessity seem to hold equally against that of any form of death. Had he left us to our fate, his sinless humanity would apparently have passed into immediate incorruption and glory; his mortality, without seeing death, would have been swallowed up of life. ® . It may be said summarily of the theory which stops short with a mystical death that, by absorbing the idea of punishment in that of holiness and healing, it leaves out that element of the Redeemer’s work which was first in h Compare Anselm :— Video hominem illum plane, quem querimus, talem esse oportere, que nec ex. necessitate moriatur, quoniam erit omnipotens, nec ex debito, quia nunquam peccator erit, et mori possit ex libera voluntate, quia necessasrium erit, etc. Heb. ii. 18. Matt. iv. 1—11. See 3 124. Luke xxii. 42. Augustin. Heb. ii. 17. Heb. vy. 2. Bishop Pearson. John x. 18. Anselm, IDE Nee abe OLE 2 Corsvoi So) Heb. ii. 17. Our Lord’s own explanation. John xvi. 12—-14. Gal. iii. 1. 80 BOOK THE SECOND. order, which was a necessary preliminary to the part of his work it recognizes, and which gives character to the whole. It makes humanity to have ceased doing evil and learned to do well in his person, without that satisfaction for past evil, and for indwelling evil, which is the very first want of the soul when it comes to know itself and its God. There is indeed a mystical death to be accomplished in us, and it was promised and virtually begun when our holy Brother in our name renounced our rebellion; but his mystic death was not substituted for our condemnation,—it was contained wn his free acceptance and appropriation of our condemna- tion. That vicarious suffering morally preceded and contained that vicarious renunciation of sin, just as in our case a - godly sorrow must precede all practical holiness. Recon- ciliation goes before filial obedience,—and this is what makes the Lord’s death even more than his hfe for our faith: it was in his death that he made reconciliation for iniquity, and brought in everlasting righteousness. § 37. How did the Holy Sufferer himself look upon his death? That is the essential question, even in the eyes of those who think they can reject the doctrine of the atone- ment without rejecting Christianity. Let everything then depend upon this issue. It is true, the disciples were intended to interpret their Master’s work, and to complete his teaching. Christ could not be fully set forth until Redemption was a fact, and the crucified Redeemer could be held up as such before all hearers. The veil thrown over his Person during his life necessarily, in a measure at least, enveloped his work likewise. Yet it may be fairly assumed that he would not leave us without some intimation of the purpose for which he appeared amongst us: we may expect to find upon his own lips at least the germ of the doctrine developed by his disciples. Readers disposed to distrust the Gospels should, moreover, remember that their confessed difference in tone and terminology from epistles written at REDEMPTION. 81 the same time, or even earlier, prove that the disciples’ re- membrances of the Saviour were not distorted by the form subsequently given to Christian doctrine. At the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry we find him telling Nicodemus that “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up ; that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” This was no passing allusion that might be taken loosely,—it was an intimation to an earnest seeker after truth, of the shape in which he was to become the object of saving faith. Again, at that critical moment when he repelled the mass of his followers in Galilee by the announcement that he was himself the great gift of God to them and to all men, he told them that he would yet give his flesh for the life of the world. Now if his presence on earth were the ex- pected food, it was given already, so that he must refer to his death as the act that would put the bread from heaven within their reach, and this is confirmed by his going on to speak of the necessity of drinking his blood. Immediately before the transfiguration, and from that time forward, we are told that he began to prepare his disciples for their separation. He did so by such deliberate and repeated representations of his future suffering as a dread necessity that they must be received as decisive. Upon his last journey they were astonished at his bearing, “and as they followed, they were afraid ;” and he told them again of the fate that awaited him, and that “the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, Ne and to give his life a ransom for many.” Elsewhere the good Shepherd is to lay down his life for the sheep; and that is not a general expression of readiness to serve and protect them at every hazard ; he speaks of a definite pur- pose, and of its approaching execution: “I lay down my life for my sheep,” etc. G John iti. 14, 15. John vi. 51. Archbishop Thomson. John vi. 53. Matt. xvi. 21, 28. DONND i OPA OIE, Mark viii. 31—33 ix. 30, 31. Luke ix, 22, 44. Mark x. 32, 40. John x. 11. v. 15—18. John xii. 24—28. Luke xxii. 37. Tsai. liti. 12. Isai. lili. 5, 6, 8. John i. 29. Matt. viii. 17. Isai. liii. 4. 82 BOOK THE SECOND. When an almost overpowering melancholy came over him in the very hour of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he comforted himself with the thought, that like the grain buried in the furrow, he should die to bring forth fruit ; and he repeats again that this was the purpose for which he had come into the world : “For this cause came I unto this hour.” At his last farewell meal he applied to himself the language of Isaiah’s memorable prediction of the servant of the Lord dying for his people :—‘‘I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, and he was reckoned among the transgressors : for the things concerning me have an end.” The last clause pointedly excludes the idea that he applied this Scripture to himself by a sort of accommodation ; it amounts to an express, deliberate appro- priation of the whole sublime picture of the victim prophet. Some writers have dwelt on the ambiguity of the preposi- tion for, but when we read in Isaiah :—“ He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray ; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all..... For the trans-_ eression of my people was he stricken,’—-when we read such a passage on the one hand, and on the other learn that Jesus applied it to himself so positively, there seems no room for ambiguity. This was to proclaim himself the suffering Messiah of whom the prophets had spoken, it was to justify that latest prophet who had said of him,—“ Be- hold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” The first Gospel, it is true, applies part of the passage with a somewhat enfeebled translation, “himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses,” to the simple healing of diseases; but what the Lord bore, he also bore away; and the sufferings and benefits of his life were the REDEMPTION, 83 prelude to the sufferings and benefits of his death. “The power to relieve the woes of humanity could not be separated from his participation in them.” In the last prayer with the eleven, Jesus used of himself F, D. Maurice. _ the term technically applied to the victim set apart to be offered in sacrifice: “for their sakes I sanctify myself.” The same idea is finally and elaborately set forth in the rite ordained in that solemn hour, to be a remembrance of his Person and work throughout all generations; it was to be a remembrance of his death. Why of his death rather than his life? Let the words of institution be the answer :— “This is my body which is broken for you;” and again, “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” He evidently alluded to the place where Moses, at the foot of Sinai, after offering burnt-offerings and peace-offerings, “took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words.” In the faith of that blood, Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, ascended the mountain that they dared not touch before, passed through the encircling clouds, and ate of their peace- offering in the very light of the glory that was the hiding- place of the Divine presence. Thus did Jesus wish his disciples to look upon the blood of the New Covenant as their title to seek the presence and scale the mount of God. He wished to be handed down to the latest generation, through the celebration of this simple rite, in the character that he then assumed,—the Lamb preparing to put away the sin of the world. | § 38. “How complete and how melancholy is the por- traiture presented to all following ages in the histories of Christ’s rejection: an example which is so perfect in its development of the profound depravity of our nature, as to induce one to think that the season, the place, and the other John xvii. 19. MCorsexiy 248 Matt. xxvi. 28. Exod. xxiv. 8, 9. Ex. xxiv. 10, 1i. The atonement coincident with martyrdom. W. A. Butler. Archbishop Thomson. Luke xxii. 42. F. Godet. 84 BOOK TITE SECOND. circumstances of the great sacrifice, were selected out of the mass of historical situations and possibilities, which lay before the Divine Disposer, with an express view to the formation of so tremendous and unparalleled a warning of the heart’s deceitfulness and desperate wickedness.... “As if to mark the event as the uttermost point of human crime, Providence seems to have permitted it to gather to itself a tribute from almost every evil passion of our miserable nature. Designed to atone for all guilt, almost all guilt was called out to accomplish it. Injustice, cruelty, false shame, unworthy indolence, covetousness, ambition, hypocrisy, envy,—all were in different ways ex- hibited in this tremendous tragedy.” Had there been in the Lord one trace of human folly or sin, high priest and pharisee would have been more tole- rant, because the contrast that rebuked them would have been less violent. But the death of Jesus, after such a life as his, was the crowning act and achievement of sin, in which it reached its height, and stood revealed to itself. There was, perhaps, no absolute necessity that the expiatory struggle of the Saviour should coincide with martyrdom. Die indeed he must; it were not enough to conquer in spirit; he must go through the last experience; but, so far as his own soul’s conflict was concerned, that hour of the power of darkness might perhaps have been another Geth- semane, solitary, prolonged, terrible, and mortal; while in the garden he had already put his lps to the cup which he was to drink. However, the cross was necessary for us. The expiation consummated in Christ must have its echo in us, if we are to be saved by it. Now the holy shuddering of our Lord’s conscience over our sin would never have been under- stood by us, without the terrible spectacle that attended it. Moreover, it was in keeping with the mighty symbolism which pervades all nature and all history,—that the circum- REDEMPTION. 85 stances accompanying the Redeemer’s sacrifice should cor- respond with its internal character. His death was that of a criminal, that it should be the counterpart of what passed within him. “Death by public judgment...was congruous to his designs in dying; did aptly represent what he was doing, and signify why he did it.” Hence the manner of his death was the most painful and the most infamous,—that from which the Romans drew their expression, inherited by modern languages, for the most awful suffering possible: ubi dolores acerrimi exagitant, cruciatus vocatur. “Our sins hung there exposed as trophies of his victories, objects of our hatred and horror, by him condemned in the flesh: those manifold enmities—between God and us,—between man and himself—between one man and another,—did all there hang together, abolished in his flesh, and slain upon his cross.” The partial triumphs of evil are always transformed by Divine grace and wisdom into triumphs of good,—we mean in general history, for of course individual evil may be irreparable. And it was meet that the greatest wrong ever committed, the most damning revolt that crowned our guilty history, should be at the same time the most blessed man- ifestation of the love of God toward sinners, and that the proof man could not live with God should become the means of reconciling him with God. The murder of the only perfect being that ever lived amongst us, the Holy One and the Just, became the greatest act of justice that the universe could witness. This victim of man became a victim for man; the triumph of Satan was changed into defeat; and out of the darkness of the most terrible hour in human remembrances was heard the most momentous sentence ever uttered: ‘It is finished.” The cross bespoke at once the personal holiness of the victim and his vicarious responsibility: inflicted by man because he was the uncompromising Representative of God, Is. Barrow. Augustin. Is. Barrow. John xix. 30. Matt. xxi. 38. Eph. iv. 22 24. Suffering in the abstract not meri- tor ous. 1 Kings xviii. 28. Ephes. v. 29. 1 Tim. iv. 8. N. Webster. 86 BOOK THE SECOND. inflicted by God because he was the willing Representative of man. The mission of the Son was an extreme measure that brought matters to a crisis: “This is the heir; come, let us kill him.” On the part of those that crucified him it was the final expression, the last word of man’s guilt, and they therefore represented the old man. On his own part it was the last word of man’s self-condemnation, and he therefore represented the new man, originating in himself, but in order to be re-produced in others. On God’s part it was a last word of judgment upon our sins, and of mercy upon our souls. It was meet that this sublime sacrifice should be attended by the most solemn, tragic circumstances, visible from afar to all ages, speaking to all hearts, giving a sensible form and body to the reconciliation therein accomplished. Literal blood, streaming from the wounded side of Jesus Christ, became the blood of the New Covenant, the symbol of our redemption. § 39. The notion of the merit of suffering, simply as such, is utterly foreign to Christianity. Scripture no where coun- tenances, indeed it directly repudiates that perversion of troubled consciences, whether Pagan or professedly Christian, which would suppose our voluntary or involuntary tortures to be in themselves pleasing to God. A father can take no pleasure in the pain of his children. The holier the being who suffers, and the nearer to him, the more abhorrent to the Divine Mind must be the spectacle of his suffering. Thus the agony of the Son of God himself, if contemplated merely as a certain amount of pain, could merit nothing for any body, nor render any one agreeable to God, but all the contrary. To suffer and to die are not in themselves moral acts, though they may become so. Lexicographers define merit as goodness, or excellence, entitling to honour or reward. Now our creation was of pure grace,—neither man nor any other beings were entitled REDEMPTION. 87 to existence before they received it; and the various shapes of happiness which would have exhibited themselves in a healthy creature existence, were of free grace, considered separately as well as when taken collectively. The sense of power and bliss attending every sinless development of our moral being was attached to it by God in his goodness, and unfallen inteHigences in heaven and earth would have adored him for the joys waiting upon every pulsation of true life, as gifts, as much as that life itself in its origin was a gift. That is to say, angels and sinless men would never have thought themselves entitled to honour or reward: the blessings of creation would have appeared as gratuitous to them as those of Redemption appear to us. The introduction of the idea of merit into the relation of the creature towards the Creator, supposes two things: the jirst, that the creature has separated his own interests from the interests and the glory of the blessed God, so that he seeks rights of his own that can be weighed against the claims of God; the second, that he has so far lost the sense of his obligations and of his unfaithfulness as to overlook the fearful counter-claim that is enough at once to swallow up his merits, and to consign himself to everlasting ruin and despair. As regards our Lord, since throughout his whole life he met the righteous claims of God, he could pronounce himself holy without lowering the standard of obligation ; but it would have been altogether unlike him to call his holiness meritorious, he loved to look upon it as due to the ever blessed God. The honour and reward that he might have claimed as a right, it was his delight to receive as grace and glory given. He had no bargain to make with his heavenly Father, providing for their separate interests. His attitude was that of one who could say,—“I do always those things that please him,’—of one who met the free love of his Father with the disinterested love and obedience of a child. JOEN Xvit., 22: Vill. 29. Matt. xviii 25. 88 BOOK THE SECOND. He did not even want to urge claims of his own, as such, for our sakes, for his desire touching us was to bring us into the same filial relation in which he stood himself. It is true we had separated our interests from those of God, we had opened that dread debtor and creditor account which left us hopeless insolvents ; and when he had settled it upon the cross he might have claimed our salvation as a right, yet he never represents it so, because he would not acquiesce in this separation of interests, but suppressed it through the mysterious unity of his own Divine and human Person; the one indivisible atoning act being the supreme expression at once of his zeal for God and of his love for us. Thus the idea of merit did not and could not enter into the relation between the Father and the Son, and those that the Son identified with himself. Patristic theology bor- rowed it from the circle of Jewish and Pagan conceptions, but it is not Scriptural, the word even does not so much as once occur in the Bible. The idea that suffering is meritorious in itself is therefore the multiphcation of one error by another, the false concep- tion of merit intensified by its false application to suffering. The practices of all ascetics, whether Pagan, Mussulman, Jewish, or degenerate Christian, proceed from the instinct that a mighty barrier interposes itself between them and the state of happiness and security which should be theirs, while it is at the same time their hope that this barrier is not altogether insurmountable. They act as if the endurance of a certain amount of pain could cancel their debt and exhaust the claims of God. Whereas, it is not the amount, it is the kind of pain that is to be considered. The mere sum of sulfering, however intense, yea infinite, if taken apart from the moral sympathies of the sufferer, could never constitute an expiation in the proper sense, nor approximate to it by a hair’s breadth. There is no element of recon- ciliation in the pains of hell; that lower sort of satisfaction REDEMPTION. 89 of law, which consists in the exercise of its penal sanctions, is rather the eternal absence of the highest satisfaction. So that if Jesus himself had merely laid his soul bare to infinite torment, he would not have thereby effected our salvation, nor even begun it. The tendency to dwell upon that which was outward instead of that which was inward in his sacrifice, comes of the ever-recurring phariseeism, that puts the letter for the spirit and the idol for God. § 40. There is a sorrow that hath a blessing in it,—that of repentance; the guilty soul armed against itself, and willingly humbling itself—the broken and contrite spinit taking God’s side against itself, The blessing comes from the moral character of that sorrow, from its being an act of real reparation and return to God. It was this godly sorrow that was wanting in us in order that we might be restored to our Father and to his heaven, for we had none but selfish and guilty tears to offer. If suffering alone could have sufficed, we might at least have begun to torment ourselves in our own strength, but we could not even begin to hate sin and renounce self; we could not stir one step in the direction of our deliverance. Now the sort of expiation which was accomplished in the soul of Jesus Christ for us, must necessarily be that of which we were incapable. Hence we are not to seek the type of his sufferings in the useless tortures of the devotee, or in the barren pains of hell, but in the blessed and fruitful experiences of the humbled, broken spirit; though, as we shall see, there was a horror and a darkness in his experiences upon the cross, which cannot be repeated in those who follow by the way which he opened. The essence and adequacy of our Lord’s sacrifice for sin consisted in its being the act of holy love, appropriating our sin in order to punish it upon himself,—to hate, to renounce it, and to put it away for ever. A purely vindictive repa- ration would not re-establish in us the principle of obedience, The real expia- tion moral in its essence. Isai. }vii. 15. baviwes Psalm xxxiv.i8. Ibe Be 2 Cor. vil. 9—11. Isai. liii. 12. Eph. ii. 1316. F. Godet. 90 BOOK THE SECOND. make it triumph through freedom, and restore the lost children to their Father, but this was an act of penitent sympathy with the righteous Judge, and it was first perfected in him, that it might be reproduced in us. The category of quantity has nothing to do with moral questions. Jesus himself did not count the tears of the penitent in the house of Simon; and God has no material measure for the agony of his Christ. It may be taken indeed for the equivalent of that which sinners should endure, but loosely and popularly, and stripping the term of its strict specific meaning, as applied to finite and sensible things. The Divine jurisprudence does not lower itself to the barbarous legislation of pecuniary mulcts for offences. God’s punishments are not the exacting of so much com- pensation for insults received; nor is reconciliation with him the mere suppression of punishment, it is the restora- tion of the lost filial relation. The Saviour bore the sin of the many in his own body, but he did more than suffer, he reconciled us to God, he became our peace, abolished in his flesh every thing that separated us from our God and from our fellows. The Divine holiness that rebukes and casts out sin is moral in its essence; the Divine pardon is a moral act; and “the human act of expiation, which is its condition, must be of the same kind.” The tendency to dwell exclusively upon the amount of the Lord’s suffering, and to understand Redemption as the mere taking away of the consequences of sin, belongs to that disposition of fallen man which busies itself with the punishment, rather than with sin itself—the radical evil, which is the great thing in God’s sight. The object of the mission of the Son, was to put away, and to save us from all sin, past, present, and future; deliverance from punish- ment being a secondary result included in this radical deliverance. He therefore presented to God on our behalf that highest, because moral and spiritual satisfaction, an — ee a REDEMPTION. 91 adequate sorrow and repentance for sin: “the feelings of the Divine mind as to sin, being present in humanity, and uttering themselves as a living voice from humanity.” § 41. A distinction is often made between what is called the rectoral and the paternal character of God. It is an unnecessary refinement, because the holy severity implied in the idea of the moral Governor of the universe, is already included in the idea of a Divine Father. There is no room for a weak sentimental pietism where God is contemplated as the absolutely holy Author of our being ; for even in this world a high-minded parent cannot esteem a son plunged into extreme and guilty degradation, nor allow him to pursue vicious courses in his house or in his presence. It is from the face of an angry father that the impenitent prodigal must be for ever excluded. However, not to contend about words, the holiness of God, whether it be called rectoral or paternal, is against the sinner, and the wish to serve God faithfully for the future, as a matter of precaution, if unattended by adequate sorrow for the past, could never wash away the stains of the past. Atonement must be retrospective; God cannot forgive the impenitent. Unfortunately, since Grotius, it has become the habit of religious writers and preachers, to substitute for this solemn truth the fatal exaggeration that God could not, consistently with his holiness, forgive even the truly penitent. They reason upon the principle expressed in the homely proverb, that a hundred years of regret cannot pay one farthing of debt; but such reasoning supposes very low and inadequate views of our wretched state, of God's feelings about it, of the nature of true repentance, and of the moral character of the atonement. It borrows its analogies exclusively from a sphere lower than that of the realities with which it has to do; it treats the relation of man to God as if it were one of mere material interests ; it lowers the character of the Divine Holiness, as if it measured Macleod Campbell. The Divine se- verity not to be confounded with implacability. 3318 and 22. BOOK THE SECOND. all things by external material standards; it warns the sinner against reckoning upon repentance, whereas it should rather warn him that his own repentance is utterly hollow and worthless, and direct him to the sole acceptable repent- ance of His Saviour Brother. This may appear at first sight a merely speculative question ; it may be asked since we are contfessedly insolvent, why be so earnest about what constitutes solvency? But it is no light thing thus gratuitously to darken the Divine character, obscure God’s thoughts toward us, and freeze up ours toward him. Christianity pronounces upon our state and prospects a sentence which conscience is constrained to ratify, and that is no pardonable theological subtlety which puts in its place a statement such as no unsophisticated con- science will countersign. The same moral instincts that recognize the necessity of the lasting rebuke and penalty of the impenitent, point to an inward necessity for the pardon of the really penitent. We cannot contend that our wrathful emotions must have their counterpart in God, and then refuse to admit an element in the Divine character corres- ponding to the spirit of forgiveness in ours. Shall we say that man bears the image of God when he punishes, and that he bears it no longer when he welcomes the penitent to his bosom? Shall the anguish of a guilty conscience prophecy of coming judgment, while the existence of mercy, highest and blessed prerogative of fathers and princes, speaks of nothing that passes in the heart of God? We dare not retract the conclusion which the consideration of our moral state constrained us to form,—that man, so far as his own resources are concerned, has nothing to look for but penal suffering, inevitable, endless, hopeless; but, unless we would arm against the Gospel the best feelings remaining in human nature, let that hopeless state be set down to our own impenitence, and not to Divine implacability. Our repentance, such as it is, could not save us; yet, such as we ee ee ee ee ea a oe oe an. eee ee ee es Ne ae See REDEMPTION. 93 are, there arise feelings within us, at least in relation to those we love, which are enough to teach us that adequate repentance towards God could save us consistently with his holiness. The consciousness of wrong, the self-reproach, the earnest purpose not to repeat the offence, which are in- cluded in every act of sincere repentance, if directed towards God, and commensurate to our obligations, would be a homage to violated law more satisfactory than our punishment ; it would be a moral victory of the Divine Holiness, greater than any display of the almighty power at its disposal. That moral victory which God could not obtain in us has been won in Christ, in order that it may be carried out in us also. God has provided for his own holiness and for our salvation ; but it is noteworthy that the former purpose is included under the latter; if the rectoral element is com- pletely satisfied in the atonement, it is not the less sub- ordinate to the paternal. God claims our repentance as his right, and as the security for the order of the universe, but he clainis it also because it is his gracious will that we should be clothed with all excellency, and that we should be holy as himself. This wider purpose includes the other; the penal necessity of rebuke and punishment is subservient to the positive purpose of reproducing the Divine image; hence Redemption is represeated in Scripture as the triumph of grace, the remission of sins through the forbearance of God, wapecis, €deos, avoxy, terms incompatible with this un- happy, short-sighted fiction of implacability. Bishop Butler repeatedly urges the fact that, in this world, even areal reformation is In many cases of no avail towards preventing the miseries, poverty, sickness, infamy, naturally annexed to a certain degree of folly and extravagance. There are cases in which the behaving well for the time to come may be-—‘“not useless,” he says, in his careful way, “God forbid ’’—but wholly insufficient to put us in the condition which we should have been in, had we preserved our Rom. iii. 25, 26. d Doha abby fay. James ii. 13. Rom. ii. 4. Bishop Butler. Analogy, pt. ii. chap. 5. Luke xy. 21. Archbishop Magee. J. H. Godwin. A. Vinet. 94 BOOK THE SECOND. innocence. The fact is indeed suggestive of the lessons he wished to teach—the danger of our becoming irretrievably and for eternity that which we already are, and the necessity of a Saviour. But if the natural consequences and material results of sin may be irrevocable and irremediable in this world, it ought never to be forgotten that there are higher moral relations, with respect to which nothing is irreparable. The prodigal here below may never recover his fortune or his youthful vigour, but. when he says—“I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight,’ he must recover his place in his father’s heart. A “learned divine” quoted by Arch- bishop Magee, and who might have played the part of the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son, ventures on this assertilon—“‘ We may as well affirm that our former obedience atones for our present sins, as that our present obedience makes amends for antecedent transgressions.” This would be true if God cared about our good works irrespectively of owrselves, but present and former obedience are not the same thing to a father’s heart. A better divine tells us that where minds are really changed, “former conduct ceases to be evidence of present character. The action which is past is unalterable, and all true judgment respecting it must be ever the same. But the character of the agent is not unalterable; and a person cannot be truly judged to be wrong, according to the wrong of past actions, if he is so changed, that what he once chose he would no longer choose.” It is just the essence of the Gospel that for Divine grace nothing is irreparable. “That which mercy annihilates is as though it had never been. God, in the ineffable power of his Spirit, makes us date from where he pleases. He separates us from that which was ourselves. He creates a new man, to which the old one is a stranger. For him there is no crime that cannot be blotted out, nor any restitution im- possible ; for him there is no time flown on without recall, ee wr hee TT ea ee! ee * ee REDEMPTION. 95 no destruction, nor any manner of death. The past can swallow nothing up.” § 42. The great sacrifice was virtually contained in the incarnation ; since the Sdn became one of us for the very purpose of reconciling us to God. An innocent stranger could not righteously prevent the guilty from enduring the consequences of their rebellion, by taking them upon himself; but the entrance of the eternal Word into the human family gave him the right to be its representative, and to do that of which we had been found incapable—to condemn sin in the flesh. It was for this that he took unto himself our flesh, and made it his, that he might have “of his own, although from us, what to offer unto God for us.” Hence the stress which the doctors-of the Church in the first great age of doctrinal evolution laid upon the incarna- tion, and upon the concentration in the Redeemer of all the common vital interests of the race. Athanasius, in a treatise written earlier than the Arian controversy, teaches that the Word saw the corruption of men could not be done away with unless they were to die altogether (ce py éa tod wavt7ws avoOavetv), and that therefore being himself immortal, he took unto him a body capable of dying (70 éuvanevor dvroOavety écavt7 auBaver oHua), Which delivering over unto death, as a spotless sacrifice, he straightway annihilated the death of all his fellows, by the offering of this equivalent (aro ravtwy evOews THY Omotwy Nhavi~e Tov Oavatov a) mpoogopa tod kata\dydov), For the Word of God being over all, fitly presenting his temple and bodily organ a ransom for the life of all (avtuvyov vzep wav7wy), filled up by his death that which was due. The Saviour came not to accomplish his own death merely, but the death of all men, in that body which he received from man. The death of all was fulfilled in the Lord’s body (6 mavtwy Oavatos ev TH KUpLaKWW owmaTe érdypodt0), He offered a sacrifice for all, giving up his own temple to death, instead of all, that he might make them Connection of the incarnation with the atone- ment. See 3 27. Rom. viii. 3. R. Hooker. Athanasius. Gregory of Nazianzum. Gregory of Nyssa Hilary of Poictiers. John xiii. 1. 96 BOOK THE SECOND. blameless and free from the old transgression ; and that he might show himself stronger than death, exhibiting his own incorruptible body as the first-fruits of the resurrection of all. To the same purpose speaks Gregory of Nazianzum. ‘The Word carried me and mine in himself, that he might make what was evil disappear in himself, as fire does wax, as the sun does the vapour of the earth, and that I might share in what belongs to him, because of our mutual incorporation (dca ty odyxpaow), And again: he was made for our sakes everything that we are, except sin—body, soul, and spirit, that he might sanctify man through himself; as leaven penetrates the whole mass, and that, gathering together ito himself that which was condemned, he might free the whole from condemnation. Gregory of Nyssa believed mankind was treated as one living being (¢v ¢éor), so that the Divine power of the head could spread through the whole body, and thus have all died and risen again in him. A similar conception of the scheme of Redemption is repeatedly ex- pressed by Hilary, the great latin contemporary of these Fathers. He tells us that we are in Christ through his birth. The whole man was in Jesus Christ, erat in Jesus Christo homo totus. The Word dwelt among us, assuming into himself the nature of the whole human race. His manhood is the city set upon a hill; the human family is gathered into him, as into a city—through the nature of the body that he has assumed, ete.’ There exists, and always has existed, but one human nature, whether in its integrity or in its corruption ; so that the reality of our Lord's humanity implied no taint of sin, and no obligation to undergo its consequences. Every step in the process of Redemption was voluntary ; the Holy One, the Prince of life, might have disowned us for his fellows, iFor further extracts upon this matter from the Fathers of the fourth century, see DoRNER’s ENTWICKLUNGSGESCHICHTE DER LEHRE VON DER Person Curisti. Zweite Abtheilung. REDEMPTION, 97 and refused to die, but he loved us to the end, and loved us at all costs. § 43. It was his Deity which rendered possible the assumption of real humanity, for no creature could become another without ceasing to be itself, while God could descend into the creature that he had made after his own image. It was also his Deity which gave his mediatorial work its infinite reach and efficacy. “The human nature of Christ enabled him to incur our debt,” says Anselm, the infinity of his Divine nature enabled him to pay it. Deity indeed cannot be supposed to suffer, and there was no confusion of the properties of one nature with another; neither did his Deity relieve his moral or physical being from any extremity of pain or weakness: there came an angel to strengthen him in the garden; he fainted under the cross, and above all, he died upon it. But the moral attributes of Deity must correspond in kind to those of perfect humanity. If the sinfulness qf sin, and the misery to which it exposed sinners, were painful to Christ, because of his holiness and love, they must have been painful in proportion to his holi- ness and love. Hence the awful intensity, the immeasurable amount of his sufferings, and at the same time, their atoning efficacy ; the moral attributes of his Divine nature deepening every impression, throbbing in every pulse of his human experience ; just as the soul of a dying man, though in its own essence immortal, participates in his sinking conscious- ness. The activities of the two natures may be separated, but not their co-working in the unity of his person. It was a Divine love in the heart of a man and therefore a Divine explation in the passion of a man; so that Luther might exclaim as he did—“If I believe that the human nature alone has suffered for me, then is Christ a poor Saviour.” No, the shame of the Son of man was the glory of the Son of God. We think more of the agony of the soldier mortally H The connection of Deity with his suffering humani- ty. Tertullian. Anselm. Cur Deus homo ii. 6, 7 (. ‘, MEVOUGa aUTHL atraQijs. John of Damascus, Luke xxii. 43. XXiil. 26. John xix. 16. Macleod Campbeil. Luther. A. Vinet. H. Kurz. Phila. 7. A / tQuToOv EKEVWOE Mark xiii. 32. Luke 11, 52, 98 BOOK THE SECOND. wounded upon the field of battle than of that of the war horse expiring by his side. We should do so if the physical suffering were known to be the same for both, because the man is a superior being; but it is probable that even bodily pain is greatest in man, because it is conveyed to a higher consciousness. In the same way, even if the sufferings of the Son of God were no greater than those of a perfect man, their significancy would be infinitely exalted by the dignity of his person. “His eternal Godhead, personally bound up with suffering human nature, gave to that temporal suffering infinite and eternal efficacy.” But it has just been shown that his agony must have been infinitely greater than that of a perfect man, because the moral attributes of his Deity enabled him to grasp the whole extent and reach of the iniquity with which he clothed himself. His Divine holiness and love made his humanity capable of superhuman suffering, without any confusion of the properties of the two natures; just as Divine love, omnipresence, and ommni- potence are at this moment necessary to enable his oloritied humanity to be a quickening Spirit and centre of life, hearing and answering prayer, from the uttermost parts of the earth. When once we have been convinced that we are sinners, that Jesus is our Saviour, and that he is to be obeyed, loved, and adored as God, the mind accepts without questioning those speculative consequences of its faith, which would be repulsive if presented as matter of scholastic dogmatism. How the eternal Word “emptied himself” even for a time of his metaphysical attributes, while retaining his person- ality, and taking up our nature into it, may well be beyond the reach of human faculties, since we cannot explain the manner of the co-existence of voluntary and involuntary life in our own persons, nor the state of a sleeper’s con- sciousness. It is certain that the Word was not awake while Jesus slept, nor all-seeing while Jesus was ignorant, 4 on ON le Coe REDEMPTION, 99 nor living while Jesus was dying—in any such sense as to make two persons of the incarnate Word. And, for aught we know, it is possible that the condescension of the Word when he became a dying Christ, was only greater in degree than that he had displayed in taking our nature upon him at all, under its present conditions. § 44. Thus the Redeemer was given over, body and soul, to all the results of the fearful task he had undertaken. Over a shuddering earth, under a darkened heaven, he was left alone with our sins, without one sympathizing look from his Father to cheer him through the struggle. It was an hour, the very anticipation of which had made his soul sor- rowful unto death. It was even understood by his disciples afterwards, that in this agony of anticipation, there was no apparent issue from the death he was about to undergo; he could not see the other side of the dark abyss into which he was entering; for they tell us, that when he had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears, he was saved from the death he feared. Beider oder keiner, “both of us or neither,” said the chamois hunter at the foot of a last perilous ascent, as he drew tighter round his waist the belt that bound him to his fellow traveller. Their fates were henceforth one; together and inseparably they were to scale the giddy summit, or together to perish. “If Christ had not been able to have freed himself from those sins,” wrote the pious Dorney, “they would have sunk him and the sinner too...If Christ, who is the surety, miscarry in his work, all they whose hope of redemption lies only in their interest in him, must needs perish with him.” When the dreaded hour was come, the gulf which separated the rebellious human race from a holy God, for a moment separated likewise him who had cast in his lot with that race, until, with the strong effort of his personal righteousness, he bridged it over, “saving himself and us along with him.” He was a man fighting in his The hiding of the Father’ s coun- tenance. Matt. xxvi. 38. 1aeloy, wy Ff. Henry Dorney. B. Pascal. Treneus. Matt. xxvii. 46. J. P. Lange. _John xvii. 15. John xix. 30. 100 BOOK THE SECOND. country’s cause, said the venerable Irenzus, erat homo pro patribus certans ! The crisis of that awful and mysterious struggle was marked by the loud cry—“ My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?” Proving at once that he would not let his brethren go, and that he could not give up his fellowship with the Father. Hitherto some sacred and sovereign good had always been present to mingle with his pains, and, as it were, naturally allay them; but now this agonizing burst of filial sorrow and submission betrays an experience so much — transcending anticipation, as to produce the effect of a surprise. The only complaint that ever escaped his lips— more than the darkness of nature in mourning for her Maker, more than the earth that shook, the rocks that were rent, and those opened sepulchres—it forces on us a deep conception of the depths of horror his Spirit must have laboured through. It was the cry of a holy heart broken with our sin, but incapable of separating itself from God— “The cry of faith in the dark,” marking the transition to victory. But a few hours before he had exclaimed in prayer—“ Oh righteous Father!” The world knows not how to combine either love for the sinner or the filial feeling with com- placency in the holiness of God; but Jesus could identify judgment with Redemption; and now he felt death as judgment and abandonment, yet found God in it, and the consciousness of accomplished Redemption; and he could at last exclaim—‘ It is finished,” with a sense of relief that would have been rapture, had his utter weakness admitted Ont | We might well seem to ourselves intruders upon scenes too sacred for such as we are to be witnesses of ; but the revelation of our God has called for our presence under the olive trees of the garden, and around that apparatus of a death of infamy. It has been the will of God that we J 4 Le a gi REDEMPTION. 101 should see his holy child utterly broken down by a wretched- ness beyond our conception, “a prey to thoughts which, judging by their outward effects, were far darker than those of the felon the night before his execution, when he counts the quarters of each hour, and hears the hammers that are busy at his scaffold.” It was intended that we should follow him to Golgotha, and hear the loud cry that marked his sense of God’s desertion, and that drawing nearer then, we should catch the fainter utterances of relief, and comfort, and trust, that fell from his dying lips. § 45. Our attempts to attain to clear and definite con- ceptions are often attended by the sacrifice of some essential element of the truth which we seek to understand. Men should tread with unshod feet upon this holy ground, beating their breasts like the women of Jerusalem; looking, listening, adoring, like John, as he stood beside Mary at the foot of the cross. He only reverently approaches this great mystery, who is ready to cast his own interpretation of it to the winds, if it be found to distort by a hair’s-breadth the great saving fact presented to our faith. In this spirit let us draw near to behold this great sight, and to put the question that goes to the very heart of Christi- anity : was the death of Jesus penal, and if so, in what sense? We believe it was penal. We believe with Luther, that the self-same person in whom there is an everlasting and invincible righteousness, is also “the highest, the greatest, and the only sinner...O Christ, I am thy sin, thy curse, thy wrath of God, thy hell; and contrariwise, thou art my righteousness, my blessing, my life, my grace of God, my heaven.” That naked, bleeding body is our nakedness ; that disfigured countenance tells of the image of God marred in us; those parched lips are the prey of the thirst that burns us up. All deaths are penal, but that of Jesus was peculiarly and emphatically so, because he alone fully embraced the awful Archbishop Thomson. Luke xxiii. 45. The Lord’s death penal. Luther. Isaiah liii. 6. vy. 10. John xiv. 11. F, Godet. ¥., Godet. 102 BOOK THE SECOND. reality that is in every death. His outward sufferings were wrought immediately by wicked men, but these were the agents of God, and the agony and ignominy they inflicted upon him were the outward signs of God’s judgment upon human guilt: “Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquities of us all....It pleased Jehovah to’ bruise him; he hath put him to grief.” His soul was made an offering for sin. There is a penal element in all genuine repentance. Every act of godly sorrow for sin has two factors: the righteous claims of law, and the self-condemning consciousness of the sinner. Now the inward sufferings of Jesus were self- inflicted, or they would have had no moral value; he ex- perienced in an absolute degree the feelings of shame and sorrow that the consciousness of sin produces partially in the awakened. But in thus afflicting his soul, Jesus was the agent of God; the sentence that he passed upon the sin he himself appropriated, was the echo of that pronounced upon the eternal throne. Looking upon sin with God’s eyes, while standing in the sinner’s place, his pain was the condi- tion into which holy love was brought under the pressure of our merited condemnation. The satisfaction he freely offered was in the first instance required by Divine justice; so that in him sin was judged and punished from above as well as Srom below. Through the mystery of his being he was in the Father, and the Father in him, so that even his own condemnation was that of God; he was at once priest and victim. Thus in every sense his expiation was “no mere painful meditation ? over sin;” it was a sentence of death against us, ratified without reserve by our own representative. It was the com- plete initiation of a holy human conscience into the feelings awakened in the Divine mind by our sin, and its absolute adhesion tothem. The sinners’ friend directing with his own hand, and toward his own heart, the sword of Divine justice. “Upon this narrow theatre of the conscience of Christ, there a ee ee ee ee ee eee yt? REDEMPTION. ~ 103 met face to face the two adversaries that only see each other from afar in ours,”’—the holiness of God and the sin of man. What passed exactly in the mind of Jesus is beyond human knowledge, it is the secret of God; but there death and judgment synchronized ; there sin was hated with a perfect hatred; there tears were shed which we could never have wept ; in that holy soul was the place of our reconciliation. “He hath made him who knew no sin to be sin for us ; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” To make to be sin is the technical expression for the conse- cration of a sin offering. (TAN NOTIN W727) Indeed the same Hebrew word stands for both sin and sin-offering (ON@T), the victim being, as 1t were, lost in its vicarious character. Twice in the same context Paul affirms that the Divine righteousness was exhibited in the atonement; and it is thus only that it can give peace to the conscience: when by faith we claim the benefit of Christ’s death, our sin has to be brought before God no more; it has already been dealt with judicially ; its punishment is over; we stand on the other side of our doom. Our peace flows from his mortal terrors, our life from his death, our glory and bless- ing from his shame and curse. § 46. Our blessed Lord suffered the effects of God’s wrath against sin, but he was not himself an object of wrath. To say, as is sometimes done, that God was angry with him for our sakes is an involuntary blasphemy. “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all,” exclaimed the Apostle in grateful rapture; it was thus he comprehended the Father’s attitude towards the Son, and none should dare to go beyond his statement. It was on the part of the un- believing Jews that the prophet said, “We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.” Nay, we have seen that the Lord himself in his agony only complains of de- sertion ; and who shall be so bold as to correct him, and to substitute stronger language? In the awakened soul, one Oo CoreVeneL Ley. vi. 26. (19.) Rom. iii. 25, 26. J.D. Smith. His person no object of Divine wrath. Rom. viii. 32. Isaiah liii. 4. J. P. Lange. John x. 17. Lev. i. 9. Eph. v. 2. Turretin. Conf. of 1560. ATh. Ex. Bishop Pearson. Jeremy Taylor. Gal. lit. 13. Deut. xxi. 23. 104 BOOK THE SECOND. and the same consciousness exhibits itself as an avenging angel of God and as a poor trembling sinner, and in the same way Jesus could have at the same time the conscious- ness of our sin and of his personal right to the favor of God. Could there have been any variation in the Divine feelings, never from all eternity had the Son been the object of the Father's complacency and love more than in that hour of unreserved self-sacrifice. “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life.” It was like the burnt- offering of old,—a sacrifice of a sweet savour unto the Lord, acceptable and well pleasing. Looked at in himself, says the elder, the orthodox Francis Turretin, “even in the very anguish of the cross, Ghrist never ceased to be infinitely precious to the Father.”* To the same effect the primitive confession of the Reformed Church of Scotland: “We avow that he remained the only well-beloved and blessed Son of the Father, even in the midst of his anguish and torment, which he suffered in body and in soul to make full satisfaction for the sins of his people.” Bishop Pearson writes: “It must not, it cannot be ‘admitted, that Christ did suffer all those torments which the damned suffer: there is a worm that never dieth, which could not lodge within his breast.” Jeremy Taylor registered a similar protest in nearly the same language. (Great Exemplar, pt. 3, discourse xx. 5). St. Paul teaches, “ Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it written, cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.” This statement is open to misapprehension and distortion through the vain effort, by exaggeration, to make amends for our inability to seize the reality. Our Lord underwent every kind of ignominy, even to the legal defilement of his body, in order that the out- ward form of his death should express what God thought of k Nec unquam, in se spectatus, Christus, etiam in ipsis crucis angoribus, desiit esse charissimus patri. re al Se REDEMPTION. 105 the sin that caused it; but the Apostle distinctly confines himself to this outward dispensation, and thereby implicitly recognizes that there was no curse from above upon the soul of the Holy One, as Justin Martyr repeatedly affirms in the dialogue with Trypho, ody ws To Oevd Katapwucvou Toitov Tod éotavpwnevov. Tertullian too says there was no curse but that of which the Jews were the instruments. “The bearing the punishment of another’s sins is to be understood as bearing that which, in relation to the sins, and to the sinner, admits the name of punishment, but with re- spect to the individual on whom it is actually inflicted, ab- stractedly considered, can be viewed but in the light of suffering.” The Father could not feel angry with his Holy Child; the God of truth could not appear to be disposed towards any one otherwise than he really was. “It is a very harsh opinion to think, that Christ,—undertaking the combat for the honour of God against his arch-enemy,—that obeying the will of God even unto the death,—that retaining his holi- ness unmoveable in the midst of all his tortures, paying God an infinite obedience ;—it is harsh,” continues worthy Lightfoot, “to think that God should requite him with wrath. .... It troubles me to think any Christian should hold such an opinion concerning our Saviour..... for God looked on Christ not as a sinner but as a sacrifice, and the Lord was not angry at him, but loved him, because he would become a sacrifice.” Of course if the wrath of God be distinguished from the feeling, and hmited to the objective judgment, Jesus may be said to have suffered it; but in this great conflict the curse obtained the outward and the blessing the inward victory. The punishment of our sins assumed a different aspect in Jesus from what it would have assumed in us,—transforming itself in his holy inward experience, exhausting itself, and, through the infinite worth of his person, issuing in the con- sciousness of ineffable communion with God, all the surer Justin Martyr. Tertullian. Archbishop Magee. Lightfoot. Heb. ix. 14. In what sense he is our substitute. Archbishop Thomson, J. H. Godwin. WA (Clare Wf, 1k Bishop Butler. 106 BOOK THE SECOND. that it has passed through such a fiery trial. Through the eternal Spirit he offered himself without spot to God. § 47. “It is not true, whether friend or foe shall say it, that God looked forth on his works to find some innocent man able and willing to bear the weight of his wrath, and found Jesus and punished him. It is all false, because it is only half true. The Son of God took our nature upon him, and therefore the sins of it, at least in their consequences ; not because he became one man among many, but because when God takes man’s nature he still has Divine right and power over all, and so manhood is taken into God.” Looking upon men individually, there was a real substitu- tion of the Saviour for each,—and that Saviour no stranger, but a brother; he is the other self of every man, the next of kin, entitled to redeem. If we think of collective hu- manity, its sin was expiated by itself, through the organ in whom its moral life is concentrated. The criminal himself beats his breast at Golgotha, and Pilate prophesied when he said Lece homo! This was assuredly a far greater homage to the holiness of law than would be exhibited in the infliction of any amount of mere punishment, just as every moral victory is grander and nobler than any corresponding display of mere strength. “It was more effectual than any punish- ment to preserve from sin, and to put away sin; and effec- tual as no punishment ever could be, to impart faith and righteousness, and love.” Through that which passed in the soul of Jesus man was brought back to God. “If one died for all, then all died” in that act: et eés izép rdvtwy dméOaver, apa o wavtes aréOavov. Objections to the method of Redemption on the score of injustice, are practically objections “ against the whole gene- ral constitution of nature,” which treats us as members one of another, and continually makes the innocent to suffer for the guilty. The law acted upon by the Divine government in this present world, is that of involuntary joint responsibi- REDEMPTION. 107 lity, attended however by a consciousness of final individual responsibility. The law acted upon in Redemption, is the voluntary acceptation of joint responsibility by a holy Being, the participation of others in the benefits of his self-devotion being thrown upon their individual respon- sibility. The sufferings of the Saviour throughout his whole human career were personally unmerited, but not unjust,— because he chose to become and remain a man. And the unspeakable sufferings of his death, utterly unmerited as they were, were not unjust,—because he chose to assert his oneness with us in the face of death and judgment, and to bear the consequences. Nor is the salvation of the believer unjust,—because the relation he asserts to Jesus and to his work is his by a natural right ; he pleads the joint respon- sibility in which Jesus involved himself, and he enters into the feelings with which Jesus carried it out. § 48. No change has been wrought in God by the atone- ment, but only in the relation of the human race to God, and therefore in his dealings with it. “God cannot change ; but yet his purpose towards us is changed in its workings by ourselves.” So long as an offending child is impenitent its father cannot—dare not—forgive it; to do so would be to authorize it in evil, to consent to its remaining at a low moral level. Such nominal forgiveness would be cruel and immoral, for “ pardon is really a grace only when it is the starting point of a process of recovery.” But let us suppose the child at last affected by some manifestation of fatherly feeling, and melted to repentance ;—it is forgiven. A great change has taken place in the child, and a corresponding change in the father’s attitude, but not in the father’s heart. It is the same God who condemns the guilty and welcomes to his bosom the penitent sinner, just as it is the same sun which withers the uprooted plant and ministers to its growth and prosperity when its roots are bedded in congenial soil. Now the sacrifice of Christ was in the history of the human No change wrought in God. Archbishop Thomson. F. Godet. Bishop Pearson. Matt. y. 23, 24. 1 Cor. vii. 11. Rom. vy. 10. John iii. 16. 2 Cor. v. 19. 108 BOOK THE SECOND. race, what conversion is in the history of the single soul : it enabled God to pardon safely, it brought a sinful world with- in reach of his grace. This great reconcilation, like every true one, is in a certain sense natural. As our Saviour adviseth: “if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother :” that is, reconcile thy brother to thyself, whom thou hast injured; render him by thy submission favourable unto thee, who hath something against thee, and is offended with thee. As the Apostle adviseth the wife that “ departeth from her hus- band, to remain unmarried, or to be reconciled to her hus- band:” that is, to appease and get the favour of her husband. In the like manner we are said to be reconciled unto God, when God is reconciled, appeased, and become gracious and favourable unto us ; and Christ is said to reconcile us unto God, when he hath moved and obtained of God to be recon- ciled unto us, when he hath appeased him and restored us unto his favour. Thus, “when we were enemies we were reconciled to God:” that is, notwithstanding he was offended with us for our sins, we were restored unto his favour “ by the death of his Son.” It is not that our blessed Lord rescued his fellows out of the hands of an unwilling God by paying a penalty for them. His sacrifice, provided by God himself, did not originate the love of God, but removed the obstacles to its free action and gave it scope. It was the manifestation, not the cause, of re- deeming love. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The plan and its execution alike proceeded from Infinite love ;—“God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them.” Christ, at his own cost, was the agent of the Father’s love and of his own. REDEMPTION. 109 The distinctions which we establish between the different perfections of God are only real for our own minds; they are but accommodations to our way of conceiving and feeling. The attributes of God are properly one with his essence, of which they are but the different aspects. Hence the asser- tion that sin sets God’s justice in opposition to his love, is inaccurate; it improperly transports into the Divine con- sciousness those conflicts of which this finite world and our own souls are the theatres, though surely it would be less unworthy of God that sin should bring about a collision between his attributes than that it should leave him in- different. It can only be said that sin ¢ends to create this collision ; but the tendency, recognized in a speculative point of view, was immediately and for ever arrested by the Divine determination to send the Son to suffer for sin. There is no practical contradiction between justice and love, because the cross accomplishes the ends of both. God is Light, and God is Love, and on the cross the two inscriptions are alike conspicuous. “Mercy and Truth are met together; Right- eousness and Peace have kissed each other,” sang the Jewish exiles on their return from the Babylonish captivity, in an ecstasy of gratitude and hope. But this beautiful personifi- cation was destined to receive a higher application,—one that can be celebrated to all eternity. § 49. From all that has preceded, it is evident that the Christian doctrine of the Atonement contains nothing of the nature of a legal fiction. A judicial process it was indeed, a morally grander assize than that before which the present heaven and earth shall flee away, and no place be found for them. But each of the actors in this mighty process is true to himself, and to the reality of things. Christ’s bearing of our sins was not a mere arbitrary imputation of them. On his part it was the deep and painful consciousness of the state of the race with which he stood in real relation; it was the struggle of his soul under our sin, appropriated by real F. Lichtenburger Psalm Ixxxv. 10. No legal fiction. Apoe. xx. il. Isa. hii. 12. The resurrec- tion. Psalm xvi. 10. Isaiah lili. 9. 110 | BOOK THE SECOND. sympathy, and with a holy and successful effort to make reparation. On God’s part—if we may presume to describe things too high for us, by a series of inevitable anthropomor- phisms,—there was stern displeasure at the sin of man, re- cognition of the right of Jesus to act as the organ of the race and the wish that he should do so, providential control over events so as to bring the Son of man into circumstances proper for the awful experience he undertook, abstinence during the crisis from any cheering communication that could interfere with the harrowing reality and unspeakable horror of that experience; lastly, the full apprehension of and complacency in the infinite invincible righteousness upon which even our sin had exhausted itself. The Father left the Son alone with our sins, until he could hail him as victor, ratify from the throne the sufferer’s exclamation, “ it is finished,” and proclaim his recompense :—“ Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death, and he was numbered with the trans- @TeSSOrs.” § 50. There had now been wrought a satisfaction which God could accept, to which every individual act of repent- ance could refer, and from which a new principle of happy obedience could proceed, touching human life in its inmost centre and over its entire extent. The whole frame of hu- manity had been wounded and healed in one spot, in that one righteous member. The wages of sin had come upon the sufferer to the uttermost, but the worm could not survive in the heart of Jesus, nor the Holy One see corruption ; his body was treasured like a sacred thing in an unpolluted tomb, and speedily raised incorruptible. While imperfect repentance 1s in its own nature interminable, adequate sorrow for sin ends by bringing into soothing and healing contact with God. The outer darkness of the cross was succeeded by the unspeakable rapture of total, finished, — REDEMPTION. Lit absolute reconciliation; and in this holier deeper joy than creature had ever known he was the representative of others, as well as in his previous suffering. As he had identified himself with the wretchedness and guilt of the self-exiled and apostate prodigal, so he now anticipated the joy of every returning prodigal folded in his Father's arms. “Go to my brethren and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God.” The look that condemned us killed him, the look that received us in grace raised him up again. The old human life, inherited of his mother and voluntarily forfeited, was gone; and there was given unto him by the Eternal Creating Spirit, a new life which death could not touch, a spiritual body upon which the grave had no claim, a power of communion with the blessed God over which no shadow of a cloud was ever to pass. Death was overcome in our flesh; the Divine invita- tion—“ Sit thou on my right hand,’ was now addressed to One in the nature of him to whom it had been said, “ Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.” Triumphant confirmation of the soul’s dearest hopes, deepest wants, holiest aspirations,—Jesus receives in his own soul and body the pledge of creation’s ransom; he has forded the raging flood, passed through the burning flame, and, from the firm ground on which he stands beyond them, he stretches forth his hands to lift us up and place us beside him. § 51. Looked at from below, the resurrection of Christ was the great convincing evidence of his mission. He was thereby “declared to be the Son of God with power.” The Apostles looked upon their testimony to his resurrection as the express end of their calling. The question of the truth of Christianity will continue to the end of time to be what it was stated by the Roman Festus,—a question “of one Jesus which was dead, whom Paul affirmed to be alive.” Looked at from above, the resurrection of Christ 1s, as to its form, the seal of reconciliation, and as to its substance, the John xx.«17. Chrysostom. Psalm ex. 1. Gen. iii. 19. Different aspects of the resurrection Rom. i. 4. Actsi 22. EXONVieeh ds Rom, iv. 25. vill. 34. EKO, Seig, UN( 1 Peter iil. 21. Is. Barrow. 1 Cor. xv. 1—8. Rom. x. 9. Psalm ii. 7. 112 BOOK THE SECOND: glorious restoration of the fallen creature represented and contained in him. So that, with the sublime simplicity always exhibited in the Divine arrangements, the same fact is at once the evidence and the accomplishment of Redemp- tion, and should be contemplated in both aspects successively, by the mind when it investigates and when it appropriates the work of the Redeemer. The resurrection was the seal of our reconciliation, because it was its effect—the Divine ratification of the Saviour’s fi- nished work, the surety let free because the debt was paid. He “was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.” Therefore the Apostle says again,—< who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea RATHER, that is risen again:” and elsewhere,—“ if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” According to St. Peter, it was upon the resurrection that the disciples could found the answer of a good conscience towards God. “Our pardon and acceptance seem not only declared, but also consigned and delivered up unto us by our Saviour’s re- surrection ; as we were punished in his suffering, so in his resurrection we were restored ; Christ merited our justifica- tion by his passion, but God gave it us in his resurrection ; being that formal act of grace whereby he was apparently reinstated in God’s favor, and we virtually in him.” Hence the tidings of his death and resurrection together constitute ihe Gospel; they are facts parallel to the great primordial fact of the fall, and lke it of universal bearing. These re- mote events concern us more nearly, affect our happiness more vitally and lastingly, than any event of to-day which should entirely change our individual, domestic, or social positions. The Lord’s death ended the first world of the natural man, his resurrection began the new world of the spiritual man. The prophetic utterance, “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee,” employed by the Psalmist as the Divine REDEMPTION, Tis consecration of Messiah to his royalty, is in the New Testa- ment regarded as fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus; he received a new life in the tomb where our sins had laid him, ——a life which he was to share with us. The “only-begotten” as touching his incommunicable glory, he here assumes a sonship that he could share with us, and in respect to which he was “the firstborn among many brethren.’’ “The first man Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.” And as the life breathed into the nostrils of the first man was communi- cated by generation to all his descendants, so the new life of the risen Saviour was to be communicated by regeneration, in such sort that all who receive it should have virtually begun to live and risen along with him. The Son hath life in himself, and wishes to bestow that life itself, and not merely some external blessing. Thus his personal resurrec- tion was also mystical: personally, he is “the first-fruits of them that sleep ;” mystically, the whole harvest was con- tained in him; personally, he was “the firstborn from the dead ;” mystically, the whole family have risen along with him : “he carries our fortunes with him when he traverses the adoring heavens.” We are already seated there in him, and hereafter shall be seated by him. “The exceeding great- ness of God’s power to us-ward who believe” is declared to be “according to the working of his mighty power which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead.” And again : “God who is rich in mercy, for his great love where- with he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus.” And again: “if ye then are risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” I Acts xiii. 33, Heb. v. 5. John i. 14, 18. ili. 16—18. Rom, vili. 29. Gen. li. 7. 1 Cor. xy. 45, WCorexvn20: Col. i. 18. Apoc. i. 5. W. A. Butler. Eph. i. 19, 20. li. 5, 6. Col. ii. 1—3. Matt.xxviii. 2,3. Col. ili. 4. 1 Pet. 1, 3, 4. OCotravade Redemption uni- versal in its cha- racter. See 3 3 27, 42. Titus ii. 11. 114 BOOK THE SECOND. Could we for a moment suppose ourselves spectators of the mystery of creation, when the first man became a living soul, we should be entitled to say,—that life is ours ; it is not indeed the individual life of which each of us is conscious, but it is not the less true that in a very positive sense we began to live with Adam. And could we suppose ourselves present at the hour that the angel of light rolled away the stone that it should not confine the Prince of life, and sat upon it like a conqueror, his countenance like lightning, his raiment white as snow, we should be entitled to say,—this life, which is stronger than death,—this life, the mighty breath of which shakes earth and hell, which has no longer judg- ment or curse to fear,—it is by this life that every Christian lives! | “When Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.” The last the old world saw of him was on the cross and in the grave, but the resurrection was the beginning and the pledge of a new glorified world. It has quickened us to a lively hope of the inheritance in- corruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away; knowing as we do, says Paul, “that he who raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus.” As his own blessed person in heaven is the undying memorial of his sacrifice, so his own glorified nature is the first trophy won from the grave. There is no blessing for others that was not first his by a peculiar right, and in a transcendent sense ; there can be no power communicated to them, or effective for them, of which he was not the first receiver. Having assumed our nature that he might restore and glorify it in himself and in us, and that he might glorify God in it, he gave up his life that he might take it again for himself and for us. § 52. When the connection between the atonement and the incarnation is understood there is no room for discus- sion about the extent of the atonement: “the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men;” Jesus REDEMPTION. 115 was made lower than the angels “that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man.” He was not only the organ of humanity, he represented the entire creation, every thing that is disfigured, or that sighs and suffers on account of men. The atonement being the acceptation of a real relation with all its consequences, no arbitrary distinc- tions are possible: Jesus Christ is the blood relation of every child of Adam. “He is the propitiation for our sins,” writes John to the Church universal, “and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” And Paul says, “We trust in the living God who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.” Nor is there any distinction to be made between original and actual sin; the tree and its fruits are one in the sight of God, and on Calvary the axe was laid to the root of both in the same act. The extended arms of Jesus on the cross were opened wide to embrace the whole world, says Lactantius:! Hence the universal mission of the disciples,—* Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature.” Hence too the grace of God is represented as going forth toward man in the abstract; it is called in the letter to Titus, “the kindness and love of God our Saviour towards man.” It may be boldly affirmed that no Scriptural state- ment about Redemption is more clear than that of its uni- versal aim. That “the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world,” is the testimony of the beloved disciple; Paul commands prayer to be made for all men, “for this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one Mediator between God and man; the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.” The same Apostle thus sets Redemption in contrast with the fall. “As by one offence judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even ! Hatendit in passione manus suas, orbemque dimensus est. Heb. ii. 9. 1 John ii. 2. 1 Tim. iv. 10. Lactantius. Mark xvi. 15. Titus iii. 4. 1 John iy. 14. 1 Tim. ii. 3—6. Rom. y. 18. Luke xix. 41. Isai. xlix. 4. Luke x. 5, 6. Cor. ii. 15. 116 BOOK THE SECOND. so by one righteousness the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.” When our Lord said his blood was to be shed for “many,” he did not apply the term restrictively, as if he only came to seek some of the lost ; he meant to express his joy at the thought that one holy victim could atone for a multitude. “Many” is not used in opposition to all, but in contrast with one ; oc roddot properly signifies the bulk of mankind, as we find it used by Greek orators for the mass of their fellow citizens. It has been said that there is something dishonouring to our Lord in the idea that he could shed his precious blood in vain for any souls. The really dishonouring idea would rather be that he did not try to save the perishing, but, like the Levite of the parable, “passed by on the other side.” Does love become less admirable, does it lose any of its in- trinsic value, when it meets with ingratitude? Were the tears that Jesus wept over Jerusalem dishonored by the hardness and enmity of the Jews? Love has its reward in itself; it is thrice blessed,—in the purpose and in the mani- festation as well as in its effect upon its object; and when the latter blessing fails, the former are multiplied by the consolations of God himself. Had the blood of the cross not proved of saving efficacy to a single soul, the love that shed it would not have been less Divine and less precious in the Father’s eyes. Messiah in that case might say of all mankind what the prophet makes him say of his mission to Israel ;—“I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with Jehovah, and my work with my God.” It was on this principle that the Lord said to the seventy disciples,—“ into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house. And if the Son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall return to you again.” Paul was conscious that his labour of love toward “them that perish” was a REDEMPTION. Rig irs sweet savour of Christ unto God, as well as that toward “them that are saved.” § 53. Vinet somewhere characterizes human history, with reference to the fall and to Redemption, as a generic fall and an individual recovery. He adds, this recovery would not cease to be individual even were it to embrace all men, since they would be converted to it one by one. This statement is true of Redemption only in the sense which was doubtless intended as contemplated in its effects here below, and in its appropriation by individuals successively. But the prin- ciple of all these individual acts—containing them as their source, giving them at once existence and validity,—was that one atoning act through which the race collectively has passed into a new standing before God. The study of the way in which mankind was effected by the fall prepares us to understand its collective Redemption. Adam was more for his descendants than the ancestor of any particular lineage can be for his. Thus all our lineages meet in Noah, in whom as well as in Adam the whole existing human race was contained; yet for the Bible and for Chris- tian consciousness Noah does not stand to us in the all-im- portant relation in which Adam does, and this because the human nature which Noah transmitted to us had been already determined to evil; like every other intermediate ancestor he was a mere link in a chain of which the direction was already given. The importance of that fatal beginning of the human race argues its real organic unity, there is an organic law of life, giving unity wherever it exists and to all the individuals through whom it manifests itself. The first sin, involving as it did man’s deliberate preference of his own will to that of God, and issuing as it must have done in despair, gave the whole race the character it was to retain, just as any serious mutilation sustained in infancy by any living creature remains throughout its life. Every other sinner is the organ of a sinful nature, but the first sinner A collective Redemption. A. Vinet. See 3 8.. See 3 7. C. Secretan. See $ 27. See ¢ ¢ 30, 42. 1 John vy. 11. Anew humanity. Ephes. ui. 15. Rom. viii. 29. 118 BOOK THE SECOND. determined the corruption of that nature. As the school- men put it: in Adam’s case,—persona corrumpit naturam ; in ours,—natura corrumpit personam. That first fatal step determined a whole career of degradation, every moment of which was contained in the first. The root of evil then being deeper than any individual mind, the remedy must also lie deeper; it must have a cha- racter of universality. That character is to be found in the first instance in the place which the eternal Word necessarily occupied in hu- manity so soon as he became a member of it. We have already seen that he was by a natural right the organ of the whole family, empowered to act for all his brethren, and that he did act and suffer for them, bringing about such a change in the relation of the whole to God as could make individual salvation possible. “God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” Every human being possesses a personal interest in Jesus Christ, has a right to lay claim to Jesus Christ, to all that he has done, and to all that he is. Every human being is an object of the redeeming love of God in Christ, may take possession of Christ, and help him to take possession of all the others. § 54. But that redeeming agency which corresponds essen- tially with the relation of the first man to the human race is that which Jesus exercises by making believing Jews and Gentiles to be “one new man” in himself, as Paul speaks. Like Adam, he has a generic and not merely individual life, he is the man as well as a man; and again, like Adam, the humanity of which he is the head, begins with himself, “the firstborn among many brethren.” In the very passage where Paul magnifies the greatness of Redemption in contrast with the first offence, he is obliged by experience to reckon upon the perversity with which many would turn away from the proffered grace. Glorified humanity will not be found co-extensive with redeemed hu- REDEMPTION, 119 manity, but “they which receive the superabundance (zy Rom. v. 17. wepiseav) of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life.” The Father “hath given to the Son to have jot y. 26. life in himself,” and as many as receive him, to them gives he “power to become the sons of God, even to them that be- i. 12, lieve on his name.” They are “born again” of incorruptible i. 18. seed, and Christ is formed within them. The fall was realized 1 pe. ; o9 by the posterity of Adam, and Redemption is to be realized Gat. iv. 49. by the posterity of him of whom it was written,—*“he shall 1tsai. 1iii. 10. see his seed.” By natural birth we bear the image of our 1 Cor. xv. 49. earthly ancestor, and we inherit his life: by regeneration of the Holy Spirit we become children of the heavenly man, 9 cor. iii. 18. are gradually changed into his moral image, and shall share his glory. In his incarnation the Lord identified himself with perish- ing humanity, and this was carried to its extreme consequence upon the cross. In his resurrection he became the founder of an imperishable humanity, with which he remains united as a permanent source of life, and the consequence of this will be manifested, but not exhausted, in glory everlasting. By the former act he entered into the conditions that others had prepared, inherited man’s nature, and finally appropri- ated the judgment suspended upon his fellows. By the latter he has prepared the conditions into which he is to re- ceive his brethren, has the power to dispense forgiveness, life, and glory, taking men into the fellowship of his own blessed nature, and giving them a share in his own destinies. When Adam stepped forth from the hands of God a living soul, he was at once of the earth and superior to the earth. His frame was made of dust, and he had a natural rank, though the highest, among the animal creation ; at the same time his higher life did not emanate from nature, he carried within him a principle competent to reign over and to transform it. Similarly, when that eternal life which had 4 gonnj. 9. been with the Father was manifested unto us, he was really 1 Cor. xv. 47. Ww. A. Butler. In what sense @ generic resto- ration. Schleiermacher. C. Seeretan. Gregory of Nyssa. Ephrem Syrus. Hilary. Dr. Schaff. 120 BOOK THE SECOND. man and yet at the same time greater than man,—“ the Lord from heaven.” The place taken by this superior Being was already provided for by the laws of the sphere into which he entered: every man is a fragment of God’s image, an object of his love, and a mean of influence over his fellows. But here is One who perfectly reproduces that image, is an object of supreme dilection, and a centre of regenerating in- fluence,—a quickening Spirit. “We have as it were given him of our nature the material of our Redemption, he has given us of his celestial nature the properties that are to qualify us for the heaven he has won.” § 55. As Schleiermacher says, it was. not necessary to se- cure the sinlessness of the Lord’s being that his humanity should have no human father ; but, as Schleiermacher fails to observe, it was a necessary condition of the unity and sim- plicity of his person. Otherwise the Word would have taken to itself an already complete human personality, and there would be a juxtaposition of the Divine and human in two persons, instead oftheir union in one. The doctrine of the incarnation assumes that the essential elements of human nature subsisted in the virgin’s womb, though as yet un- personal. And, as “in our natural and moral life man evidently represents diversity, succession, progress, and woman the identical, the permanent, the universal,’ our Lord’s assumption of humanity of the substance of his mother is consonant to his relation to the race. Christian teachers in all ages have dwelt upon concep- tions akin to this. Gregory of Nyssa says God took unto him not individual but universal human nature; Ephrem Syrus calls Christ the whole man, and not a certain par- ticular man (vey odor not tov twa dvOpwrov); and Hilary writes, “In order that the Son of God should also be the Son of man, he teok into himself the nature of universal flesh.” Dr. Schaff says, “Christ is not merely a single man among REDEMPTION. Lead other men; he bears at the same time a universal character as the Saviour of the world. Hence the evangelist says not i Novos dvOpwros éyevero, Which would denote merely a human individual, but sap£ éyevero, to show that he assumed human- >? ity, or the general human nature.” To the same effect one of the most eminent Catholic divines of the present day : “The Word having become the Son of man, has abolished sin in the common, universal, impersonal human nature, with which the Divine person is clothed.” He has transformed, continues M. Gratry, purified, or rather divinized humanity in himself. All such statements are valuable so far as they ex- press the true Christian instinct—that our blessed Lord must have stood in a relation to the whole human race which no other man could occupy. But the universal character of that relation should be made to rest upon the broad facts of our organic unity, and of his all-reaching powers and sym- pathies, and not upon a refinement which, when pushed too far, has a tendency to make our Lord a sort of interme- diate Being, neither absolutely Divine ‘no properly human. Though the human elements of the Lord’s being were im- personal before he assumed them, yet when incarnate he was an individual man. | Modern popular theology dwells exclusively upon the atonement, without taking cognizance of the connection be- tween it and the incarnation, which is practically left out of sight. Ancient theology dwelt almost though not altogether as exclusively upon the incarnation. Athanasius goes so far as to say the Son became man “that by the power of his incarnation he might make men God ;”™ again, “becoming man himself he made men to be Sons and to be Gods!”™ The disadvantage of the former extreme is that it gives the whole plan of salvation a dry, legal, arbitrary aspect, which does not recommend itself to the conscience, and deprives MTG duvduer THs évOpwrrjcews ut Oedv Toujon. ny; \ t AG) 4 ‘ ? (e) id UA 2 A bal 6 LOTTOLNGOE KAL EVEOTTOLNTOE TOUS AV PWTOVUS Vy EVOMEVOS AUTOS QAVUPWTTOS. A. Gratry John iii. 6. Chrysostom. 22 BOOK THE SECOND. the atonement of its essential character of an inward moral process. One of the disadvantages of the patristic extreme is that it tends to connect the Lord’s generic life with the old humanity into which he entered, rather than with the new of which he was the head. He did not simply restore the old, but created the new; there is no change in humaii nature in the abstract; that which is flesh remains flesh in us, and produces in every successive generation the same evil fruits. He arrested the stream of corruption in himself, purifying and transforming our nature: “human nature was blessed in him,” but the change is confined to his sacred person, and to those who by faith begin to participate in his life. The new order of things and the reign of Redemption properly date from the resurrection; though, since he gave himself to us in becoming man, and since his life was a moment of transition more momentous than any other crisis in history, it was no mistake when the Christians of the sixth century made the new era begin with his birth. A graft inserted on the main stem of the wild olive does not change the nature of the stock below its insertion, nor that of any natural branches that issue from the stock without connection with itself; but the branches which are gradually developed out of the graft, receiving the sap that has passed through it, these share its nature, bring forth good fruit, and for the future constitute the real tree, the natural branches being no longer counted. It is in one sense a new tree, and in another it is the old transformed for the better, since the stock contributes the juices that have been sweetened. Thus the new humanity begun in Christ, into which the old passes, which is gradually to take the place and fulfil the purpose of the old, will practically prove a generic restoration, and is so already in principle. It is not an absolutely new humanity, but the old trans- formed for the better in Christ, raised to a higher character, filled with new meaning, and power, and blessing. REDEMPTION, 123 § 56. The logical and moral necessity which ever impels the mind to seek the reconciliation of sovereign mercy and sovereign justice could never have been met by speculation, but it has been more than satisfied by facts, for at the cross the judgment and redemption of the world were coincident. The cause of all the struggles and sufferings of the world is the spirit of selfishness, and the solution of the greatest difficulties that pain and perplex the heart has been effected by the spirit of self-sacrifice. There are questions the solu- tion of which involves that of all others; there are wants the satisfaction of which assures that of all others, or else stands in their stead. ‘‘The great enigmas proposed to mankind from its earliest days——those contradictions ever perceived even by those that deny them, and the obscurity of which increases—the poignancy of which is heightened —in proportion to power of mind and sincerity of soul,— those problems, eternal aliment of thought and its despair, —they are resolved by facts, by an act of man and by an act of God. With the fall and Redemption, reason, ex- perience, interest, and duty are reconciled.” The noble and glorious destiny that we had forfeited is once more set before us; sovereign good placed within reach of every out-stretched arm. A second tree of life has been planted, and this time we are ordered to take of the fruit and live. Christ has made himself joint heir with us, that we might be joint heirs with him. “He made our life his, that we might make his life ours, and that he might com- municate to us by his grace that he possesses by his nature.” Instead of condemnation and death, we are summoned to receive pardon and regeneration. In Jesus Christ, and in him crucified, “we find at once the God that is immanent in nature, and the God that is above nature, the God of the universe, and the God of our own soul, the supremely holy God who forgives nothing, and the supremely merciful God who forgives everything.” The cross is at once the triumph The glories of Redeeming love. C. Secretan. Calvin. A. Vinet. A. Vinet. Is. Barrow. W. A. Butler. 124 BOOK THE SECOND. of grace and the triumph of justice, mercy breathing judg- ment, and judgment breathing mercy, the most strict and terrible justice has become the most wondrous phase in the manifestation of supreme compassion. “Jt has been provided that the same dispensation which works joy in the heart of man, should by the same act work love in it. A Divine violence has been done to that heart which could be won by violence only. Man had reversed all his relations with God; God, in his turn, has reversed all his relations with man. Man had tried to make himself God, God has made himself man. Man had refused every- thing to God, God gave himself to man in the person of Jesus Christ.” Oh depth of love, and goodness unsearch- able! “ What words can express, what thought can reach a favour so ineffable and inconceivable. Well might Paul call it love transcending all knowledge. Well may heaven and earth be astonished and hell tremble at such a miracle of mercy.” Well may we say with a disciple who fell asleep but yesterday,—* around the cross all the truest glories of Divine wisdom gather ; and they who will not study heaven there can never know it.” The sinner knows that he ought to love God, but he can only think of him with a feeling of fear and estrangement. His sinful preference of his own will and his evil conscience _ are both of them in the way. The consciousness of his state hinders him from loving the good from which he knows himself at such a distance ; and the hatred which he ought to feel toward sin, he turns it against the good that con- demns him. The unawakened conscience seeks its heaven upon earth,—a heaven without God; an awakened conscience without either the Gospel or its preparation, if such a thing were possible, would be given over to utter despair; a partially awakened conscience might set before itself as the highest aspiration possible—after a long life of penitence, and _per- haps ages of suffering in a future existence—a bare remission REDEMPTION. 125 of sins, without admission to the favour of God or to partici- pation in his blessedness. And now our God begins where we should have ended, doing exceeding abundantly above all that we could ask or think,—proclaiming from that cross and from that open sepulchre, forgiveness, full, free, imme- diate—the adoption of sonship—a welcome to his heart and to his heaven for ever. The God to whom we dared not, could not, draw nigh, has come to us in grace. Justice would have crushed the sinner without annihilating the sin; Mercy has put away the sin and saves the sinner. The cross meets alike our insensibility and our despair; it has made it pos- sible for God to forgive, and it wins our hearts to seek his forgiveness; the feeling of banishment, the menace of violated law removed, that a new will of love might be created within us. What a difference there is, says Augustin, between seeing one’s peaceful home from the top of a mountain and from the midst of a wild forest where the lion and the dragon prowl, without being able to find the way to it, and the speeding happily upon the right, safe, and well-known path. Forty times is eternal life mentioned in the New Testa- ment, and as often does it stand for the unspeakable blessed- ness provided for us in communion with a reconciled Father. If a planet had broken away from its orbit, it could never be restored, unless the sun should in some way follow it in its wanderings. This is just what the Son of God has done: in him the heaven to which we never could have worked our way comes down to us, to receive us and to adopt us to itself. We may think of God now without the thought of being shut out from his presence. What a sense of obliga- tion should be created by such grace unbounded! What a rebuke to our sin and ingratitude, proclaiming it great as his passion! And how great the dignity recovered for the fallen creature. “ We are inseparably linked with all that Ephes. iii. 20. Augustin. Ernest Navyille. Phil. of the plan of Salvation. is loftiest in the economy of the universe: there can be no- w, a. Butler. thing effected or undertaken in which we are not personally All things be- come new. A. Vinet. PECOr veel ts John ix. 126 BOOK THE SECOND. interested, as effected or undertaken by him, who, in one loving manifestation of his nature, has been pleased to bind us for ever to himself.” § 57. Christianity goes straight to the heart with all the power of a mighty fact. It does not rehearse the old argu- ments of human moral systems, which never changed a sin- gle heart, but brings with it a new fact above nature and above reason. It tells of the compassion of the Most High ; of the Eternal Word made flesh; how mankind were recon- ciled to God at Calvary, and called to renew filial relation- ship with him; how life and immortality were brought to light at the grave of Jesus. It tells of the circulation re- established between the Spirit of God and the spirit of man, of the joys of heaven coming to visit and to bless the earth, the dawn of eternal happiness lighting up our miseries, time passing over into eternity across the yawning tomb, and then sight continuing hope, joy continuing joy, life continu- ing life. The first creation having gone astray, the basis of Redemp- tion was laid in a new creature, and all that partake of it become themselves new creatures: “old things are passed away ; behold all things are become new.” Nothing can be looked upon in the same light as before by those, who, once without hope and living for themselves, have learned to know God in Christ. . Like the man born blind, who re- turned cured from the pool of Siloam: he looked abroad upon the green valley for the first time, and he looked up to the Temple and palaces of Zion, and the blue heavens, and the human face divine; and his own countenance was changed by the new expression that animated it, and the joy that beamed from it; until the neighbours could no longer tell whether this was really “he that sat and begged.” The consciousness of pardon changes the whole manner of being toward our God and toward our fellows; it introduces a regenerating principle into the very heart of humanity, REDEMPTION. 127 bearing upon our every relation. Left to ourselves, one selfish creature meeting another, we should have turned for ever in the same weary circle, for no change could come over the world without new motives, and all the motives that men could find in themselves had already proved their insufficiency during thousands of years. Mere increase of knowledge might teach men that it is their interest to do each other good, and so far make their selfishness more enlightened, but it could not remove that selfishness. The highly civilized Greeks and Romans loved their fellows as little as the most barbarous of their contemporaries, and never could have found any effectual motives to change. The world was about utterly to perish in its own corruption, when God wrought this new thing that made love possible, —that can kindle the sacred flame in every bosom. “Love is the only power capable of stirring up the world, of lifting it out of its worn track, repairing its evil, and bringing it back to the Divine way it had abandoned. A stranger to the world, Love came into the world to serve it, and by serving to subdue it, and by this conquest to vivify and finally to glorify it.” Men and their ways call out the partially good and partially evil principles that are at work in our nature; but when we meet God manifested in Jesus Christ, forgiving our sins, reconciling us to himself at his own cost, giving the soul the present possession of life eternal. Oh! there is a new thing here,—the power of God unto salvation, creating principles and motives that did not exist before within us. Now.we have learned to love God and man; let the whole world learn this truth and the whole world shall be friends, and the whole world shall be happy. So it shall! The knowledge of the grace and elory of Jesus shall cover the earth ; “men shall be blessed in him; all nations shall call him blessed;” and unborn millions shall be inconceivably happier than if the fall had never taken place, for it has become the occasion of draw- Dorner. Rom. i. 16. Psalm Ixxii. 17. Augustin. The gift of Christ the crowing work of creation. Prof. Owen. Agassiz. Dr. Harris: A. Gratry. 128 BOOK THE SECOND. ing out the all-suffering love of a Saviour God. O felix culpa, que talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem ! § 58. One of the most magnificent generalizations of mo- dern science is the doctrine that man’s physical being is the archetype, “ the ideal exemplar ” which vertebrated animals have been approaching throughout the many successive periods which have left their traces in the crust of the earth. “Man is the end towards which all the animal creation has tended from the first appearance of the first paleozoic fishes.” It may be said more generally still that the whole series of organic structures culminates in the type which attains its perfection in him. By his faculties, his moral being, his destination, by the Divine breath that animates him, he stands above and aloof from subordinate creatures; but physiologically he is an integrant part of the system of which he is the explanation and the highest term ; his or- ganization proclaims him a real member of that material creation which he so far surpasses, and which only exists for his sake. The mineral was made for the plant, the plant for the animal, and the animal for man. The laws and forces of pre-existing nature are not only summed up in his person, they are ennobled in his service, becoming the instruments of a free activity and a religious life, and thereby associa- ting the material world with the destinies of a godlike being. Man sets the seal of his high calling upon every element that he has borrowed from the inferior stages of creation. Physical laws and animal appetites become with him occasions of moral discipline, and instincts are trans- formed into affections. As we pass through the several levels of created existence we see the inferior regularly taken up into the superior, and subsisting in it. God raises the whole creation toward him- self by a succession of gifts, of which the last is always incomparably greater than all the preceding. Vegetable life REDEMPTION. 129 embodies itself in inert matter; animal life, again, is a new principle, associating with itself organs similar in kind to those of involuntary vegetative life, a new and higher nature dwelling within and penetrating the lower. At last, in man, this dumb, slavish, animal existence becomes the clothing and the organ of free, intelligent, moral being, capable of knowing, loving, and serving God. In virtue of the unity of creation there are such analogies and correspondences between all its parts that the lower strata suppose the upper, not as their product—for in that case nature would be a series of effects ever greater than their causes—but as pre-existing in the Divine mind. The lower may even be said to have foretold the apparition of the upper, but as prophecies that could only be understood after their accomplishment. Compared with inferior creatures man ig an end, created for his own sake, and not as a mean for the development of other existences. But man’s history and his aspirations prove him to be an end only in this relative sense. He cannot find the happiness he craves in the possession of the objects beneath and around him, neither does he possess the secret of it in his own bosom. The resources of the universe and those of his own heart are alike insufficient to satisfy his vast desires. “His being is without bound. Low as he now lies in evil and weakness, he is born to the good and the perfect.” There is an unspeakable divine significance, full of glory, wonder, and terror, in the existence of every man, This his insatiability is sometimes a sort of instinctive pursuit of happiness in pleasures of the senses, the in- tellect, or the imagination, in the exercise of a royal will, and the consciousness of moral greatness. There are “ aspi- rations and yearnings in him which soar beyond the ken of his understanding, and depths of thought and feeling which strike down below it.” So far as he does not interpret them K Thomassin, Emerson. T. Carlyle. Archd. Hare. Psa. viii. 6—8. See 3} 4. Ezek. 1. FE. D. Maurice See Havenbach. Dogmengesch. $ 1892. Third German Edition. 130 BOOK THE SECOND. to himself they may be compared to the instinctive upward striving of the inferior creation, and they are accompanied by the illusion that they can be satisfied here below. But when man understands himself he learns that this thirst after the infinite is to be satisfied in One above him: he is not made to meet the wants of a higher being, but to satisfy and to sanctify his own soul in communion with that high and holy One who has no need of him. God has given him these two gifts of creative grace—that he should be the Lord of all creatures, and that he should be the conscious, willing, happy servant of his Maker. It is his glory and his bliss to be dependent on his heavenly Father. Thus all things strive to ascend, and ascend in striving ; the sigh of all creatures goes up before God, each tending to- wards something greater and better than itself; man’s aspi- rations being the last utterance, and the explanation of all the rest. He is the voice of creation. When he seeks, the whole world seeks in him; when he finds, when he rises, the whole world finds and rises along with him. This was the mystery seen by the Hebrew prophet among the captives by the river of Chebar,—creation animated by immanent Deity, the winged cherubim moving at the will of the spirit that dwelt in the self-infolding fire, man ascending by the power of this spirit and exalting all the lower creatures with him. But was the ascent of creation to stop here? Was this union through humble imitation and adoring submission, had man attained to it, to constitute the creature’s nearest approach to the living centre of holiness and love? Many Christian thinkers of the middle ages, especially Wessel, Luther’s forerunner, boldly answer, it was not. The relation of the eternal Son to mankind seems to them of such a nature that he would necessarily have become incarnate in order to raise it to perfection, even if our sin had not called REDEMPTION. Fat him down to make atonement and to restore. They look upon Christ as the predestined centre of the human race irrespectively of its fall and ruin. They think there would have been an essential place left empty even in a sinless humanity, had there been no Christ to fill it, that he became our Saviour because he was already our Prince; “can we suppose,” they ask “that the human soul of Christ was a contingent creation: that in any sense he has to thank us for his existence?” ° "A philosopher of the present day, in a remarkable essay ? on the plan of creation, at this moment in process of publication, professes to find in the results of modern science ground for believing that the Lord stands in a natural relation to humanity, and through humanity to all creation. Dorner and Lange also incline to believe that the Word would have become incarnate, and been manifested in im- mediate glory if our sin had not determined his manifesta- tion in humiliation and suffering. Calvin contended against the idea. | Tt concerns us much more nearly to know what Christ has become for us sinners, than to ask what he would have been had our race remained true to its divine calling. We leave the speculative question without an answer, because Scripture has not provided any; but this at least is certain, that the Scriptural solution of the practical question does put the Saviour in what may be called a natural relation to the whole human race: in the pre-established harmony of things creation was so constituted as to leave room for the entrance of the Redeemer into it, and to give him the central ° St incarnatio facta est principaliter propter peccati expiationem, sequeretur, quod anima Christi facta sit non principali intentione, sed quadam Quast oc- casione. Sed inconveniens est, nobilissimam creaturam occasionaliter esse introductam. P Recherches sur le plan de lu création et la structure de Vdme. Par H. de Madiis. Paris, rue des saints-peres, 8. An English edition is an- nounced by Gould and Lincoln, Boston, Mass. Wessel. Ht. de Madiis. Calvin. Inst. bk. li. chap. xii. 3 4. Zwingle. Augustin. Thos. Aquinas. A. Gratry. Athanasius. Bonaventura. Thomas Aquinas 132 BOOK THE SECOND. place in its organism so soon as his presence became neces- sary; so that the manifestation of Deity in the world under the most perfect form of created existence, though an act of grace, and an act superior to natural order, was at the same time the accomplishment of natural order. Nothing so leads us by the hand, says Ulric Zwingle, to witness the assump- tion of humanity by the Son of God, as the contemplation of the first insertion of mind in stupid matter. “As man is a soul clothed with body, so Christ is the Word of God clothed with humanity.” The great circle is completed in Christ personally, as the crowning sumiit of creation, even the ex- altation of human nature and the consummation of the universe. The growing up of the creature towards the Creator ended at last in the sovereign—the personal union of actual incarnation, and after having given man every thing beside, the hour came in which God gave himself. Athanasius compares God to a wise master builder, who not only erects his edifice with all care, but takes precaution that if injured it may be easily repaired; our re-creation in Christ falls in with the original structure. Bonaventura employs the beautiful comparison of an artist who produces a work out of himself as nearly assimilated as may be to the exemplar in his mind. In this case the exemplar is a living one, the eternal Word, and the work is intended to know its own author, to love and honor him. Its vision has been darkened ; it has failed to raise itself above itself; but the living exemplar has stooped down into that nature which he originally called into being, that he might restore it and bring us back to our Father. Thomas Aquinas taught “it was supremely fitting that the Word of God should become incarnate, since he is the creative concept and the model of all creation. And as creatures are constituted according to their several kinds by their fleeting participation in this model, so it was fitting that through a union of the Word with creatures—no longer one of mere participation, but REDEMPTION. 133 personal —the creature should be repaired in order to its eternal and immutable perfection.” 4 Widely separated in place and in time from the great Neapolitan, and further still ecclesiastically, we find the lamented Hugh Miller expressing himself thus,—“ It speaks of the harmony and unity of one sublime scheme, that, after long ages of immaturity,—after the dynasties of the fish, the reptile, and the mammal should in succession have ter- minated,—man should have at length come upon the scene in the image of God; and that, at a still later period, God himself should have come upon the scene in the form of man; and that thus all God’s workings in creation should be indissolubly linked to God himself, not by any such mere likeness or image of the divinity as that which the first Adam bore, but by divinity itself in the second Adam; so that on the rainbow-encircled apex of the pyramid of created being, the Son of God and the Son of man should sit en- throned for ever in one adorable person.” § 59. The unity of God is not like that of finite beings, but embraces in its depths a plurality of persons. The Son is an image, not such as is reflected from a surface, but one re- producing all the glories and the actual personal subsistence of the holy Original_—an image not less real than resplen- dent, coequal and coeternal. The Father eternally aspires after the perfection of his own being, and eternally possesses it in the Son. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “The bright- ness of his glory, the express image of his person.” The Son is the Supreme Revelation of God to all intelli- gences in heaven and in earth, the manifestation of him 1 Convenientissimum fuit personam Filit incarnari, quia verbum Dei, qui est conceptus creantis Dei, est similitudo exemplaris totius creature. Lt ideo sicut per participationem hujus similitudinis creature sunt in propriis speciebus institute, sed mobiliter, ita per unionem verbi ad creaturas, non participatam, sed personalem, conveniens fuit reparari creaturam in ordine ad eternam et immobilem perfectionem.—Summa. q. 1., art. 8. Hugh Miller. The purpose of creation exhibited in Chrisi. Lessing. Johannes Hrigena. John i. 1. Heb. i. 3. Lim avalos ¥F. Godet. See ¢ 4. W. A. Butler. F. Godet. John xvii. 1. 134 BOOK THE SECOND. who dwelleth in light unapproachable ; but the term Word is doubtless meant to express an eternal relation in the bosom of Deity itself, and not one conditioned by creature existences. THE Worp is in the first instance God’s eternal affirmation of all that he thinks, and wills, and loves,—of all that he ¢s,—his eternal expression of himself to himself; and it is thus that the Word becomes, in the next place, God’s expression of himself to created intelligences. He shines abroad, because he is first filled with light ; he gives, because he has first received. Man was called to nothing less than the being, in time, and within the limits of creature and finite powers, the re- production of that which the Son had been throughout eter- nity. He was to be the distant echo of the Divine self- affirmation,—a second and fainter rainbow or segment of a rainbow round the throne. God’s own excellence and hap- piness were the type of the excellence and happiness of his creatures. That ineffable relationship of the everlasting Father and Son was the model of our relation to God, as well as of that relation to each other which constitutes all the rest, and is meant to be “the counterpart, and symbol, and memorial of the heavenly.” The work of creation would have been completed by man’s self-determination to holy obedience; the fall was therefore an interruption of the process at the point at which the creature itself had been summoned to work with God for its own completion. The Incarnation was the resumption of that work: the Word came to realize in Jesus, under the form of human existence subject to the law of development, that relation of filial de- pendence and communion which he realized in heaven under the immutable form of Divine life. In so doing he became the man whom God had sought and whom Adam had refused to be. When he says “ Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son ;” that is no selfish prayer: the glory of Christ was to be that of the Father, and of humanity, and of creation. REDEMPTION. 135 God willed the existence of man in order that there should be creatures of earth capable of enjoying him and repro- ducing his image, and this was exhibited in the person of Christ first, in order that it might be accomplished in us afterwards. We cannot know or ignore separately these two things: the sublimity of our destination and the wretched- ness of our present condition. They help us to measure each other, and they are both to be learned by the contem- plation of Jesus. His filial submission, communion with and holy joy in God, teach us the sublimity of our calling, as his tears and premeditated agony hold up our wretched- ness before our eyes ; so that a lesson which could otherwise work only humiliation and terror, becomes in him a blessed and saving attraction to God. “We know not the truth of humanity, we only know its perversion while we are living the life of self and enmity, and are as Gods to ourselves...... Apart from Christ we know not our God, and apart from Christ we know not our- selves ; as, indeed, it is also true that we are as slow to ap- prehend and to welcome the one revelation as the other,— as slow to see man in Christ as to see God in Christ.” The higher life of every being is its true hfe: we only know a plant when we have seen its flower and seed. Again, we only understand the inferior through the superior, nature through man, and man through Christ. “What man was designed to be first appeared as a reality in him; and his divine perfection was the promise of what would be given by Divine grace to those who received him, and be a reality in them also.” Thus it is in him only that we can study the whole depth and mystery of our being, in its wondrous powers, capacities, and aspirations. Jesus has glorified the world to be God’s sanctuary, by living in time has hallowed it, and consecrated its simple occurrences to be symbols of life eternal. We triumph over nature, but he teaches us that we are ourselves greater than all its wonders, and that Macleod Campbell. J. H. Godwin. H. Bushnell. The purpose of Creation carried out by Christ. John xvii. 21—26 136 BOOK THE SECOND. there is a submission which makes us greater than all our triumphs. § 60. We are made to be happy, but we are made also to find that happiness in the love of God and of our fellows. A deathless instinct prompts us to pursue some shadow of happiness, and authorizes self-love, and yet we have no self that we can or dare love; and so far as we are conscious of what we should be for God and for our fellows, self-love must be a cause of torment and self-contempt. All these contradictions disappear when the one Head and Brother of us all has taught us to see in him our other self, and made it easy for us to love a reconciled father, and set us once more in the unity of a common life, and enabled us to feel that it is our glory and blessing to be like himself, to obey God and to serve our brethren. Humanity is raised to a higher character by its union with the Divine in Christ; the temple is more sublime, but the architecture is of the same order, and all the magnifi- cence that has been added is in conformity to the original structure. When we give ourselves to Christ, the life upon which we enter is in no respect foreign to our original con- stitution ; on the contrary, we then first begin to become what we should have been from the first. The purpose of Redemption reaches farther than the restoration of men to their normal type, but this is included under it. It was not an expedient to fill the place of a creation which had failed, for the Son became earnestly and sincerely a part of that old creation, in order that it might not finally: fail, and his work in us in time and eternity is the re-establishment— the bringing to perfection—the glorious transformation of the primitive conditions and relations of the creature. Jesus loved to call himself the Son of man; he came not to de- stroy but to fulfil the laws of our constitution ; he came not to buy but to buy back his bride; hence the re that is ever occurring throughout the Christian vocabulary, re-concilia- REDEMPTION, Loy. tion, redemption, renewal, etc. He came to seek the lost sheep and bring it back upon his shoulders rejoicing, be- cause it belonged to God, and he had not given up his right over it, nor his loving purposes towards it. Man is not a foundling who meets with an adoptive Father, he is a pro- digal son who finds himself in the arms of his true Father. If we take away the sense of the primitive relationship we destroy the meaning and the rapture of that reconci- lation. False and perverted human nature is subject to vanity, and at enmity with God; but as the conscience is enlight- ened it begins to recover its primitive affinities; as the spirit of Christ directs and strengthens the will, he quickens the true man in each of us, and renews the almost obli- terated image of the Creator, and the disfigured features regain their expression never to be lost again. In this re- spect the human soul has been compared to those precious manuscripts of which ignorant copyists had effaced the characters that they might use the parchment for some worthless writings. A Divine chemistry brings out the primitive text once more, and the sublime readings of a primordial Gospel can be traced distinctly under the vulgar stuff that overlays them. As Basil says, “The dispensation of God and our Saviour towards man is the recalling of him from the fall, and his return into the friendship of God from that alienation which sin had caused.” And Jeremy Taylor—* The parts of our religion are but pursuances of the natural relation between God and us.” When the creature loves God the purpose of creation has been accomplished: God has become all again after consen- ting for a while not to be so; he has found means to make us will his glory and our own bliss. The original plan of creation has thus been carried out and vindicated by Redemption. The truth of humanity, banished by a falsified and corrupted nature, has been re-established in its rights, Luke xy. 3—7. v. 11—22. Rom. viii. 7, 20. Eph. iv. 23, 24. Col. iii. 10. Ad. Pictet. Basil. Jeremy Taylor. P. Goy. Apoe. vil. 9. Luke xiv. 23. The primordial apinity of human nature with Divine Word. the 138 BOOK THE SECOND. and man has been restored to himself by the new life that has given him to God. - .Jesus Christ came to be what we were not, and to do what we could not. He has been the only real man in the world’s history hitherto ; and those alone in whom he lives and works are growing into manhood. There is good reason to hope that when the ages shall have run their course, and the innumerable multitude of the saved from all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, shall stand before the throne, they will be found to constitute the immense majority of human beings born into the world. The Father's house shall be filled. However, those who remain finally insensible to the appeals and the attraction of Jesus Christ do thereby forfeit their place in redeemed humanity, and fall short of the human calling; they cannot interrupt the Divine purpose of filling that house with redeemed and glorified children, but they can shut themselves out from it. The heart of Jesus bleeds over them more than any crea- ture compassion can, but it must be in the very presence of the Supreme Love from, which they turn away, that their ruin will be most clearly seen to be righteous and inevitable. § 61. Greek speculation used the term )oyos for the idea of ideas, the universal reason of things, the sum of concep- tions constituting the intelligible, and therefore the eternal pattern of the visible universe. The theology of the ancient Persians, so far as we understand it, seems to have used an equivalent term for the ideal in the mind of the Creator: The Word was the ferver of Ahura-Mazda. The Jewish teachers of Egypt on the one hand, of Babylon and Palestine on the other, were variously influenced by these different schools of thought, and combined the ideas thence suggested with elements already furnished by the Scriptures. They wished to spiritualize the anthropomorphisms of their sacred books, lest the worship of Jehovah should degenerate into a coarse idolatry. They shrank for the same reason from admitting ‘REDEMPTION. 139 immediate communications of God in person with the patri- archs, and therefore distinguished Jehovah himself from the mysterious angel of his presence, with a precision greater than the text admitted of. They found the Creative Wis- dom partially personified in the book of Proverbs, and the Word of the Lord treated generally as the agent of creation and providence. The speculative and theosophic turn of the Rabbis worked up these several elements into the no- tion of an intermediate principle of creation, revelation, and theocratic manifestation, which they called the Word of Jehovah. They only attributed to this Being a sort of shadowy personality, but did not the less believe that the link between the entire creation and the secret inscrutable being of God was to be found here. These theories and this terminology had nothing to do with the statements of the Lord as to his own pre-existence, and oneness with God, and his right to be the object of our faith and adoration. It was the spectacle of what Jesus was and did that led the Apostle John to fasten upon the term doyos as peculiarly appropriate to him. It is as though John turned to these Greeks with their busy intellect, and to these Jews with their reverence for the letter, and said to both together,—“ This unknown intermediate being be- tween God and the world, whose existence you have sur- mised and are in vain seeking to grasp by your philosophi- cal speculations, or your exegetical subtleties, we have heard him, seen him with our eyes, contemplated leisurely, touched him with our hands. Jesus is that Word of life whom you are ignorantly feeling after.” This application of the term Word is grounded in the very being of Christianity. It proceeds from the consciousness of the organic union of creation and redemption in Christ,—a truth which Paul held as strongly as John, though he did not lght upon the same expression. To call Christ the Word, is to say that he is the prototype and spiritual prin- Gen. xvi. 7, 13. Xxxii. 28, 30. Isa. lxiii. 9. Prov. viii. 22-31. Psa. exlvii. 15. Isa. ly. 11. nt Ko) ohn ey eee Col. i, 12—20. Tertullian. Jerome. Guizot. Eph. ii. 1. Chrysostom. Novalis. Augustin. F, D. Maurice. Pilato. Timeeus, xvi. 140 BOOK THE SECOND. ciple of human nature; that, as Tertullian says, man was animated of his substance,—or, as Jerome puts it, that there is nobody who does not contain something of Christ within him at his pirth,—or, as a venerable Christian statesman wrote but yesterday, that man is an incomplete and imper- fect incarnation of God. False systems begin by flattering man and end by think- ing meanly of him; with Christianity it is the opposite ; it pronounces him dead.in trespasses and sins, because it alone takes account of God’s thoughts concerning him, of the glory to which he was called, and to which he is begotten anew. On the Christian scheme man is consubstantial with the Divine Word, related to him as the imperfect to the perfect image of the Father; whatever truth, justice, wisdom, love, whatever moral and intellectual excellencies exist among men, participate in a minor degree of the nature of the Word. “Man is the true shekinah,”—a revelation in the flesh. “Too late have I loved thee,” exclaimed St. Augustin after his conversion: “too late have I loved thee! O beauty so an- cient, and yet so new! And thou wast within me, while I was away from myself, and sought thee abroad. Thou wast with me, and I knew it not.” The Word is the light of nature, the light of grace, and the light of glory. “If there is not some one beneath ourselves—the ground of all that we desire and believe and are, the spring of our hopes and the consummation of them, the fountain of all love in every life is a very miser- creature and the satisfaction of its love able sleep, full of turbulent broken dreams, mixed with a strange dread of awakening.” » Plato represents the artificer of the universe as commis- sioning inferior Deities to create man, because beings be- gotten by himself and receiving life directly from him, would not be mortals, but “equal to the Gods.’ Wondrous inspiration this, at the very moment that it betrays its im- capacity to estimate the immensity of the ocean to the shore REDEMPTION. 141 of which it leads us! Wondrous glimpse of realities too grand and glorious even for this great heart to conceive without revelation! Had Plato wakened from the dust four hundred years later, he might have heard at Ephesus, on the opposite coast of his own sunlit Aigean sea, one teaching in his own tongue, with a mind singularly akin to his own, but brought up at a higher school ; and John would have taught him that the Divine Word was in the beginning with God, in the bosom of the Father, before all worlds,—the eternal Son; because the filial relation alone unites the ideas of sub- ordination and equality; and John would have added that the Word did really create us himself, and communicate to us a spark of his own Divine Life, that we might be immortal and Godlike, and, in the measure possible for finite exist- ences, share his own glory, and lie in his bosom as he in the Father’s. Like is known by its like. He has raised up children of the stones. According to John the Life was the light of men from the moment that there were men upon earth. It shone amid our darkness. Every faint ray that penetrated the antedi- luvian and the pagan night issued from it. That True Light shone in every man; it came into the world through every divine testimony felt in the heart, before it became visibly incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. His first coming like his second was continuous and invisible, until he stood amongst us “God manifest in the flesh.” Then the new era opened in the intercourse of man with heaven. The change was such “as would have struck the eye of an observer of nature, had one lived on our planet at the time when the sun was first set in the firmament. The light which before had been a wide and level mystery, now had to his eye a law, a centre, and a spring.” This primordial homogeneity of human nature with the Word was the condition of the real organic union effected in the Incarnation. That man should have been made in the John i. 2, 18. John i. 4, 5. v. 9, 10. JL Alibent, srbe, G. W. Arthur. F. Godet. Hugh Miller. 142 BOOK THE SECOND. image of God was a meet preparation for God’s after assump- tion of the form of man. It secured a stock possessing the necessary affinity with the Divine graft. And contrariwise the fact of the Incarnation involves a sort of secondary di- vinity, a mysterious capacity of receiving and containing Biblical Review. Deity, latent in human nature. If our being “is, in the person of Christ, actually exalted above the angelic, it surely implies a primary superiority to the angelic. We cannot conceive of a nature permanently placed above its appro- Gen. ii. 20-24, priate condition.” When Adam found no help meet for him on earth she was drawn from his own sleeping side, and Eph. ii. 21-23. when the Son found amid the hosts of heaven no order of being worthy to share his glory there was one first created out.of his own fulness, and then ransomed by his agony. He will be the Omega because he is the Alpha; he will be after the world the head of a new spiritual creation, because he was before it as its ground and principle. A Sade ed Recent impugners of the pre-existence and Divinity of the Lord assume that the Divine and human consciousness necessarily exclude each other, so that a being who should become gradually conscious of his Divinity would in the same proportion feel himself less and less man. It is well that we should be thus reminded that the Incarnation sup- poses the Divine consciousness could identify itself with the human, as if Infinity made itself a centre coinciding with that of a finite circle. Morally, the Son could never become other than he is and has been from everlasting, but he was under no necessity of retaining without interruption the at- tributes of omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. Even the creation of free intelligences was already a self- limitation of Deity. How deeply rooted 1s the instinct which brings man to beheve himself of Divine race and destiny, to confound his existence with that of God, and, notwithstanding all his wretchedness, to seat himself upon the throne. The statues REDEMPTION. 143 of demigods and heroes once peopled the earth until every thing was god except God himself. This is the attractive element in all the dreams of Pantheism and false mysticism, religious or philosophical. Humanity in her troubled sleep has striven after glories that were to be hers in her waking hours; she has ever pursued the accomplishment of the fatal promise, “ye shall be as Gods;” and this is the Divine purpose concerning us likewise ; God gives us in his way the greatness that we have sought in our own. Thus as all pre- vious creation called for man, so every thing human called for and prefigured a Redeemer. Our instinct of greatness as well as our sense of sin and misery prophesied of Christ. This original relation between God and man is at the foundation of all true and effectual Christian apology from St. Paul and Clement of Alexandria, to Pascal and Vinet. It is the secret of the resistless charm which the contem- plation of the words, the works, and the cross of Christ ex- ercises upon every true, honest, and good heart. We might have known his Divinity by the sacrifices he required at our hands, but we recognize it assuredly—the very truth of his being and of our own—by his sacrifice of himself. Those words of life, those acts of grace, those promises and invita- tions, that cross—would have no meaning for us, but for the sparks that still smoulder under the ashes of our selfishness. _ Every thing that he said or did to condemn or to encourage us, or to reveal himself, finds its echo in the depths of the soul. Assertions of Divine claims over us and Divine yearnings towards us, such as the world had never heard until they issued from his lps, seem nevertheless not so much a something absolutely new as the reappearance of faintly yet fondly remembered features that had smiled upon our childhood." We do not individually remember a state of absolute in- * Et inhorresco, et inardesco. Inhorresco inquantum dissimilis et sum ; inardesco inquantum similis et sum.—St. Augustin. Gen. iii. 5. Luke. viii. 15. Of the incom- municable glory and Sonship of Christ. W. A. Butler. John i. 12. 144 BOOK THE SECOND. La nocence from which we have fallen, and yet our experiences and feelings are just what they should be had our fall been altogether personal, so that we implicitly recognize the unity of the race ; and we are equally prepared for a dispensation of atonement and restoration through that same principle of unity, for human nature is only too ready to put its trust in vicarious works and penances. § 62. Redemption is necessarily as much greater than creation as Christ is greater than Adam, as God incarnate is greater than the image of God. There is no proportion in degree between the blessings we have lost in Adam and those we have regained in Jesus Christ, though they are the same in kind. The honor that he has put upon our nature and the love that he has shown our persons alike surpass all creature con- ception. “At those majestic levees where he by whom the worlds were made surrounds his throne with the directing powers of the innumerable orbs he first summoned into being, amid the glittering millions that encompass him, the marvellous tale is whispered that the Sovereign of all that infinity of glory has yet a bond of special and thrilling ten- derness that links him with one little province in creation. Our names are spoken of with awe. The human heir of eternal life is regarded as something altogether peculiar and consecrated.” With the strong feeling of this truth many Greek and Latin Fathers (most of all Athanasius), some medieval writers (as Johannes Erigena), and some moderns (of whom Bunsen is one of the most eminent), go so far as to assert that Christ will finally make us altogether like himself, will in fact divinize man,—and some add, divinize the universe along with man. The assertion is not justified by Scripture, and is indeed positively inconsistent with it. It is just one of the vain attempts to which we are given to make amends for our in- capacity to raise ourselves up to the truth by strained and exaggerated statements of it. To as many as receive him REDEMPTION. 145 he gives power to become the Sons of God; they receive the adoption of sons, they are children of God, brothers and sisters and fellow heirs of Jesus Christ. However, in the highest sense of the words, he is and must eternally remain the “ONLY BEGOTTEN Son,” to whom every knee shall bow, whom all worlds shall everlastingly adore. Hooker delivers himself on this matter with his usual judgment and reve- rence : he says, “If we respect but that which is common unto us with him—the glory provided for him and his in the king- dom of heaven,—his right and title thereunto, even in that he is man, differeth from other men’s, because he is that man of whom God himself is a part. We have a right to the same inheritance with Christ, but not the same right which he hath ; his being such as we cannot reach, and our’s such as he cannot stoop unto. Furthermore, to be the way, the truth, and the life; to be the wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, resurrection ; to be the peace of the whole world, the hope of the righteous, the heir of all things; to be that Supreme Head whereunto all power, both in heaven and in earth is given: these are not honors common unto Christ with other men; they are titles above the dignity and worth of any which were but a mere man,—yet true of Christ, even In that he is man, but man with whom Deity is personally jomed, and unto whom it hath added those excellencies which make him more than worthy thereof.” And again, “ He which is in the Father by eternal deri- vation of being and life from him, must needs be in him through an eternal affection of love. His incarnation causeth him also as man to be now in the Father, and the Father to be in him. For in that he is man, he receiveth life from the Father, as from the fountain of that ever-living Deity which in the person of the Word hath combined itself with man- hood, and doth thereunto impart such as to no other creature besides him is communicated. In which consideration, like- wise, the love of the Father towards him is more than it can L Gal. iv. 5. iii. 26. Rom. viii. 15—17 Phil. ii. 10, 11. R. Hooker. R. Hooker. The new song before the throne. Apoc. y. 1-4. 8—10. Apoe. iv 11. 146 BOOK THE SECOND. be towards any other; neither can any attain unto that per- fection of love which he beareth towards his heavenly Father. Wherefore God is not so in any, nor any so in God, as Christ; whether we consider him as the personal Word of God, or as the natural Son of man.” § 63. When John, caught up in the Spirit, saw a throne set in heaven, and the book of human destinies in the right hand of him that sat upon the throne, no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was found worthy to open the book, neither to look thereon. John was weeping bit- terly, when lo, in the midst of the throne stood a Lamb as it had been slain, and he came and took the book. The Re- deemer, sought in vain elsewhere, is found in the midst of the throne; the resources of the wisdom and the mercy of God had been hidden in himself. “And when he had taken the book, the four living creatures and the four-and-twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints. And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof; for Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation ; and hast made us unto our God kings and priests; and we shall reign on the earth.” John had already seen, at the beginning of the vision, these representatives of the redeemed prostrate in adoration of the Almighty Author of all things: “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” But the thought of him who has filled the earth with beauty and plenty, and given us all our faculties and our immortal being, yea, and created multitudes of worlds and hosts of in- telligences, cannot inspire the same adoring gratitude as the one work of Redemption. There were no harps the first time, no vials full of odours sweet; but immediately upon REDEMPTION. 147 the manifestation of a Saviour upon the throne new means of celebrating his grace appear all around; the presence of the Lamb evokes the harps of God and an incense hitherto unknown. Creation was a first hymn to the glory of the Father, but the hymn of Redemption is a “new song,”—holier, sublimer than any strains that have ever filled the radiant throng with rapture ; because Redemption has changed the face of heaven,—it has exhibited God in a light in which his creatures could never have known him otherwise. John heard the voice of many angels in their turn pro- claim the glory of the Lamb slain. They stood around the redeemed of men, farther from the throne than they were, spectators only of the grace they celebrated. Finally, in ever widening circle, “every creature which is in heaven and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.” Then they who had first given the signal for the acclama- tions of the universe, met them with a responsive Amen ; and, overcome by the echo of their own songs of praise, fell upon their faces, and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever. Never had the Word so spoken as he did upon the cross, —never had like glory shone in the heavenly sanctuary,— never had God so shown himself to be love. The meanness of the creature saved at such a price only illustrated the more the Divine compassions, and a new halo encircled the throne when the Lamb appeared upon it. The moral glory of the Divine character is incapable of increase in itself, because it is infinite; but there are degrees in the creature’s apprehension of it, and now God had acquired a Apoe. v. 11, 12. Wiaedics new title, these two names are associated for ever in every — work of love, and in the praises of heaven: “The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them... and Apoe. vii. 17, Apoe. xiv. 4. xxi. 22, 23. sora, Bh, The late F. W. Robertson’s view of the atonement. F. W. Robertson 148 BOOK THE SECOND. God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes... .First-fruits unto God and to the Lamb... .The Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it....The glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof....The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it,” etc., ete. Nott A. However strange the fact may appear to those more favourably situated for keeping up with contemporaneous English literature, the remarkable sermons of the late Mr. Robertson, of Brighton, did not fall into our hands until the preceeding pages had been printed. The sympathy we feel for the gifted and lamented preacher as a man—our admiration for his character, and for his teaching as a Christian moralist and exegete—our reverence for his piety,—these are all so many reasons for pointing out the extent to which we believe his conception of the central fact of Redemption is theoretically defective. M. Robertson, whenever he approaches the great question of the atonement, exhibits a want of precision of thought which is very unusual with him. He may be said to vacillate between the various theories which have been treated as inadequate in § § 34 — 36, He says that the law of sacrifice pervades all nature: the de- struction of the mineral is the life of the vegetable ; the anguish of the mother is the condition of the child’s birth ; conquerors pass over the bodies of their noblest comrades who died that they might win ; all the life of God is a flow of this Divine self-giving charity ; creation itself is sacrifice. The highest man, he continues, recognized this law, and, voluntarily obeying it, became a sacri- fice and not a mere victim. This is all true, but it isnot enough. As has been already urged, every sacrifice that nature claims is necessary to accom- plish a given purpose. Mr. Robertson himself confesses that “ self-denial for the sake of self-denial does no good ; self-sacrifice for its own sake is no religious act at all... .Sacrifice alone, bare and unrelieved, is ghastly, unnatural, and dead.” There must therefore have existed some pre-established necessity for the sacrifice of Christ ; it must have had some positive special end that could not have been effected, or at least so well effected, without it. Now, no adequate end for such a sacrifice has been suggested by Mr. Robertson: Christ’s death sealed the REDEMPTION. 149 identity between religion and goodness, but his life had already sufficiently done so. He was the martyr of spiritual religion, and of a testimony against Jewish exclusiveness, but there was no peremptory necessity that his testimony should be unto blood; and it would have been utterly incongruous with the glorious privilege of martyrdom that, in the most illustrious instance, it should have been attended with inward horror and heartshrinking. He died in order that the spirit of his life and death might pass into us, but a Moses and a David could become the religious guides and examples of their people without this final ignominy and agony. Indeed, such a mighty fact in the life of the uni- verse, as God’s becoming incarnate, is inconceivable, except for some end altogether beyond creature powers of endurance or accomplishment: he who would reduce the atonement to a martyrdom, even were it worth all other martyrdoms put toge- ther, should in consistency reduce the person of Christ to a finite value, to be measured by that of other beings put together. We know that minds who have time to work out the conse- quences of inadequate theories of the atonement, and who are not restrained by an instinct of reverence stronger than the want of logical consistency, do habitually come to this result. It may be freely admitted that there was something more or less contingent attending the minor events in the life and ministry of our Lord. It was necessary that he should manifest his glory ; but he might have done so in places and circumstances different from those fixed upon. It was necessary that he should reveal his Father’s purposes of love ; but other ears might have been privileged to hear the things that a Mary, a John, a woman of Samaria heard. Can the same admission be made with respect to the closing scene? Could the sacrifice of Christ have been omitted, or something different substituted for it without aban- doning the whole purpose of his mission and incarnation? Every inadequate view would admit of answering—ZJ¢ could, but we trust Mr. Robertson would never have allowed consistency to carry him so far. There may have been, for aught we know, that which was contingent in the form of our Lord’s death; but that which constituted the substance of the atonement was neces- sary, in the very highest and absolute sense, if there were con- sciences to be relieved upon earth, if there was to be a just God and yet a Saviour in heaven. ‘To suppose any other forms of doing or suffering could be substituted for the sacrifice of Christ, would be to suppose them its equivalent. F. W. Robertson Newman Hall. ¥. W. Robertson In $439—42, and 46—49. 150 BOOK THE SECOND. “The profound idea contained in the death of Christ is the duty of self-surrender. ...The pain, the blood, the death, were the last and highest evidence of self-surrender....We are redeemed by the life of God without us, manifested in the person of Christ, kindling into flame the life of God within us.” But the soul wants to learn more than the lesson of self-surrender for the present—it wants to atone for the past. There must have been upon the cross more than the will of a man perfectly coincident with the will of God, or it would only condemn us to shame and to despair. “If Christ’s sacrifice is not for me as an atonement it is against me as a testimony; if it does not cancel it only reveals my guilt. His self-surrender displays by contrast my self-indulgence... .Man needs a salvation which can reach him when helpless in sin and sorrow, which stoops down to his lowest estate, which gives him power when without strength, which tells him of reconciliation while he is still an enemy of God.” To represent Christ as the ideal man, explaining us to ourselves, putting into words and into speaking acts the feelings and emo- tions, the thoughts and aspirations that are struggling for utter- ance within us, is to state a most important part of the truth ; and it would not be possible to do this with more heartfelt earnestness and attractive simplicity than Mr. Robertson. There is, he says, “an almost boundless joy in acquiescing in the life and death of Christ, recognizing it as ours, and representing it to ourselves and God as what we aim at....There, that is my reli- gion—that is my righteousness—what I want to be, what I am not—that is my offering, my life as I would wish to give it.... My Saviour, fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my clumsy hand has drawn of divine life, with the fulness of thy perfect picture. I feel the beauty which I cannot realize.” The one thing wanting in this beautiful passage is the con- sciousness that Christ’s sacrifice accomplished the adequate self- condemnation, as well as the holy submission at which we should aim, and therefore satisfied God’s displeasure against man’s sin, as well as God’s claim upon man’s filial obedience. We have already expressly guarded against the low and superficial views too gene- rally encumbering this doctrine, and the exaggerated recoil from which is the secret of the fatal omissions in the theology of Mr. Robertson, and of some other generous minds. We have freely granted that God can have no pleasure in the blood of the righ- teous merely as blood-shedding—that agony as such could only satisfy a Moloch—that expiation must be both human and moral REDEMPTION. lol —that the penal retribution which we have undergone in the person of Christ, and in which we are now called to acquiesce by faith, can be recognized as our passion only in virtue of a real relation between his person and ours. We are ready even to add, that, separate acts of sin being but the manifestations of one wide-reaching principle, there is no positive Scriptural evidence that all the particular sins of all mankind were present to the mind of the Lord upon the cross, as though they were his own. But after taking all these precautions against mis-statement and over-statement, the fundamental fact remains—that we feel our- selves, guilty as well as weak,—that the conscience craves forgive- ness as well as the power to change, and that these cravings are met in the Gospel while they are overlooked in the scheme before us. The soul should see in Christ not merely the life she would offer to God, but the death she should have died. If Jesus only died for our sins in this sense, that he waked up the rage of in- justice, hypocrisy, and falsehood—that he fell a victim to the evil dispositions that are at work in our own bosoms—then he only died through our sin like any other righteous sufferer—any other martyr for truth and goodness: but, no! “ Zhe Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Evil, Mr. Robertson rightly tells us, “can only be crushed by suffering from it ;” but he does not observe that the suffering is twofold: there is the struggle to get free, and there is also the necessity of doing justice upon ourselves; the fangs of the cocka- trice torture as well as paralyze. Reconciliation issues in the dis- cipline of a new life, but it is based upon atonement,—the heart breaking under the sense of Divine abandonment. Evil is crushed in principle and as a whole in the penal sufferings of Christ, before it is crushed in detail in his disciples by the discipline of remedial suffering. The Divine propitiation places us in a new condition as a means of developing in us a new character. St. Paul says, “if one died for all then did all die,” and Mr. Robertson’s own comment is, “ What Christ did for humanity was done by humanity, because in the name of humanity.” This is afterwards unfortunately qualified by the assertion, that, since a truly vicarious act implies and acknowledges the principal’s duty of performance, the Lord’s sacrifice is not to supersede ours, and we are still under obligation to die the sort of death he died for us. Now, there is a sense in which Christian life is a per- petual repetition of the sacrifice of Christ,—we must know the fellowship of his sufferings, we must bear our cross; but the Isai. li i. 6. 2 Cor. v. 14. Rom. viii. 1. John x. 15. F. W. Robertson 1 Cor. xy. 17, 152 BOOK THE SECOND. very first step of this via dolorosa should be taken with the con- sciousness of forgiveness through the blood of his cross. He does not offer first to raise us up out of our sin and thereby indirectly out of its penalty, he begins by absorbing into himself and can- celling the penalty, in order to be able to raise us afterwards out of our sins. His death is to be repeated in us as regards our sympathies, but not in its proper specific value. His offering up of himself once, supersedes the sacrifice which is out of our power in order to quicken us to perform the sacrifice which is within our power. He was our substitute in the same sense as when some mailed champion of yore came forth to do battle for the weak and helpless: we fought and conquered in his person, and faith exempts us for ever from venturing our weakness into that dread conflict. The struggle that ever recur- ring sin continues to produce in us is carried on in altered cir- cumstances : “ There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” The sermon on Zhe Good Shepherd, preached March the 20th, 1853, very near the close of the author’s ministry and life, contains a statement of the doctrine of the Atonement more satisfactory in its terms than any of his other published sermons. Quoting the passage, “I lay down my life for the sheep,” he proceeds,— “ Here is the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice: sacrifice of one instead of another : life saved by the sacrifice of life. “Most of us know the meagre explanation of these words which satisfies the Unitarians ; they say that Christ died merely as a martyr, in attestation of the truths he taught. “ But you will observe the strength of the expression which we cannot explain away, ‘I lay down my life for,’-—v.e., instead of ‘the sheep.’ If the Shepherd had not sacrificed himself, the sheep must have been the sacrifice. “ Observe, however, that the suffering of Christ was not the same suffering as that from which he saved us. The suffering of Christ was death. But the suffering from which he redeemed us by death was more terrible than death. The pit into which he descended was the grave. But the pit in which we should have been lost for ever, was the pit of selfishness and despair. “Therefore St. Paul affirms, ‘If Christ be not risen, ye are yet in your séns.’ If Christ’s resurrection be a dream, and he be not risen from the grave of death, you are yet in the grave of guilt. He bore suffering to free us from what is more than suffering— REDEMPTION. 153 sin: temporal death to save us from death everlasting ; his life given as an offering for sin to save the soul’s eternal life.” This passage, taken simply as it stands and without any con- troversial pre-occupation, should apparently satisfy every orthodox reader ; yet those previous deliverances on the same subject which we have been criticizing, make it probable that Mr. Robertson did not mean to extend the effects of Christ’s sacrifice beyond the production of a moral effect upon our disordered nature. He probably continued to contemplate Redemption as taking place exclusively within us. It is not the less remarkable, however, that a mind so eminently straightforward and truthful, should express itself at such length in language adjusting itself, through- out, to a doctrinal conception which it had repudiated. May there not have been an unconscious completing of a defective theology by the undercurrent of Christian instincts? In any case, every reader will have understood that we have criticized Mr. Robertson’s theology so freely just because we do not presume for one moment to sit in judgment upon his faith. Or rather, we would say of him as Paul did of Philemon,—he is one the com- munication of whose faith becomes effectual, by the acknowledg- ing of every good thing which is in him in Christ Jesus. Philemon 6 ook the Chird. Appropriation of Redemption. Necessity of @ § 64, EVERY man is now in a natural and involuntary rela- personal appro- Abad “e- tion to Jesus Christ; but if the virtual justification of the human race is to be made actual for each of us, we must enter into voluntary relationship with him; there must be marriage as well as brotherhood. That our personal appro- priation of Redemption should be needed is a consequence of the same law which made Redemption itself necessary. We have seen that God could not welcome man to his bosom so long as he was unable to measure his ingratitude and un- willing to return to his allegiance. To do so were to violate the order of the universe without benefitting the sinner ; for, in heaven or out of heaven, the happiness of every moral and intelligent being must be in proportion to his fellowship with God. Hence even after the race collectively has been brought into a new standing before God, its individual mem- bers must be won successively, and may remain indifferent or hostile, voluntarily excluded from their share in the new prerogatives of the human family. Redemption is not ef- fectual until the soul has been brought into vital union with the Saviour, and learns to feel and to respond to his sur- passing kindness, claiming its portion in him as he claimed his in us, consenting to meet God in him as God met us in him. On any other terms it would be a mechanical salva- tion, and a mere outside painted heaven. When the Israelite led his victim to the altar he laid his hands upon its head, figuratively loading it with hig sins; APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 155 our victim has anticipated us, and taken the burden upon himself. Jt is for us now to ratify what he has taken upon him to do, which is the work of faith. “So that faith be- comes an integral part of the atonement, just as the laying on of hands, under the old covenant, belonged to the act of sacrifice.” When I believe in Jesus Christ, I have chosen him for my representative. The work begun in the depths of the Divine mind and manifested on Golgotha, is only per- fected in the conscience of the sinner attracted to the light and laying hold on his forgiveness. A missionary relates that on one occasion when he read the history of the cruci- fixion to a congregation of South Africans, a man started up and exclaimed wildly, “Jesus Christ, come down from that cross, and let me be put there!” The poor Bechuana made the death of Christ his own, and realized it in his conscience. This.was as it should be; we recognize our solidarity with Christ, and the human soul, another and an immortal Cal- vary, becomes a place of terrors and of reconciliation. If the conscience be the mirror of God, whatever is consum- mated in the mind of God concerning us must be repeated there. If the conscience had, ike God himself,.to require satisfaction in order to exercise grace, then the mystery of Redemption must also be accomplished in its subject. Man receives pardon and bestows it upon himself; and as in God mercy cost holiness nothing, but confirmed it, so in man the claims of God are strengthened by the grace received. God offers his grace without imposing it, he solicits our free acceptance of it without constraining us. He is love; he wills our perfection, and therefore he requires our love, be- cause it is our bliss to love him. He wills our good without forcing us to attain it, because that to which we should have been constrained would no longer be our good. It was as free beings that we were to give ourselves to God at the first, and it is still as free beings that we are summoned again to yield ourselves to God in Christ. We are besought F. Godet. Casalis. W. A. Butter. 2 Cor. v. 19. The Holy Spirit. 156 BOOK THE THIRD. to become fellow heirs of the Son of man, “on the one con- dition of turning to him in simplicity and obedient love; that is,—besought to be happy hereafter, on the sole condition of being in the purest and deepest sense happy now.” God has come nearer to us than in creation; he solicits us by stronger motives; the barrier of guilt and condemnation that separated our soul from him lies broken and prostrate. He does not merely tell us that salvation is possible, or that he is willing to forgive,—the Gospel says more than that ; nor does he tell us that he has actually forgiven, as a transaction past and completed,—the Gospel does not go altogether so far; he tells us that he forgives, that he is in the act of pronouncing the pardon which needs but our Amen to be valid, and that no legal righteousness is necessary to make out a title to it, nothing whatever done by or wrought in the man, not even evangelical affections, except the faith that embraces it. § 65. And now the practical question presents itself :— will men ratify God’s forgiveness, and make their Rhedemp- tion real by casting themselves upon his mercy in Christ, and by setting their seal individually upon what passed in the soul of their blessed representative ? The Bible says that, if left to their own resources, they would not. They are too utterly fallen from righteousness to be finally and effectually attracted by any manifestation of God whatever. If the person of Christ were to remain without any internal contact with ours, confined within an exclusive incommunicable individuality, like that of other men, the spectacle of his death like the contrast of his life would only aggravate our guilt. But it is the prerogative of Christ to act immediately and directly upon other souls. In that holy, eternal, mysterious plurality of the Divine Being from which he had come forth, he himself as the Worp is the eternal image and revelation of all that the Father zs; the Spirit is the eternal agent of all that the Father APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. Loe does. The Spirit was the agent of all physical creation and renewal, acting upon every form of being according to the capacities which it pleased God to bestow upon that being. Both the physical and the spiritual worlds are submitted alike to his silent, mighty, all-pervading action; the author of our intelligence, speaking through our conscience, plead- ing with our will—he is that Holy One within us, deeper. than our own consciousness can penetrate, who looks upon us and loves us. There is not merely a Divine and immense force, in the bosom of which we are plunged, there is a mind enlightening ours, there is a heart sustaining ours. “Christ and the Spirit are complementary forces, and both together constitute a complete whole........ There was an inherent necessity that whatever supernatural movement for the regeneration of man might be undertaken, should include both a moral and an efficient agency ; one before the under- standing, and the other back of it, in the secret springs of the disordered nature; a Divine object clothed in beauty, and love, and justice, to be a mould into which the soul may be formed, the type of a Divine life in which it may consent- ingly be chrystallized; an efficient grace, working within the soul, preparing it to will and to do, and rolling back the cur- rents of retributive causes in it, opening it to the power of its glorious exemplar, and drawing it ever into that, and a life proceeding from it. Without the former before the mind, whatever is done within, by efficiency, would be only a work of repair,—a something executed, of whose way or method we should know as little as we do of health restored by hidden causes. The change would be merely physical, not any change of character at all, more than when the se- cretions of the body are changed. Without the latter— the efficient working—the model set before us in the Divine beauty of Christ and his death would find us dulled in un- derstanding, blurred in perception, and held fast in the penal bondage of our sins; approving the good before us only Gen. i. 2. Psalm. civ. 30. Job xxxiii. 4, XXxXii. 8. A. Gratry. H. Bushnell. Received by Jesus for himself and us. Gal. iii. 14. 2 Cor. iii. 8. F. D. Maurice. John in. 34. Coli 9: Matt. iii. 16. John i. 33. Luke iv. 14. Acts i. 2. Matt. xii. 28. Acts x. 38. Luke i. 35. iii.122. 158 BOOK THE THIRD. faintly, desiring it coldly, endeavouring after it, if at all, im- potently,—even as a bird might try to rise whose wings are cut.” § 66. The promise of the Spirit is put forth as the most obvious and characteristic promise of the Christian dispen- sation. Things take their titles from their essential character, and the religion of Jesus is declared to be the “ministration of the Spirit.” The very name of Christ “indicates that he was himself endowed or anointed with a Spirit; the preach- ing of his forerunner, and all his own preaching declared that he had received it himself, that he might bestow it upon his disciples then and in ages to come.” It was the prerogative of the Son of man to receive the Holy Spirit without measure. The Spirit had waited hitherto for a temple worthy of his presence, but now, in the holy nature of Jesus, there was room for the fulness of Deity, and in this his sinless human nature he became in a peculiar sense the subject of the agency of the Holy Ghost, at that great crisis of his life marked by his baptism. Thenceforward his thoughts, his words, his acts were suggested or accom- panied by the power of the Spirit dwelling within him. He said of himself that he cast out demons by the Spirit of God. Peter’s summary of his Master’s whole ministry is this :— “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.” If the question be asked why the indwelling of the Spirit was necessary for the man Christ, who was already the Son of God, no man can give an adequate answer, because the essential reason doubtless lies in those mutual relations of the Divine persons by which the Holy Ghost is the agent of Deity in all things. The Son’s assumption of human nature was accomplished by the Holy Ghost; the arming of that nature with the powers necessary for the work before it was also accomplished by the descending Dove at the baptism of APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 159 Jesus ; finally, the new life manifested in the Lord’s person at his resurrection was the operation of the same Divine Being. He was “quickened by the Spirit.” Thus the agency of the Holy Ghost was necessary, both to effect the incarna- tion and to carry out its results, capacitating the finite pro- perties of the Saviour to realize the glory for which they were created. It was by the incarnation of the Word that human nature became capable of such a gift. Father of the everlasting age, he inaugurated the new order of things in his own sacred person, elaborating for us those gifts and graces which could not have been directly conveyed to such as we are, as the mother’s breast does the nourishment which her infant could not otherwise partake of. Divine life as- sumed a shape in Jesus Christ which admitted of its being bestowed upon others; the organ of the race in his life and death, he re-acts upon the race by that which the Spirit takes from him and imparts to us. So that he truly receives the Holy Spirit not for himself only, but for the body of which he was to be the head ; that, dwelling in him and in his members, it might be the bond of union between them. He was anointed with the Holy Ghost, that the same holy fragrance might spread to us. As Barrow says,—“God in his wisdom hath appointed that so incomparably excellent a gift should be the reward of his obedience, the consequence of his triumph, the fruit of his intercession, an ornament of his royal estate, a pledge of his princely munificence.” The Holy Spirit is all this and more; he is the organ by which Jesus realizes his generic relation to the race, so that in his promises to the disciples we see the same operations alternately attributed to the Holy Spirit and to Himself. As the Lord finished his own work “through the eternal Spirit,’ so must it be perfected in the hearts of his people through the same Spirit; no longer under such forms of transient and sporadic afflatus as had been known previously, but immanent now through Jesus 1 Peter iii. 18. Isaiah ix. 6 Calvin. Athanasius. Is. Barrow. F. F. Astieé. John xvi. 14, 25. XVii. 26. Heb. ix. 14. Dr. Nevin. J. H. Godwin. John vii. 39. Comp. Acts xix. 2. Greek, Dean Stanley. John xiv. 16. Luke xxiv. 49. Acts 1. 4. Jchn i. 16. Ephkes. i. 23. The operation of the Holy Spirit. 160 BOOK THE THIRD. Christ in humanity itself, in the form and power of the new supernatural creation he had introduced into the world. “The Divine life, first manifested in Christ, was to be com- nunicated to them; the perfection first seen in him was to be produced in them.” Their holiness was to be the continu- ation of his; they were to be born again of the same Spirit that accompanied him to the cross, and that raised him from the dead. Hence St. John once says, “The Spirit was not yet (ovzw yap jv), because Jesus was not yet glorified:” that is, did not yet exist as the distributer of the perfected life of Christ. In the original Nicene Creed the Holy Spirit was said to proceed from the Father; the development of the Athanasian doctrine against the Arian Visigoths in Spain led to the ad- dition “and from the Son,” which was gradually adopted throughout the West during the eighth and ninth centuries, and became one of the pretexts for the disruption of the eastern and western Churches. If the statement be under- stood ontologically as applying to the abstract essence of Deity, the simplicity of the Greek creed is to be preferred ; if it be understood economically as applying to the Divine agency in the salvation of man, the Latins are not in the wrong. Prayed for by the Son, given by the Father, pro- ceeding from the Father, and from the Son in the new rela- tion in which he stood towards the Father and towards us, the Holy Spirit issues from the depths at once of Divine and of human nature, with powers derived from the incarnate and risen Christ, transmitting, not the incommunicable glory of the pure Godhead, but the graces of the man Christ Jesus. Thus in the revelation of the Divine Being called forth by our necessities, the Father is love absolute and original, the Son love seeking and meeting the creature, the Holy Ghost love working in the creature. Jesus restores the world by. his Spirit, as God created it by his Word. § 67. Jesus is represented as breathing upon his disciples - Se a APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 16] when he said, “ Receive ye the Holy Ghost;” and again as sending from above the promise of the Father, or the mani- fested miraculous gifts and powers of the same indwelling Spirit. The former act implied the new creation in the soul, the latter characterized the abounding energy of spiritual life in the founders of the Church for the first generation. The Holy Ghost descended upon Jesus himself in a bodily shape like a dove,—a complete organism, indicating the fullest personal indwelling. He descended upon the first Christians in the likeness of many cloven tongues of fire,—implying the distribution of his several gifts among distinct recipients. The tongue is man’s “glory;” this was therefore a meet symbol of the kindling and purifying of every capacity first to adore and then to proclaim abroad the saving grace of God ; it announced the presence of an all-conquering, all- uniting power of which man’s voice was honored to be an instrument : “man’s voice, God’s truth; man’s speech, the Spirit’s inspiration ; a human organ ; a superhuman power! ” The Pentecostal effusion introduced the religion of Redemp- tion into the world with the authority of a message from heaven. That which is essential, however, in the agency of the Holy Ghost, that for which he was sent from above and continues among men, is his work upon the heart; therefore the Lord confined himself to this when he spoke of the mis- sion of the Comforter in the long and ever to be remembered conversation with the disciples that preceded his arrest. St. Luke called his Gospel the treatise he made concerning “all that Jesus began both to do and teach.” He evidently considered the history of the first labors of the Apostles which he was about to enter upon to be the continuance of Jesus’ doing and teaching: and so they were. Every soul that is quickened here below to trust and love, every broken spit that is healed, every wayward will transformed, every faint heart made strong, is a fresh testimony from heaven that there is a living Christ upon the throne. M John xx. 22. Acts ii. 1—4. 1 Cor. xii. 11. Ps, xxx. 12. W. Arthur. Heb. ii. 4. John xiv., xv., Xvi. Actsi. 1. Viguiet. John xvi. 14, M. Matter. Matt. xi. 28. 162 BOOK THE THIRD. The Holy Spirit is an invisible preacher, who takes of the things of Jesus and shows them unto us; presenting motives for repentance, obedience, and gratitude, such as could not exist before the manifestation of redeeming love. He tempts us to good, renders decision easier, puts a softening divine attraction in the place of prevailing evil influences, and solicits to repentance. His operation is mysteriously pro- found, pervading and perpetual as human corruption itself. How the Divine mind can thus act upon our minds, visit the inner central loneliness, the solitude of the soul, touching its springs of thought and action, and renovating the will,— how all this can be, is the secret of God,—and may well remain so, since we cannot even understand how our own minds act upon the limbs that obey them. As the creation of the world would be inconceivable if it were not followed by the continuous action of the Creator upon it, so would the new creation in the Son of God be inconceivable, if it also were not followed by continuous action, by a permanent intervention in the world. The presentation to the intelligence of the truths to which the Holy Spirit would render the soul sensible 1s a necessary condition of his normal agency. He awakens the conscience to recognize the validity of the claims of God as they are as- serted by the religion of Redemption, and the genuineness of the type of perfection exhibited by Jesus, and consequently moves us to feel our own guilt and danger by the contrast. Again he lights up the features of our adorable Saviour with the compassion and the holy love that belong to them, and makes us feel the tenderness of his appeals. Through the Holy Spirit is Jesus perpetuated in the world,—present in all places, with all ages and generations; and his invitation, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” thrills through many a broken spirit to-day, as if it had but just fallen from his lips. Through the Spirit he pleads with every soul who understands the APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 163 Gospel, or even surmises its purport. By the sense of reality which the spirit of truth conveys he makes it impossible for such a soul to remain absolutely indifferent; it must be either attracted or repelled by the summons to put itself in contact with a Saviour God. And when it yields to the blessed attraction, wishes to love Jesus and to keep his words, the Holy Spirit comes and dwells within that soul, lends himself to its aspirations and takes part in them, so that even in inarticulate cries God can recognize the plead- ings of his own Spirit. He conveys the sense of pardon and adoption, teaches us to say, Abba, Father, and makes us participate in the feelings and sympathies, the peace and strength, the hopes and joys of our blessed Master,—mys- teriously fitted as they are to be communicated to the mem- bers, by having been first the living experience of the head. “He shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you,” so runs the promise ; “the truth which the Spirit shows to the soul is Christ’s truth; the graces which he imparts are Christ’s image; the joy which he sheds abroad is Christ's own peace. This other is not another; for Christ and the Spirit, like Christ and the Father, are one; and where the Spirit works his word is verified,—‘I in them and thou in me!’ How sublime this unity, so that the whole work of the Spirit begins with Christ. Christ is the object revealed ; Christ is the object reproduced; Christ is the object glorified.” § 68. The work of Jesus in the heart is called grace in the New Testament ; men are said to believe through grace, and the Holy Spirit is called “the Spirit of grace.” Xapis is a word much older that Christianity; it expressed joy, delight, —any charm or attraction in material objects, any thing in physical or mental gifts pleasant to look upon; lastly, a favorable and kindly disposition towards a definite person. The connection of these varied senses is a beautiful example of the ready instinct with which early races, in the exercise of the marvellous faculty of speech, caught hold of true re- John xiy. 23. Rom. viii. 26, 27. Vi LD: Dr. Cairns. Divine Grace and human free- dom. Acts xviii. 27. ° Heb. x. 29. Hom. iii. 5. Chavannes. Augustin. John viii. 34. Ephes. ii. 1. John vi. 44. Fenelon. Ernest Naville. 164 BOOK THE THIRD, lations between the moral and physical worlds. They felt that benevolence ministers delight first of all to him whom it animates, and that it is agreeable to witness; they under- stood beauty to be a meet symbol for goodness, and felt that easy graceful motion, suggesting freedom from restraint or incumbrance, is most appropriate to happy minds, and to those bent on kindly purposes. Similar uses of the corres- ponding Latin word, and of its derivatives in modern lan- guages, including grace, gracvous, etc., in our own, show the universal consciousness of this natural symbolism. Salvation is of grace because it is the fruit of the free, un- merited love of God in Christ; as it is written, “ being justi- fied freely through his grace.” And it assumes the shape of grace within the soul because it consists of peace, joy, love, and liberty. It is called by the same name as a purpose of love in the Father’s heart, and as a filial response in the heart of the poor sinner. Grace disengages our moral liberty, sets us free from the grasp of sin, that we may once more choose between the true God and the false,—between the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and our own selfishness. It is God’s pleasure to win our hearts not by constraining but by inclining them, bestowing upon us in the form of holiness the good to which our nature inclines in the form of happiness. St. Augustin says that man by abusing his free will lost both himself and it.’ It is certain that we are by nature the slaves of sin, and unable to break our chains, nay, “ dead in trespasses and sins,” and that none can come to Jesus except the Father draw him. But it is through the freedom which he revives that the Father draws him, it is by a moral suasion in harmony with man’s constitution. The pure and mild light of grace not only fills the open eye, it also opens blind eyes ; but it makes the blind see by restoring the proper organ for that function. “Humility is not the feeling of being 8 Homo libero arbitrio male utens et se perdidit et ipsum. APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 165 nothing, but that of being a free and a real power in a state of rebellion against its law. The work of restoration is not intended to bring the soul to a state of involuntary obedience, but to enable it, with a fulness of life, to will before all things the accomplishment of the purposes of Infinite Love. ro Ay Grace is no ecstasy in which personality is lost, but a strength that mans the faint and wavering will, raises it to its stature, sets it free, renders it triumphant; so that by a mysterious concurrence, the more God works in the man, the stronger the man becomes in himself; because the work of God is just the re-establishing in the creature of the primi- tive forces that suffered by the fall. The Christian soul does not pray to be annihilated, but to be strengthened.” The Helvetic Confession says, —“The regenerate, when they choose the good, do not only experience in themselves the operation of God leading to it, but they also feel that they act of their own accord with pleasure.” It proceeds to quote St. Augustin’s comment on the Scriptural statement that God works with us: it is only one who acts of whom it can be said that he is helped. In a similar moment of happy inconsistency the same father distinguishes between the bestowal of power and the exercise of constraint upon a will.’ “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves,” says the Apostle, “to reckon any thing as if it were of ourselves ; but our sufficiency is of God.” And again, “ Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working who worketh in me MUL. ys. “T follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.” He exhorts his brethren in these words,—“ Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” It seemed to him that the solemn thought that God Al- t Sed cum potestas datur, non necessitas utique imponitur......... ergo fides in potestate (est), quoniam cum vult quisque credit, et cum credit volens credit.— Aug. de spirit. et litter. x. Conf. Helv. cap. ibe; Augustin. 2 Cor. iii. 5. Col. i. 29. Phil. iii. 12. ii. 12, 13. J. H. Godwin. Grace does not act mechanically, but morally. 166 BOOK THE THIRD. mighty puts his own power at our disposal to accomplish his holy will within us makes our own responsibility all the greater. “There is not less obligation when a father employs argument and entreaty, rather than constraint and force, for the promotion of his child’s welfare. So men cannot be under less obligation to God for any good, because in its communication he has respect to the highest endowment which they receive from him.” § 69. Holiness supposes the exercise of freedom. We cannot believe in Christ at first, or become like him after- wards, unless our own will takes part in the work of God within us, and unites itself with the will of God. That is to say, grace acts morally, not mechanically ; it puts the as- sertion of our freedom into our own power, and woos us to our own everlasting good. Thus only are its fruits of real value in the sight of God, for neither in creation nor in Re- demption did he seek that mere mechanical accomplishment of his will which his material government of the world se- cures in its own sphere. The stars of the spiritual heavens must move willingly in their orbits. It is only because ex- ercises of choice are unlike all other changes that they are felt to be right or wrong, and that we recognize ourselves as the subjects of moral government. Leligious life is no ex- ception to this general character of human conduct, but rather its supreme exemplification; in its beginning and continuance it presents the highest possible series of moral acts. Our will belongs to us even more than our reason; the ideas amid which we move, and to which we are obliged to subordinate our faculties of knowing and thinking, are not of our own originating ; they proceed from a universal, eternal, immutable reason, that created and still sustains us and all things with us. The acts of the will, on the contrary, really belong to us, they proceed from ourselves. The conscious- ness of the reality of our will confounds itself with that of APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION, 167 our personal existence." It is through the will that we are in a subordinate sense creators. The will is the man. There- fore it was upon the will that God laid his lien by the sense of obligation, and it is the will that he now redeems, eman- cipates, and sways by the attraction of sovereign grace. Faith looks to God in Christ, and says, “I had never sought thee if thou hadst not first found me, I had never followed after thee if thou hadst not first loved me; and now I will what thou wilt, let my will be done within me since it has become thine; I am able to do all that thou art able to do in this heart that begins to beat for thee.” The working of the Spirit of God on the soul of man is the introduction of a power above nature, but which does no violence to our real nature, because the soul was made to be the sphere of that holy agency. The Lord opened Lydia’s heart, but had we been able to read in that heart as it opened we should have seen anxiety, astonishment, emotion, peace, gratitude, succeed each other, without anything forced or sen- sibly supernatural. And as love always thinks itself trans- parent, she did believe her feelings visible, and reckoned upon the disciples’ recognizing at once the reality of her faith. When Jesus said to the man with the withered hand, “Stretch forth thy hand,” the poor man could have replied that he was utterly unable to do so; he might with apparent reason have asked to be cured first without the co-operation of his own poor efforts, but the will to be cured cut short all speculative difficulties; he obeyed, “and his hand was restored whole as the other.” God wrought in and with his own honest effort, which had never been made without the healing power that called it forth. This lesson is repeated in-so many different shapes in the miracles of our Lord that “St. Augustin says in his confessions, tam me sciebam habere voluntatem, quam me vivere ; and in de civ. Dei, L. xiv., c. 6, voluntas est quippe in omnibus ; immo omnes nihil alind quam voluntates sunt. Acts xvi. 14. Vielen Luke vi. 40. John il. 7. roids, he Veo: Thos. Aquinas. Mark vy. 41. Luke vii. 14. Jobn xi. 43. Eph. i. 15. Mal. iil. 7. Acts. ti. 37—40. 2 Tim. 11. 24. Exod. xiv. &. EF. D. Maurice. 168 BOOK THE THIRD. he must have intended it to remain inseparably associated in our minds with the sense of his own power and will to save. Every work of healing or blessing is his doing, but then in such a way as to make it man’s doing likewise : the servants must fill the water-pots; the man born blind must wash in the pool of Siloam ; the cripple of Bethesda must get up and carry his bed, ete. Deus operatur in omni operant, says Thomas Aquinas. The very voice that reached the ear of the dead upon the bier and in the grave was a summons to an act. “Jehovah said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto Me? Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.” They had to fling themselves into the dark channel left by the retiring waters. The passage through the Red Sea was God’s work, and their own! “Return unto Me, and I will return unto you,” said the Lord of Hosts by His prophet. “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” asked Peter’s hearers, when their heart was touched; and he answered,—“ Repent... save yourselves from this untoward generation ;” yet repentance and faith are both distinctly called the gift of God. The solution of the apparent inconsistency lies in the fact, that the gift requires to be accepted. Jesus Christ is present ty His Spirit to enable us to do what were otherwise impossible. Repentance is volun- tary, as well as salutary; remorse is forced, as well as destructive. Remorse is importunate, repentance we cherish and entertain. “The sense of evil contains implicitly the pledge of a deliverance from it.” Self-condemnation is the last trace of freedom in fallen man, and the preparation for its restoration : it testifies to our primitive and real destina- tion, and to the gracious designs of our God, who has not given us up. We, who are obliged to live, think and act under the conditions of time and space; we cannot understand how God exists, knows, and acts independently of them; nor can any present revelation inform us on the matter, unless —_——- APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 169 it be accompanied by the creation within us of faculties other than those we possess. The problem transcends the limits of human thought. In the same way, there are many questions of which we can touch but one extremity,—see but one side: and though our only knowledge of agency is one of free agency, we are unable to represent to ourselves the manner in which the agency of human wills, as relative first causes and original springs of action, is adjusted to the agency of the absolute First Cause. This limitation of our faculties can never be pleaded as a reason for accepting as equally true two plainly contradictory propositions ; but it nfay become a reason for accepting, upon the authority of experience or revelation, facts, of which the reconciliation hes too high up or too low down for our present powers, so as to be surmised rather than understood. Now, this is really the case when Divine Grace and human freedom concur in the conversion of the soul. Nothing short of giving God the whole glory of the saving process can satisfy the religious conscience and the legitimate mysticism of faith ; and yet its subject is equally persuaded of his own moral freedom and responsibility: he knows that he is drawn, and not constrained,—that he has prayed for the grace he has received,—that he is only too capable of grieving the Holy Spirit—that his will is strengthened, and not supplanted by a foreign power acting within him; so that, unless theological prejudices have been instilled into him from without, he is not tempted to materialize that grace, or to suppose his own free service a mere passive obedience. Both these positions are true, if held together; both are indispensable to the Christian consciousness and to the glory of God,—for there is no glory in reigning over inert matter. The influence which the pleadings of some much-loved and honoured earthly friend may exercise upon our mind in some great crisis of life may be complex, subtle, and far- Luke xi. 9, 18 Ephes. iy. 30 Ed. Verny. LAO BOOK THE THIRD. reaching beyond all power of analysis. Everything leads us to believe that the influence of God the Holy Ghost is incomparably more intimate and more powerful, and reaches _ the man himself, below the feelings and motives that work with it, and yet that it leaves him more really free than the solicitations of the earthly friend. Here is a mystery indeed : —to describe it better, let us borrow the words of a late lamented servant of God :— “T have always observed that the voice of the Gospel excites, even in the most obstinate sleeper, at least that vague murmur of impatience,—that sort of sigh which the sleeper unconsciously allows to escape from him when the first sounds of morning life awaken around him. Ah! this slumberer was made to be alive and awake: this captive was born free,—a child of noblest birth, an offshoot of the race of God; and the voice that calls him is that of liberty, of his native land and home,—the voice of a brother speaking of his Father,—the very voice of the Father himself: and long as he may have lived in slavery, low as he may have sunk, he cannot be entirely insensible to the tones of that voice; they must fall upon his ear with a melancholy charm,—they must retain at least a painful fascination! What must be done to awaken altogether, and to set him really free? Can he be shaken out of that slumber? Can we scream into his ears? Shall we go with file and hammer to break his chain, and if he cannot or will not walk, tear him from his prison, bear him away in our arms, substitute a friendly for this hostile captivity? No! If one can be aroused by force from physical sleep or delivered from material captivity, it is otherwise with the sleep of the mind and with spiritual slavery. Without the conscience, without freedom, without will, without the act of the person, nothing is done in the kingdom of Spirit. An J will is the first step taken. Doubtless a Divine J will precedes it, but this Divine Jf will does not become the first step for man, APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. PRE unless that of man reacts upon it and works with it: from their mysterious contact issues the kindling-spark of the new life.” § 70. The co-existence and practical conciliation of Divine erace and human freedom are not only exhibited in conver- sion, but recur throughout the Christian’s career. Every act of patience, of submission, of self-devotion, of obedience, of faithfulness, supposes them both. Every time that Scripture speaks of conflict, or labour, of a cross to be borne, or work to be done, it summons us to a real human life, and yet it is the life of Christ in us; every step is of grace as much as the first, but they are steps that we take. Mysterious circle! yet one consisting of facts, and lived through by multitudes daily. The harmony of the Divine and the human is inex- plicable, but it is demonstrable. It does not lodge itself in the mind, like a phenomenon circumscribed within the limits of the understanding and that can be measured in every sense, but it commends itself to the mind as part of an harmonious whole which cannot be explained while we only know in part, but which must be, since every other hypoth- esis fails, and since—to borrow the words of Pascal upon another subject—the Christian is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to the Chris- tian. Every truth of which man is the subject has two poles, —two elements, which are only contrary in appearance, but complete and sustain each other. Hence the complexity as well as the unity of Christian life. The Christian reconciles those opposite elements within himself practically, though he cannot do so scientifically. We can only affirm for the present that science, were it attainable, would neither sup- press nor alter facts; the mean between these opposite truths would be error; their assertion in any sense that would suppose them partially applied and separable, would be mutilation; they must be reconciled in their integrity ; there must be a recognition of that reciprocal penetration See note B. And that, through the Chris- tian’s whole career 1 Cor. xiii. 9. 1 John iv. 19. John xy. 16. Gal. iv. 9. Repentance and conversion. 7 BOOK THE THIRD. by which each fills the whole common sphere without exclud- ing the other. The error of the Semipelagians consisted in the idea that there was on man’s side at least, a minimum of activity independent of grace. If God made ninety-nine steps to- wards man, they thought man made at least one towards God, altogether of himself; whereas, in truth, every thing from beginning to end is of God; and every thing is also of man; every step on the path of life from first to last, is taken under the attraction of grace, and man’s own agency can never be separated from that which quickens it. Neither does the co-operation of grace and of our slowly recovering free-will put them on the same level; grace is first, and grace is supreme. ‘“ We love him, because he first loved us.” “Ye have not chosen me,” said our Lord, “but I have chosen you.” The Divine element exceeds the human in the same proportion that the love of God does the love of man: that is, there is no proportion and no comparison between them possible. The little child may put its arms round its mother’s neck, but it is the mother that carries the child. “Now, after that ye have known God,” writes Paul to the Galatians, “ or RATHER are known of God.” § 71. The dependence of faith and love upon the will is apparently indirect, for we cannot by any single act of voli; tion bring ourselves to believe what appears doubtful, or to love what appears unamiable; yet the simplest observation teaches that this dependence is practically all-important. One man studies his moral state and prospects honestly and anxiously, with a determination not to allow himself to remain under any illusions willingly, still less to court them; another turns away from all such thoughts. The former is invariably drawn to faith in Redemption, as a religion that must come from God because it leads to God; the latter never fairly weighs the claims of religion upon him ; he either assents to them with levity, in order to have APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION 173 done with them, or else he snatches at every argument against them, even the most futile and mutually contradictory. When we come to know ourselves, we understand that it is the direction the will has taken that makes the difference between these two men. It is the love of the truth, and the desire to lay hold on it that brings one mind to fasten its attention where the other withholds or refuses it; and to lay itself open to influences against which the other shuts every entrance. It, is however, at the great decisive crisis when the conscience is brought face to face with the Gospel, as an offer to be accepted or advisedly neglected,—it is then only that we fully realize the solemn truth that the will is the seat—the immediate and proper organ of the faith that closes with the grace of God, or else of the unbelief that hardens itself against it. Just as man’s trial was narrowed to a simple precept, so the ground of our acceptance with God is narrowed to the single point of our welcoming his free eift. The ruin of the world was implicitly contained in the fall, an eternity of holiness and happiness is implicitly con- tained in the faith that embraces the forgiveness of Almighty God, and the latter is as much as the former an act of the will. The soul’s yielding of itself up to God in Christ, cannot be better illustrated than by the thoughts and intents of one pious mind, as they were registered two hundred years ago, in secret, for its own subsequent use and meditation. “ Christ Jesus was in earnest when he gave his body to the cross, and his very soul an offering for my sake. O that I could be in a like seriousness, in giving away my body and soul to him again!...Because I am weak, therefore I go to everlasting strength..... O my soul, render up thy guilt to him who has bought it out of thy hands. Withdraw thy shoulder from the burden, and with a loathing of thyself and thy sin, leave it upon Jesus Christ. His Father and thine laid thy guilt upon him already on the cross; and when thou dost by faith lay thy gilt upon him also, thou H. Dorney. Lye BOOK THE THIRD. dost not crucify the Son of God afresh, but dost only set to thy seal that he is ‘the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world’ He bought thy sins to destroy them ; he shed his blood that their guilt might be condemned; and waits upon thee, to bring them forth to him for execution... Holy and gracious God, I close with thy appointment for laying my sins and all my guiltiness upon him; and do pro- fess, through thy grace, that I will not hazard thy displea- sure by covering my guilt, or bearing it myself, by unbelief cherished within me....[ embrace the covenant wherein thou has promised and sworn to be mine; and that blessing thou wilt bless me in Christ for thine own sake: and I do here heartily, willingly, and joyfully, with fear and trem- bling, offer up myself to thee, and to the belief of thy Word; and do bind myself to thee this day with my whole heart, and in express words, to be thine, and to yield my- self, mine and all that doth concern me, to the good pleasure of thy will; and that I will attend upon thee, through thy erace, for wisdom and strength to love, fear, serve, and obey thee ; that I will choose the things that please thee, and not repine at thy dealings towards me, as if thou hadst for- gotten at any time to be gracious..... When I look upon my own strength, I loathe it, and am astonished at such a work as this; but I implore thee, and do profess I do with full desire of heart cast myself upon the wings of thy power, to be carried above all impediments that shall arise from Satan, and from this present evil world, and from the body of sin and death which is within me.” The secret of resistance to grace is, that the love of God, which should have been the very accomplishment and ful- filling of our being, has now become its sacrifice. The self- seeking principle having become our nature, to renounce it is to strip ourselves of our very nature: it is a death, and the most painful of deaths. Man must part with himself in order that he may part from evil. The Gospel is a sum- APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 175 mons to make this sacrifice, the counterpart of that of Christ for us; and no lower resolve is at issue whenever a soul stand hesitating between the attraction of grace and its own centrifugal tendency. The awakened soul is con- scious of its inability to determine itself to good at such a price ; but it is equally sensible that Christ, through the Spirit, can give it the power, if it surrender itself to the con- trol of his gracious and loving will. As Vinet says,—in the sphere of material things, the satisfaction of our wants is the principal thing, but in the sphere of spiritual life, the existence of religious wants is the thing to be wished for, since their satisfaction has been already provided for, and can never fail. “Tf the punishment as well as the criminality of sin con- sists in an opposition to the character of God, the fullest pardon must be perfectly useless whilst this opposition re- mains in the heart; and the substantial usefulness of the pardon will depend upon its being connected with such cir- cumstances as may have a natural and powerful tendency to remove this opposition, and create a resemblance.” . This necessity is met by the wonderful spectacle the religion of Redemption sets before us: “the Holy One and the Just, worthy object of the Father’s love from all eternity, taking upon him our entire condition, life and death, and what is hardest in life, and what is bitterest in death,—accepting every thing but sin ; the Son of God gathering into his own person, along with all the sorrows of humanity, those intimate and ineffable sorrows that humanity hag never known; here is charity’s last effort of which man could never have thought, and which must either break our pride to pieces or show it to be incurable.” When the sense of such love as this thrills through the awakened sinner’s soul, and a free pardon presses itself upon his acceptance, and at the same time he feels that death is written upon all things in one shape or another, that he A. Vinet. T. Erskine. A. Vinet. Mark i. 15. Acts xx. 21. See Acts xxvi. 20; and Conf. of Augsburg, Art. xii.; and Calvin. Inst. 1. iii., cap. iii., 5-—9 176 BOOK THE THIRD. must be crucified either with a blessing or without one, with Christ or with the impenitent and blaspheming thief, —the struggle is over: he is won! He exclaims, “ Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!” He throws himself, with all his weakness and his sinfulness, into his Father’s arms, that he may be a pardoned and an altered man. This crisis, be it sudden, or be it gradual as the slow break of day when the sun rises behind clouds, is called conversion when we look at its outward effects,—repentance when we look at its inward principle. However great the work of sanctifica- tion that remains to be accomplished, life has taken a new direction; the same atonement that opened the avenues of heaven has made itself available by forcing the avenues of the heart; the soul changes the weeds of her mourning for bridal robes. She is restored to God and to herself. The so much dreaded death to self has become the new life —the birth of a higher and better self; the lost secret of love has been recovered ; the chords of the broken lyre are strung once more, and the harmonies of heaven are heard within the long-deserted sanctuary. When our Lord preached, saying, “ Repent ye, and believe the Gospel,” or when Paul summed up the substance of his preaching as “ Repentance toward God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ,” it is not meant that men should repent first and believe afterwards. The whole change of mind rather—a process one and indivisible—is characterized in two different aspects: we turn from sin and self and to Christ in the same act. Repentance cannot of course exist with- out a measure of sorrow for the past and a wish for forgive- ness; but it includes more than sorrow; the repentance of . the prodigal began among the swine and ended in his Father’s arms. Sorrow for sin is faith begun, and faith is that sorrow looking away from itself and to Christ. To the act by which he claimed us and all that belonged to us— suffering, death, and judgment,—corresponds the act by APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION, 177 which we lay claim to him, his righteousness, eternal bliss, and glory. Then righteousness and peace kiss each other in the poor sinner’s heart as they have been reconciled in heaven, § 72. Apart from prepossessions, there is at first sight no very great difficulty in admitting the coexistence and co- operation of Divine grace, and of our free-will while under- going a process of restoration. In the most simple physical sensation no one can entirely understand the relation between the impression received from without and the act that repeats it in the depths within: The sun and the earth concur in producing the fruits of Autumn, and there is nothing self-contradictory in the idea of God and his rational creature having their distinct agencies comple- mentary to each other, and, as has been said already, mutually penetrating instead of excluding each other. But the objection presents itself, that the earth as well as the sun is glorified by its produce, and that similarly on this conception man would apparently have whereof to glory, which is distinctly contrary to Scripture and to the most elementary Christian consciousness: God must from first to last have all the glory of our salvation,—every in- habitant of heaven must be ready to cast his crown at the feet of the Lamb. Both within and without Christianity there are two classes of mysteries. In the first place, there are those secrets of life which baffle our ignorance and weakness ; and in the second, there are those redoubtable antinomies, or apparently contradictory propositions, neither of which can be denied. The latter species of difficulty is far the most humbling and embarrassing, because it not only obliges us to feel that there are truths out of our reach, but threatens to break up the conclusions that we draw from truths apparently within reach, and mars the unity of that systematic con- ception of things towards which we tend by an inherent instinct, so strong and go persevering that it must be a N None can glory before God. Luther Acts xii. 7—10. 178 BOOK TILE THIRD. od feature of our primitive being, intended to glorify our Maker. He who seeks the premature solution of such an antinomy by suppressing one of its terms is presumptuous, . and sins against the truth. All that we can do, is to recog- nize facts as they are, and abstain from tampering with them in order to make explanation easier. We must do like the naturalist when he meets with phenomena that do not square with the present lights of science. We must say as Luther did on this very subject :—the pillars of the heavens are so far asunder, that he who stands at one cannot see the other. To which of these two classes does the problem before us belong? There are considerations which go far to diminish its difficulty, and to rank it among the mysteries of life, rather than among hopeless antinomies. Man’s part may be real,—so real that, if refused, all is lost, and yet be infinitely little compared to that of God; and we may shrink from attributing to him the living receptivity, which makes him susceptible of grace, only because of our incapacity to realize its comparative insignificance. Peter sprang up when the angel touched him in the inner-prison: he cast his clothes about him, and followed his deliverer. That was his part in the transaction; but was there anything of which to boast himself in it? Could it be compared to the power that sought him in his utter helplessness, lit up his dungeon, made his chains fall asunder, held down the keepers in an iron sleep, threw open the prison doors without hand, and the great gate into the street? We see that the ~ eoncurrence of a free agent to his own deliverance may be real,—may be necessary, and yet the whole event be such as to summon him to adore the saving grace of God, without a thought of any merit of his own. | There is a more illustrious example, and yet more to the purpose. The angel was sent to the blessed Virgin, to prepare her for the honour that was to be put upon her :—the concur- APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 179 rence of her faith was evidently necessary to the accomplish- ment of the incarnation. Could we suppose her in unbelief or self-will rejecting the proffered grace, another would have been chosen for it. Thus her part was real and necessary, and yet it was as nothing compared to the power and the condescension of Almighty love. God has all the glory, and may be practically called the sole Agent of this the only miracle — virtually containing all others as it does, either as its preparation or as its manifestation. There was no merit in Mary’s consent, though a beautiful and graceful example of humble believing submission ; and we recognize the coexistence of human and Divine agency in her case without hesitation, because we feel at once that the former bore no proportion to the latter. We should apparently be equally free from speculative difficulty throughout the whole realm of grace, did we but realize that the honour put upon every converted soul is greater than that vouchsafed to Mary,—and for this we have our Lord’s own word: once when a woman in the crowd called out,—“ Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked :” He answered,—“ Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” Mary, the servant of the Lord, was yet more blessed than the mother of the Lord ; to have Christ formed within her, the hope of glory for eternity, was a yet greater privilege, though shared with mul- titudes, than that of bearing the holy child for nine months in her womb, and supplying the human element to his Divine person. Mary’s part in her spiritual life was as real as her part in the incarnation, and in neither case was there any- thing to dim the glory of redeeming love. N ay, God is more glorified in restoring the freedom of his fallen creature, who had otherwise perished, and in raising him up to co-operate in his own salvation, than if he had saved him in an abso- lutely passive state; his strength is never more divine than when perfected in our weakness. We can only doubt Luke xv. 27, 28. Gal. iv. 19. Colsin2m@ 2 Cor. xii. 9. Schleiermacher. Ezek. xxxvi. 26. Ezek. xviii. 31. 180 BOOK THE THIRD. this through a sort of optical illusion: man is near and visible,—he seems to us to be something, and we think that whatever we take from him is so much gained for God; but the Infinite, from whose majesty all created beings are equally distant, whatever difference there may be between them in our eyes,—he thanks us not for an officious zeal that only betrays our incapacity to understand his all surpassing glory. The instance of the incarnation is more than a mere illus- tration : the new life must have the most exact analogy with that of the Redeemer from which it flows, and whose per- sonality is also conditionated by the union of the human and the Divine. Let us pronounce human nature to be as passive in regeneration as the humanity that Christ assumed in his incarnation. Still there must have been a manamum of activity,—at least a receptive principle in the latter; the elementary ovwm appropriated by Deity must have so far reacted as to produce the natural human side of the Re- deemer’s development. There was a 7epixwpyos (as early Christian writers termed the relation of the two natures, mutually embracing and containing each other.) The equi- valent of this is the living receptivity of the converted soul, its Opyavor AymriKov, Again, let us pronounce human nature to be as passive in regeneration as was the body of Christ in his tomb, when quickened by the Spirit. Yet there was that in him that awakened at the call of God, and lent itself to quicken the whole man; so that if generally said to be raised by God,” he is also said to have risen by his own power.” ‘The prophet Ezekiel promised the Jews a new heart and a new spirit, as the gift of God, and it is the same prophet who says— “Make you a new heart and a new spirit, for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” ¥ Acts ii. 32; Eph. i. 20; Gal. i. 1; 2 Cor. xiii, 4. MeJOND elo eleax. LPC 1S. APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 181 *If I feed myself,” says Abbadie, “by taking the aliments which are necessary for me, how can it be said that God feeds and sustains me? Or if it be God that feeds me, why am I obliged to feed and to sustain myself? One does not make all these difficulties in matters of nature, they are reserved for matters of religion.” The strong sense of the worthy old apologist told him that men either involved themselves in inextricable difficulties, or else came to suppress realities in order to escape them, by the tendency to push to metaphysical exactness, statements the truth of which was of a practical and popular nature. This common weakness of theologians is made more inveterate-in their treatment of the subject before us, by the mistaken application to the in- ward processes of the soul of reasonings which St. Paul meant to apply solely to the external work-holiness of the Jews. We have already seen that man was called at the first to determine himself to that sympathy with and imitation of supreme excellence for which he was destined, and that God was more glorified by this co-operation of man in his own creation, than by any possible communication of a mechan- ical perfection. There is no reason why the same principle should not equally apply in the kingdom of grace ; or rather, nature and grace are provinces of the same kingdom. With- out Christ, what we can do were nothing. Without Christ, we should reckon upon nothing but terror and despair, in life and in death. Shall he who through God removes mountains and divides the waters, boast himself because forsooth he has really stretched forth his own puny hand? Conversion is so little meritorious, that it involves the renun- ciation of all merit; it is so little the triumph of our own strength, that in the very act of changing the direction of our inner life we experience our own utter incapacity to effect the change which the strength of Christ accomplishes in our weakness, With reference to our personal respon- sability and safety, the importance of our own wills is Abbadie. Grace can be resisted, Fenelon Augustin. Heb. iii. 15. John v. 40. Apoe. iii. 40. See also Deut. FOS 18), Heb. x. 29. Luke vii. 30. 182 BOOK THE THIRD. inconceivably great; but compared with what Christ has done for us, and works in us, it is inconceivably little: just as the world we live in is vast in relation to the beings that crawl on its surface, while it is but the small dust in the balance of the universe. It is this microscopic greatness, and telescopic littleness of the same object or the same act, which our faculties are unable to grasp in their simultaneous reality. Our inability to determine the relation of the Divine agency to our own, is probably a necessary part of our inability to fathom the Divine Being. § 73. When the sun of grace shines upon a man, none can intercept its rays from him except himself. He need never say to any one—Stand out of my light; but from all that precedes, it follows but too clearly that he can darken the healing beams to himself. As in creating man immortal God implicitly bound himself never to annihilate him, so in creating man free God bound himself never to force his will, Even St. Augustin says—He that created us with- out our help, cannot save us without our consent. Hence Almighty wisdom took its measures for a victory without violence over the heart of man, and not for a sort of irres- istable magical agency in contradiction with the nature of moral beings. That the attraction of the Spirit can be resisted as well as the love of the Son, is affirmed in Scripture as -distinctly as any other fact connected with man’s relation to God: “while it is said, To-day, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” “Ye will not come to me, that ye might have life,” said the Saviour to his hearers; and again, “ Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews assumes that it is possible to do despite unto the Spirit of grace. The Evangelist privileged to be Paul’s companion tells us that “the Pharisees and APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 1838 lawyers frustrated the counsel of God against themselves,” by rejecting John’s mission. A most astonishing statement, and therefore it must have been made deliberately and ad- visedly ; the whole tone of the Gospel, and the attitude of its Messengers, are in unison with it. “Now, then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead.” Ambassadors are only sent to sovereign powers: when a Saviour beseeches, it can only be because man can hear through grace, or refuse to hear through his own perverse will. We cannot save our- selves without God, but we can destroy ourselves unaided. Faith comes from the Father of lights, but unbelief is in no sense the gift of God. “Oh that my people had hearkened unto me, that Israel had walked in my ways!” said the Lord, through the Psalmist ; and we hear the same exclamation of Divine love mourning over our human folly, nearer to us, and in tenderer accents, upon the lips of Jesus. “Oh Jeru- salem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” One thing that has led to the denial of this truth is a mistaken zeal to vindicate God’s almighty power. Many pious minds have turned a deaf ear to that most solemn and most blessed affirmation,—* As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” rather than believe that the Lord’s pleasure could remain unfulfilled. It is indeed hard to realize the condescension of creating love, and the practical responsibility and peril involved in the fact that we were made to be free; and so men reason instinctively, as if the only will in the universe were that of God: but since the creation of angels and men it is no longer so. Almightiness has voluntarily limited itself, and honoured rational and moral beings with the grand and awful prerogative which makes their service perfect freedom, Cor. v. 20. Jase le Live AS b oe ale aly, Matt. xxiii. 37. Ezek. xxxiii. it. XVill. 32. Chatham. See $75. Ps. Ixxyi. 10. Nisaeexmeoo. 5:6, 5% Chalmers. 184 BOOK THE THIRD. but which also empowers them to refuse themselves to God to the very last! Our great statesman’s boast, that the king dare not set his foot unbidden within the poor Englishman’s cottage, were all the winds of heaven to make their way through it, is an apt illustration of a loftier freedom. God was in earnest when he made man in his image ;—created liberty is sacred and inviolable in his eyes; and, even when eternal happiness is at stake, the Almighty can but stand upon the threshold of the ruined soul, and “beseech” admittance. Let it be remembered, that if man can dispose of his own soul in a manner contrary to the will of God, he cannot so dispose of anything else in the universe ; so that he remains the subject of God, even when the slave of sin: his freedom can never become sovereignty, except when his will is united to that of God in Christ. He is not even master of the form which his own evil dispositions may take, for the Almighty in a thousand ways so controls all his practical determinations as to make the wrath of man to praise him and to accomplish his ends. Evil is not of God, but it is used by him for his own glory. Its principle is only foreseen, but its action is predetermined. Where man feels himself freest, and thinks himself most master, countless unknown antecedents and influences have dug the channel in which his volitions are to run. God has established in the world of realities that consistency between the certainty of actions and their moral character which the wisdom of man has not been able to effect in the world of speculation. Hence the possibility of prophecy: the simple prediction of the taking of Babylon involved the prescience of every disposition, and the predetermination of every circumstance, that decided — the career of every soldier in the vast army of Cyrus. When it pleased the Master of the universe to create man free, his own sovereignty was secured and vindicated before- hand, by the fact that the creature could never be happy in we Tg ara ee ait aac a a ndincapo t-har ta ee Samra tee Aa Sy OP. ae eS APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 185 a state of alienation from him. His will can only be resisted in that inner sphere where it was his pleasure to make it possible beforehand that it should be resisted : so that man’s ungrateful use of his awful prerogative is no triumph over the Almighty. On the other hand, real dishonor is done to the character of the blessed God when his love toward his fallen creature is misrepresented or denied. When, in the face of a whole Revelation that proclaims him “long-suffer- ing to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance,” he is represented as only willing the salvation of some—as having it in his power to rescue all from degradation and everlasting death, but for- bearing to use the power,—as claiming to reap where he has not sown,—withholding the gift of faith, and then condemn- ing immortal souls for unbelief—calling many in appearance, while only meaning to choose a few, and to enhance the condemnation of the rest through their rejection of a Gospel which was never really meant for their acceptance,—these are the views that dishonour God, and put a mask of cruelty upon the face of the Father of mercies. There is a certain amount of good intention in all errors, but when an error is particularly monstrous we may be sure it must have some mistaken and artificial connection in men’s minds with truths so precious that one who is persuaded of them will bear the weight of a mountain of paradoxes and frightful consequences rather than part with them. No- thing but the intense energy with which the Reformers were bent upon celebrating and magnifying the grace of God in the conversion of any poor sinner, could have given existence to the theory of irresistible grace with all its consequences— implicit and latent in Lutheranism, avowed and developed by Calvin, as they had been by Augustin eleven centuries before. Men whose minds had just been awakened to the folly and impiety of claiming any merit before God, who were dis- eusted by the mercenary religion that set God at a distance 2 Peter iii 9. DAGOTES seo 186 BOOK THE THIRD. as the patron of the papal chancery, and then drove bargains with him,—men who gloried in the cross of Christ, whose hearts were touched by the consciousness of the free forgiving love of the God they had recovered,—such men naturally thought they could not too loudly proclaim that God was everything in the work of salvation, and man nothing. And they were right, had they contented themselves with the practical feeling and not pushed it to an extreme metaphy- sical proposition. We trust it has been sufficiently shown in the preceding section that receptivity for grace on man’s part can give him no ground for glorying before God, as indeed he who should think himself somewhat, would thereby prove himself a stranger to grace. But a second question presents itself: does his faith give the Christian any ground for glorying before man? If there be a response to the love of Christ in the soul of John, which, though of grace, is also in any measure whatever of himself, may not John boast himself as better than Judas? It is upon such a point as this that one may see the necessity of treating religious truth experi- mentally, according to the data of conscience, rather than by reasoning beside them. Let us ask, will any one suppose that the spectacle of Judas’ treason did really arouse in John feelings of self-complacency? It is one of the charac- teristics of the work of the Spirit on the soul, that it busies us with our personal relation to God, without allowing us to seek any reason for excuse or self-complacency in the conduct of others. “We dare not,” says Paul, “make our- selves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.” A soul taught of God, and dwelling in the truth, is so penetrated by the sense of its own unworthiness, and of the grace that has been extended to it, and of the danger from which it has been saved, that it cannot entertain —— APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 187 the thought of this sort of comparison with the companions of its guilt. Could we imagine a really penitent adulte- ress measuring herself with some other fallen woman, and recognizing with satisfaction that she is herself the less guilty and degraded of the two. Could we suppose Peter at the high priest’s door, wiping away the bitter tears, and comforting himself with the thought that he was better than Judas? Grace teaches to obey the Master’s order. “So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.” Had experience been consulted upon this question instead of mere discursive reasoning, it would have been settled at once, for all Christians know to their cost that grace is re- sistible at every later stage, and yet that there can be no pride in those that yield to the blessed attraction. Why not recognize that it must also be thus with the first stage of spiritual life? Were the heart of man in the hands of the Lord in the way supposed by the theory of irresistible grace, no Saviour and no redemption had been necessary at all, for all hearts could have been swayed irresistibly to meet and adequate repentance, or to whatever substitute for it might have place in an automaton; and grace triumphing over later obstacles by the same law as it did over the first, we should at once have attained to an absolute mechanical perfection. § 74. The whole scheme of Augustinian theology can be deduced with unfailing sequency from the doctrine of irre- sistible grace, and was deduced from the very first. “Who shall be so foolish and so impious,” says Augustin, “as to deny that God can change into good the evil wills of men, —whomsoever he pleases, when he pleases, and where he pleases?” “Many things there are which he can, but does not wish to do; there is nothing, however, that he wishes and cannot do.” ‘To refuse to admit this, he continues, is to contradict the first article of the creed, “I believe in God Luke xvii. 10 Compare $ 41. The idea of the irresistibility of grace the weak point of Protes- tanism. Augustin. Encheirid. cap. XXViil. Ibid. xxvii. Ambrose. Augustin. De gratia, Dei. cap. xlvi., ete. Calvin. Cons. Geney. Acts xy. 18. Conf, Belg. Art. XV1. Augustin. De preedest, lib. i., cap. 5. De civ. Dei, lib xii., cap. 27.edono pers., cap. xiv. Cont. Julian v. 3. Calvin. Cons. Genev. 188 BOOK THE THIRD. the Father Almighty.” Ambrose had already said—“ God calls whom he pleases, and makes whom he wills religious.” Augustin laid hold on the expression, as proceeding from one whose name had at that tine more weight than his own, and is never weary of quoting it in the various writings called forth by the semi-pelagian controversy, quem vult religiosum fact. Calvin repeated it with Augustin’s com- ments, and asked—‘‘ Who does not see that the whole sum of this question (predestination, etc.) is contained in these few words?” Calvin was right. If God can make souls to become religious and does not, then it 1s not his will to do so: he does not wish them to be religious; and if he does not wish them to be religious now, neither was it his purpose when the world was made, for whatever he now wills and: works must have been known to him from all eternity. These consequences were perceived and adopted by Augustin him- self. He was persuaded that God did not wish all men to be saved, and repeatedly explains Paul’s plain statement to the contrary (1 Tim. u. 4) to mean that there were all sorts and conditions of men among the elect. The idea which recurs in some confessions of the Reformed Churech,—that the elect were chosen to illustrate the mercy of God, while he showed his justice on those whom he left in their state of ruin and misery,—this idea first appeared in the writings of this ardent, daring, and subtle genius. God chose from the common mass of guilt and perdition some that were to be vessels of mercy; the rest were blinded, and left to become vessels of wrath, serving a two-fold purpose,—to be examples of the righteous severity of God, and to be useful to the elect. Calvin asserts, with truth, that Augustin’s doctrine was so completely identical with his own, that he might compose a confession of faith satisfactory to himself by simply putting together extracts from this Father. The founders of the Church of England, with their ac- APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 189 customed moderation, practical wisdom, and reverence for Scripture, abstained from all development of the harsh and repulsive features of Augustinianism, and profess that the oblation once offered on the cross, was a “ perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual.’ They nowhere assert the doctrine of irresistible grace; it is not the less implicitly contained, however, in the explanation of predestination and election. Baxter attempted a formal and scientific recon- ciliation of these conflicting elements, holding that effectual calling is confined to the elect, and yet that “all mankind, immediately upon Christ’s satisfaction, are redeemed and delivered from that legal necessity of perishing which they were under; and they are delivered up to the Redeemer as their owner and ruler, to be dealt with upon terms of mercy, which have a tendency to their recovery ...In the new law,” he continues, “Christ hath truly given himself with a conditional pardon, justification, and conditional right to salvation, to all men in the world, without exception.” This modification of Augustinianism is much more general than the pure system at the present day. With its spirit and aims we cannot but sympathize, but it must be confessed that it cannot stand criticism. Assuming as it does without examination, silently and almost unconsciously, the prejudice of the irresistibility of grace, it remains in decided opposition to Scripture upon this point, and that without the poor com- pensation of attaining the satisfaction of the intellect by a self-consistent scheme. If we with Baxter say that Christ died for all men, and yet that “he never properly intended or purposed the actual justifying and saving of all,” we make the Lord inconsistent with himself. If we adopt the more popular view, and suppose the love of the Son to be seriously and earnestly universal, but the love of the Father and the effectual calling of the Spirit to be particular, then we intro- duce a positive, and a permanent, and an irreconcileable Conf. Angl. Art. nS-Srd | Art. xvii. R. Baxter. R. Baxter. Calvin. J. F. Astie. Cone. Trid. Sess. vi. Cap. Xvi. A. Vinet. 190 BOOK THE THTRD. opposition of wills into the bosom of the ever blessed God. No, if it be once admitted that grace is irresistible, there remains no alternative to save us from the stern verdict of Calvinn—“To admit the election of grace, and reject the election of death, is puerile; it is unpardonably stupid (wne sottise trop lowrde). Human ideas, human justice, human pity must disappear from these questions. The honour of God requires it.” Ah, “the worship of logic is cruel, like all idolatries.” The idea of the irresistibility of grace with its consequences, and in its consequences more than in itself, has been the weak point of Protestantism. The Council of Trent did not fail to single out the doctrine itself for condemnation. The conclusions drawn from it, the tenet of reprobation especially, supplied the Jesuits with moral arguments that contributed almost as much as the sword to the great reaction against Protestantism, that took place in all central Europe at the close of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth cen- tury. The same cause led at a later period to the rationalisms of Holland, Geneva, and New England. All these retrograde movements were prepared and furthered by the exaggerations of the scholastic divines who succeeded the Reformers,— enarled and sapless consciences, “ferocious intelligences, who could glut themselves upon a syllogism, though steeped in tears and blood,” and who carried out the radical error of their system into extremes from which the noble minds of Augustin and Calvin would have recoiled. The reader may ask (and it is wise that we should ask ourselves) if the stress we lay upon the fact that grace can be resisted, is not itself a fruit of the same unwholesome speculative tendency against which we protest, when we see it working in a direction contrary to that we have taken? May we not content ourselves by affirming the responsibility of man, and the moral character of human actions, without venturing to decide peremptorily upon the mysterious ques- APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 191 tion—whether Divine grace necessitates or only influences the determinations of the human soul ? Assuredly none can be too much upon their guard against that besetting sin of technical theologians—the mutilating the facts of consciousness, and the statements of Scripture, in order to suit the demands of human logic, and to create well-rounded theories, containing nothing too great for the grasp of our feeble minds. But the reader is requested to observe that Scripture is most clear and decided upon this question, as well as upon the collateral one of the universal love of God in Christ. We are not actuated by speculative but by practical wants, and we are not convinced by mere reasoning, but by the testimony of the Word of God, when we affirm that the Saviour loves his fellowmen, all and each of them, and at the same time that we have to beware of rejecting his love. We must believe that Jesus Christ loves every soul of man as he wishes to be loved himself,—seri- ously, truthfully, with all his heart and mind, and soul; and we must believe that in this he is the faithful represen- tative of the Father’s love; and we must believe that we possess the fearful power to resist that love and frustrate its purposes. And if we refuse to assent to these three proposi- tions we stand in such plain contradiction to the spirit and the letter of the Bible, to its general tenor, and to distinct particu- lar utterances, that we have left ourselves no right, with any consistency, to believe anything whatever upon its authority. § 75. It is necessary here to notice an argument which has been supposed to establish peremptorialy the irresisti- bility of grace. We are repeatedly encouraged by precept and example to pray for others,—for those we love, for our enemies, and for all men. It appeared to St. Augustin that every prayer addressed to God for the conversion of others, is a practical confession that it lies altogether with him to grant or to withhold it. He often presses this point. The answer is, that this is a characteristic example of the See 3 3 69, 73, 52. The efficacy of prayers for others ib boon, 0h, ole Matt. v. 44. Augustin, Pp. ad Vitalem, ete. 192 BOOK THE THIRD. tendency to put a metaphysical proposition in stead of a practical truth. Because God has left himself mysterious ways of reaching the inmost soul, and puts them forth at the prayer of faith and love, it does not follow that his agency is so absolute as to leave room for none, and to admit of no resistence on the part of the soul upon whom it is exerted. There are crises in the history of the inner man, when all the weapons in the armoury of heaven are brought to bear upon the very citadel of the will. To pray for one we love is to ask God to push forward every ap- proach with redoubled vigour, to press the siege with all the resources of his wisdom and ineffable charity. To pray for one we love is the same thing in principle as would have been the asking Jesus, when he was upon earth, to visit a sick friend. Jesus is ready to go with us in search of that lost one; he suffers himself to be led to the bedside; he loved that poor sufferer before we did—loves more than we do now or can,—but it is his gracious will to associate our love with his own, and to make our prayer work with his charity, and so it is at our request that he stands theré to do what was already in his own heart. Are we to be told that it is useless to have brought Jesus with us if the sufferer retains the power to reject the proffered grace, or shall we not rather, while recognizing this power, trust in that holy, loving Presence to overcome resistance? The consideration of the efficacy of intercessory prayer cuts two ways ; for if my crying unto God in my neighbour's behalf makes me really a worker together with God, then my prayer for myself makes me so likewise. We pray for others as we pray for ourselves, though in- wardly convinced that it is necessary to ask in earnest of our own wills the same things that we ask of God. In neither case do we pray to one who is indifferent; in both cases we pray to one whose quickening power will never fail man, unless the heart of man be closed against it. APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 193 We pray for the conversion of others as we pray for the growth and development of the converted, or as we ask for the prayers of others for the same end, though the ex- perience of all Christians witnesses that the faithfulness of man is necessary for this as well as the grace of God. Our prayers for others may remain long unanswered, and seem unnoticed, because the souls over whom we yearn are not yet ripe for the final appeal. God bides his time, or he refrains from increasing responsibilities which would not be met. But, oh! let us never entertain the chilling, sickening thought, that the cry of our poor heart falls back, neglected and unregistered, from the closed gates of a brazen heaven ! Instead of making the elect the exclusive objects of Divine mercy, and the non-elect the exclusive objects of Divine justice, as Augustinianism puts it, we believe that both justice and mercy go forth toward all men. God’s justice has been exhibited upon his believing people by visiting their sins upon Christ, and again, in a relative sense, by bringing them to recognize their sin, and to judge it themselves in the new daylight that has been let in upon their soul. And God’s mercy is exhibited towards the un- believing in the tears and the life-blood of Jesus Christ, and in the pleadings of his Spirit. Even Calvin uses these words, so remarkable as coming from him, “God is not to be blamed because men reject. his grace through their own voluntary wickedness. He draws them quite enough to make himself be believed in: ,but who shall tame wild beasts ?” * § 76. In our Lord’s sacerdotal prayer, he said, “I pray not for the world, but for them which thou has given me.” God forbid that we should try to lessen the legitimate force * Tl n’est nullement coulpable, pource que les hommes ne rejettent sa grace que de leur malice volontaire. Dieu les attire bien assez pour se faire croire: mais qui apprivoisera des bestes sanvages ?—Comment on John x. 26. O 2 Cor. xiii. 7. 1 Thess. vy. 23. Col. i. 3. Thies BY: Eph. vi. 19. N ed0v) Gap Gant John iii. 20, 21, Ephes, v. 13, 14. Calvin, Of Scriptures that seem to limit the love of God. John xvii. 9, John xvii. &. 194 BOOK THE THIRD. of the warning incidentally conveyed in these solemn words, but they must not be pleaded to show that Jesus did not love the world. The graces which he sought at the Father's hands, in this wonderful prayer, are founded upon the rela- tion already established between him and _ his believing people; “I have given unto them,” he says, * the words that thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee.” He asks that they may be kept, that their joy may be full, that they may be sanctified, and grow up into that perfect oneness in God to which they have been called. These were not things that could be asked for the world, remaining such ; and the Lord does not say, “I pray not for the world,” so much to exclude one class as to justify his prayer for the other class. He wants to show that he seeks blessings for his disciples, which they were already morally prepared for. He after- ward prayed for those who crucified him, as individuals, —but he cannot pray for the world, considered as such by its own final election. Looking forward as he did in that hour, to the long’ future, he cannot pray for those who shall be definitively found on the side of the world. They do not allow him to do so: he cannot seriously address petitions to the Father of which he knows beforehand that they can- not be answered. At every moment of the process in the triumph of goodness there is a corresponding rejection of evil. A similar explanation may be given of other passages, which would be capable, if they stood alone, of being taken as an intimation ‘that the Lord’s love is confined to some men, but are equally capable of harmonizing with the whole revelation of the charity of God in his person, and are de- termined in this latter sense by the contexts in which they are found. “ All that the Father giveth me shall come to me....No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him....Even so the Son quickeneth APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 195 whom he will.” These are fragments of appeals addressed to the Jews at Jerusalem and in Galilee, at a turning point in the Lord’s ministry, when the thoughts of many hearts lay revealed and open before him. He saw some turning away and judging themselves unworthy of everlasting life, He saw others beginning to respond to the Divine attraction, and he formally disposed himself to carry out the work thus beginning in their hearts——to bestow for eternity the life that they were preparing to welcome. But the expres- sion of this hopeful redeeming purpose towards them in particular is associated with the most general invitations : “Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out... Ye Sas will not come to me that ye might have life.” The morally v. 40. dead hear the voice of the Son of God, “and they that hear shall live.” He throws upon those who rejected him the Wa 20. responsibility of their own ruin; such as they were they could not believe, but it was their sin that they should be what they were. That love the immensity of which embraces the whole human race in each of its members, can only definitively fasten and rest with complacency upon those who allow themselves to become its objects. Wherever this is the case Jesus recognizes the Father’s hand and the Father's oift. Where this response is absent, Jesus recognizes—not God’s refusal to save, but—the inexorable self-will that rejects his salvation. The most startling class of Scriptural testimonies upon this matter, is that which communicates the awful fact that a penal hardening of sinners is one principle of the Divine government. “From him that hath not shall be taken Matt. xxv. 29. away even that which he hath.” Ag good can only be re- warded by being changed into still greater good, so evil is punished by being allowed to become completely itself, and to carry itself out in all its hideousness. Thus when the Rom. i. 20-2 earliest races forgot the true God and worshipped and 2 'Thes. ii. 9—12. 1aeany, 16-<, Wee Acts il. 23. WBE abl, |Sh Isai. vi. 10. John xii. 87—49. 196 BOOK THE THIRD. served the creature, God also gave them up to vile affec- tions, to all uncleanness and cruelty. At a later period, the coming of the wicked one is allowed to be with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness towards those who refused to receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. They believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness, and therefore God sends them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie. God would have been glorified by their sal- vation, but since they constrain him to be glorified without them, he determines that they shall serve him in another way, and that their very evil shall assume the shape he pleases, and become an instrument of his purposes. He does not predestinate them to be evil, but he predestinates the form their foreseen evil is to take, and the results that it is to bring about. Pharaoh and Judas as individuals, the generation that crucified Jesus as a people, were placed in circumstances that led them thus to carry out the Divine intentions by virtue of that very selfish principle within them that rebelled against God, and that in itself was inexpressibly displeasing to him. ‘“ Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and under- stand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.” This terrible sentence of Isaiah is appled by John to the Jews of the Saviour’s time, but only at the close of that ministry of unexampled patience and love. The very hardness of the prophet’s menace, and the paradoxical form into which it is thrown betray the wounded love concealed beneath them. God is represented as taking precautions against the sinner’s conversion, in order if possible to startle and to arouse him from his iron sleep. This explanation of the principle of penal hardening is adopted, and frequently put forward by Augustin and Cal- APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 197 vin themselves. “God is not the author of the evil wills,” says the latter, “but he uses them as he pleases.”” The person and the preaching of Jesus, according to the Re- former, were but the occasional causes of a blindness of which the perverted will of the sinner was the real, effective, and decisive cause. “Since the Son of God is naturally the light of the world, it is but an accident that some have been blinded by his coming.” And, again, “ That the Word of God should blind and harden men is an aceidental thing.” The question is argued at length in the ninth of Romans. Contemporaneous Israel, by their unbelief, had made them- selves strangers to the covenant of promise, and brought down upon themselves the righteous retribution of God. They now presented to the universe the most fearful example possible of a people whose blessing had been changed into a curse; and to this they had been condemned before the world was,—sentenced to be so left to their own evil hearts as to be hardened to the uttermost, that God might instruct the world by their ruin, since he could not by their blessing. In the prosecution of the argument Paul uses the most daring paradoxes, just because the thought never presented itself to him that he could be understood to mean God was the author of the original evil principle in their minds. All that he cared to establish was that the saved had no merit of their own to boast of, that the Divine mercy was altogether gratuitous, and that the penal hardening of the unbelieving was an act of just severity. In the common mass of guilt and misery, the Moral Governor of the world finds vessels of mercy, “whom he had afore prepared unto glory,” and vessels of wrath, “fitted up to destruction” by their own state, and by his consequent sentence. § 77. If God did not love me before I was born, said a pious woman, he surely has not seen anything in me to make Y Non facit voluntates malas, sed utitur eis ut voluerit. * The italics are ours. Calvin. See Conf. Gal. Art viii. On John ix. 39. On John xii. 40. Rom. ix. The true sense and place of elec- tion. Exod. xxxili. 17. Apoe. Xiii. 8. 2 Thess. il. 18. 2 ‘Vim. 129. Eph. 1. 4, 5, 6. John xy. 19. Like x. 21. 198 BOOK THE THIRD. him love me since. The Christian should be prepared to hear his God loved him before the world was, for God must have determined his work beforehand, and it is a work of detail ; he calls us and loves us by our names. Those names have been written from the first in the book of life of the slain lamb. “We are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord,” writes Paul to the Thessalonians, “because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation, through sanctification of the Spirit, and belief of the truth ;” and to Timothy,—“ God hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus; before the world began.” Else- where,—‘He hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame betore him in love; having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.” Etymologically, the word election seems to imply the choice of particular persons from among a larger number, for the possession of peculiar and exclusive privileges; and a superficial view of its use in the New Testament might convey the same impression. The measure of truth con- tained in the idea may be illustrated by this saying of our Lord,—‘‘ If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen (€£edeEduynv) you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.” The disciples had been singled out by the Saviour from an unbelieving world, as such they stood in marked and ominous contrast with it, and were rejoiced over with a Divine tenderness and satisfied love, different in kind from the compassion he felt towards the world. But it cannot be repeated too often, or in too many shapes,—it was not the Lord’s fault that he could not indulge in the same feelings APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 199 towards all. The look of Divine sympathy that now singles out with such ineffable love those upon whom it has not been wholly thrown away, had been first directed towards all. So far as his thoughts and will concerning men could go, he would have melted every heart, and brought back every soul of man to hide in the bosom of God. Whatever difficulties may remain to be cleared up in his government of the world, and in his dealings with souls, we must believe him in this, if we believe him in anything, for he confirms it by his tears. Thrice that we are told of he wept: on his way to the tomb of Lazarus, and when he confronted our judgment, and when he mourned over the lost. In nothing can the Son have been more truly the repre- sentative of the Father than in this his universal love. God is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever ;"if in Christ he loved sinners really, and sought them seriously, it is 1m- possible that he can have been otherwise disposed before the world was: hence the obstacle that hindered the election of the sinner then, was the same that hinders his conversion now,—his impenitence was foreseen. God’s love before the world was was only the anticipation of that which he now feels; and that it should have anything exclusive, or particular, or exceptional is the world’s doing, not his. His message is “whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” The non-elect are so by their own choice; and so far are they from being shut out by any act of God’s from the grace that he has sent them, that the final decisive cause of their con- demnation is the rejection of that grace. ‘‘ He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.... If I had not come and spoken unto them they had not had sin; but now they have no cloke for their sin.” If God had designed to exclude men from Christ, he could not command them to trust in Christ, or treat them as guilty for neglecting to do so; but now, for those who have been brought into contact Luke xiii. 34. John xi. 33. Hebava ie Luke xix 41. Apoe. xxii. 17. John iii. 18. Luke xiv. 24. 1 Peter i. 2. Rom. viii. 29. R. Hooker. 200 BOOK THE THIRD. with the Gospel, the sin of unbelief absorbs and swallows up all other sin, because that Gospel is no make-believe,—it was sincerely meant for all men, and for every man. The bar to their salvation is where Christ described it in the parable of the supper,—in the perverseness of those who having been bidden to the feast would not come. God loved his children before the world was, because he saw beforehand Christ in them. Therefore they are “elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father:” as Paul puts it, “whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son.” Foreknowledge precedes predestination.~ As has been already said, we do not understand the manner of the Divine knowledge of facts under the conditions of time. We cannot represent to our- selves the difference which we may and must suppose to exist between God’s knowledge of what is necessary,—.¢., his eternal choice of what constitutes his own being, and his knowledge of that which is contingent,—7., his dealings with us in creation and redemption. We cannot represent to ourselves the idea of chronological antecedence in his thoughts, and we can as little assume its absence with respect to things contingent; but this is certain, that fore- knowledge is logically antecedent to predestination,—that those who were chosen out of the world in the counsels of God were such as he foresaw could be won from the world. Contemplated in this hght, the Divine choice of them is called in Scripture, election ; the predetermination of the times, and seasons, and instruments of their conversion and subsequent education in Christ, is called predestination. “We are in God through Christ eternally,” writes good old Hooker, “according to that intent and purpose, whereby we are chosen to be made his in this present world, before the world itself was made: we are in God, through the knowledge which is had of us, and the love which is borne towards us from everlasting. But in God we actually are APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 201 no longer than only from the time of our actual adoption into the body of his true Church, into the fellowship of his children.” The present moment is that of the essential and decisive crisis; the present moment makes Christ our’s for eternity ; the consciousness of pardon, and of the present favour of God in Christ should abundantly suffice for the soul’s peace and joy, even if they were supposed to date from yesterday. The work of Christ in time is the object of our faith, our present relation to God through him is the substance of our salvation; the weakest believer is actually a lamb in the arms of the good Shepherd. We inevitably conclude from this present relation to his past love, and we are encouraged to do so, the conclusion is expressly drawn by the pen of inspiration, but it is because there are luxuries as well as necessaries of life in the house of our God. We are accustomed to associate the ideas of security and success with plans long entertained and perseveringly pursued, and thus the fact that God gave his children to Christ before all worlds, strikes the imagination; it helps our weakness to realize a little better, though still poorly and faintly, that his is an unfailing, unchanging love, and that what he has taken into his keeping is eternal as himself. On the hypothesis of irresistible grace, election is every thing: the Divine will becomes the only will in the uni- verse, and the original Divine decrees surpass in importance the redeeming acts which they virtually contain, and which only exist as means to carry them out. In a word, on this scheme particular election should fill the chief place in Revelation, and in our thoughts. On the hypothesis of resistible grace, on the contrary, the first place is given to the general love of God towards the human race in each of its members, which was the original moving cause of crea- tion and redemption. The second place is taken by the actual contact of the Divine and the creature wills: they met on Calvary, where the’ creature will of the man Christ See ¢ ¢ 69, 70, 72 Rom. xi. 33. The revealed motives of re- deeming love. ‘Calvin. A, BOOK THE THIRD. made atonement for the sin of the world, and gave it back to God: they meet in every converted soul, when Christ entering into it enables it to give itself back to God, and to identify itself with his atoning act. Here, particular election comes only in the third place; the general love which gave being to all men, and which made over Christ as a Divine gift to all men, becomes effectual in Christ and in believers, and upon this result foreseen from the begin- ning, God set the seal of his approbation: “whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate.” On the hypothesis of irresistible grace, the mysterious past of the process of salvation lies hid in heaven ; its origin is not explained; God loves the elect rather than the non-elect for reasons that he has never given. On the hypothesis of resistible grace, the mysterious part of the process passes upon earth. We can only partially satisfy the intelligence about the relation of Divine grace to human freedom: we only recognize the facts,—that man’s part in the process is necessary, so necessary that he cannot be saved without it, and yet that he feels it is nothing in comparison with God’s part, and that he has nothing to boast of before God or man. Zhere is the mystery; it contains something inex- pheable, though nothing appalling. On the other hand, in the fact that God loved his believing people before all time there is nothing inexplicable, however much to adore. Paul’s exclamation, “O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” was a cry of intelligent admiration. § 78. Calvin believing grace to be irresistible, was obliged, in order to maintain its gratuitous character, to suppose God was actuated by motives altogether secret. He warns us, indeed, against thinking the Divine decrees were made with- out reasons; but since these have not been revealed to us, “we must so far honour the will of God as to allow it to stand us instead of all reasons, the more so that it is the’ fountain and rule of all justice.” APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 203 To us it seems that the motives of the redeeming love of God in all its phases are revealed as clearly as possible. God sent Jesus to bring back his lost children ; he loved them, and sought them in their ruin and degradation, because they were children. That is to say, the motives of Redemp- tion are taken from creation; the primitive relation of the creature to God is pre-supposed in the gift of the fallen creature to Christ in order to its recovery,—preceded that gift in the counsels of God, as distinctly as the creation preceded the mission of Christ in time. For this cause Christ called himself “the Son of Man.” He did not give up the primitive relation of the creature, but came to restore it in its value and reality. The unbelieving Jew is a child of Abraham in a real and abiding sense,—in a sense which could only cease with his own existence; and this his privilege is the reason of his punishment for not being morally a child of Abraham. In the same way man has made his relation to God a miserable and irremediable failure, so far as his own strength goes. But he can never be as though he had not been called to share the life, and be the glory of God; he must stay nearer than other intelligences, or else farther off: he never can escape the consequences of that first hfe breathed into his nostrils. If the worm that never dies consume him in this world or in the next, it 1s because he is a rebellious child; if he is restored through grace, God says—‘ This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” The God and Father with whom the prodigal son was reconciled through Jesus Christ, if too long a stranger to his heart was not an absolute stranger; that father had never lost his rights. Yon drunkard reeling upon the road, lives physically through the transmission of the life that God communicated to Adam, That breath subsists in us. That theopneustic soul, however sullied, is herve within, and could not be anni- See 33 59, 60, 61. JE Cormexdn ss Gen. ii. 7. Luke xy. 24. Luke iii. 38. Acts xvii. 28. Gen. ix. 6. James ili. 9. Eph. iv. 25. 204 BOOK THE THIRD. hilated without annihilating our being. A father may have to drive his son from his presence, may shut his doors against him for ever, but a child he is and must remain ; and children we are of God by nature, in a sense as real as possible, after a paternity which is not only the model of our own, but is also actually transmitted through our own. The relation is indestructible——it must subsist as our glory and bliss, or as our shame and torment, as long as the souls to which it has given being. This relation is the reason of everything that God has done for man, and of the unspeakable gift of the Son himself. We read in the last verse of our Lord’s genealogy,— “Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.” The fall had changed our glory into our condemnation, but in Luke’s eyes the primitive relation was not the less per- manent. It is indeed the principle of moral obligation among men, the reason why we should reproduce the image of God morally, and why we should respect others who are called to the same dignity; fallen man has not lost his claims upon his fellows just because God has not renounced his claims upon him. Therefore Paul quoted to the Athenians with approbation the saying of their countryman Aratus, that we are the off-spring of God. According to the law of Moses, the murderer was to die because he had shed the blood of one who was made in the image of God. According to James, to curse men was to insult that holy Jmage. According to Paul, there is a sense in which all men, believers and unbelievers, are members one of another, and it is for that reason that every man should speak truth with his neighbour. There is a sort of degenerate popular Calvinism current in certain circles, which only recognizes in the ways of God his sovereign decrees and present grace, and which virtually overlooks creation,—as if God had given it up in order to APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 205 accomplish an entirely different work. On this scheme the Christian belongs to God by virtue of his election solely, and the worldling does not belong to him at all. It is a conception essentially pharisaic, and cutting the very tap- root of Christian morals ; it may indeed leave room for the accomplishment of certain duties through natural instinct, and from obedience to given precepts of Scripture taken separately, but the principle from which all particular duties proceed, which gives them unity and quickens the sense of obligation,—the principle is gone. I must know and feel something of what all men are for God, if I am to know and feel anything of what they should be for me, and if I am to love them in God. I must answer the question—“ Who is my neighbour?” as Jesus Christ answered it when he owned every sinner as his other self upon the cross, and then my love for my neighbour will really be the travail of the charity of Christ in me. § 79. Augustinianism has been much misrepresented by its adversaries, and sometimes by those also who supposed themselves its disciples. When studied in the writings of Augustin, or Calvin, or the Jansenists, it cannot be accused of fatalism. With these great and pious minds, and indeed with their successors generally, predestination was no abstract decree,—no ground of metaphysical certainty independent of spiritual life. It was considered 7m Christ, the elect are predestinated to be ike Christ, the choice of the means is included in the same sovereign act with that of the ends. Hence genuine Augustinianism never produced a generation of quietists, but some of the strongest and bravest men the world has seen, the human will all the more nerved for every conflict by the consciousness that it was acting with the Divine. Neither can this doctrine be accused of invariably contra- dicting the love of God for all men. We have seen how distinctly Calvin made the terrible sentence of reprobation ? 118. Augustinianism alters the aspect of the Gospel, and is constrained to be inconsistent with atself. $ 173, 206 — BOOK THE THIRD. to rest upon foreseen disobedience and resistance. His God was a being whose unbounded gratuitous love showed itself towards the elect, and who felt gratuitous hatred for no creature that he had made. How deep has been the com- passion for suffering humanity exhibited by some schools of Augustinian Christianity, how sincere and touching their respect for the soul of man as for a ruined sanctuary, how honourable the part they have borne in the history of Christian thought and Christian life. The real error, the fatal, the incurable weakness of this 374. conception of Redemption, lies in the consequences we have seen it deduce from the prejudice of the irresistibility of grace. God could save all men, and he does not. God has reasons of his own for forbearing to put forth the saving grace that might have left hell without a human tenant. Geis “When one of two men,” says Calvin, “shows himself docile, and the other, though hearing the same doctrine, perseveres in his wickedness and obstinancy, it is not that they are of different natures, but that the one is enlightened of God, and that the same erace is not granted to the other ... for although God invites all men to believe by the out- ward voice of the preacher, he nevertheless calls none effectually by his spirit and his grace, except those whom he has deliberately proposed to save.” Thus, while the fallen nature of man is as it were forced upon all the individual members of the race, the renovating grace of the Redeemer is effectually offered only to some. | Sin and its penalty reign over a wider extent, and with a surer empire than the grace and love which are to deliver us from them. God expressly ordained such a constitution of things as admitted of a universal and inevitable disease, and only an exclusive and partial remedy. God’s self-limited redeeming power is narrower in its aim than man’s need of redemption. It is certain that a mind which has really sought and APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 207 found God in Christ is so convinced of his gratuitous loving- kindness and tender mercies, that it can trust him implicitly in all his ways towards itself and towards all men. It can wait without fear, or doubt, or impatience for the revelations of eternity. No appearances can shake his confidence who knows in whom he has believed, and is persuaded that the glories of the Divine character must in the end be manifested and triumphantly justified. It is not the less true, however, that this humble willingness to walk in the dark is a greater work of faith on the part of the Augustinian than for any other Christian. It is doing him no injustice to say that the Gospel, as he understands it, has to wait for eternity before it can be wholly justified to the heart and conscience; appearances are against it for the present ; its own statements as to the ways of God are against it. It is not then such a message as Paul preached, which already, by its very contents, recommended itself to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. It is obliged to wrap itself up in reserve, and tell us to wait before we can be satisfied that God is love. Christianity on this scheme is certainly a revelation of the most wonderful gratuitous love towards a circle which may prove in the end wider than that of the lost, but it also contains the affirmation that God’s love for the souls he has passed over is so much less, or else so much hindered by unknown motives hid in himself, that he looks on while they perish for ever. He puts Christ before them, and tells them to lay hold on him, but does not himself lay hold on them to put them into Christ. We may come to understand, by and by, that this was not indifference, that there was real love beneath it, but it will practically have done nothing for the lost, since it has not done the one thing necessary. The doctrine of particular redemption, as developed by the Synod of Dort and the formula consensus helvetica, was never formally stated by Calvin, but it was involved in the logical 2 Cor. Vig lite Dord li. Al iv. 2. Syn., cap. t. d. Isa. RK V. LO: 208 BOOK THE THIRD. consistency of the system; Augustinianism from the first was condemned to fall over this precipice. We cannot but believe that this way of representing the Divine attitude towards sinners, needlessly throws a stum- bling-block in the way at once of the humble and the self-sufficient ; it tempts the timid to despair, and the rash to blaspheme; it would imperil the future allegiance of mankind to Christianity, if the truth could ultimately be confounded with errors that have long cleaved to it. As the human mind is constituted both by what is good and by what is evil in it, by its dark suspicious thoughts of God, and by its legitimate expectations, it is Inevitable that the attention of most men will be fastened not so much on the love shown the elect, as on the apparent indifference exhibited towards the non-elect. Instead of a mystery of love to be fully developed as well as consummated in eternity, this theology practically puts forward a mystery of indifference to be justified in eternity. The change is a very serious one, and if it be a difficulty with which Christianity has been eratuitously incumbered, if it be a misrepresentation of God in Christ, there never was a generation to which it was more capable of doing harm than the present, disposed as it is to take nothing upon trust. Paganism shows that the natural tendency of fallen man is to a worship of fear. He feels himself the victim of a state of disorder and suffering, and instead of seeking the cause in himself, he attributes it to all manner of vengeful, capricious, implacable Divinities, whom he supposes to be the authors of all the ills that he suffers in this world, or that he fears in the next. A prophet had represented sorrow and sighing as escaping from the city of God like fugitives, as the ransomed of Jehovah entered it; but this was only partially accomplished by the first spread of Christianity. Throughout the middle ages, the old Pagan Deities retained a certain degree of empire over the popular imagination ; APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 209 they were supposed to retain possession of the forest where they surprised and terrified benighted travellers. From the Supreme Good still greater ills were feared, and the masses and ceremonies of the priests were looked on as protections against him, in much the same way that witches sold charms to protect the persons and cattle of the superstitious from the demons of night and of the woods. The reformation was a revival of Christian faith and life, upon a scale, and with an intensity which had not been seen before; but Satan continued to accuse God to us, as he accuses us to God and to each other; and it was in a great measure to the consequences of the doctrine of irresistible grace, that the religion of fear owed the hold it still retained over the minds of men, of course in a shape more refined than before. “Since there are multitudes whom God does not so love as to intend to save them, how am I to know whether I am of the number?” There is the question which humble, self-distrusting spirits, some of the most excellent of earth, have been putting to themselves these three hundred years. The Synod of Dort, and Augustinian authorities in general, try to reassure them by telling them to look in themselves for fruits of election,—“ true faith in Christ, a filial fear of God, godly sorrow for sin, hungering and thirsting after righteousness,” etc. But were it not that the smile of Divine love so often miraculously thaws the icy obstacles thrown in its way by a scholastic system, the remedy would only make the disease worse. How is a true soul, con- scious of utter unworthiness and manifold insincerities, ever to be satisfied with its own faith, its filial fear, and all the rest? Am I not sent forth upon an endless and hopeless career of morbid self-inspection, if I cannot be sure God loves me until I am satisfied with ny own experiences? The mind trained in this school only attains to peace by unconsciously breaking through its rules in some happy hour, and embracing Christ as he offers himself, on the faith of his own words and works. P Dord Syn., cap. i, 12. The conviction of sin. Chavannes. 210 BOOK THE THIRD. Thus a system which began by throwing a veil over the universal love of God, lest its confession should seem to allow the elect to claim any merit of their own, is obliged to end by referring man to his own inner life, before he can know that the Gospel is intended for him at all. A system which began by the most inexorable logic, is obliged to end by making faith a vicious circle, smce a man must believe in order to know that he has a right to believe. One of the last ramifications of the school avoids this inconsistency, by making faith a process as technical and artificial as if it had been invented by the Austrian police. A man must first believe in a general way, that Christ is a Saviour; this gives a sort of passport provisoire, and from the feelings this preparatory faith awakens within him, he may learn that he is the Lord’s, and may look to Christ with assurance as his own Saviour, who has died for him in particular. Happy the preacher who needs not recur to such devices, whose hearers need only ask themselves if they are men, to be sure that this message of forgiveness and salvation is sent to them, and meant for them,—that the love which sent it can only be frustrated through their own indifference, and not even by it if they look to him who can work in and with them, to will and to do. Happy the apologist who may stand forth before his fellows the witness of a love that is marred by no reserves, no accompanying mystery of in- difference, to arm them against it, and to associate it in their minds with the superstitions that once degraded and enslaved the world. § 80. The consciousness of his misery is man’s remaining ereatness, and the condition of his deliverance. It is here that the new and saving creation connects itself with the old, through the very element which seemed its contradiction: the love of God maintained in man the faculty of self- condemnation, as the future starting point of a new life. The flesh or principle of sin in us strives against the APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 211 offers of grace, because their acceptance would imply the determination to renounce the attempt to make self the centre of our existence. It either persists in sinning with a high hand, or else claims to appease violated law by its own expiations. It prefers any semblance of righteousness or freedom to the acceptance of a restoration at once humiliating and self-annihilating. Hence it is the broken and contrite heart alone that brings us to the foot of the cross. The first recorded words of our Lord’s teaching are :— “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for their’s is the kingdom of Matt. v. 3, 4. heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” It was to conscious poverty that his whole ministry was addressed. The Son of man came to seek and to save those that felt themselves lost, and it was the want of this feeling that made the self-righteous Pharisees reject him, and persecute him to death. So that the whole ungod- liness and selfishness of the world finally summed itself up in the refusal to recognize its want of Jesus Christ. When the Comforter is come, said the Lord, “he will reprove the world of sin... because they believe not in me;” and accordingly, earnest souls in all ages testify that their deepest experience of their own unworthiness, and of the power of sin upon them, has been in the consciousness of unwilling- ness to give themselves to Christ. ; “When a sinner cometh to the knowledge of himself in very deed,” writes Luther, “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 them for all mankind, is made even sin, death, and malediction.” Before he has descended into the hell of his own heart, man cannot ascend to the heavens of God and of his saving erace. XVili. 11. John xvi, 8, 9. Luther Augustin Macleod Campbell. Macleod Campbell. Of morbid self- inspection and false repentance. ALY BOOK THE THIRD. The expiatory confession of our sins was made by the Son, and accepted by the Father, with the understanding and purpose that it was to be reproduced in us really, however feebly and imperfectly. The heart touched by grace recog- nizes in what passed in the heart of Christ the atonement that it would fain itself have offered, and clings to it, and appropriates it as offered up in its name and for its sake. The atonement so appropriated reproduces its own elements in us; we share in the states of mind through which our blessed Lord passed, and in the same order as he experienced them ; getting nearer to God in the measure in which we enter into the spirit of his confession of our sins, and his grasp of our reconciliation. His pardon is realized, though not measured by our faint apprehension of it. Thus holiness, truth, righteousness, love, dawn in us as confession of sin; we begin our new life by partaking in the mind of Christ concerning our old life. The disposition which God accepted for us in Christ, is also given us in and communicated by Christ,—not in order to constitute any merit in us, but be- cause the sense of the truth is the life of the soul. The fellowship of the mind with which Christ tasted death for every man exhibits the first breathing of that new life which came to us through his death. To the free act of Jesus identifying himself with us, such as we are, answers the act of our faith emboldened to claim him, recognizing the same relation that he did, identifying ourselves with him such as he was, and such as he is, “making his condemnation of our sin to become our own condemnation of it, his choice for us our own free choice for ourselves, his love the light of life to us.” § 81. I can bring no repentance to Christ, says Henry Dorney, but I must first get it from him. The earnest soul must beware of allowing itself to suppose that it has to do anything, or to attain to any given amount of feeling, in order to become entitled to claim Christ and his work as its APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 21S own, for he is ours already, and we were contemplated in his work. The feeling of sin is necessary to induce, but not to entitle us to come to his feet. “As the Gospel freely offers Christ, pardon, and life, so faith takes them freely ; not measuring the ground of accepting them from below, but from above ;” not trying to create by its own efforts the right that has been already freely given. The believer and the unbeliever have at every moment the same right to Jesus Christ, the difference between them being that the former takes advantage of the right common to both, while the latter neglects it. We never can be satisfied with our own shallow sorrow for sin, nor with anything else in our- selves, but God was satisfied with what he saw in Christ, and it is for our will and our conscience to ratify his verdict. Our own repentance will ever need to be repented of, but when acceptance before God is concerned, we have not to think of ourselves, but of what Christ has done and is. We are slow to believe in love so boundless, so Divine,—in a forgiveness so absolutely free ; but Jesus Christ meant all that he did, and all that he said, and is present to prove it upon us and in us. We are not to sit still and dwell with despondency upon our own slowness to believe, our indiffer- ence and vacillation, our incapacity to change; the believer and the unbeliever have the same power to give themselves to God, for it is there, in Christ, within reach of both, even the effectual help which he offers them by his Spirit. If it were necessary for our salvation that we should. remove mountains, we could do it through a power that is to be had for the asking. We should equally beware of looking for a given amount of emotion in ourselves, as a warrant for the sincerity of our repentance. The overpowering sense of sin expressed by a strong, deep, volcanic nature like Luther’s, serves to interpret the meaning of what passes in more ordinary minds, but none are to be disheartened because they experience no H. Dorney. Angustin. J.H Godwin. 214 BOOK THE THIRD. such strong agony. The agony of Christ is enough for us all. He repented for us just because we never could be sufficiently sorry for ourselves, and the practical question is not how sorry we may be, but whether we feel the necessity of laying claim to that which passed in his soul on our behalf. It is not a question of the degree of our feelings, but of a matter of fact: do we want forgiveness,—do we embrace the message that makes forgiveness our’s the very instant we ratify it in our own souls,—do we ask the near and present help of the Holy Ghost to enable us to act upon the message? Neither sickness nor sin can be cured by the perpetual analysis of their symptoms; the consciousness of disease is only of value because it sends the soul to the Good Physician; and whether we go with tears and anguish, or with a calm sense that we have been to blame, and are in danger, the important matter is that we should go. Whether our bark be driven before the tempest, or wafted by a gentle breeze, the all important question is that of the direction it takes, and the shore it reaches. Had the prodigal son sat sentimentally busied with his own sorrow, it would not have been real. He did not care about his own feelings, but about the feelings of his father, and longed to be forgiven. He went as he was, and was welcomed as he was. His trouble was enough to make him rise up and go; that was the essential thing. And doubtless he shed more tears and holier tears in his father’s arms, than he had done in his wretchedness; for we find the true re- pentance when we have given up the false. ArT THOU AFRAID OF GOD? TAKE REFUGE IN HIS ARMS. Many a well meant discourse or treatise on “evangelical repentance,” has helped to foster this unhealthy tendency. Our Lord, on the contrary, as it has been judiciously re- marked, seems to have said little to his hearers individually, of the wickedness of their former lives; “he said nothing to lead any to suppose that the consideration of themselves, by f APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 2] of their weakness, and wretchedness, and wickedness, would be itself beneficial, or that this was the proper preparation for his Gospel.” To brood over the past, without equally considering the forgiveness and the present strength that wait on us, and the future with its boundless possibilities of good, can but paralyze and appall. “Repentance itself is more connected with anticipation and hope, than with re- membrance and regret.” The future is everything to us. “The fixing our faces in the right instead of the wrong direction,—this is the difficulty, this is the turning-point, this is the crisis of life. But, that once done, the future is clear before us.” We are speaking of one extreme: unfortunately the other exists likewise. The religiously indifferent, the men who admit in a general way that there is a God in the universe, and yet feel no uneasiness at being as if there were none,— they would do well to examine themselves. But the soul that has been awakened to its danger has examined itself already ; it has pronounced the result unsatisfactory, and it must not now continue repeating the process interminably, but look away from itself to the Saviour, the forgiveness and the new life he brings. “We are not to spend our days in watching our own vices, in gazing at our own sins, in stirring and raking up all the mud of our past lives ; but to lift up our thoughts from our own corrupt nature to him who put on that nature in order to deliver it from its corruption, and to fix our contemplations and our affections on him who came to clothe us in his perfect righteousness.” Do not stand picking the flaws out, one by one, said Luther, but plunge into the river, and drown them! After having examined self and found it wanting, it is time to examine Christ,—his promises, and the power of his Spirit; it is time to trust to what he has done for us and can do in us. § 82. The sufferers by the tendency to morbid self-in- spection may be divided into three classes. here 1s in the J. H. Godwin. Dean Stanley. See $86. Archd. Hare. Luther. Various forms of this unhealthy tendency. Rom. vii. 24. viii. 25. 216 BOOK THE THIRD. first place the self-righteous type. It is a mistake to suppose this evil can only exist in the shape of a pharasaic com- placency in our own persons and works; there is such a thing as a dissatisfied—aye, a despairing self-righteousness. It exhibits itself in the perpetually recurring effort to find in ourselves some title to the favor of God, attended by the alike recurring sense of guilt and failure. Paradoxical as the assertion is, the wretchedness of a soul in this state arises from its distrust of self not being sufficiently complete and final. Let it only despair of itself altogether, and then look to the passion of Christ for the satisfaction that it never can find in itself. When Paul had been brought to exclaim with horror, “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?” He was able in the next breath to say “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Then there is the anxious, restless type. Here the mind is enlightened as to the hopelessness of ever acquiring merit of its own, but it is all the more anxious to be sure that its repentance and faith are genuine, and it is therefore ever intent upon testing its experiences. In doing go, it is like a child who scrapes away the earth from plants to see whether they are growing, or like a man who should dissect himself to be satisfied as to the soundness of his organs. In our bodies the vital processes take place out of sight, nay, when the action of our organs is healthy they take place without our being conscious of them; so in a healthy state of the soul faith is busied with Christ, and not with itself ait does not with introverted eye seek to make itself its own object. The cure for this state is to be found in the contempla- tion of the character of Christ, and in dwelling upon all those utterances which convince the soul of his purpose of love towards it. The more I am persuaded that it is posi- tively his will to show me mercy, the more I shall be ready to trust to him, instead of attempting to trust to my own APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 27 feelings about him, and I shall take my willingness to receive mercy as a sufficient evidence that I do receive it. His gracious purpose, as it is known and felt, becomes my warrant for the reality of the attraction it exercises over me, and I am conscious not only that the simple reception of him involves a change of character more important than any other, but also that it is one the reality of which may be more surely known. It is his absence, not his presence, that I am inclined to fear; then, disposed as he is, the saving help of his presence is assured. He will not sift my faith to condemn, but to supply its shortcomings. The first serious thought of the prodigal son was merely this—that there was plenty at home, while he was hungry; and similarly, the awakening consciousness that we are not safe as we are is a right beginning of conversion to God, provided we do not stop short in it. Our third type is that of minds professing to proceed methodically, and who therefore defer coming to Christ until they shall have gone through a stage of repentance such as they deem a satisfactory preparation. This temp- tation is often unintentionally furthered both by systematic treatises and by Christian biography: from the fact that so many eminent servants of God groaned under the bur- den of their sins for years before they found peace, it is too hastily concluded that others may remain intentionally in a preparatory phase of religious life. Now, it is certain that the Luthers and Bunyans of all ages never remained in that phase for one day longer than they could help. No sooner did they come to understand the Gospel, than, like the jailor at Philippi and the Eunuch in his chariot, they embraced it at once and rejoiced at once. If I see on one side the yawning precipice, and on the other the Divine hand stretched to save me, I am not to remain voluntarily suspended over the former, but am to turn immediately to erasp that saving hand without a moment’s hesitation or J. H. Godwin. Acts xvi. 34. Vili. 39. Heb siis7: Mat. ix. 9. Rom. x. 8. 218 BOOK THE THIRD. delay. It was well for the world that Luther was left so long grappling alone with that mortal anguish in his cell at Erfurt, but the experience there gained was precious for himself and for the Church only because it was involuntary. Our religious education may be slow and insensible; the most apparently sudden conversions have doubtless been prepared, asis the bursting forth of spring by the hidden working of the sap under the bark; but when an understood Gospel speaks to the heart it does not say “Be converted eradually,” nor “ Be converted speedily,” but “Be converted at once! ‘To-day, of ye will hear hrs voice. nothing to be done first, no preparatory step whatever: Christ calls us to-day, as immediately and as simply as when he said to the publican “Follow me.” Lvery feeling that would bring us to his feet immediately is of God, every 99) There is feeling that would make us wait a day in order to be better prepared is a temptation and a snare. One great secret of the influence exerted by the instru- ments of genuine revivals is that they have invariably reckoned upon immediate results; the Gospel, as they preached it, was not a message transmitted by the post,—a printed circular: it was delivered by a special messenger, who waited for an answer, and who knew that there was no legitimate excuse for delay. The final explanation of the returning prodigal with his God may take as little time as the interview that sees an earthly father and son reconciled. When I understand what God has done for me in Christ, and that he is waiting for one word from me,—a word that is already within me, pressing for utterance, trembling upon my lips—I cannot allow myself to close my eyes in sleep until that word has been pronounced. The next sun that rises in the heavens must shed its rays upon one child more recovered for his father and for himself. Souls under the discipline of life often find themselves trusting to Christ as a Saviour, and desiring to do God’s APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 219 will; that is to say, find themselves true Christians, with- out knowing when they first began to be so. But it is well that such minds should recognize their own state, and attain to a final explanation with their God; thus only will they fully realize the joy which is their por- tion, and the strength which it produces. “These things,” says John, “have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.” If it be my supreme desire to belong to Christ and to serve him, then I do belong to him already ; but it is good for me to know it, that I may have confidence in my prayers and conflicts, and that the peace of God may garrison my heart. § 83. When Christianity is contemplated in its subjects, we learn that the appropriation of Redemption is effected by faith. Now in order to show that this law is founded on human nature itself, and is not of arbitrary appointment, it is necessary to cast a glance at the place held in man’s intellectual and moral constitution by faith, and by those processes in the lower spheres of human activity which constitute so many kinds of inferior or preparatory faiths. Much as words have been tortured, hardened, stiffened, sharpened, by the exigencies of theological controversy, this all-important term retains great elasticity, and is ap- plied with the most various modifications. Taken in the most general meaning that can be given it, faith ws the sense of the realities without us, and of our relation to them. The instinct by which the infant seeks its mother’s breast is an example of the first stage of faith, though it be but a blind, secret impulse. Men without being conscious of it, says Fichte, “apprehend all the reality which has an existence for them, through faith alone; and this faith forces itself on them simultaneously with their existence,—it is born with them. How could it be otherwise? If in mere knowledge, Neh. viii. 10. 1 John vy. 13. Pe ivs0 Of faith in the abstract. J. G. Fichte. Mare Debrit. Goethe. C Malan, jun. Dr. Guthrie 220 BOOK THE THIRD. in mere perception and reflection, there is no ground for regarding our mental presentations as more than mere pic- tures which necessarily pass before our view, why do we yet regard all of them as more than this, and assume as their foundation something which exists independently of all presentation?” Belief, writes another metaphysician, is the essentially realizing faculty of the soul, to which we must refer our persuasion of external objective realities, so that whenever we perceive a phenomenon we believe in the existence of a noumenon. This faculty is born with us; it is not reason, for all reasoning is founded upon it; it is a sort of internal revelation, ranking with all those necessary and universal ideas which precede experience. It was in accordance with this application of the word that Goethe said that all knowledge supposed faith, and that he himself was a believer in the five senses. When we come to the higher sphere of adult life and labours, faith, no longer instinctive but self-conscious and reflecting, busies itself with distant as well as present realities, is seen to be our security for all that is known of the past or expected from the future. ‘Let faith in the veracity of the impressions of reason be shaken in all men for one day, and mankind will be struck motionless as if by a thunderbolt! It ceases to have a history, for that which has hitherto passed for such has become an unreal, worth- less phantom. Its members have no longer any common tie! The torch of all the sciences of observation has been extinguished! The wisdom that ages had transmitted as a sacred deposit is no more. The edifice of human science that had sheltered every successive generation, and which each had enlarged by the labour of its own faith,—that immense edifice totters on its foundations, and falls, burying under its ruins the glory and the hopes and very being of the human mind !” ; “Faith is the world’s great worker.” By faith the hus- APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. Bo bandman ploughs his field ; by it the sailor directs his ship across the ocean towards a land he has never seen, and ploughs the deep trusting to that trembling needle. Without faith no human occupation can be pursued,” no progress realized, no discovery effected.” It is the sight of the invisible that strengthens the mind in every sphere. By faith the enterprising merchant makes his fortune where shortsighted mediocrity dared not venture itself ; by faith Palissy broke up furniture and flooring to feed his furnaces; by faith Columbus reached a new world in spite of unbelieving crews. By faith in the destinies of the “eternal city” the old Romans conquered a world, and made the name of their empire the greatest ever given to any thing human. Faith is the source of every thing that bears a character of dignity and strength in the eyes of men. Vulgar souls must see and feel and handle, but those who have ever done any thing great have had faith in some truth, or in themselves, or in God. Faith makes things hoped for substantial, it makes things unseen evident ; our dependence upon it increases with our knowledge and activity: the loftier any intellect the more room there is for its exercise ; the more kingly any character the greater its power to exert it. “One might measure exactly the greatness of individuals and peoples by the proportions of their faith.” This peremptory and indestructible instinct of submission to facts given independently of our wills is however but an imperfect beginning,—a pledge—a prophecy of a life of Faith of a higher kind, or of more kinds than one; for a principle thus controlling our whole being must be intended to bear upon objects commensurate with itself, and calling forth the aspirations of our whole being. This higher order of faiths 4 Quia nec navem quis ingreditur et liquido ac profundo vitam committit elemento, nisi se prius credat posse salvari, nec agricola semina sulcis obruit et fruges spargit in terram, nisi crediderit venturos imbres. Nihil denique est, quod in vita geri possit, si non credulitas ante preecesserit,—Rufinus, expos, fidei. A. Vinet. Heb. xi. 1. A. Vinet. Augustin. J. D. Morell. 229 BOOK THE THIRD. dawns upon us already in those which concern moral reali- tues. Through faith man will confide his whole future to the honour of a friend,—and woman will commit her happiness, her life, her all in this world to the keeping of one she loves and trusts. Mutual confidence is the principle of every generous action and happy relation between man and man, of all family order and happiness, of all filial, and of a great part of parental affection. It is through faith that man gives himself. The nobler any soul the more joy it feels in trusting and in being trusted ; its capacity for faith is the measure of its capacity for l¢fe, for the very central emotions and functions of the inner man. Religious faith, as it would have existed in unfallen man, would have been the consciousness of his relation to God, and therefore of a kingdom of truth, and righteousness, and love, of which God is the centre. It would have been the life of that which is eternal in us, and thereby the final ex- planation of the supremacy of faith. It would have been at once an intellectual and an emotional state of conscious- ness,—the two “perfectly blended in that pure spiritual elevation where our intellectual gaze upon truth is not separable from the love and ecstasy we feel in the contem- plation of it—that pure and holy fazth which seems to be the immediate contact of the finite with the Infinite—the calm repose of the soul of man upon the eternal God ;” that is to say—the sense of the highest and holiest of realities. Faith in its higher stages is opposed to sight, and yet it constitutes those elementary convictions of the reality of the external world, and of the persistance of its laws, which are necessary for our adjustment to the very conditions of our existence. Faith is opposed to the present, and yet its objects are ever flashing through the visible and material world, making its phenomena the instruments of revealing the unseen. Faith is opposed to the mere logical under- APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 225 standing, because its first intuitions are at the foundation of all discursive processes, and its final conquests are at the end of them. It is the active element in that universal reason which gives us the consciousness of the primary laws and ultimate facts of the realities with which we are con- versant. The understanding afterwards works upon the contents of this consciousness, distinguishing, comparing, combining, deducing; but the normal end of it all is the furnishing believing reason with vaster conceptions, loftier views, and stronger motives. Hence faith is never properly opposed to reason,—being rather its crowning triumph. We have attained to the dignity, complacency, and security of reason, in any given sphere, so far as the reality with which we are conversant in that sphere has been received, under- stood, carried out in its consequences, fitted to its place in the harmony of things, and mentally subordinated to the unity of the Divine plan. § 84. Faith in Redemption differs from mere knowledge or belief by the moral act which it involves. “ Whenever there is an exercise of trust, there is not only some truth to be believed, there is also some good to be desired, and some course to be chosen. ... Whenever there is Christian faith, there is with the belief of what is true, the desire of what is good, and the choice of what is right.” To become saving, knowledge must be changed into faith: it is not enough to believe that there is in Christ the right to forgive, and the power to heal,—if this belief is to become faith there must be the will to apply to him. Again, “trusting to a person commonly includes more than trusting to any propositions or facts ; and it has a much ereater influence on character and conduct... Jesus Christ himself, the Son of God, is the object of faith, in whom men will find all that is to be believed, desired, and chosen, that they may receive through him eternal life.” Of course every object of trust must be known in relation to the good ex- Of faith in Christ. J. H. Godwin. Comp. close of 85. d J H. Godwin. A. Vinet. Luther. 924 BOOK THE THIRD. pected ; we look to the Son of God in the character which he has assumed towards us,—that of our Saviour; faith in his work is therefore included in the faith that embraces his person; but the latter and more comprehensive expression 1s in many respects the better: it points to him as the present living dispenser of the forgiveness he secured, and the life he inaugurated; it points to him as one who gave himself once for us, and is ever renewing the gift. We have not merely to do with a blessed fact past and gone, but with its author, a living person to be loved and trusted to, and who gives that fact its present reality for our souls. A very real and lively faith in Christ may moreover co-exist with a very imperfect idea of his work; a mind may be prevented by natural incapacity, or by erroneous teaching from under- standing the simplest theological proposition, and yet by looking to Jesus as an Almighty friend, experience a peace of which it is unable to give the theory. The faith which is most enlightened, and is able to explain itself, is the acceptance of the relation of Jesus Christ to us um the full consciousness of its results. It is “ simply the will te accept the forgiveness of God,” addressing itself to him in whom God’s gracious purpose is revealed and effected, and fastening upon the work that brought salvation within our reach. It is grace within teaching the conscience to lay hold upon grace without. ‘Faith sees our sins in the light shed upon them by the death of Christ, and our justification in the light of his resurrection. It gives peace with God, and the power to love his holy will. It does not procure eternal life as something external, but its objects constitute that life; it contains—it is itself that peace and that. transformed will,—at once receptive, because it appropriates the offered grace, and productive because it thereby creates a new life. “Faith it is which rendereth us a 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 with- APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 225 out faith God loseth in us his glory, wisdom, righteousness, truth, and mercy.” § 85. We have seen that faith can be predicated of all degrees and kinds of human contact with external realities, that it becomes successively, according to its object, an in- stinctive, an intellectual, a voluntary and moral process. Faith in Redemption is all three, but essentially culminating in what is moral. It is the welcome of our whole being, thinking, feeling, and willing to this great salvation; the person and work of Christ embraced, not by a fraction of our spiritual nature, but by the entire man. “It may have historical certainty for its starting point,” writes Vinet, “but this certainty is not faith ; it may take the form of a philo- sophical theory, but this theory is not faith; it may remain in the state of opinion, but this opinion is not faith ; 1t may dwindle down to a popular prejudice, but this prejudice is not faith: to believe is to confide oneself; to believe is to reckon upon God.” This conception of faith must have been always more or less present to instinctive Christian feeling, but that it was not realized in the early Eastern Church is proved by the very existence of the term orthodoxy, betraying as it does the tendency to connect salvation arbitrarily with mere soundness of opinion. It was otherwise with the more earnest Latins, both ancient and medizval. “Believing,” says Thomas Aquinas, ‘depends on the will of those that believe; but the will must be prepared by God through erace;”” and Peter Lombard,—“It is one thing to believe in God, and another to believe God. To believe God is to believe the things which he says are true; to believe in God is by believing to love him, by believing to go to him, by believing to cleave to him, and be incorporated with his members.” Since the Reformation, the tendency of Roman b Oredere quidem in voluntate credentium consistit ; sed oportet quod voluntas preparetur a Deo per gratiam. Q Faith culminates ina moral process. A. Vinet. Thos, Aquinas. Peter Lombard. Calvin. Melancthon. Luther. Rom. x. 12. Luke xvii. 6. 2 Thess. 1, 3. John vi. 29. 1 John iii. 23. 2 Cor. v. 10. Rom. xvi. 26. Bishop O’Brien. 226 BOOK THE THIRD. Catholic teachers has been to look upon faith as a mere act of the intelligence, in order the better to exhibit its imper- fection ; Protestant authorities, on the other hand, are unanimous in the moral and more complex view. “To believe,” writes Calvin, “is to embrace with a firm and sure persuasion ;” and Melancthon,—* Faith 1s confidence apply- ing to us the benefits of Christ. Confidence is a movement of the will, by which it acquiesees in Christ.” Luther’s definition in the preface to his Commentary on Romans, is characteristic :—‘ Faith is a living, reasonable confidence in the grace of God; so certain, that it would die upon such erounds a thousand times over.” The step which is the grand passage from a world of wickedness into the conscious presence of Christ, the inter- nal change on which eternity is suspended, that state which contains within itself the practical essence of Christianity, of which all other religious affections are but the conse- quences, and which comprises in itself the seeds of immortal elory,—that step must concern at once the intellect and the heart; it must be the work of the moral faculties, since it is the appropriation of a moral act. Hence it is said, “with the heart man believeth unto righteousness ;” and the disciples could ask the Lord to increase their faith, and an Apostle could rejoice that the faith of the Thessalonians was erowing exceedingly. An intellectual process once performed is complete for ever; but feelings and affections, the acts of the soul, are capable of very various degrees of intensity. Faith is a work, and a matter of commandment, and a matter of Divine entreaty, and there is such a thing as “the obedience of faith,” because it is in a measure an act of the will, enlightened and strengthened from above. It is for the same reason again that the New Testament habitually speaks of faith in the Saviour’s person, or on his © Fides est fiducia, applicans nobis beneficia Christi. Fiducia est motus in voluntate quo voluntas in Christo aquiescit. APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 2 name: some preposition® is always so coupled with the word as to imply that we do not merely believe a statement, but trust a person. It is because faith is essentially a moral process that it requires the agency of the Holy Ghost; the simple propositions which are its object matter have nothing unintelligible in them, nothing which can only be understood by supernatural help, but it is otherwise with the obstacles in our perverted wills; believing is equivalent to coming to Christ, and he says “no man can come to me except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” If faith stopped short in a mere intellectual process it would be involuntary, it could not involve our responsibility, nor effect our sal- vation. Shall it be thought inconsistent with the Protestant conception of faith that we are told, “whosoever be- heveth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God,” and that saving faith is sometimes presented in Scripture as the simple belief of the facts that Jesus died for our sins, and rose again for our justification? Such passages must be understood to involve a belief entering into the spirit of the facts with which it concerns itself. We think, moreover, experience has shown that such is the nature of these facts, and such our connection with them, that no man can really be persuaded of them without feeling himself a sinner, and being willing to receive pardon, and being moved to grati- tude and joy. The intellectual part of the process is pre- pared by certain moral conditions, and passes over into others. There probably exists no such thing as a purely intellectual cognition of realities involving our moral state and our prospects for eternity. In this sphere “ we only understand what we believe, and know, and practise,” and cannot sever phenomena which coexist in the unity of our consciousness, or set off from each other by sharp boundary lines, functions which are involved in one. When James d éa or év with the dative, és or és with the accusative. John yi. 44. 1 John v. 1. Rom. x. 9. 1 Cor. xv. 1—4. A. Vinet. H. Rogers. James ii 19, A. Vinet. Faith does not create the right it Uses. Acts viil. 37. See $381, 82. 228 BOOK TIE THIRD. wishes to speak of the dead work of a merely nominal unin- fluential faith, he chooses as an example that of the abstract doctrine, ‘there is one God;” but it does not appear that a positive persuasion of truths so intimately concerning our own everlasting weal or woe as those of Redemption can exist without rising into faith. The so-called historical faith, upon examination, proves to be merely a knowledge ~ of the received way of stating certain facts and proposi- tions, with a prejudice in its favour; and practically, the simple summons to believe that Jesus bore our sins and put them away, is a touchstone of our knowledge of our- selves, and of our disposition towards God. In other things we believe first and then act, but in the concerns of the soul even belief is already an act: it is incipient faith ; its very objects characterize the man, and savoir ce que nous croyons, cest connaitre ce que nous sommes. § 86. The Gospel is doubtless put in this its simplest shape that the desponding and the self-righteous may not be tempted to remain for ever analyzing their feelings. Say to such, as Phillip was made to say to the Eunuch, by an interpolation,—“ if thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest,’ and they will set themselves to examine with painful anxiety whether they do indeed believe with al] their heart. The healthy faculty is busied with its object and not with itself, and faith should fasten upon the blessed Redemption without stopping to contemplate itself and anxiously satisfy itself of its own reality. The perishing Israelite must fasten his looks upon the brazen serpent alone, and never withdraw them to satisfy himself of the effect of the miraculous cure upon his swollen, festering limbs ; if he does so he delays his recovery and puts it in peril. This is the most refined form of self-righteousness, and, like all its other shapes, proceeds from our inborn dis- trust of God and slowness to believe in his gratuitous love ; and so when we know that we have nothing else to bring APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 229 that can be meritorious in his sight, we still try to make a merit of our faith. The poor soul persuades herself that she has no right to lay claim to Christ until certain con- ditions are performed,—there must be a certain amount of repentance, @.e., sorrow for sin, and confidence in the Saviour ; and as no earnest soul can ever be satisfied with its own feelings, the examination of them can only be productive of despair. | The Fathers of reformed theology, from Calvin downwards, did their best to meet this snare, by insisting that faith is the instrumental and not the meritorious cause of justifica- tion. “It is not,’ says the Heidelberg Catechism, “that I am agreeable to God through the dignity of my faith ; but that the sole satisfaction of Jesus Christ, his righteousness, and his holiness, stand me instead of righteousness before God, and that I cannot embrace them or apply them to my- self, otherwise than by a true faith.” Similarly the Walloon Confession: “we do not mean that it is properly faith it- self that justifies us; for it is only the instrument by which we embrace Christ our righteousness.” Faith is doubtless precious in itself, in the sight of both the father and the returning prodigal, since it restores them to each other, but its value as regards results—its saving efficacy—les in that which it receives. “It justifies by bringing us Christ, as a pot full of gold enriches the man that finds it.” The res- toration of the prodigal to his place in the Father's heart and house was altogether of grace: he would have abhorred the idea of connecting any merit with the feeling that made him confess his sin, or of supposing that his repentance gave him a right to the grace that was shown him. Faith does not give the believer any peculiar title to lay claim to Jesus Christ; it is the simple assertion of the right common to all men: it does not create, but it uses this common right, and it lays claim to Christ immediately, without putting in the way the previous fulfilment of any Heidelberg Cate- chism, rep. 1xi. Walloon Confes- sion, art. xx11. Calvin. Salvation by faith a doctrine peculiar to Chris- tiantty. 230 BOOK THE THIRD. condition whatever; as it expresses itself in those simple well-known lines— Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling, A slowness to believe arising from our moral state cannot be overcome at once by simply correcting a common mis- apprehension of terms, but it is true that the ambiguity attending the popular use of the word repentance helps to obscure the simplicity of the Gospel for many minds. Meravora includes in its complex meaning the feeling of sorrow for sin, but it is not to be made merely equivalent to that feeling, still less is it to be made a preparatory con- dition to entitle us to come to Christ; repentance is itself the act of coming, the change of Wt that gives a new di- rection to the whole life. As temperaments are different, the sternest self-condemnation may exist, and the most momentous change take place, without a tear; put in any case no man can shed the tears of genuine repentance until he has given up trying to force them in a legal and self- righteous spirit. § 87. It is a peculiarity of Christianity that it has re- cognised the place faith occupies in the human constitution, as the organ for recognising realities, and directing our ac- tivity in every sphere. That it should do so is consistent with its claims, and argues a thorough insight of its own nature as well as ours. Other religions brought nothing new into the world ; they enlarged the province of imagination by various combinations, they involved also certain elementary intuitions of faith, which they did not create but only used and abused. They did not even profess to offer any additional material for faith to act upon: the incarnations of Vishnu for instance, on the showing of the Hindus themselves, were but so many successive masks of a Deity who was already part of the world, and not the introduction and permanent APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 231 indwelling of a Being from above. The religion of Re- demption differs from them and from all philosophies and ethical systems, by professing to have imported.-into nature a grace from without: it proclaims the advent into the world of One who is from above, a salvation which was: not contained within the premises of natural fact, and presents itself to the reason as a new transcendent fact, to be proved by the experience of its blessed reality and power. The vulgar current antithesis of faith and reason comes of an arbitrary limiting of the operations of the latter to the phenomena of nature. If this were justifiable, of course Christianity without being opposed to reason would be al- together out of its sphere. Redemption cannot be deduced from anything in nature, not being contained or revealed in it, but being the act of free Divine love coming to relieve the fallen creature. But the sphere of reason includes moral as well as material phenomena, and history as well as nature, so that the facts of Redemption furnish it with its noblest object matter, and faith becomes the final satisfaction of reason. Mahometism imitated Christianity, as in so many other respects so also by assigning great importance to faith, but without containing in itself any reason for doing so, or recog- nising its intrinsic value. In the scheme of Redemption, on the contrary, the place occupied by faith is justified by the nature of both object and subject,—of the object, because it purports to be a reality presenting itself to the faculty that concerns itself with such,—of the subject, because it is through faith that man works, feels, lives, and disposes of - himself; his faith is the measure of his peace, his charity, his moral freedom and life ; it is not rewarded arbitrarily and accidentally, but is the necessary instrument of the appropriation of Redemption. “The more ready the shal- low wit of man is to find fault with such a condition, as humiliating or insulting to reason, the more evidently Bushnell Justification a Divine anticipa- tion. Rom. iv. 17. 252 BOOK THE THIRD. it is not from man, but from a superior and superhuman source.” § 88. Christ must tend to live entirely in the souls that open to him; hence Redemption is not considered as com- pletely realized until the restoration of the human person in its integrity, by the clothing of the renewed spirit with a renewed and glorified body. The process of recovery is therefore, by the appointment of God himself, a gradual one; In any case the moral part of it would be so from the very nature of things. Man’s recovery from so great a death could not but be slow and laborious: how infinitely short of the righteous claims of God is our deepest repen- tance, how hesitating, and superficial, and thankless our appropriation of Redemption, how partial the sanctification of the most advanced, how lamentably imperfect to the very last, and such as never upon its own merits could find © acceptance before God. Now justification is that act of foreknowledge and sovereign grace by which God forgives and pronounces just the sinner who lays claim to Jesus, recognizing in that claim the prin- ciple of all righteousness, the beginning of a union with Christ, which is one day to be complete. Our heavenly Father, who calleth things that are not as though they were, appreciates that feeble spark of spiritual life in its origin and in its results; he has respect unto that of which it is the dawn; he has consented to accept the assimilation of the work of Redemption which faith has undertaken, how- ever incomplete it may be at present, provided it be but seriously begun ; because, as God, he-cannot but view the consummation of the new higher life in its germ, and take © the principle for the whole series of developments which are to proceed organically from it, and again, as God, he cannot but be reconciled with a soul thus on its way to bear the image of Jesus. As our conversion is the substitution of Christ for ourselves in our own hearts, so our Justification APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 233 is the substitution of Christ for ourselves before God, and that because we have laid claim to him, and because if he is anything to us now, in positive living relationship, he will one day be ad/. Johannes Erigena, that audacious thinker of the very darkest age, had a glimpse of the truth when he wrote,—“ the righteous, while they still live in the flesh, are not called so because they actually are so, but because they wish to be so, craving for a perfect righteousness which is to be.” We are not saved by the excellency of our faith, but by the all-sufficiency of our Saviour, put at our disposal by love, and appropriated by faith. We have no righteousness of our own, Pharisaic or evangelic.—no inherent holiness of our own; but the righteousness of another, and that other in us. We are not saved by union with Christ in the abstract, but by the sort of union that lays hold on his finished atoning work in the first instance, and along with it receives the capacity for a life partaking in an ever in- creasing measure of his own sinlessness and blessedness. Pardon and regeneration are connected in the same way as condemnation and spiritual death, but they do not follow each other in the same order, because in regeneration the soul retraces its steps. We set out at first with spiritual death, and therefore with condemnation ; arrested by grace, we embrace the Divine offer of forgiveness, and in doing so find ourselves in the possession of the secret of a new life. In contrast with all false schemes of salvation or of happiness, Christ has been made to us a Divine wisdom, both righteous- ness and sanctification, redemption in all its aspects: “and you that were sometime alienated, and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh, through death, to present you holy, and un- blameable, and unreproveable in his sight.” Faith is the door of every heavenly and spiritual relation : it anticipates in an instant the rest of life,—it takes us out Johannes Erigena. 1 Cor. i. 30. CO EN, PR Phil. iii, 12, 13. i John iii. 9, 234 BOOK THE THIRD. of ourselves and lifts us into Christ, making us one with him both in our own consciousness and in God’s judgment of us. The recognition of this union on the part of God is our justification, its recognition in our souls is our peace, and Christ has come to dwell in our hearts. God has not merely forgiven, he pronounces us just, because he anticipates and allows us to anticipate the final triumph of the new creature, when the conflicts of this poor world shall be over and nothing survive within the Christian but his heart for God. As the conviction of sin anticipated the judgment which would have been our condemnation, so that of right- eousness recognizes what we are to become in Christ. As Christ clothed himself with our sin, bore it upon his conscience, and all that was deepest within him echoed his cohdemnation in us,—so faith clothes us with Christ, and gives us relief in the consciousness of the completeness of his atonement, and the preciousness of his person in the sight of our God and Father, and all that is deepest within us echoes our deliverance, acquittal, and justification in him. The soul awakes to the hope of life, and to the power of truth and goodness ; it yields itself to the spirit of Christ in order to have uttered within it that prophetic absolution— high amen—that shall render possible the exaltation of love to God into the governing principle of the entire man. Then the believer's rest precedes his labour, he is taken in a measure into the communion of the Saviour’s own untroubled happiness, and the peace breathed into his soul is an earnest of the consummation of Redemption,—-like that instinct of returning well-being, which betimes, at the beginning of a long convalescence, cheers the pallid and drooping invalid, serving, even in the midst of great remaining weakness, as a promise of future health and vigour. Conversion is not the attainment of moral perfection, but the first step in its pursuit in the right direction, and in his strength who will enable us to attain it; so that when John APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 235 says he that is born of God cannot sin, he speaks as one who rises up on angel wings to see with God, and to con- template the whole man present and future, in that holy seed which is to assimilate to itself all that is genuine in the man. The Antinomian distinguishes between himself and his sin speculatively, in order that it may be left undisturbed ; John and Paul do so really, because they hate and renounce their sin, and desire its annihilation. But John’s God-like intuition did not lead him, any more than Paul, to forget that sin is ever lurking in our hearts and lives, in hideous contradiction to the ideal of our being. It is as when the same Apostle loves to repeat the passages in which the Saviour seems to overlook his sufferings ; and to treat the cross as only a summons to glory ; and yet he too once lifts the curtain, and adds to the evidence afforded by the other evangelists, of the horror with which the Lord looked forward to the cup of trembling which was before him. § 89. The distinction between justification and sanctifi- cation is legitimate, for the one passes in the mind of God, and the other in the mind of man; the one is immediate, and the other gradual. But that is a superficial theology, accustomed to put words for things, that ventures to make them successive processes, the one beginning where the other ends. Forgiveness and salvation are sometimes con- ceived as a sort of legal reconciliation, antecedent to the return of the heart and the affections to God. This is to ignore at once the real nature of our ruin and that of our restoration. Alienation of the heart from God is the real evil that is to be dealt with, and so long as its principle remains untouched, our God has neither the will, nor the right, nor the power to pronounce us other than we are. The contrary supposition makes God important to us because of what he has to bestow rather than for his feelings towards us viewed in themselves, robs him of the attribute that life Rom. vii. 20. 1 Johni. 8. John xii. 27. Simultaneous- ness of justifica- tion and commenc- ing sanctification. Macleod Campbell. A. Vinet. Calvin. 236 BOOK THE THIRD. lies in his favour, and tends to smother the cry of the orphan spirit for its long lost father. It is as though the prodigal son could reckon upon recovering a share of the inheritance as a matter altogether distinct from his personal reconciliation with the father and the revival of his filial sympathies. But it is not so. “God out of the heart was sin and its punishment, God in the heart is pardon and its fruit.” All the applications of Redemption were comprehended, as in their seed principle, in the first act of the faith that substi- tuted the name of Jesus for our own in all our hopes of eternal life. Faith makes us one with Christ, living branches of the vine, and his righteousness is henceforth imputed to us because it belongs to us in principle; members of his body we have a right to lay claim to everything that renders him agreeable to God. The right to what we are not yet is made over to us now, an interest in his death and the obligation to realize his life, the same cross embraced by faith cancelling our sin and purifying our hearts. The punishment from which we have been delivered is the necessity of continuing in sin. Thus justification and the first step of sanctification are simultaneous, and by no one has this been asserted more distinctly and repeatedly than by the great teacher of the Reformed Church: “this conjunction of the head and the members,” says Calvin, “this dwelling of Christ in our hearts, this mystical union, in a word, is set by us in the very highest place, in order that Christ becoming ours, may make us partners of the gifts with which he is endowed himself. We do not therefore contemplate him from afar as one outside of us, to have his justice imputed to us: but because we clothe ourselves with him, and we are grafted into his body, and finally he has deigned to make us one with him,—therefore it is that we boast of the fellowship of a common righteousness with him.” He puts the question categorically, how and by what APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 237 right faith justifies, and it is in these words that he sums up his answer: “we only wish to set down those two things, to wit that faith never stands fast until it has reached the gratuitous promise, and secondly that we are not reconciled to God by it otherwise than as it unites us to Christ. These are both to be noted... How can faith be saving except in so far as it inserts us into the body of Christ ?” One of his chief purposes in the third book of the Insti- tutes is to show “how man is justified by faith alone and by pure pardon, and nevertheless real holiness of life is not separated from that gratuitous imputation.” And further on: “Osiander objects that it would be unworthy of God, and contrary to his nature, if he should justify those who remain practically impious. But what I have already said must be remembered, that justifying grace is not to be separated from regeneration, although they are distinct.” Calvin’s strong moral conception of justification and sanctification received together and conjointly, semul et con- junctum, from the hands of Christ, corrects what was one- sided in occasional statements of Luther, and leaves anti- nomianism no place for the sole of its foot. There remains as little room for despair; in presence of a message of pardon the convinced soul may not remain perversely working itself into experiences of hopeless sorrow. Grace speaks like the Lord to Joshua: “get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?” It is to Jesus that we are to look and not to the liveliness of our joy, or the firmness of our assurance, or the sensible fervour of our love. Doubtless, since all are not saved, no man can have peace without its being founded upon something in his own state, but that something is precisely the will that looks to Christ. § 90. Thus the gift of Christ is the one unchanging object of all New Testament theology. ‘Seen in one direc- tion it is pardon, seen in another it is holiness, seen in another it is glory. He justifies as Christ crucified and Calvin. Calvin. For original, see Note C. J. FE. Astie. Josh, vil. 19. Faith and works. W. A. Butler. Ernést Naville. Aucustin. De civ er LEXI xX; ca, 27 238 BOOK THE THIRD. risen without us; he sanctifies as Christ crucified and risen within us; he glorifies in virtue of both, as Christ enthroned in the fulness of consummate power, and at length subduing all things unto himself....To receive him is to receive the germ of every blessing that is written in the book of God. One with Christ we must have pardon; for how could God love the head and hate the members? One with Christ we must have sanctification ; for how could he that is bound- lessly pure remain one with aught that is wilfully unholy ? One with Christ we must have the prospective redemption of the whole man to glory ; for how could he abandon to the everlasting grave a portion of his own being, such as he has deigned to make us?” The man who has gazed in humble adoring joy upon the face of the risen Jesus, and read his own acceptance there, can realize as yet but faintly the im- port of the heaven beginning within him, but he knows that he has been reached in the very centre of his being; he is ata school of filial confidence and entire self-surrender, and what he learns there will prove to him a secret of energy in action and patience in suffering, of consolation in sorrow and moderation in joy, of strength in weakness and hope in death. The eternal life begun in him gives unity to all his thoughts, ways, and aspirations ; it is now, in principle, in the midst of the obscurities of faith all that it is to be in the midst of the splendours of sight. It sends us abroad to pay to our fellows the debt that we owe to our God. It bids us realize the purposes of universal love, to carry along with us purity, charity, and peace, into a world of defile- ment, selfishness, and suffering. The peace attainable in this life, says St. Augustin, is but the solace of our misery, and similarly the righteousness made ours is rather remission of sins than actual perfection of virtue ; it is not the less real righteousness, on account of the end of the good man contemplated in it. You might as well, exclaims Luther, separate light and heat from fire as APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 239 works from faith. “Christian faith is not, as some say, an empty husk in the heart until love shall quicken it; but if it be true faith, it is a sure trust and confidence in the heart, whereby Christ is apprehended, so that Christ is the object of faith ; yea, rather even, in faith Christ himself is present. Faith therefore justifieth because it apprehendeth and pos- sesseth this treasure, Christ present. Wherefore Christ, apprehended by faith, and dwelling in the heart, is the true Christian righteousness.” We are not therefore to represent the Gospel to ourselves as meaning that God, not being able to get good works, had to put up with belief. Without faith no works would be good, for, whatever amiable or ad- mirable characters they might otherwise exhibit, all would be marred by association with neglect of the highest duty, and insensibility to the first, nearest, most sovereign of all claims. With faith, on the other hand, a source of all goodness has been made to spring up within the heart for eternity. And, just as light, sound, motion, electricity, are all physically so many equivalents of heat—so much trans- lated sunshine—so morally, every christian grace is only another shape of that radical function by which the soul appropriates Christ and his inexhaustible fulness. Hope is the firmness and confidence of faith looking to the future ; love is faith moved to a gratitude towards God which is afterwards reflected upon man; every effort to accomplish the will of God towards others or to honor him in ourselves is a work of faith, in one form or other of its manifold re- sponsibilities and solicitudes. Works, in New Testament usage, means the whole sum of moral activity, both in the act and in the tendency,—at least this is the widest sense of the term: thus the Lord’s miracles of mercy were emphatically his “works.” The good works unto which the elect have been created before- hand in Christ Jesus are such as help to carry out the intentions of God concerning our neighbours and ourselves, Luther. Eph. ii. 10. Michael Angelo. James ii. 24. Galeayalo: Justification immediate. Cone. Trid., sess. vi., cap. Xvi. Bossuet. 240 BOOK THE THIRD. but have nothing to do with arbitrary practices ascetic or liturgical. Mixed as they are with sin and selfishness, consciously and unconsciously, we never could be pronounced righteous because of them; but God does not judge us ac- cording to the evil that has been in us, but according to the good that we are willing to receive. The character of those in whom Christ begins to live is estimated by what he has done and is, and by what he is to accomplish in them, rather than by what they have been or still partially remain. “There is an angel imprisoned in that marble block,” said Michael Angelo, “but I will set him free.” It is thus with the Divine Sculptor; what he loves and admires in the poor sinner is that holy image of the Firstborn which his own creating hand is to shape out of the rude block. When St. James insists that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only, he evidently takes faith in the sense of bare profession of an orthodox creed, and works for him had the same meaning as Paul’s “faith which worketh by love.” Hence both Apostles, assuredly without concert, select Abraham’s relation towards God as an example of the saving life they speak of. § 91. The Council of Trent so defines justification as to make it disappear altogether, and to put sanctification in its place. It is called the renewal of the inner man by the volun- tary susception of grace; and for that reason is pronounced to be gradual and always incomplete here below. This was a poor attempt to protest against the sense of reconciliation with God then newly awakened in the breasts of multitudes. It is made to look most like truth by Bossuet, when he affirms that, in the act of justifying, God is not merely a judge, he is also a Creator ; and even in this shape the proposition is a misuse of words. Justification is not what God works in us, but his fatherly welcome to his bosom; it is complete from the hour that God has recovered his lost child, because he need not wait to see how the returned prodigal will conduct APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 241 himself at home. He foresees the result of the work that the Holy Spirit has begun ; in the presence of Christ in that soul the Father sees the pledge of the final destruction of every thing that is not of Christ. Here is the whole order, internal harmony, and connection of this great salvation— “after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour ; that being justified by his grace we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” Let us not imagine, writes Ullmann, that faith first exists all alone, and attains a certain state of completeness and perfection before love arises, for love exists implicitly in the first breathings of faith. “The Christian does not live in himself, but in Christ, and in hig neighbour,—in Christ by faith, and in his neighbour by love.” Faith asa living basis Includes its consequences,—that is. love and its works ; and excludes these only in go far as they could afford a second Independent basis of salvation. It cannot exist without tepentance, love, patience, hope; but it only justifies because the being in Christ and possessing him constitutes the righteousness which is valid before God. It is not the heli- ness or love the believer possesses that could justify him, but the holiness and love he desires to have, and embraces in Christ. The immediateness of Justification is expressed by the inward consciousness of the soul itself. “He who is justfied by faith does not go about doubting in himself or his future destiny, but trusting in God. From the first moment that he turns earnestly to God he believes that he is saved ; not from any confidence in himself, but from an overpowering sense of the love of God and Christ,.... He has no right to this peace, and yet he has it....At once and immediately the R Tit. iii. 4—7. Ullmann. Luther. C. I. Nitzsch. Jowett. No imputation of Christ's obedi- ence. 242 BOOK THE THIRD. Gospel tells him that he is justified by faith, that his pardon is simultaneous with the moment of his belief, that he may go on his way rejoicing to fulfil the duties of life.” § 92. Christian doctrine has been sadly obscured by the scholastic invention of an imputation of the active righteous- ness of Christ, or of his obedience to the moral law. This idea first appeared in the Lutheran “form of concord,” A.D. 1574, and it was eagerly appropriated by all the dry, super- ficial, hair-splitting theological systems of the 17th century. Men were led to it in the first instance by a false view of the relation of mankind to Adam’s sin, and in the second instance by a natural wish for symmetry in their conceptions of the fall and of Redemption. It was supposed that our first parents’ disobedience was actually imputed to us, and that original sin consisted in the obligation to suffer punish- ment in consequence of the sin of others. In the same way it was asserted that the merits of the life of Christ were transferred to us, and that as we are saved from punishment through his death so we ‘are pronounced just through his life. : This scheme admits the principle of the doctrine of works of supererogation, but it makes of the obedience of Christ one vast work of supererogation superceding every other,— just as the same tendency makes of the sacrifice of Christ another mass, no more connected with our salvation neces- _ sarily in the nature of things than would be a mass muttered Adam Smith. by a priest. The whole device is utterly immoral ; no man can be good enough for others and himself too,—not even Jesus Christ; for his whole career of sinless obedience to the Father’s every wish was due to God and to himself; there was not, could not be any excess of holiness,—and if there were it could not be transferred to us but by a fiction. Adam Smith observes that systems of physical science are simplified from one period to another, just as improvements in machinery make it possible to produce the same effects APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 243 with fewer motive forces ; how, in theology, this doctrine of imputed obedience is a wheel worse than superfluous, and it cannot be too soon discarded. What a broken law requires is not obedience but punish- ment, and what Jesus Christ went through for us He ac- complished that it might be spared us. I may in certain conditions die for my brother, but my life cannot morally be reckoned for his. Poor deceived people may pay others to make pilgrimages and do penances for them, because the substitution is not more foreign from the reasonable service of moral beings than is the act itself, but man cannot be holy by proxy any more than he can go to heaven by proxy. Happily there is not a shadow of support for this theological figment in Scripture: the holiness of our Lord’s life was necessary that he might be the spotless lamb upon the altar, but he did not Jive for our justification ; it is at the foot of the altar that we are identified with him, and appropriate— not his life, but his death. We are “justified by his blood,” and the Christian Revelation knows of no other righteous- ness of the Saints. The Christian is indeed more than pardoned; he is an heir of glory, dear to God, loved even as Christ is loved—but he is all that by virtue of his present mystical oneness with a living Christ upon the throne. An enlightened conscience should be sensible to every- thing justly imputable to it; accordingly in New England it was once conceived to be a part of piety to reproach oneself with the sin of Eden, but no unsophisticated conscience ever did so; as little should we be conscious of having resisted the Tempter in Christ, or of having passed with him nights of prayer upon the mountain. He was indeed vortually the organ of the race from the moment he entered it, but it was only in the hours of death and j udgment that he actually and formally took our responsibilities upon him,—accomplishing that act of universal bearing to which our faith lays claim, A. Clarke. Rom. v. 9. Apoe. vii. 14. Rom. viii. 17. John xvii. 23. Q44 BOOK THE THIRD. and with which we are identified, though it be but imper- fectly repeated within us. Justifieation in § 93. The too general tendency to remain in the outer no respect arbi- trary or fictitious. court of material analogies, instead of penetrating to the sanctuary of moral relations, makes the dealings of God with men appear like a succession of arbitrary acts. The believer’s faith does in some degree implicitly supply what is lacking in the formula, and Redemption recovers for his consciousness some of the glory that has been obscured by misdirected superficial intelligence; but when Christian teachers do not understand the substantial unity of the race, which made both the fall and Redemption possible—and when they lower the sufferings of Christ to a mere matter of external infliction, unconnected with the incarnation, with the mutual solidarity of the race, and with his own holy sympathies—and when they make faith a purely intel- lectual act, not having in its own nature any necessary intelligible connection with the forgiveness of sin,—it is no wonder that many men of large minds and strong moral instincts turn away from the religion so fatally travestied ; though they are not excusable, for if they had sought Christianity in the Bible they would have found it very different from this pedantic scheme. If there were no connection in the nature of things between the death of Christ and reconciliation with God—it the Judge of all the earth were supposed to be bribed to pass over certain souls in the day when his righteousness shall be revealed from heaven—if faith were a mere con- juring trick, not bringing us into any living submission to the will of God—if we were really represented as condemned by one legal fiction, redeemed by a second, justified by a third, then we should say boldly,—let every honest man repudiate such a religion ! We cannot allow such doctrines to be imposed upon us under the title of mysteries, because our conscience, such as it is, is competent to judge and to APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 945 condemn the idea of either damnation or salvation upon false pretences. Blessed be the only wise God, we are not shut up to such an issue ; Christianity is a religion of realities. There is the sad reality of a selfish nature alienated from the life of God, and its consequence—guilt and condemnation. There is the holy soul-stirring reality of a sinless member of the human race asserting his oneness with his brethren, and making atonement for their sin. There is the Divine reality of a Saviour upon the throne imparting his own life to sinners, so that his perfections may be imputed to them, because immanent in them. Justification is no fictitious imputation of a righteousness which remains without and foreign to the heart; it is no arbitrary absolution anterior to all moral change, dispensing us from personal holiness, and delivering us from a purely objective punishment, independent of and separable from our moral state. The faith of the Gospel only saves because it regenerates; it consists in recelving into the heart things proper to change it. Conversion is sanc- tification begun, and sanctification is conversion continued. It is not that the Christian is no further righteous before God than he is actually and inherently so, it is not that the power of grace infused is the measure of righteousness imputed. Faith looks where God looks, upon the righteous- ness of Christ in himself, and not as it labours and struggles in our weakness. It is a righteousness finished and complete that is treated as ours by an act of legitimate and inevitable anticipation. God does not through a fiction of mercy see us other than we really are, but the life of sonship is quickened in us through faith. Our Father rejoices over it. Our inadequate repentance, our imperfect holiness possess already the properties of those of Christ: the very feeblest cry of faith is part of that which is in absolute perfection in him. “Is not the whole river in the source? He that sees the source, has he not seen the river? Even so the A. Vines. A. Vinet. Eml. Kant. Gal. ii. 18, A. Vinet. Luther. Conf. Angel, Art. xiii. The love of God shed abroad in the heart. 246 BOOK THE THIRD. whole life is included in faith, and he who has looked upon faith has looked upon that life” Conversion is the change of the will, and with the will everything is changed. Even Kant says—‘ There are many virtues, and but one virtuous determination.” “If I build again the things which I de- stroyed,” wrote Paul, “I make myself a transgressor.” He considered that in the act of giving himself to Christ he had in principle destroyed sin, It seems to me, says Vinet, that they are hard to please in works who do not recognize in faith “the work of works: an act the deepest, the richest, the most manifold, the most fruitful that a human being can accomplish,—an act containing everything that ought to be done, and excluding everything that ought to be left undone, and which prepares the soul to meet every difficulty, and to accomplish every duty. They are indeed hard to please in works! That which they despise and reject shall one day, in the presence of God, devour all the works of which they boast, as the rod of Moses did those of the magicians.” Scripture constantly insists on faith without explicitly men- tioning works, because they are contained in faith, and as often on works without mentioning faith, because it is supposed in works: to name either is to name both. When Luther says that good works are to be guarded against more than sin, or the Anglican Articles, that they have the nature of sin, there is a mischievous suppression of one truth as well as a paradoxical expression of another. Everything that ought to be well pleasing in man’s eyes is also, so far as it is genuine, well pleasing in the Lord’s eyes. What is con- demned in the worldly man’s good works is their want of the principle that should give a life its depth, its unity, and its proper moral value. The bent of the whole man in the normal direction is the condition of any special action in a right direction, and this is only found in a converted soul. § 94. It has been asserted that all the religions in the world have practically fostered the idea that God only loves APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 247 the men who worship him in a certain conventional manner, Theod. Parker. —and certainly there are corrupt forms of Christianity open to the charge, but not the doctrine of Redemption in itself. In the life which it sets before us God recovers real possession of the soul that had strayed so far from him, and becomes its supreme object. His service becomes everything for the heart that is learning to know him. The affections are only conversant with persons, and Chris- tianity does not offer us a theory to embrace, but the arms of a Father open and ready to enfold us. It is no general amnesty into which individuals may enter unobserved, but personal contact with a Father and a Saviour. Its doctrines may be summed up in these few words,—God has loved us; H. La Harpe. and its morals in as many,—le¢ ws love God. It has shown us God becoming man that he might sacrifice himself for man; his cross an altar, upon which burns a holy fire from which our own hearts have been kindled, and which shall never be put out. “Herein is love,” says a disciple, “not 4 son iv. ‘ti that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.” And another could write : aL “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, accept- able unto God, which is your reasonable service.” Nor was the appeal in vain : “we love him because he first loved us ;” “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.” The reader may pause to ask whether the Apostle means to speak of our love for God, or of the sense of God’s love for us? the context shows that 1 John iv. 19. Rom. v. 5. both are meant, together and inseparably ; it is through the consciousness of the love of God for us that the Holy Ghost quickens us to love Him. As human nature is constituted it is impossible for us to realize what he has done and to remain indifferent, therefore it is that wilful ingratitude sometimes refuses to believe in the work of Redemption, and sometimes refuses to be convinced of its necessity, whereas Dr. Jowett. Hesiod. A. Vinet. 248 BOOK THE THIRD. the miracle that redeeming love works in our hardened sel- fish hearts is only inferior to itself. “The strength of this feeling arises from its being directed towards a person, a real being, an individual like ourselves, —who has actuaily endured all this for our sakes,—who was above us, and yet became one of us and felt as we did, and was like ourselves a true man. The love which he felt towards us, we seek to return to him; the unity which he has with the Divine nature he communicates to us; his Father is our Father, his God our God. And as human love draws men onward to make sacrifices, and to undergo suffer- ings for the good of others, Divine love also leads us to cast away the interests of this world, and rest only in the noblest object of love. And this love is not only a feeling, or senti- ment, or attachment, such as we may entertain towards a parent, a child, or a wife, in which, pure and disinterested as it may be, some shadow of earthly passions unavoidably mingles ; it is also the highest exercise of the reason, which it seems to endow with the force of the affections, making us think and feel at once. And although it begins in gen- tleness, and tenderness, and weakness, and is often supposed to be more natural to women than men, yet it grows up also “to the fulness of the stature of the perfect man.” The truest note of the depth and sincerity of our feelings towards our fellow-creatures is a manly (that is, a self-controlled) temper : still more is this true of the love of the soul towards Christ and God.” Love is the final perfection of man and God. It is the only grace in which we can perceive the possibility of reci- procity between God and us. It is the enduring element of our being, and was therefore shadowed forth in all crea- tion,—in the cosmological relations and chemical affinities of bodies, as well as in the metamorphoses of plants, and the reproduction of animals,—Eros uniting contrasts everywhere, as it is put in mystic lore. “The happiness of being loved ——i APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 249 would be incomplete without the happiness of loving. If the charity of God is infinitely precious to man, it is by giving him reason, and, so to speak, constraining him to return love for love. The supremest grace of God, the last word of his charity, the summing up of the Gospel, the practical end, for us, of Redemption,—is not so much the being loved, as the learning to love.” Jonathan Edwards tells us how the whole face of nature assumed another aspect in his eyes when he had come to know God in Christ. “The appearance of everything was altered ; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast or appearance of Divine glory in almost everything. God’s ex- cellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in every thing—in the sun, and moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees.” One particular experience is thus recorded, “An inward sense of these things—Christ and the work of Redemption—came into my heart, and my soul was led away in pleasant views and contemplation of them. There came to my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express. I certainly do know that I love holiness such as the Gospel prescribes.” Bunyan says, “I was so much taken with the love and mercy of God that I remember I could not tell how to con- tain, till I got home ; wherefore I said in my soul with much gladness, well I would I had a pen and ink here, I would write this down before I go any further: for surely I would not forget this forty years hence. Oh! methought, Christ, Christ! There was nothing but Christ before my eyes, The Lord did also lead me into the mystery of union with the Son of God; that I was joined to him; that I was flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone. Now I could see myself in heaven and earth at once: in heaven by my Christ, by my head, by my righteousness and life; though in earth by my body and person. ...I lived sweetly at peace with God through Christ.” Jonathan Edwards. id. Bunyan. John Howe. Judge Jessup. Joy and assur- ance, Rom. viil. 55 250 BOOK THE THIRD And John Howe: “I felt the most delightful meltings of heart, attended by profuse tears of joy, that the love of God should be shed abroad in the hearts of men, and that his spirit should be shed on mine for that blessed end.” The ereat Pascal kept the record of such an hour upon a scrap of parchment sewed up in his coat. It registered the 23rd of November, 1653, from half-past ten until half-past twelve at night. “ Fire, God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob... Certainty, certainty. Feeling,—Joy,— Peace,—God of Jesus Christ. ..Righteous Father, the world hath not known thee, but I have known thee. J oy, joy, joy, tears of joy....May I never leave him,” etc. These and other half coherent frag- ments of broken French and Latin he treasured up as a remembrance of raptures for which language could not find adequate utterance. These are feelings that survive when every thing else goes to wreck, in the mind palsied by age or prostrated by disease. “My father,” it was said of a late American judge, “has forgotten that he ever was a lawyer, he has forgotten his books, but he has not forgotten his Saviour nor his Bible. He has forgotten the names of his children, but he leads his household daily in coherent prayer.” § 95. The recollections which have just been quoted, and all similar experiences of men of God are distinguished by this common character,—that they invariably combine their assurance of the love of Christ towards them with the sense of their love to him in one act of consciousness, like the ob- verse and reverse of the same medal. The same words serve to express their confidence and their gratitude. It was thus that Paul exclaimed,—‘ Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” when he looked round with the feeling that there was no avenue by which condemnation could reach him. Our knowledge that we are justified should be of the same experimental nature with the true knowledge that we are sinners. It is not to be sought in the way of inference from i APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 251 the fact that we believe, but in personal intercourse with God. It is a matter of spiritual intuition ; the conscicusness of the favour of Almighty God,--the Spirit witnessing with our spirit, teaching us to say, Father ; giving present posses- sion of eternal life, which is in principle what it is to be for ever,—a germ that God has placed in the heart, and which is to develop itself completely in the air of heaven and under the sun of eternity. We are already in eternity, for it embraces the present as well as the future, and we have eternal life already when we possess Jesus Christ,—with whom there is no illusion, nor failure, nor satiety, and whoge virtue in us is one and the same, here and hereafter. What a relief to the soul thus to be rid of the presumption of its own merits, or of the despair of having to look for them in vain! What a source of strength to have no longer to reckon upon one’s own strength, and yet to promise oneself the victory! The crown already won, this life become the next, our union with Christ more true and real than any accident of our temporal existence. How safe should a ransomed sinner feel himself after the judgment, upon seeing the mighty throng disperse, and hearing the loving call,— “Come ye blessed of my Father.” But faith has heard that call already, faith has seen the judgment accomplished upon Calvary; such is the confidence of the believer, such his Settled and affectionate sense of security, his peace and joy in believing, which becomes the spring of holy tempers and virtuous conduct. And now faith works by love; God’s commandments are no longer grievous; the servant of Jesus Christ is the servant of all men; he sets his affections on things above, puts on bowels of mercies, kindness, humble- ness of mind, meekness, long-suffering, letting the peace of God reign in his heart. God has given him unasked more than he can ask or think,—a gift containing every grace that can be heaped into his bosom throughout eternity. What can he now ask or desire of the world who is greater than the Rom. viii. 15, 16. E. Naville. Is. Taylor. Gal. v. 6. 1 John v. 3. Col. iii. Cyprian. W. H. Stowell. John x. 28. Schonberg-Cotta family. R. Hall. J. H. Godwin. Peter i. 5. fear and vigi- ance. Micah vii. 5. Matt. vil. 21—23 952, BOOK THE THIRD. world? And the Christian is higher than any power upon earth, for he begins to be that which he is already by faith.° The Christian is happy, and knows that he will be so for ever; he is a jewel in the crown of a master who will not suffer one leaf to fade, or one gem to lose its lustre, —a master whose sheep are in his hand, and none shall tear them from his grasp. When hope, as it has been beautifully said, has stolen to the casement and withdrawn the shutters, and the light which had been slowly insinuating itself before has streamed unhindered into the heart, there is a peace there such as “no evolutions which time may dispose or eternity conceal are capable of effecting.” There is a sense of Divine forgiveness, and approval, and communion, and sustaining erace, “which comprehends every real good, and is the nearest approach possible for a creature to the perfect blessedness of the infinite Creator.” The Christian is kept by the power of God through faith unto the state of com- pleted and manifested salvation that awaits him. § 96. No man can have a mathematical certainty of the affection and the truth of his friends, or of the wife that lieth in his bosom, for confiding men have been deceived by both; but he may have a moral certainty,—a confidence in those he loves and honours, that is all his heart can wish for; and he would reject with indignation the proposal to exchange that feeling of trust, which ennobles its subject and its objects, | against any arrangement to render their proving false mate- rially impossible: that is to say, he would not exchange moral for mathematical certainty. Christian assurance is of the former nature, and therefore it creates a mixture of security and vigilance for ourselves, of earnestness and gentleness in our relation to others. No man can be mathe- matically certain of heaven, for there are souls that deceive © Nihil appetere jam, nihil desiderare de seculo possit, qui seculo major est... . sole altior et hac omni terrena potestate sublimior, id esse incipit, quod esse se credit. APPROPRIATION OF REDEMPTION. 253 themselves to the last; but a man may so know God as to be morally certain: and this feeling, accompanied by that of his own unworthiness and inveterate self-seeking, fills him with a holy awe; it is with reverence that he clasps the hand that sustains him along the brow of the frightful precipice ; it is with godly fear that he watches his steps,—not the fear that hath torment, but the fear that takes precautions, and realizes the solemnity of the salvation accomplishing in him, and the awful nearness of God, though present to save and to purify. In such a spirit the Psalmist prayed,—“ Jehovah, if thou shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand ? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.” This is a matter of experience, and which no de- scription can bring home to the imagination; the same conscience which is taught of God to realize its forgiveness, realizes in the same process the greatness of the danger from which we escape, and the hatefulness of the sin which we have to unlearn. Scripture welds together these apparent opposites in one exhortation :—“ Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you, both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” The same man who exclaims—“ Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” tells us elsewhere, without fear of inconsistency, that he keeps his body in subjection, lest after preaching to others he himself should be a castaway. “We have eternal life here below, but under what con- ditions ?—a holiness that is never beyond the reach of defile- ment, feeble sparks kindling on the verge of outer darkness, joys flickering in the cold wind of instability.” The African traveller sleeping within a circle of fire, while lions prowl around it, may be safe, but he must shudder. We never escape any great and real danger without a solemn feeling ; and the depth of that Christian joy which knows no tremb- ling may well be questioned. Henry the fourth of France used to say, “It is only cowards who have never been afraid.” 1 John iv. 18. PsaCxx mo, 4: Phil. ii. 12, 13. Rom. viii. 35. 1 Cor. ix. 27. Ernest Naville. 254 BOOK THE THIRD. . Nore B. § 69. That grace does not act mechanically is freely confessed in terms by the Synod of Dort ; Sicuti vero per lapsum homo non desiit esse homo, intellectu et voluntate praeditus, nec peccatum, quod universum genus hu- manum pervasit, naturam generis humanze sustulit, sed depravavit, et spiritualiter occidit ; ita etiam hee divina regenerationis gratia, non agit in hominibus tanquam truncis et stipitibus, nee volun- tatem ejusque proprietates tollit, aut invitam violenter cogit, sed spiritualiter vivificat, sanat,.corrigit, suaviter simul ac potenter flectit ; ut ubi antea plene dominabatur carnis rebellio et resis- tentia nunc regnare incipiat prompta, et sincera Spiritus obedien- tia; in quo vera et spiritualis nostree voluntatis instauratio et libertas consistit.—Canones Synod. Dordecht, iii. 16. Unfortunately the scheme of which this statement forms a part was necessarily, as a whole, untrue to it. Norte C. The passages from Calvin’s Institutes quoted in § 89 are in the original as follows ; “ Conjunctio igitur illa capitis et membrarum, habitatio Christi in cordibus nostris, mystica denique unio a nobis in summo gradu statuitur; ut Christus noster factus, donorum quibus preeditus est nos faciat consortes. Non ergo eum extra nos procul specu- lamur, ut nobis impatetur ejus justitia ; sed quia ipsum induimus, et insiti sumus in ejus corpus, unum denique nos secum eflicere dignatus est : ideo justitiee societatem nobis cum eo esse glori- amur.’”’—Calv. Instit., lib. iii., cap. xi. 10. “Tantum enim indicare hec duo volumus, nunquam scilicet ipsam consistere, donec ad gratuitam promissionem pervenerit : deinde non aliter nos per ipsam conciliari Deo, nisi quia nos Christi copulat. Utrumque notatu dignum..... Quomodo autem fides salvifica nisi quatenus nos in Christi corpus inserit ?”— Instit., lib. iii., cap. it. 30. “Melius patebit quomodo sola fide et mera venia justificetur homo, neque tamen a gratuita justitic imputatione separetur realis (ut ita loquor) vitee sanctitas.”—Instit., lib. i1., cap. iii, 1. “Excipit Osiander, contumeliosum hoc fore Deo, et naturze ejus contrarium, si justificet qui re ipsa impii manent. Atqui tenen- dum memoria est quod jam dixi, non separari justificandi gratiam a regeneratione, licet res sint distinctz.’’ — Instit., lib. iil, CLD cial ————————— Hook the Fourth. Lndividual Christian Life. § 97. The man who rejects or neglects the offers of grace is obliged to make a compromise with law ; he is pursued by an instinct of humbling and startling insufficiency and failure, or else contents himself with a half-reform and some fragmentary morality, from which he excludes the thought of God as much as possible. When faith in the revelation of God in Christ, however, truly and livingly enters into the mind, it necessarily makes its object the absolutely highest, claims lordship over all the other relations of life, and con- centrates them around itself. All possible virtues issue from it at once, “as so many streams diverging from a common source. It does ‘not effect a gradual reconstruction of our nature piecemeal and separately, applying to each disease of the soul its special remedy. It does not teach us to be vir- tuous by successive additions, juxtaposing, so to speak, one virtue to another. United to God by faith, we are renewed in the spirit of our minds; the cure is applied—not to differ- ent points of the surface, but to the very centre which is the seat of the one constitutional disease, for “out of the heart are the issues of life”? By warming the whole ground of being it quickens the growth of every specific plant; for we cannot really possess one grace without wishing for, and in Sanctification and Christian Life. Julius Muller. Eph. iv. 23. Proy. iv. 23. principle possessing all the rest. It is the Christian’s calling ~ to transform his whole life to the resemblance and in the spirit of his Master's, learning experimentally the power of Gal. ii. 20. 2 Cor. iii. 13. A. Vinet. 256 BOOK THE FOURTH. his risen life, how he was crucified in the flesh that together with his own body he might quicken multitudes. “Iam crucified with Christ” exclaimed a disciple, “nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: 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 Spirit of God having imparted a life the tendencies of which combine with his own continued operation, the re- newed soul possesses a natural adaptation to derive good from all.things; it is quick to perceive, dislike, and repel what is evil; it is solicitous, vigilant and active to apprehend and retain the good. The Spirit changes us gradually into our Master’s image, “from glory to glory,” as we contemplate it and feed our life from the fulness of His. However far we must remain from his sinless perfection and untroubled bliss, we partake in a measure of both. He imparts delicacy of conscience, teaches us to hate sin, makes us find in that love which was the principle of the Divine pardon that of our obedience,—transforming submission into freedom, and self-devotion into happiness, restoring truth and goodness, cancelling every distorted growth, emancipating us from the thraldom of guilty self-seeking by the spontaneous fascina- tion of that love over the soul; the Divine life in us over- coming the world, partly by transforming and glorifying it, . partly by a process of purification and exclusion. “Christianity has at once insatiable exigencies and in- exhaustible helps. It awakens an immense desire of perfec- tion, but it also awakens hopes in proportion to this desire. It does not spare any one of the deformities of our soul, holds them all up in its unpitying mirror, and does not allow even this spectacle ever to discourage us. It does not show us a given level which we must attain to and then stop; it points to a road which must be followed into the infinite depths in which it disappears, but with God himself ever walking beside us. It exhibits an example who is perfec- INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 257 tion itself, and yet it knows the secret for bringing us not to allow of any other.” ; Christian life is a slow, laborious convalescence from a mortal disease, so that we do not see a difference between the lives of believers and unbelievers proportionate to the difference of their principles, but any honest observer may recognize the genuine tendencies of faith in the Redeemer, “True Christianity is complete nowhere except in Jesus A. vinet Christ: we can conceive it in its perfection and in all its beauty, we never realize it in our hearts or in our conduct. And yet the little that each true Christian does realize ig divine,—is incomparable. One stops astonished before this rude sketch of what is to become a marvellous picture; one recognizes in this unfinished work the very pencil of God; and a single Christian moment is worth more than a whole life that is not so.” If our blessed Lord occupies a place of solitary sacredness, clothed in the beauty of holiness, and anointed with tHE OUT pen iy 7, of gladness above his fellows, he is not the less followed by a willing people, disciples who love him, and learn of him to become priests of God,—-sacrificing first of all their own self- seeking, and everything known to be contrary to his mind, and then becoming ministers of truth and peace to others, feeding the hungry, relieving the distressed, comforting the mourner, bringing home the wanderer. They learn that their real good does not consist in loving themselves, but in loving God, and their brethren, and their fellows. « Chris- tianity has brought down eternal truths into the field of history. It proclaims through facts what the brave have been taught by their courage, and the fainthearted by their remorse,—that the triumph, the maturity, the truth of moral being lie in self-sacrifice.” “To love,” says Leibnitz “is to make our happiness con- Leibnitz. sist in the happiness of others.” Christianity teaches us by Gal. v. 13. love to serve one another, to become voluntarily servants of 7°" “1 S C. Seerétan. J. H. Godwin See 3 88. H. Dorney. 258 BOOK THE FOURTH. others for their relief, and happiness, and moral perfection ; and that because the love of God in Christ has kindled di- vine tastes and joys in our souls, so that it is our bliss to be, after Christ, instruments of the common salvation, organs of many-handed Omnipotence. God saves his children because he loves them, and they obey him and labour for others be- cause they learn to love him and their fellows,—an obedience and a love which he inspires as well as prescribes, and which is less a consequence than a part of their salvation. As men receive the Saviow’s spirit and imitate his conduct “ their love will be like his, drawn from the highest source and di- rected to the highest objects; descending to the lowest ser- vice that may be required by human wants, and ascending to the loftiest ends which, by means of human love, Divine love accomplishes.” A spiritual mind infuses spirituality into the motives of the commonest works, as a graceful person infuses grace into the most trifling gestures. The Christian’s device is that of Calvin’s seal—a hand holding a heart. His Saviour claims the whole man, but is also ready to communicate the- self-devotion he requires ; to make willing, loving, intelligent submission to the will of God the central principle of the inward life in this world, and the preparation for its own continuance and development in eternity. This entire consecration of the disciple to his Master’s service is expressed by the New Testament term— Saint, applied as it is to all true Christians, not so much to convey the impression of a state of holiness to which they have actually attained, as that of the end of their calling, the purpose of God concerning them. “No action, state, or condition of such a renewed person is so entirely his own, and of private concernment to him- self alone, as it was before. His sins were more entirely his own damage before; now they wound his relation, and evieve Christ. He sinned before against the law of God, he now sins in all his miscarriages against Christ also; and eer een INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE, 259 against the law of his marriage relation to him. He bare his Own guilt before perhaps with horror and distraction, now Christ bears it for him before his very eyes, and melts hig heart into remorse at such a spectacle,” “A man cannot know what a serious thing his life is, until he sees that he is ever with Christ in it; that for a little space he is called out of the throng, to do solemnly his own part before the face of the Son of God. As he grows _ to perceive this all becomes earnest around him, Life is a real thing to such an one: real in its deep heart of joy, real in its connections, its actions, and its changes. And with this sense of reality is closely joined a blessed freedom and gladness, such as that which blesses our innocent childhood. The strength of a constant will, the artlessness of an open heart, the sense of safety, the gladness of a filial confidence, and the sparkling play of the unclouded affections ;—these are the blessed fruits of leading a life in the remembrance of the constant presence of our Lord, § 98. And if vital Christianity as it has been hitherto ex- hibited is a poor thing in comparison with what it ought to be, it is not the less a principle of progress in the soul where it exists. There isa growing beauty of character, an increasing love of God and man, an Increasing spirit of wisdom, justice, benevolence, and self-devotion; our daily doing and suffer- ing idealized and embellished by the thought that we are living for him who loved us, J esus transforms our ideas of greatness, beauty, and happiness, by the revelation of his truth, justice, and love in Redemption. He acts upon our every faculty, giving the mind, the conscience, and the affec- tions health and room to perform their work. He cuts at the root of every evil and inconsistency, and makes our communion with himself and with the Father more intimate and more blessed day by day. The Holy Spirit, still in go many respects operating as a check, becomes more and more & power of joy in God and in his children, as he is to be one Bishop Wilberforce, The growth of the Divine life. B. Pascal. w. A. Butler. J. H. Godwin. Theaustere side of Christian life. 260 BOOK THE FOURTH. day a power of communion and sympathy with universal Heaven. 7 It is a mistake, says Pascal, to suppose that there is a degree of perfection beyond which it is not necessary to ad- vance; there is none at which one can safely stop short, none at which there is any other way of avoiding a fall, than the rising ever higher. As the Father eternally produces the Son by the renewed effusion of his substance, or as he uninterruptedly maintains and renews the bliss of those that see him, so must his grace be ever at work in the heart, making the blood of life circulate freely in every passage, adjusting and proportioning the forces of an active growing holiness to the wants of a nature that is progressive in its essence, Christianity has awakened our sleeping faculties by the new objects which it has presented to them, but these Divine objects in turn increase in brilliancy and attractive- ness, as our faculties recover their tone; so that there is an ever brightening presence of a redeeming God worshipped by faculties and affections that grow as they gaze, the better sight of supreme excellence reacting upon and increasing the very love which had made that sight better. The progressively increasing knowledge of God attracts and encourages the soul to draw nearer, and at the same time makes it all the more realize the immeasurable distance at which it still remains. “We cannot have the happiness of perfection now, but we may have that of progress,” of holy affections growing within us, cherished and cultivated by meditation and prayer and sympathy, by expression and action and self-control. § 99. With all this, the austere side of Christian life and its continuance during our whole career upon earth, must neither be forgotten nor underrated. One day that great multitudes followed Jesus, he turned round and uttered words that may have seemed to many a sort of defiance hurled back at them, with a cruel purpose of discourage- INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 261 ment :—“If any man come unto me, and hate not his sake siy. 26, 27 father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my dis- ciple. And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.” We may be sure it was love that prompted our Lord to this seeming hardness. It was better for those souls not to be exposed to mistake a momentary enthusiasm for the settled faith that has thrown itself upon God without fear of after thoughts, because it has already counted the cost. It was well they should learn that the claims of God are exclusive and all- -engrossing, that the disciple must recognize a paramount relation, and be animated by a supreme affection, and be ready to brush aside the nearest and dearest upon earth if they thrust themselves in the way of his faithfulness to Christ. “The Gospel is light, but it shineth in darkness ; the Gos- Ernest Naville pel is a message of love, but it is also a call to none to self-denial and sacrifice.” The state of our hearts by nature is such, as has been already said, that to give ourselves to God is a sort of death, and the Christian is never safe from the natural man’s attempts at resurrection, and from a re- newal, with less intensity, of his painful struggle with him- self He is ever trying to take back piecemeal and by retail what he had once given up as a whole, and without reserve, and he has to confirm the sacrifice of himself day by day. He cannot bear his cross once for all, but has to take it up daily. There was not only a right hand to cut sure ix. 93 off, but what is worse—the iron must be passed upon the See 3 71. wound again and again. He must reckon upon hours of x sadness ; his native selfishness, pride, lusts of every kind, moral cowardice or else hardness towards his fellows, and the root of them all—his independence of God, will ever and anon rise up and make war against his soul. “He must increase, but I must decrease ;” it is in the last Tohmiit. a0. clause that the difficulty lies. We are ready enough to make A. Vinet. M. de St. Cyran Eph. vi. 13. PP AMT, The LE 262 BOOK THE FOURTH. room for Christian life and to allow it a large place among our interests, provided it do not claim the whole, and that its increase be not attended by the abdication of our false independence. Self pretends to be as accommodating—as unassuming—as possible, because it knows that if it can call the least little corner its own, if there is anything what- ever that it can refuse to Jesus Christ, its indulgence will make up by its intensity for all that it has lost in extent; it is as ready to hold us by one chain as by a thousand, provided that one cannot be broken. It is ready to make itself religious, and to sacrifice every other passion if it will only be allowed to live on under the disguise of spiritual pride or self-seeking intolerance and despotism. “After one has ruined the cupidity of the riches, the honors and the pleasures of the world, there arise in the soul, from that very ruin, other honors, other riches, and other pleasures, which do not belong to the visible but to the invisible world. This is a fearful thing” adds the austere Jansenist, whom we quote, “that after having destroyed within us the visible world and its appurtenances, so far as it can be destroyed here below, there should at once be born from it another and an invisible, harder still to destroy.” God had once his tower to build, he counted the cost— and gave us his Christ! It is our turn now to sit down and reckon that his service, if needs be, must cost us our all. It is only by prayer, by the faith that is able to walk in darkness, and by the habit of victory that we can meet the engagements to which our faith has pledged us. “Stand therefore,” exclaims St. Paul: “take unto you the whole ar- mour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand ”—each bleeding, but erect —a conqueror upon the field of battle. What a solemn sense of the seriousness of life mingled with the Apostle’s grateful confidence, when he wrote in his last letter, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 263 It is often the Lord’s will that our faithfulness to him should bring us into circumstances of pain and difficulty. In any case faith has already laid everything at his feet. That he should ask nothing less is our privilege and our blessing ; had he loved us less, he would have been content with less ; and when our love is put to the proof practically, it is always either to strengthen it or else to make us aware of its weakness. He never makes us the poorer of anything except in order to enrich, never asks any sacrifice at our hands but to bless us in the offering, when it is really made. § 100. The Christian is conscious that temptations of various kinds present themselves to him with a suddenness, an independence of circumstances and of his previous frames of mind, and yet an adaptation to them such as to convey the impression that these evil suggestions are not always entirely spontaneous. He sees also that temptations are sometimes disastrously opportune, and that they are multi- plied at all critical periods of his own life or that of others. Finally, in the history both of individuals and of mankind at large, especially in their religious history, he recognizes a sort of infernal irony, as if an enemy of God and man had bent himself to caricature everything holy, and to make the highest promises issue in the most shameful aberrations. Scripture explains all these experiences by the existence of fallen spiritual beings, whose leader seduced our first pa- rents, and dared to tempt the Saviour,—wicked spirits, who put every obstacle in the way of our conversion and subse- quent education for heaven, with a pertinacity and a vigilance which must be called fiendish as the only appropriate word, since there exists no type of such hate except itself. We have to contend with living spirits,—beings who know us better than we know ourselves, and hate us more intensely than their worst inspirations have instigated us to hate one- another. It is strange that any minds acknowledging the authority The Tempter. John yili. 44. John xii. 31. xiv. 30. xvi. 11. 264. BOOK THE FOURTH. of the Christian Revelation should endeavour to explain away the existence of the Devil and his angels. The use of the necessary degree of violence upon the plainest statements would seem to imply the working of some very strong mo- tives, and yet in this instance there is nothing to be gained by the process. Were it to be established beyond contra- diction that there exists no enemy of souls, should we have succeeded thereby in getting rid of the load of sin and suffering that weighs upon the world, defiling and disfiguring God’s creation? He who has brought himself to think that man alone, without any other tempter than his own heart, was the original author of all this guilt and sorrow,—he has not escaped the character from which he shrinks, he has only transferred it to another agent, making man himself the Devil. The lies of which the world is full are evidence enough of the existence of a father of lies, and if his name be not Satan it is man! It is a weak mind that can be disposed to scepticism on this subject by the puerile terrors and grotesque features with which the imagination of the middle ages invested the Devil, or even by the darker superstitious fears and morbid asceti- cism which attended the popular conception of these beings, and of the tragic mystery of their fate. False ideas of the Evil one no more disprove his existence, than all the false ideas of God and all the frightful idols men have invented disprove the existence of the true God. And as Christian representations of the Divine character are free from the errors and extravagances that beset those of every other re- ligion, so the Scriptural conception of Satan is free from all those elements that made the medizval mythology so pic- turesque, and wrought such havoc in monkish imagina- tions. Above all it is free from any taint of Dualism: Satan is no rival God, but a fallen creature. He is in one sense “the Prince of this world,” because iniquity prevails in it, but he is not the legitimate master of any element in human INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 265 nature, or in human society; so that there is no reason in genuine Christianity either for the coarse material asceticism of the monk, or for the more refined mani- cheism that eschews attention to art, literature, or social interests. Scripture tells of good angels without leading us to invoke their help, and of evil angels who can suggest evil thoughts and impulses, but cannot bring any event to pass without permission, and from whom the man honestly desirous to serve God has nothing to fear. As Jerome observes, the Devil could only suggest to the Saviour to cast himself down. He may persuade us to fall, but cannot precipitate us without our own act. Our Master “beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” when the first miracles were accomplished by believing souls, and the God of peace shall shortly put him under our feet. § 101. The relation of Christianity to morals cannot be satisfactorily stated until it has been conceded that religion in general in its simplest expression—the consciousness of the will of God—is the basis of morals. The moral feeling of obligation is connected with the religious feeling of depend- ence. This first step is the more necessary that the Epicu- reanism and Sensualism of all ages, and the Stoicism of many, however modified by the character of particular writers and of their epochs, have put forward the pretension to separate religion and morals. In our own day this tendency is strengthened, directly, by the parallel current of Pantheism, voluntary and involuntary; and to a certain extent it 1S strengthened indirectly by the melancholy fact that Chris- tianity has been losing its moral savour, the authentic seal of its divinity, in different countries and in various ways, and has been lowering itself into a mere bundle of doctrines and practices, imperfectly connected with the development, the dignity, the real culture of the mind and heart of man. Every thing is involved in this question, for assuredly if religion Jerome. Luke x. 18. Rom. xvi. 20. Of the founda- tion of morals. ya Josephus, ce. Apion. ii. 17. A. Vinet. 266 BOOK THE FOURTH. and morals can be separated, the former is useless, it is false, and has no business in this world. Christian thinkers believe that moral obligation emanates from a primeval creative authority. It does not rest on penal sanctions, though armed with them ; it is not merely superior strength meeting ours; it rests upon a will su- premely holy summoning us to respect the Divine image in ourselves and in others. The Decalogue is the declaration of the inseparable unity of morality with religion. Josephus justly boasted that whereas other legislators had made re- ligion to be a part of virtue, Moses had made virtue to be a part of religion. This is the only conception consistent with theism: on the supposition of the existence of God, he must be admitted to be the source of all good, and the centre to which every will must gravitate, or else he is not God at all but the subordinate minister of laws made by another,— and then that other is God; or of laws which have their being from themselves,—and then there is no God but that eternal order. It ought to be felt that the idea of eternal self-originating order implies everything that we mean by God except personality and its attributes ; that is to say, it implies everything except the element that gives reality to all the rest, whether for the Divine consciousness or for ours. The denial of God as a Creator is however less unreasonable than the recognition of a Creator who is not at the same time the eternal type of excellency, the author and fountain of all law. Goodness is a quality, an attribute, a mode of being which supposes a subject: “If good can dwell in us who are created beings, it is because it dwells primitively in an un- created being, from whom all things are derived ; so that to reach perfect goodness we must ascend to God.” Precisely the same indication is to be found in our experience of the sense of obligation: all men are conscious that they never feel under obligation towards things but only towards per- ee -_ — ee ere Ri ie rer NAS Cp ~= — INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE, 267 sons; a fact which plainly argues that the source of all obligation exists in a Person having a right of supreme legislation,—a Person who has given all other persons their value, without whom others would be but things to me, and I should be but a thing to myself, What is the authority to which the sense of obligation requires our submission, if it be not God? Is it self. interest,—that is to say, ourselves? Is it instinct,—that is to say ourselves? Is it habit,—that is still ourselves? Is it conscience? But it is derisory to admit the authority of conscience when it can speak in the name of no one—when its letters of credit are torn. If it be not an ambassador from God it may be bowed away without scruple. “What we are cannot be the measure of what we ought to be: we have to seek our rule out of ourselves, our own will cannot be the law of our will.” If we are only under responsibi- lity to ourselves, we can abdicate or recall it at pleasure ; if only to mankind at large, we can brave them without any loss of self-respect; if to an ideal perfection, why are we bound to aspire to it ? There is a school that professes to build every thing“ on observation, but confines its observation to external—or at least to secondary—phenomena. We find one of its ablest re- presentatives asking : “Why are we bound to keep a promise at all?” and giving the following answer: “No satisfactory ground can be assigned for the obligation, except the mis- chievous consequences of the absence of faith and mutual confidence to mankind. We are therefore brought around to the interests of society as the ultimate ground of the obligation of a promise.” Who does not see that Mr. Mill here supposes the existence of the sense of obligation with- out given it anything to rest upon? He asks himself a question, and supposes he has answered it by a statement which is really the answer to a different question altogether, Spinoza once said, very seriously, that is foolish to keep a A. Vinet. J.S. Mill. Spinoza. J.S. Mill. Utilitarianism, p. 43 Thid, 53—56. 268 BOOK THE FOURTH. man to his word unless it be his interest to be true to it. Tell a logician of this extreme and inexorable type, that breach of faith is injurious to society, and he will retort triumphantly, —“ But why is my present convenience to give way to the interests of society ? * To this Meawan really attempts no reply: utilitarianism, in the large way in which he understands it, is a good criterion of what our conduct towards others should be,—but a standard of con- duct is clearly a different thing altogether from the reason of our obligation to conform to that standard. Utilitarian- ism amended and refined teaches me what I should do to diffuse happiness around me, but it does not teach me why I am obliged to concern myself about the happiness of others. This doctrine is only erroneous when it professes to be complete: the ethical system which bids us seek the well-being of the whole sentient creation and the highest good of our fellows, is worthy to direct our efforts,—but it neither creates nor explains the feeling of obligation which it directs; and when, with a mistaken zeal for simplicity of theory, it explains away this sense of obligation, making it to be but another name for enlightened self-interest, then the theory is positively false and mischievous. Mr, Mill says that the danger of a person’s putting the question, Need I obey my conscience? is not confined to Utilitarian morality—True, but then no system is so utterly helpless in presence of such a question as Utilitarian morality, for it can make no answer whatever. It has eliminated the ideas of right and wrong, to put in their place questions of profit and loss. It confessedly presents moral excellence as a good to be sought, not for its own sake in the first instance, but to procure pleasure and to escape from pain. Virtue is not naturally and originally the end to be pursued, though it is capable of becoming part of the end by a sort of illusion, like that which makes money also to be loved for its own sake. On this system the person who refuses to obey his conscience | | INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 269 miscalculates : you can tell him that he is greatly mistaken ; but you cannot tell him that he is guilty or base ; you can- not in consistency call his act by its real name. You may indeed retain the words moral and immoral, praise and blame, conscience and obligation, and the whole vocabulary founded upon our consciousness of responsible agency, but you have attempted to suppress the zdeas and to put in their stead mere processes of the intellect. Because honesty is the best policy, you have explained it to be mere policy,—identified the feeling of self-approbation and the pleasure of successful selfishness. It could not be otherwise: there can be no scientific moral system for any mind that stops short of the idea that the Divine character is the source of every law of right, or truth, or justice, or benevolence, that has been eternally willed along with it ; for thus only have we secured the characters of absoluteness and universality which are indispensable to make a system scientific. And in practice, every such mind must ultimately put up with its own character or tempera- ment, more or less modified by the ideas and habits of surrounding society. ‘The theory of morals in which the principle of obligation is omitted, is a house without a foundation. Kant writes: “ We cannot have the intuition of obligation without thinking at the same time of another,—namely, God, and of His will.” And every earnest, unprejudiced, clear- sighted theist, to whatever school he may belong in other things, agrees with him in this. We need only quote Rous- seau: “let people take what trouble they please to establish virtue by reason alone, no solid basis can be given to it. Virtue, say they, is the love of order: but this love can it then and ought it be stronger in me than that of my own f Wir keennen uns die Verpflichtung nicht wohl anschaulich machen, ohne einen Andern und dessen Willen, naemlich Gott, dabei zu denken. Metaph. der Tugendl. Emil. Kant. Rousseau. Ley. xix. 18. Confucius, Lun- yu. vi. 28. Aristotle. A. Vinet. IRREN, Sabrq, fe 270 BOOK THE FOURTH. well-being? Let them give me a clear and satisfactory reason why I should prefer it. At bottom, their pretended principle is a mere play upon words: for I too may say that vice is the love of order taken in another sense. There is some moral order wherever there is feeling and intelligence. The differ- ence 1s that the good man arranges himself with reference to the whole, while the bad man arranges the whole with refer- ence to himself. The latter makes himself the centre of all things, the other measures his radius and keeps at the circum- ference. Then he is in his right place with respect to the common centre, which is God, and with respect to all the con- centric circles, which are the creatures. Ifthe Deity does not exist, the bad man alone reasons rightly, and good sense is a fool.” The golden rule, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy- self,” was first promulgated at Sinai. We find in China, a thou- sand years later, its practical popular side,—that we should do to others as we should wish them to do to us. Aristotle attained to the less ambitious axiom, that a man should love his friend even as himself. The rule that we should love our fellows as ourselves is indeed a sufficient measure for our social duties : but what authority except that of a Father could impose such an obligation on his children? When once promulgated we feel it to be a natural as well as a po- sitive law ; though presenting us with an unattainable ideal, it imposes itself upon our consciences, but it is because the matter as well as the principle of all moral law comes from above. “The idea of God is the only one that envelopes and developes the whole man, the only one that towers over and enlightens every thing. God is in the moral world like his sun in the physical: nothing is hid from the heat thereof.” The attempt to rest obligation on any other foundation than his creative will is exactly parallel in theory to the practical attempt to be one’s own end,—that is to say, to be one’s own God. INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. Ad § 102. Christianity proclaims that God is love, and as- suredly he must be so in such a sense that nothing can.per- tain to his moral perfections that may not be deduced from holy love. His metaphysical attributes,—Almightiness, Om- niscience, Omnipresence,—are at the disposal of his love; his moral attributes are so many manifestations of the same Divine character in different aspects, “as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes.” Divine retributive justice is the negative side of holy love, repelling and destroying that which is inimical to its own essence. God would have us like himself in excellence and happiness, but when we have made ourselves morally unlike him, our happiness is shipwrecked also: the same Divine love that chose for man his sublime calling arms itself against him, and is changed into righteous displeasure when he seeks an inferior happiness, and that in a wrong direcdion. Holiness is Divine love pursuing and commanding its own reproduction. The conception is now inevitably invested in our minds with a character of severity, because this is its aspect as towards a sinful world; but the working of the su- preme element in the Divine Mind must not be made de- pendent upon creature existence, and upon the accidents of creature conduct. On the contrary, it must be such as would have found its adequate exercise in the self-involved rela- tions of Deity had no creatures been called into existence, and would have been exhibited in its perfection toward the creature likewise had sin never entered into the® universe, God could not want our sin in order to become himself, and it is evident that but for sin we never should have known the negative aspect of the Divine character. His would still have been a holy love indeed, exhibiting its holiness in the choice of the highest and worthiest kind of character and happiness for his rational creatures ; but holiness in God would not have been associated with the idea of severity, nor holiness in man with that of austerity. The central t- tribute of Deity. 1 John iv. 8. Emerson, Lxcellencerather than happiness, the ultimate aim of creation. aren BOOK THE FOURTH. So far as creatures incapable of moral agency are con- cerned, Divine Love can only appear in the shape of bene- volence. It seeks and secures their well-being in the greatest possible measure, consistent with the fact that they are made for each other, and ultimately for man. When man is concerned, Benevolence rises into Love ; it seeks his moral excellence, calls for his sympathy and intelligent adoration, and wills its own reproduction in his character. It is man’s calling and his glory to be like God, within the limits of his relative being; it is his perfection that his every power should subserve this holy purpose. Hence the capacity to love his God and his fellows was the funda- mental principle in man’s nature, as it should be the domi- nant principle in his life. Feelings and passions that in their present shape are generally the opposite of love were in- tended to be its ministers ; ambition, for instance, is properly the desire of a kingly mind to become the leader of others for their good, and its purest type would have been compa- tible with the most ardent self-devotion. § 103. In no stage of creation is the simple production of happiness an ultimate end. In the case of man himself, a sense of enjoyment accompanies physical health as its proper sign ; but we do not live merely for the sake of this agreeable sensation, and are ready to forego it, and to bear pain in order to prolong life. Again, a sense of pleasure is attached to the exercise of various functions, stimulating us to their performance, and so far becoming an end subjec- tively ; but in the purpose of the Creator that pleasure was destined to secure the preservation of the individual and of the race. When we come to the phenomena of intellectual life,—vivid enjoyments may be felt in the multiplied activities to which human culture gives scope, or in the recognition of scientific truth: here too the enjoyment is the reward of and inducement to study or labour,—but it 1s not the very substance of the good pursued, it isa superfluity rather, the a ee eta INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 248 overflowing of a cup filled by supreme benevolence. We rise at last to the sphere of moral life and affections : the feeling of happiness is altogether higher in kind now, and yet the fact that the place it occupies is subordinate is more | evident than it was at lower levels: it is of the very essence of moral order that the pleasure felt in doing right is to be left out of account in comparison with the obligation to do right. “The principles of moral rectitude are not right Wardlaw. because they produce happiness, they produce happiness because they are right ; their nature not arising from their tendency, but their tendency from their nature.” Duty is paramount, it is the ultimate aim: because, if necessary | every other interest, and happiness, and life itself must be sacrificed to it; and if the deepest joy be hidden in that stern sacrifice, no man who understands the martyr will dare affirm that joy to have been his aim. Similarly, it is of the very essence of real affection that the pleasure felt in loving others should be subordinate to their recog- nized claim to our affections,—so the heart teaches us with its instinctive metaphysics, its dunkel gedachte Meta- physik, to speak with Kant, Thus the highest forms of happiness that can be known on earth are the seals that God has set on the highest forms of moral perfection; but such happiness is not to be sought for its own sake, or it will be lost in the very pursuit. We have no title to it unless we are ready to sacrifice it: “he ohn itor that loveth his life shall lose it? Our duty must be done for its own sake, and not for the satisfaction that it brings ; those that are dear to us must be loved for their own sakes, or they are not loved at all. The latter proposition will be denied by no man; the former is exactly parallel to it, and its denial involves the principle of the fall,—makes the crea- ture its own centre. The instincts of personal interest are legitimate, and concur to the general good when not exces- sive ; but their excess is not tolerated, just because God and il OF Good and Evil. 274 BOOK THE FOURTH. not self is the centre of the world, and our obligations are the expression of his will, grounded in the perfection of his being. | As mere happiness cannot lawfully be our ultimate aim for ourselves, neither should it be our ultimate desire for our fellows. We should seek their moral perfection in the first instance, so far as we can contribute to it; and we should wish to see them ready at every moment to sacrifice their present happiness—not to a higher, but—to the excel- lence which is attended by a higher happiness. We desire their happiness as part of a concrete whole, in which it is a necessary but not the principal element. If God himself be the supremely Blessed One, it is because, in the first in- stance, God is Love. § 104. Evil is acccompanied by suffering, as Good by happiness,—but that suffering is not its substance, it is only a warning of its nature. It is not primarily the producing of so much happiness or unhappiness that constitutes good or evil; ingratitude, for instance, does harm by tending to make man less disposed to do good another time, but it is a crime first of all because it is opposed to the ideal of holy love. I owe truth to my neighbour and to myself on all occasions, even on those where a lie would evidently prevent suffering and hurt none. Rectitude is not independent of love, but it is a mistake, and a perilous one, to forget that it has a reality, a substance, independent of mere benevo- lence. How often does the doubt about an action depend not at all on a calculation of the general effects of it, but on its relation to our own inner selves. There are complex circumstances in which I may have to investigate the results of a given action in order to know whether it is expedient for myself or for others, but that investigation could never create the sense of obligation which it helps to direct. The sense of right and wrong may have occasion to avail itself of the reports of the intelligence, but it is itself a phenome- INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 275 non of a wholly different order. Right and wrong objectively mean conformity or opposition to the Divine umage,—subjec- tively, they mean conformity or opposition to those features of the Divine image concerning which our sense of obliga- tion has been awakened, whether by our own reasoning or by express revelation. The absolute standard of right and wrong, said Cudworth, is constituted by the nature of God. “Though God always wills what is just, nothing is just solely because he wills it,” writes the great schoolman. He means to oppose the false and superficial idea that moral obligation is of arbitrary creation, as if a particular act could be constituted just or unjust apart from general principles, But we are not on the other hand to assert, with some modern thinkers, that God therefore merely recognizes and sanctions moral obligation as a principle logically antecedent to his will. Such a proposition is implicitly inconsistent with Theism ; by setting an impersonal principle above God, and before God, it virtually makes it to be the true God. No: Truth and Love, Justice and Mercy niust exist eternally in the Divine mind ; his attributes and his being alike willed in the same self-creating act, that transcends all thought of created intelligences, and is in every sense antecedent to the laws of which created intelligences can take cognizance. We understand these perfections : we cannot but feel their obli- gation absolute, and the right to look for them at others’ hands Indefeasible, because we were made to be like God, to be in relation with him and with his children. We could as little suppose the universe without them as we can divest ourselves of the ideas of substance and cause, and space and time, and of the relations of number. They can never be repealed because their existence is no accident, and the Divine character cannot be other than it has been willed from all eternity. They have their birth in heaven, says Sophocles, “that prophet among poets ;” Jove alone and not human nature has begotten them, neither can any sink them Cudworth. Thos. Aquinas, J.S. Mill. Diss, 1. 125. Sophocles. The sense of right and wrong. J.S. Mill. W. Smith. A. Vinet. Dollfus. A. Vinet. Eml. Kant. Tugend. p. 99. Rom. ii. 15. paris, BOOK THE FOURTH. in oblivion. God is great through them, neither waxeth he old. Meyas ev Tovrows Oeos, ovoe yn packer, § 105. The conception of a moral sense is often misrepre- sented in order that it may the more easily be re} ected. It is not a whole system of moral law innate in the mind “without any outward standard ;” it is not a power of dis- crimination by which a man perceives certain conduct to be right or wrong, just as by his ordinary organs of perception he perceives things to be blue or red, round or square.” Taken in its immediateness and simplicity it is nothing more | than the sense of obligation. Man is conscious of obligation to act according to his persuasion ; in relation to his fellows for instance, he feels he ought to do what he knows to be right and kind; but to determine what is right or kind in particular cases requires the exercise of observation and reason,—the judge requires the assistance of witnesses and counsel. The instinct of obligation is the immutable element, while mind is the mutable or progressive element ; the har- mony of the two is the conscience as it actually subsists in a given person. Conscience may be led astray by prejudices and by false views of the human calling; its horizon may be limited or infinite, according as our relation to the true God is recognized or ignored; its determinations are in a great measure dependent upon the moral level of the society in which we live; it may be utterly untaught, or its voice may be habitually stifled, and in either case it is condemned to practical inaction ;—in short, conscience requires both to be informed and educated, but when it does pronounce judg- ment at all it is felt to be authoritative. “It can play no subordinate part; wherever it appears, it must appear as a sovereign,” and that, because it represents the sovereign. “ Conscience is the consciousness of an inward tribunal in the man, before which his thoughts accuse or else excuse each other. Every man has a conscience, and finds himself watched by a judge within, menaced and constrained to Anta INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. par fy A reverence mingled with fear; and this power over all the laws which are at work in him is not something which he has ordained for himself, but it is incorporated with his being. When he thinks to escape from it, it follows him as his shadow.” Supreme judge of the inner man, whose voice we cannot resist without degradation, whose sentences exe- cute themselves upon the refractory without the noise and pomp which conceal the weakness of human , magistrates, the sanctions with which it is armed proclaim us the sub- jects of God’s moral government, as distinctly as if we could sit beneath his throne, hear hig voice, see his smile or his frown following our every act. Intended at the first to set the seal of a blissful consciousness upon our harmony with God, it is now more frequently a protest,—a breaker in the midst of the stream, announcing its existence and its purpose by the agitation which it produces, though unable to stop the torrent; and, even as a present restraint upon evil, nothing could supply its place. Conscience is distinguished from our other faculties by two characters which separately and together proclaim the perilous greatness of the human calling. The first is that, while other classes of desires and affections require ulterior means for their eratification, the moral faculty looks no farther than the will; its end is attained when it has deter- mined the direction of the will. The bestowal of a will— “grave and awful privilege—gave the other parts of man’s nature into his own keeping, placed the most sacred trust in creation—his character—in his own hands.” Will confers the power of proposing a definite object to oneself, and of living for that object, instead of being a mere instrument to serve the purposes of other beings. The will is therefore that prerogative of man over animals which makes him a subject of moral government. The second characteristic of this peculiar monitor is that, while other faculties serve us and our aims, this alone is Dr. Harris. McCosh. Dr. Harris. A. Vinet. Gen. iii. 22. Of the relation of Christianity to morals. De Weite. 278 BOOK TIIE FOURTH. independent of and claims to guide our will. “It 1s wonder- ful that there should be in the soul something beside and distinct from the ego. By what right? And for what pur- pose? And what are we to do with it? What do we want with this non-ego? It would seem that it is rather the non-ego that wants us; it would seem that it is not for us to call this stranger to account for his presence.” If the possession of a will makes us capable of moral agency, the assertion of a claim upon our obedience through the voice of conscience is the formal call to be moral agents and sons of God. It is a summons to act according to the eternal self-determined principles of the Divine Mind; it is the claim of the Divine upon the human will; and it is our glory, as it is written,—* Behold the man is become one of us, to know good and evil.” § 106. According to De Wette, religion is “faith in the validity of moral law in the invisible world.” As a defini- tion this proposition is not satisfactory, but the connec- tion it establishes between religion and morality is true, and it is only through subjective religion, voluntary or involuntary, that morality can exist. Had man not fallen no distinction would ever have been made between them, as there can be none now in heaven; men, like angels, would have continued to love and serve God in serving and loving their fellows. With the world as sin has made it, however, the difference soon grew up; man still indeed sought in religion the ideal that he could not find authentic and un- deniable in himself, but he could find it as little in religions that degraded the gods to the level of his own vices. Moreover religious influences gradually fell into hands that rendered them arbitrary and conventional, distinct from genuine morality, and laboured to create for them a sphere apart. Hence the divorce of the two elements, for men’s consciences and interests required a certain amount of mo- rality, and when the temple was no longer worthy of it, or INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 279 unwilling to receive it, they gave it shelter in any kind of shed. Then was seen the monstrous anomaly of a certain order of religion without morals, and of a certain order of morals without religion. “The one great corruption to which all religion is exposed is its separation from morality.” The separation has frequently reappeared in Christianity itself, It comes to pass in entire countries where the existing forms of Christianity are effete, and the morality of the Church is lower than that of the better part of society. Elsewhere individual minds possessing average moral in- stincts, or even higher, are sometimes seen to contemn all positive religion, while retaining a sort of involuntary re- ligiousness, and therefore aiming at the moral ideal they can form, however mutilated and fluctuating it may be. Judaism was unable to accomplish the complete recon- ciliation of men with God, with each other, and with them- selves, because it was only the preparatory stage of the definitive religion. However, the developments of religious and moral ideas, so far as they went, were closely connected and parallel, and both became broader and purer from age to age. But when God was revealed in Jesus Christ religion and morality were once more identified, and in principle both became absolute. There was now definitive moral truth, because there was definitive religious truth. The very word truth, in its highest New Testament use, meant the whole reality of our relation to God, to our fellows, and to our- selves, and that relation a new and inconceivably blessed one. We were no longer a prey to the mobility and power- lessness of our own will, no longer left to renew our nature with its own resources. The news of deliverance from the greatest danger and the most awful misfortune, brought home to the soul through Divine grace, awakened it to a new life. Gratitude is the only feeling evidently disinterested of which our present being is susceptible, and for that reason it was Dean Stanley $ 163. A. Vinet. Casalis. A. Vinet. 280 BOOK THE FOURTH. fitted to become the fulcrum on which the Divine Operator was to rest his lever. Again, “it is the property of gratitude and love that they identify the soul that feels them with the object which has awakened them. Gratitude assimilates us to our benefactor....How could we be grateful for the atonement without ceasing to love that which made the atonement necessary ? Poor as we are with respect to God, incapable of giving anything to him to whom we owe every thing, how can we testify our gratitude otherwise than by the offering of our hearts, and how give him our hearts without loving what he loves, without hating what he hates, without loving good, without hating evil? There is the logic of the soul and it never deceives us.” So wrote a Christian moralist at his desk in the heart of cultivated Europe; and nearly at the same time a poor South African exclaimed to his teacher,—“ the cross of Christ condemns me to be holy.” “From the gratitude derived from such a benefit and ad- dressed to such a benefactor, flows the whole sum of moral law, individual, private, public. It is morally impossible for him who believes in this benefit, and who accepts it, not to be i principle everything that he ought to be. However, the goodness of God does not stop here; and after having, as one may well say, taught moral law from the cross, he has developed its maxims in the Gospel. Here we find the same coherence, the same systematic perfection as in the work itself which forms the basis of the book. The Gospel, viewed as a body of moral teaching, is the most firmly knit, the most consistent, the most complete of systems. As the water of a flowing spring, though it has received but one impulse, can be divided and ramified as we please, according to the slopes of the ground, so from the first of moral truths do all particular truths flow down without effort, and take each of them the way to its proper object. The inward life, the family, the state, are legislated for in the same sense and INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 28] after the same principles. It is but one and the same idea, taking, like water, the form of the vessel into which it is poured ; it is ever truth and charity, justice toward self and family and country. And how could there be anything out of keeping? ‘There is not a precept which cannot be laid alongside of a principle alone of its kind—the fact of Re- demption, and measured by it; the mother-thought of all morals is deposited in the expiatory sacrifice of the Lamb without spot; all the guiding lines of human life start from the cross, where justice and mercy gave themselves mutual satisfaction. This one fact, meditated, analyzed, furnishes the whole true system of morals.” Let none then pretend to admire the moral precepts of the Bible while rejecting its doctrines. They would be an insupportable yoke, a crushing burden, a dreadful menace, were it not for its doctrines. “In the Gospel, doctrine is moral precept begun, moral precept has not ceased to be doc- trine; and their respective characters depend upon this in timate and organic union which makes the one to be the con- tinuation of the other.” Love to God, once judged impossible, has now been drawn forth by a fact of immeasurable bearing that puts order in chaos, and peace in the soul, and displaces the axis of the will. The great, and ultimately the only enemy—self—may be slow in dying, but he has received a mortal wound. The Gospel, writes the great thinker from whom so many of those pages have been borrowed, “The Gospel requires the soul to give up* without reserve every thing that she loves, that she wishes, that she is. Indispen- sable condition of a true moral system ; for the least refuge, the most modest retreat is enough for the will ; the smallest corner of the soul is a whole world for the will... .it 1s not space that it wants, but existence : the ego takes up no room ; he only asks to be allowed to live,—not to be made abso- 8 i.e, To give up in principle, to be ready to give up if called upon. A. Vinet. A. Vinet. Eph. iy. 32. View shes Vv. 5. Me Piss. Wty VES Gras 282 BOOK THE FOURTH. lutely nothing, because this is to become everything.” Now it is this last asylum, this mathematical point that the moral system of the Gospel refuses to the will.” It is thus radi- cal, uncompromising, inexorable,—because the love from which it proceeds is infinite,—and the deliverance on which it is founded, immeasurable,—and the perfection it calls us to imitate, absolute. The theory that distinguishes religion and morals repre- sents God as asking nothing for himself, and being content when we fulfil our social duties. The Christian scheme on the other hand represents the Lawgiver as a Father who cannot be satisfied with a cold and servile obedience. Or- dinary legislators are honored for the sake of the law, but here the law is honored for the sake of the Divine Lawgiver. Our duty toward God is not only the first part of morals, but it is also carried out in the two last; every duty toward our fellows or ourselves is to be done as unto him, every affection is to find its way at last to the bosom of God, ‘and in fine the consciousness of Redemption is the soul of Chris- tian morality. “Be ye kind one to another,” says Paul, “tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you....Be ye therefore followers of God as dear children; and walk in love as Christ also hath loved us....No whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God....Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church... .Children, obey your parents in the Lord...Servants, obey. . not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good well-doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men.” All these quota- tions are taken from a single epistle, and here, as throughout Paul’s writings every fresh precept assumes the shape of a hive, If we advisedly refuse to God the merest trifle, it is finally our own will and not God’s that we follow. INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 283 fresh privilege, the addition of a new element to Christian happiness. } Even where the consciousness of Redemption does not exist, or where the very doctrine is haughtily rejected, Chris- tian Revelation has not the less shed’ a new light upon our duties to ourselves and to otheis, as is shown by the su- periority of modern over ancient moralists, and still more by that of modern over ancient legislation. However, so long as the will of God remains outside the soul as mere law, and is not living in the heart, no man can escape the apparent collision of duties ; and then an unquiet conscience becomes the prey of casuistry and probabilism, while stronger natures incase themselves in a hard and narrow stoicism. § 107. Inseparable from the feelings awakened by Re- demption is the action exercised upon the heart and mind by the spectacle of the character and life of our blessed Lord himself. It is not holiness and love set forth in abstract sentences, but breathing on the lips, and kindling in the acts of One who had a power of revealing himself and letting men read his heart, which no one else ever possessed. He “dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory,” the moral glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. How easy it is to become familiar with his life, how readily is it present to all remembrances, as if he had said to all ages as to the two young men who asked him where he lived, “Come and see.” How homely those tales of the way side, and the wilderness, and the boat upon the lake. With what mysterious power do his words adapt themselves to all com- prehensions. How completely is he our own, now thinking aloud, and now—adorable condescension !—allowing his very prayers to be heard. Uncultivated minds, or those naturally of a low order are incapable of studying abstract conceptions, but all intelligences—would we could add all hearts and con- sclences—are open to such a history as this, and can make themselves acquainted with Jesus Christ. A holy example. John i, 14. 1.39. Grotz C. I. Nitzsch. S. Vincent. 284 BOOK THE FOURTH. We see his bearing under reproach and in suffering; we see him before his enemies, and in the intimacy of private converse with his disciples, and in contact with the sorrows of men ; now dealing with anxious souls, and now awakening the utterly indifferent. Few as are the selections from his words and works that we possess, the nearest friend cannot be better known than the Son of Man. Now, “every thing that Jesus did conscience presents to us as our duty and our law. Whatever may be the distance that separates us from the Saviour, we cannot escape this obligation.” No sense of his majesty can so prevail with those accustomed to trace his footsteps as to dim their consciousness of his nearness to us and of the obligation to follow his example, for they can see that there was nothing unreal in his humiliation and temptations. Itis the example of one ever living to draw near to us, and help us to be like himself. There are not only such footsteps upon our sands as may cheer for ever forlorn and shipwrecked man, but he that left them is at hand, waiting until we cry to him for saving help. “Since Jesus Christ presented to every man, even to the meanest, the glorified image of humanity in himself, there have arisen personal and social feelings other than those which were formerly current.” A magic wand has touched the divine principle sleeping in the soul, and man has awa- kened to contemplate as in a spotless mirror the greatness and the loveliness—the awful beauty—of his calling. At once, without effort or hesitation, by the simple truth of the picture, he recognizes himself as he should be. His first im- pression is one of admiration and love; the next is the senseless wish to dash to pieces the ideal that condemns him, and by its contrast makes him appear hateful to himself, But his fratricidal arm is stayed when he understands that this his sinless brother has come to reconcile him to God, and when he feels the need of being forgiven by him and made like him. INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 285 If the Redeemer were intended to set us an example to be literally copied in every matter of detail, a thousand lives would not have sufficed for the task; so various are the cir- cumstances and the temptations of men. But he teaches his children a spirit which can be carried into all possible rela- tions, even those into which he never personally entered ; and one can be Christlike as a husband, a father, a magis- trate, a merchant. § 108. “Piety and probity are different things,” says Pierre Charron, “I would have each support itself without the aid of the other. I would have men honest without paradise or hell: it seems to me horrible and abominable when one says: ‘If I were not a Christian, and were not afraid of God and of being damned, I would do so and so.’ You poor wretch, then what thanks can be given you for all you do?” Thirteen centuries earlier the beautiful enthu- siast, Hypatia, animated by the same idea, appeared in the streets of Alexandria with a torch in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other, symbols of her wish to burn heaven and quench hell, that men might learn to love virtue for its own sake. The thesis that true virtue is independent of all sanctions contains enough of truth to make the errors associated with it plausible. The lofty stoicism that refuses to allow ques- tions of reward or punishment to be mixed up like a foreign element with the consideration of duty, has been sincerely professed by many of the noblest minds, it is enough to mention Emmanuel Kant. It appears especially attractive when contrasted with certain vulgar representations of Chris- tianity as a mere system of personal safety and interest, which teaches us to obey God because he outbids the Devil, and transfers to the things of eternity the same hard and selfish spirit which men show in looking after their interests in this world, putting one selfish object instead of many. “The difference, and the only difference,” says Paley, with Of Christian appeals to self- love. Charron. F. D. Maurice. Paley. Moral Phil. Whateley’s ed. p. 57. 286 BOOK THE FOURTH. complacency, is this, “that in the one case we consider what we shall gain or lose in the present world; in the other case we consider also what we shall gain or lose in the world to come.” | Of the two extremes thus in presence, the former isolates the feelings of moral approbation and disapprobation from elements which are inseparably united with them; the latter makes no account of moral feeling at all, dn puts well-directed self-love in its stead. To make happiness, whether here or hereafter, exclusively for its own sake, the aim of our life is to be systematically irreligious; it is to persevere upon principle in the direction taken by man at the fal. Experience has shown that it is sure to defeat its Own purpose in this world; and if God be love, and the cross the symbol of Redemption, it is equally certain to be disappointed in the next. Happily we are not obliged to choose between the mutila- tion and the negation of moral excellence. The great error of the Stoics of all ages consists in the thought of the existence and character of a personal God being altogether left out of their reasoning,—an omission consistent with the tendencies of the early Stoics, but generally unconscious on the part of their successors. Had we to do with nothing but abstract laws of justice and self-respect, we could under- stand their being unconnected with any reward. The strong and the high-minded could try to accomplish them, with- out expecting any higher approbation than the proud con- sciousness of their own dignity; and love would have no place upon their list of virtues, for it is no matter of ab- stract law. But we have to do with One who is himself eternal blessedness, as well as holiness and love, and whose gracious will it is that his children should bear his image in this world and in the next. Hence goodness and hap- piness are inseparable in us, because they are one in him, and evil and suffering are inseparable, for evil is the con- INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 287 tradiction of his being and of our own. Happiness is not to be sought as a supreme aim, but it is found in seeking goodness. The wish for happiness or the feeling of unhap- piness, serving as an attraction or as a warning, may prompt the first steps of the prodigal, as in the parable he is made to say, when he comes to himself, “How many hired ser- vants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!” But when he is in his father’s arms, his heart is full of a deeper thought: “I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight.” Hence it is that the Lord offers the soul that gives up all for him, a hundred-fold more even in this present life; union with the source of all good must put us in possession of the fulness of Joy. Man asked after the highest happiness, and Jesus taught him to seek rather the highest excellence, without giving up the wish to be happy. More ambitious for us than we were for ourselves, he gives us a higher felicity than that we coveted. “Tt is a marvel peculiar to the Gospel that, when one wishes, from its own point of view, to distinguish the means it offers from the end it proposes—sacrifices from their re- ward, the present from the future, earth from heaven—it is hardly possible to do so; such is the unity of man’s destiny, such is the unity of truth; so completely are duty and happiness the same thing at bottom, though separate in our minds by an effect of our fall. In the Gospel the reward of loving is to love more, the reward of seeing 1s to see yet better.” “The submissson of the human to the Divine will is virtue; virtue is truth—truth in action; now happiness is necessarily included in truth. Nothing in the world, nor out of the world, can bring it to pass, that a being, whose will is one with the will of God, shall not be happy in the very fact: he would be so in the very sojourn of the lost. Nothing can bring it to pass, that, from his first 3 103 Luke xy. 17 vy. 21. A. Vinet. A. Vinet. S] inoza. 288 BOOK THE FOURTH. efforts to unite his will to the Divine will, such a being should not in some measure taste that true felicity which has its principle in the shedding abroad of peace in the heart. It is useless then to try to isolate from each other two such inseparable elements; they would rejoin each other in spite of all obstacles, or perish in their separation.” However real the satisfaction of our desire of happiness that is found in the pursuit of goodness, it might have been passed over in silence, since it 1s confessedly secondary to the pursuit of goodness for its own sake. But Scripture does not do so, it formally and repeatedly appeals to our self-love, both in the way of promises and menaces; and it uses the love of self as a standard by which to measure our love for others. Hence the desire of happiness and the fear of suffering are legitimate in a Christian point of view: we are not made merely to obey, but to be happy in obeying; and there are states of the fallen creature in presence of which it is wisest to dwell most upon the latter, because the desire of happiness is still alive within him. Self-love should be subordinate; in its perverted form it becomes selfishness, ready to sacrifice to itself the claims of God. and of our neighbour; but that, in its proper place, it should ever have been discredited by moralists is a singular proof of the disorder into which our nature has been thrown. How strong must be our sense of the fatally deep-seated reign of selfishness within, when some of the most profound thinkers have been driven to condemn the most primitive and indestructible of our instincts, even when directed to- wards the best and highest object! The vulgar, said Spinoza, think virtue a slavery for which they are to receive rewards of a kind different from itself, and which they value more. The observation is just, and he did well to protest against the idea of a beatitude different from goodness, but goodness itself is not the less true happiness. The absence of God from the heart constitutes sin and its punishment ; INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 289 God in the heart brings with him forgiveness, peace, joy, love, devotedness. The wicked want to make use of God as their instrument, but the good wish to enjoy God, and in this sense cannot and ought not to be disinterested, A practical regard to our own happiness, writes Bishop Butler, “ is not only consistent with the principle of virtue and rectitude, but is a part of the idea itself. And it is evi- dent this reasonable self-love wants to be improved as really as any principle in our nature: for we daily see it over- matched, not only by the more boisterous passions, but by curiosity, shame, love of imitation, by any thing, even indo- lence.” The judgment of our great English apologist is thus responded to from the shores of lake Leman: “ Happi- ness is the proper object of the will, its immutable pole : man wills happiness from the very fact that he wills at all, and he cannot will otherwise; to despoil the will of this tendency would be to annihilate it altogether..... How could I love another if I did not know what it was to love myself ? How could I be sensible to what touched him if nothing touched me? How understand his situation, wishes, hopes, if all circumstances were alike indifferent to me,—if I were incapable of forming any desire or conceiving any hope on my own account?....How can I enjoy the happiness of others if I do not know what it is to enjoy? Nay, how come to deny myself—that essential peculiarity of love— unless I am first in possession of myself?” In a word, without self-love it is impossible to conceive love, and again with love satisfied it is impossible not to conceive happiness. Man was made with the right to be happy because he was made in the image of God, and he retains in his bosom the empty place that should have been filled with the presence of God. § 109. In the world as we find it, goodness and happiness seem utterly distinct ; might often triumphs over right, the most generous aspirations end in disappointment ; our purest U Maine de Biran. Bishop Butler. A. Vinet. Self-love at once purified and satisjied, Ernest Naville. Montesquieu. W.A. Butler. 290 BOOK THE FOURTH. affections occasion the deepest sorrow; the noblest hearts are wrung by the bitterest anguish. There would be no unity—no moral purpose in the Universe if this disaccord between: our higher life and the conditions of existence were founded in the nature of things, and therefore real and per- manent. The strong moral sense of a Socrates told him it was only apparent and temporary ; but he could not suppress the dark enigmas and contradictions of life, nor lift up the veil that covered both the past and the future. Hence the two great philosophical sects of antiquity: they both recog- nized the practical separation between happiness and virtue, and from this common starting point the Cynics and after- wards the Stoics proceeded to found life upon the idea of duty independently of happiness—the Cyrenaics and the Epicureans upon the search of happiness independently of duty. The imperishable instinct that constrains us to pursue a happiness of some kind, or at least some substitute for it, rose up in the Stoic in spite of himself, seeking its eratifica- tion in the fierce joys of pride and savage isolation. The sage professed himself independent not only of the cares of earth, but of all its interests and affections. In the cold, eloomy fanaticism of self-idolatry he allowed himself to love no one, not even his own children, and he ended by prizing the power to take away his own life as the extreme of self- assertion, the final evidence that he was his own master. The herd of Epicurus meantime hurried on that state of Universal corruption and frantic pursuit of material enjoy- ments in which the glory of Rome and the civilization of antiquity were to perish together. Strange and startling phenomenon! These two rival tendencies, at different stages of their development, encouraged the same indiffer- ence to life. The grisly phantom of suicide meets us alike in the voluptuous bowers of Cyrene, the halls of Alex- andria, and the palaces of Rome. Ptolemy Philodelphus 1s INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 291 said to have been obliged to prohibit Hegesias the Cyrenaic, surnamed Peisithonatos, from teaching, so overpowering were his descriptions of human misery. The same gloomy refuge of despair discovers itself among the maxims, or the sugges- tions, or the inferences of each of these celebrated schools that had accepted the separation of what God intended to unite. Faith in Redemption restores the relation between good- ness and happiness ; and while rightly proclaiming goodness supreme, it makes them eternally one. It teaches us that it is our duty to be happy. At bottom it is one form of man’s primordial misery that he does not believe in happiness ; in his levity and frivolity he gives himself up to pleasure be- cause he does not believe in joy ; he lets himself become the prey of freezing pride or devouring passion because he has no faith in the serene light and warmth of true felicity. But faith brings us to despise these poor counterfeit joys, and at the same time bids us look for the association of real good- ness and happiness as the order of the world. “It is not only for the soul, it is also for the mind, that happiness is a necessity. Happiness is part of the truth. There is nothing then that dishonours us when we ask for it pure, whole, un- alterable; and, in this sense, the man who is freest from the empire of low desires—the most disinterested—does not ask for it less earnestly than the miser, the voluptuary, the man wholly given over to self.” He decides in the case of others as much as in his own, he would do go if his personal in- terests were altogether unconnected with the matter. Thus we are not obliged to choose between the chimera of disinterested love and the baseness of mercenary obedience. Gratitude for Redemption includes everything that is true in either system: It is easy to be disinterested when one 1 This great practical self-contradiction was already noticed by St. Augustin. Philosophers, he Says, pretended they attained to the vita beata, and then killed themselves.—De Civ. Lab xix, 6.4 Ernest Nayille. A. Vinet Rom. xii. 1. J.G. Fichte. W.A. Butler. A. Vinet. 292 BOOK THE FOURTH. has been made rich; when Christianity has assuaged the soul’s thirst, and satisfied its aspirations, it brings the affec- tions to reinforce the conscience : “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice ;” there is its appeal. One of the condi- tions Fichte required for a genuine revelation was that it should offer no reward to virtue, and another that it should promise no supernatural aid: “ proud and cruel mockery, which freezes to despair, on pretence of hardening to forti- tude; which forbids the sick to be healed on any terms but those which the healthy alone could use;” which would constrain us to starve rather than eat the bread of heaven. The religion of Redemption cannot be accused of lending itself to the abuse of self-love: “Its gifts are spiritual, invisible, it draws upon eternity for its final rewards ; its exigencies are at hand, immediate, inexorable, illimited. It does more than hold forth happiness as the result of sub- mission ; it puts it in the very act of submission: obedience is more than the means of felicity, it is felicity itself Prodigal as this religion is of her gifts, she draws them from our own heart, enriches us with our own sub- stance, makes us the artizans of our own lot: we are only free in proportion to our obedience, rich in proportion to our self-denial. The giving up of our own willis the whole of religion, it is life eternal, We have been plainly warned of what conscience had been whispering since the would exists—that we shall then only have attained the end of our being and the term of our desires, when we shall have placed our sincere, heartfelt abdication of self in the hands of God. But though this truth stands at the threshold of every conscience, what a task nevertheless is such an abdi- cation, what a subject of horror and fright for the natural man !” Christianity has reconciled man’s pursuit of happiness and his willing dependence upon God, though carrying each of INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 293 these elements to the highest degree of intensity possible. On the first view of what it has done for either, one would suppose the other sacrificed ; and when it is studied in the life of the Christian, each of these rival principles seems to occupy the whole soul. From the state in which Redemp- tion finds us the task might well be deemed impossible. A system offering unmixed happiness would indeed attract, but not teach us submission, or change our hearts; a system presenting an aspect of austerity would necessarily repel us. The problem was to find a system “such that the will should realize its triumph in its own defeat and its defeat in its triumph, truth in its happiness and its happiness in truth, liberty in submission and submission in liberty!” AIL this has been done ; the religion that reconciles justice and mercy in God has reconciled conscience and will, self-love and de- votedness in man. The pardoned sinner, relieved from the anguish of his conscience and the terrors of death, learning to know God in Christ, and something of the unsearchable riches of his grace, becomes capable of loving his Saviour likewise. Itis the glory of God that he saves man by taking up in his heart the place that he should have occupied from the first ; thus Salvation becomes the harmony of man with his native destiny, and with the principle of his being; it is at once the health and the supreme happiness of the moral man. ‘The Gospel has laid hold on him by the two poles of his being, satisfying his thirst and yet bringing him back to God. § 110. It is sometimes lightly said that Christian morality is beautiful but impracticable. The assertion is a contradic- tion in terms; nothing is beautiful that is not true; nothing - is admirable that fails in the purpose for which it was in- tended. If the standard of Christianity be high, and in its perfection unattainable, we have to choose between it and the absence of any standard whatever, for God has put such honour upon our nature that since Jesus Christ appeared in A. Vinet Of true liberty. A. Vinet. John viii. 31, 32. 994 BOOK THE FOURTH. it we cannot rest content with any meaner example. Nor is this standard to be judged from the point of view of un- assisted nature: along with the Christian ideal is given grace to aspire to it honestly, and to attain it in a certain measure. Christian morality is practicable “in this sense— that not one of its precepts is absolutely out of the reach of aman armed with the arms of God; and still more in this sense—that its spirit becomes without reserve or restriction the spirit of the believer.” It is not only imposed upon him, but incorporated with him by the Spirit of grace. “Tf ye continue in my word,” said Jesus, “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” He spoke of . the experimental knowledge of the realities of our relation M. Matter. Bacon. Hegel. to God, to our fellows, and to ourselves, as they are constitu- ted by Redemption, in union with his person, through faith in his work. Thus to know Jesus is to possess true liberty ; it sets the soul free from the thraldom of sin, and puts the will in harmony with the laws of the universe, and with our own blessedness. “A character elevated and purified by the love of God abdicates its personality so little, and runs so little danger of enfeebling its will, that it becomes all the greater and the stronger from controlling itself in accordance with the supreme will.’ The man who anxiously desires to do or to consent to the will of God from the heart,—that man’s will is done in heaven, on earth, and in himself. He is a king ; he has found the secret of royalty in submission. Bacon observed that it is by obeying the laws of nature that we become masters of nature. very step in civiliza- tion reveals some new law claiming our submission, and by submitting to which we enlarge our empire. very art is in the first instance a yoke that we take upon ourselves, a discipline of our docility, which becomes the secret of future power. In the social state, submission to order and authority is submission to justice; and this limitation of brute emo- tions and rude instincts makes the power and the real free- INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 295 dom of the civilized man greater than that of the savage. In every sphere, man, a king by birthright, strives to reign, and he succeeds so far as he humbles himself to accept the subordinate and delegated royalty which has been traced out for him; but the process is then only adequate and complete in principle, when it is applied to the very central spring of life, when the sinner at the feet of Jesus desires to have no will but his, and then rises up his own master and the heir of all things. Royally minded, royally clad, royally guarded, royally victorious, he shall one day be royally lodged, and shall receive a crown, though he will not allow it to rest upon his own brow. “To be free,” writes old Jansenius, “is to be independent of others, to have one’s cause in oneself; liberty has only itself for its end; hence the greatest possible liberty is that of the Supreme End—that is to say, of God, whom every thing serves and who is subject to nobody, and who is thus essential liberty (¢psessima libertas) ; however, the more any created being comes near to this Supreme End, through the condition of its substance and of love, the more also it comes near to essential liberty, and attains the summit of its own true liberty; this is the case with souls; the love of the Supreme End confers upon the loving soul some- what of that illimited independence of all creatures which the Supreme End himself possesses, it is set free from any direct subjection to secondary things, beginning with itself; so that this love becomes exactly its lberty, and its liberty is no other than this liberal and emancipating servitude.” Liberty is a favourite word with New Testament writers, and is used in various senses. It frequently expresses the Christian’s emancipation from the Mosaic ritual, and his relief from the vain effort to work out bis own righteousness. But Paul speaks of the “ glorious liberty of the children of God,” in a higher sense, intending a freedom from the power of sin such as the world had not known before; as it is in Jansenius. Gal. vi. 1. 1 Peter ii. 16. Rom. viii. 21. 2 Cor. iii. 18. Jas. i. 25. A. Vinet. Phila Jude 24. 296 BOOK THE FOURTH. another place: “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” And for this reason the leader of a school of Christians, altogether independent of that of Paul, calls the ereat unwritten Gospel “the perfect law of liberty.” The true system of morals must give us an adequate method of ascertaining our duties, must furnish the true motive, must supply to that motive sufficient strength, must address itself to all ages, conditions, and degrees of culture, it must finally be within reach of all men. It is wonderful how faith in Redemption unites all these conditions. It does not go on repeating for ever the old, worn, powerless arguments of the mere human moralist; it goes straight home to the soul with the power of a fact, a fact that a child can understand, and yet can occupy, captivate, and subdue the mightiest intellect. It lodges the principle of regenera- tion in the very seat of disease and death. Mistress of the will, it puts to silence every sophism; the love for God and man that it creates is not a matter of luxury but of necessity ; it is not an arbitrary, mystic, transcendental perfection suited for a particular class of minds or a particular order of men, it is the one thing needful for every human being. This love is such that its work can only become perfect in eternity, and yet it can be really, practically, honestly begun by any human being at any moment of time, and begun with the assurance of its being brought to perfection. Indeed the Gospel does not so much propound a new sys- tem of morals as give power to practise the old; it did not invent morals but it gave them life, and set them on a new foundation. Even in the heathen world many beautiful maxims were in circulation before it, and all possible claims of God or man upon our feelings or acts were included fifteen centuries before it, in the two great commands of the Jewish Law, which again are reducible to one. There could be no progress in the sense of addition to this one fundamental principle, but, when life and immortality were brought to INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 297 light through the Gospel, there was an immeasurable pro- gress in the sense of evolution. There was an introduction of higher sanctions, and more powerful motives. Men came to know what the love of God and the love of our neighbour meant and included, as it could never have been known before. “As touching brotherly love, ye need not that I write unto you; for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another.” What a testimony is this amidst the hideous hardness, selfishness, and moral decomposition of old Roman society! There was a new principle of moral life intro- duced into the world by Him who had life in himself; and men were enabled to acquit themselves joyously of duties which they had only known as a yoke, and to obey com- mandments that had hitherto only served to measure their weakness and their guilt. Just as in nature the one light of heaven, variously absorbed and reflected by the surfaces on which it falls, delights our senses with a multitude of hues, blended and shaded in endless profusion, so the one simple law of love, issuing forth from our relation to God, and carried abroad into all our complex associations, sheds a holy, heavenly beauty over the infinitely varied scenes of human life. § 111. The part played by the sexual system in the veget- able and animal kingdoms was an anticipation of a law which was to find its highest expression in the life of man. It pleased God to bestow upon man the Divine prerogative of paternity, to make him in an instrumental and subor- dinate sense a creator, multiplying the image of the great Creator : and therefore, before the existence of man the suc- cession of inferior creatures was effected in the same way. The system which strews the flowers in the mead, clothes the birds. with their richest plumage, fills the grove with song, animates and embellishes all nature—is also that which, ennobled, transformed, rendered moral and spiritual in man —-constitutes the family. To it we owe the affection of hus- 1 Thess. iv. 9. The Christian's household. See $7. J. Harris. Eph. vy. 22—388. Gal. iii. 28. 298 BOOK THE FOURTH. band and wife, the love of father and mother, and the filial love that more faintly responds to theirs, the strong friend- ship of brothers, the chaste and tender fondness of brother and sister, and all the richly shaded and varied relationships under which the kinship of mankind makes itself felt, and through which we receive so many lessons of self-denial, so many calls to love and to serve each other, and to find our own happiness in the good and in the happiness of others. A system in such intimate contact through countless ramifications with our whole being and life, naturally affords room for the most deplorable aberrations ; in no other sphere, therefore, has man’s degradation exhibited itself in such heart-sickening and heart-rending aspects. Nevertheless, the institution of the family contained in itself so many checks and practical correctives of the worst forms of evil, as to make it an admirable instrument for the purposes of an economy of restoration, in harmony with all the other conditions of a state of probation, of suspended condemna- tion and possible salvation. Hence, from the very first, Christianity took up the family as the strong position from which it could act upon the world, and in which it could assimilate successive generations. It has indeed made of home the sanctuary of holy affections, and of the highest, purest earthly happiness, God’s effectual protest and or- dinance against the dissevering power of sin, the seat of a permanent reaction against the disorganizing agency of sel- fishness, where “every coming relation of life, every fu- ture form of duty, and every subsequent social affection, are seen virtually put in rehearsal for the more public scenes of active life.” Christianity ennobles the conjugal relation by proclaiming that its prototype, the union of Christ and his Church, is eternal. It has raised woman to the level of man by pro- claiming her the sister of Jesus Christ, by recognizing the value of her peculiar aptitudes and moral features, and by INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 299 calling her to be man’s partner in the fulfilment of his nearest, highest duty. He is a king in his own house, wielding the sceptre for the good of all; he is a prophet when he teaches ; he is a priest at the ‘family altar; but the mother’s bosom was the child’s “first paradise,” and she is “the earliest to enter the infant heart, and to take possession in the name of God, radiating on her children the light and life of her own intense affection.” A Christian father holds in his family a place similar in principle however feeble its realization, to the place occupied by the Redeemer at the head of the human race: he is the representative of the family, entitled to act for it, and em- powered to act upon it. Nature teaches us to rejoice when aman is born into the world, but faith inspires a deeper, more serious and heartfelt joy; for the parent who has under- stood and embraced the grace of God in Jesus Christ, and the virtual reconciliation of mankind in him, welcomes in his children the blood-relations of Jesus Christ, beings whom his God confides to his care, that they may be brought up for him, because they are dear to him. I am allowed— nay bound—to receive the sacred trust from the very hands of my heavenly Father, and to look for the triumph of Redemption in my family as it is to triumph in the world. Blessed thought! Human hands presented to the Lord in his temple the little child Jesus, who had been from all eternity the Son of his love ; and we too may do so with our children, in the hope that they were God’s, according to his purpose of grace, before they became ours. The believing master should look and labour for a blessing upon the ser- vants with whom he is brought into contact by a kind Provi- dence, whose dispensations are never without meaning; how much more should we lay hold of the fact of the birth of these redeemed souls within reach of our influence, as a pledge of a special co-operation of the grace of God in their education. J. Harris, John xvi. 21. Luke ii. 22. Acts ii 39. Luke x. 5. Acts xvi. 31. Eph. vi. 4. Col. iii. 20. 1 Cor. vii. 14. Deut. vii. 6. Rom. xi. 28. Pliny. Lucretius. Arnobius. ady. Gentes. Origen, contra cels. v. 76. 300 BOOK THE FOURTH. Hence at the very first proclamation of the glad tidings it was said, “the promise is unto you and to your children;” the disciples, whenever they entered into a house, were to say, “peace be to this house ;” salvation by faith for himself and for his house was the theme of Paul’s preaching to the jailor at Philippi; the Christian parents at Ephesus were told to bring up their children in “ the nurture and admoni- tion of the Lord,” and it was assumed that the children at Colosse wished to do what should be “ well-pleasing unto the Lord.” Apostle to the Corinthians,—that their children were holy. The most emphatic declaration of all is that of the It had once been said to Israel’ also, “Thou art an holy people unto Jehovah thy God:” that is to say, a people set apart for God,—“ beloved for the father’s sake;” a people whose every lineage was ennobled by a special religious calling, on whose every house rested the shadow of the cloudy pillar. The naturalist and the poet of ancient scepticism, com- plained of the helplessness of man in infancy, and of his long childhood, compared with the quick development and early independence of animals. Even a Christian apologist, the superficial Arnobius, made himself the echo of the same common-place philosophy. Yet a very little observation might have taught them that as creatures rise in the scale of being their young become more and more dependent. Origen, as became a master of a higher school of thought, perceived that this apparent inferiority was intended by Pro- vidence to stimulate man’s activity and exercise his faculties. The advantages which we are tempted to envy animals would really have made it harder for us to rise above them. We have been constrained to supply by mind and industry the arms and clothing with which we found ourselves unpro- vided by nature. However, the great, the essential purpose of this law of human development must have been the creation of family life, and the prolonging its gentle in- INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 801 fluences; the preparation of the strength, the usefulness and happiness of the future man, by habits of willing obedience, self-restraint, and consideration for others, acquired in an atmosphere of affection. ‘“ How beautiful is the arrange- ment which has thus adapted to each other the feebleness of the weak and the fondness of the strong; in which the hap- piness of those who require protection and of those who are able to give protection, is equally secured; and man, deriving from his early wants the social affections which afterwards bind him to his race, is made the most powerful of earthly beings, by that very imbecility which seemed to mark him as born only to suffer and to perish.” In this respect, as in every other, there is a pre-established harmony between creation and Redemption: nature has pre- pared the channels through which grace is to act. “The child’s love of its mother is religion, and its reverence for the looks and tones of the father, morality,” and both are of such a nature as to be a normal preparation for the adult morality and religion into which they should grow. If parents and children are made for each other it is that their reciprocal action may bring them together to the feet of the Redeemer, raise to a higher power the close and tender relation that exists between them, and make it last for ever. A voice and hand that cannot be mistaken have, from the first, “called a little child and set him in the midst” of every family,—a symbol of loving dependence, an object of soul purifying affection, reviving the otherwise fading sense of the ideal; and his parents, on their side, write their own characters and beliefs on his receptive mind, making of their home the “one school from which there are no truants, and in which there are no holidays.” It is true they cannot dispose of their child’s future ab- solutely ; in that nascent will there lies the dread power to resist the Holy Ghost himself; but they can gather from the character, the acts and the declarations of God, the Dr, Thos. Brown Dr. Harris. J. Harris. Anderson. See 3 75. Cae BOOK THE FOURTH. assurance that every power Divine Wisdom has left itself shall be put forth to win that beloved soul for heaven: our God will work with us, and this is enough for our faith ; it can ask no more for our children or for ourselves. fans of al sta § 112. We have not rightly understood the grandeur of if the Christian scheme of salvation, until we learn the dis- tances, so to speak, at which, and the successive spheres in which, the agency of the Redeemer is exerted with various degrees of intensity. As the attractive power of the sun is felt by the most erratic comet when it is at the further ex- tremity of the solar system, though in a degree not admit- ting of comparison with the force exerted upon the ponder- ous planets that revolve in nearer orbits,—so in the moral heavens there are stars of all degrees of glory really re- volving round the great central Luminary, yet receiving his warmth and reflecting his light in unequal proportions, from the most brilliant to the faint and even the impercep- tible. Not only so, but they are all too distant: the nearest and the brightest are yet cold and dull, only beginning to obey that saving attraction, and to recover from the pertur- bation that has sent them wandering into infinite cold and outer darkness. The wretched Australian negro possesses, latent and locked up within him, all the virtualities and possibilities of man, yet how far below the level of civilized man does he lie grovelling; and on the other hand, it is equally true that the noblest examples of civilized human- ity are just those who feel most deeply their brotherhood with that poor outcast. Now the higher any order of reality in a fallen world, the greater must be the distance between its ideal and the highest measure of perfection attained, the greater also the intervals between the several inferior levels. We have been obliged to set forth the normal type of Christian life: it is certainly one to which the experience of multitudes has so far approximated as to justify the description, but it puts us ordinary Christians to INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 303 shame ; the faith,—the deep settled peace,—the love,—the devotedness of the adult man in Christ, seem to belong to a different religion from that of the majority of even earnest souls. That it should be so is but consistent with the statement of that utter moral shipwreck of the race with which Chris- tianity set out, and with the moral character of the process of recovery. Since we are not cured magically, we were too far gone—dead in trespasses and sins—to be speedily cured. Therefore it is that Christian life exhibits itself, even in the best, as a long, a slow, an irrecular convales- cence, and that there are cases in which no eye but the great Physician’s can perceive that the process of recovery has commenced at all. If Christianity be what it claims to be —a principle of life at work in the heart of a dead world, it is in the nature of things, while its influence is yet partial, that it should exhibit itself in some minds only as a con- sciousness of definite, personal relation to the Saviour; full of heroic faith, and equal to all forms of self-sacrifice and martyrdom,—the slow, the silent, the unapplauded, as well as those that are witnessed by admiring multitudes. A more numerous class, instead of these triumphant breathings, will exhibit an obscurer consciousness, and tamer experiences : their manifestations of religious life do not precede them, as it were challenging attention to its source, but follow after with feeble and unequal step; yet they too are at the school of God, and whatever genuine piety does animate them is characteristically Christian. As Goethe says, to see that the heavens are blue one need not travel over all the world,—so the least: patch visible through their cloudy sky, reveals what would be the hue of the en- tire firmament, if it were clear. Outside both circles lies a broad space of partial illumi- nation,—a whole society whose moral state is affected, and whose moral standard is raised by Christianity ; a society 1 Tim. v. 25. Goethe. Jowett. 304 BOOK THE FOURTH. pervaded by a sense of purity, tenderness, truthfulness, justice, and benevolence unknown to other civilizations ; and yet its members, taken individually, are more solicitous about the concerns of this world than about the hope of another. They are men without any strong sense of sin, or any keen feeling of the need of forgiveness, whose notion of both virtue and happiness is in a great measure pagan ; “to whom, except for the indirect influence of Christian in- stitutions, the life and death of Christ would have made no difference.” Their Christianity is not a living process in them, but the reflection of that which exists in others. When they do not consciously disbelieve they cannot be said to believe, but forget God in the easy decencies of religious observance, There are minds much richer than those of the mass of mankind in imagination, in the power of feeling, expressing, and awakening emotions and sympathy, and in that of giving themselves wholly to some object of pursuit. To this class belong all true poets, artists, and orators. When such natures are touched by the grace of God they become shining lights, but they can also go astray more fatally and terribly than others, and become the fanatics of every cause. Often have the inquisitor and his victim been moulded of the same clay; often are the saint and the impassioned infidel representatives of the same _ order. There are also minds in which imagination, impulse, and prejudice are all-powerful, not from real depth of the emotional being, but from the comparative weakness of the faculties which should balance it, and which therefore possess a false resemblance to the natural aristocracy we speak of: among them are to be found the mere pretender to art,—the bitter political partizan,—the bigoted, talkative, and unsteady religionist. Once more: such a spectacle should not leave the impres- sion that there is any exaggeration in the pretentions of the INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 305 religion of Redemption, but rather that of a world being hardly and painfully raised out of its fallen condition by a benign influence from above. We only see this religion in its struggles, and in its weakness: “We are saved in hope,” said Paul. It has triumphed over disease, and suffering, and death, but it has not Suppressed them : it has struck at the root of selfishness, without as yet lopping off all its branches, and suppressing its manifestations. § 113. Multitudes are silently and unobstrusively learn- ing the great lesson of life, and it is only some death-bed scene or some unexpected hour of trial which occasionally affords us a glimpse at the result ; so that it may be hoped the number of those who, in every place, call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, is much greater than super- ficial or censorious observers can imagine. However, the comparatively uniform moral level of modern society, at least upon the surface, must not be allowed to dim our per- ception of the fact that, after all, there are the two great classes,—those who minister to their religious needs, and those who do not. If some well-meaning people attempt to draw the line of demarcation clearer than it is, by artificial means and conventional habits, it only proves that the real distinction—personal love to the Lord Jesus is feeble, and its utterances indistinct; if a want of reality is frequently betrayed by high professors, it is but the most painful evidence of the tendency of the human heart to self-decep- tion; if many a humble, tearful worshipper is slow to call or even to believe himself a Christian, he so far deprives himself of a certain amount of moral strength, and his religion of a certain weight of testimony. The mixed state of society upon the whole, the imparity between principle and practice, the inconsistencies cleaving to the good, the limits that beset the evil—these are all so many symptoms of a state of nascent Redemption, and may not be abused to prove that Redemption needless. x Rom. viii. 23. The final test of persceral religion, 1 Cor. i. 2. Jno. Foster. Ernest Naville. Eph. vi. 24. Matt. xii. 49. RyliLis Luke ix. 45. 306 BOOK THE FOURTH. There is a difference of direction and character in the in- ward lives of men, and not merely one of degrees of attain- ment. There are those, the very aim and purpose of whose minds has become right, and there are others whose best impulses come from without. The converted and the un- converted need not be each others’ antipodes in all things, they may be near each other, and yet there are really two sides to the equator, and they are in opposite hemispheres. It is as when the feeders of two mighty streams rise in the same level upland, the naked eye cannot detect the slope of the district that belongs to each, and yet there is a watershed, and the basins of the two rivers are thoroughly distinct, and their waters flow to different oceans. Speculatively, religion must be everything in life, or else nothing, for either eternity does not exist or else it is the only legitimate end of time; practically, a man must have his treasure above or below, and the dispositions of heart accompanying each al- ternative are not merely different, they are contrary. “ Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity ;” there is the Apostle’s final test of personal reli- gion; it is not the use of irreproachably orthodox language, nor hatred of heresy, nor even clear views of Christian doc- trine,—but personal love of the Saviour. The highest kind of love indeed implies trust, and in this case trust in him for the forgiveness of sins, for every object of trust must be known in relation to the good expected. Moreover from the day that he died for us it became impossible that faith in his person should not also connect itself with that work in which he exhibited his infinite love; it is as a crucified Saviour that he is ever present to the Christian’s thoughts, so that the total ignorance of the cross which was compatible with faith at one time is incompatible with it now. However, since the Twelve, during the life of Jesus, had faith in him, and were assured of their acceptance through him, without even knowing that he was to suffer, it is certain that there may also INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 307 exist a very sincere faith in him now, without any clear un- derstanding of the nature of the great expiation. The earnest, loving, saving look to Jesus may coexist with imperfect con- ceptions of his Divine glory, and with a very inadequate philosophy of the plan of salvation. Faith may be untaught, and badly taught, and overloaded with superstitions ; 1t may be trembling, and little sure of itself, and utterly unable to produce its solemn reasons; it may make a poor figure among the Doctors, and yet be real, and unite that anxious soul to her Redeemer. In religion and morality it is easier to change the whole than a part: a man may be attracted to Jesus slowly—there is a “fulness of the time” for him as well as for his Master— but he cannot become better piecemeal; the whole man changes together, and nothing is right until the whole man is right. It ought to be easy for all to know whether they love the Lord Jesus or not, but if our timid and troubled consciousness cannot directly satisfy us, we can ask our hopes and our fears, what Christ is to them. What would be our feelings, for instance, were we suddenly to learn of a certainty that there is no Christ? It is true that life can be sustained where only half the substance of the lungs exists. It is true that wherever there is a real wish to love Christ, there is already a beginning of love. Angels gather in their golden censers many a prayer that proud and rigid orthodoxy would despise? But do we appreciate the happiness of everlastingly serving God? Do. we wear the wedding gar- ment of heavenly affections? We may at least be persuaded of this—that we cannot meet our heavenly Father without moving a step, nor be engaged in a warfare that tries every principle of the spiritual nature without becoming conscious of it; neither can there be any final neutrality in such a struggle. § 114. The frivolous and the heartless, when prosperous, ,, shut their eyes to the existence of suffering ; the unhappy Jowett. De Pressens *. W. A. Butler. The use of Dering Jo». ii. 9. Saturday Review Psalm Ixxxii. 5. Mrs. Stowe W. Scott. Herder. 308 BOOK THE FOURTH. and the earnest blaspheme it. The “curse God and die” of Job’s wife is the only consistent utterance of scepticism, or indeed of any speculative system that takes no note of the facts from which Christianity proceeds and those which it accomplishes. Stoicism may strive to satisfy itself with the contemplation of pain as a mean of strengthening and perfecting character, but it is only the system which teaches that we want to be wholly changed—renewed in the spirit of our minds—that has a right to look upon it as a necessary instrument of our education. If “there is congruity between prosperity and superficial feeling,” if suffering is indispen- sible to introduce us to the deepest inward life, if the joy of one who has never known trial or sorrow is superficial and vulgar, it is because “the foundations of the earth are out of course.” Privation, and pain, and disappointment, all ills external and internal are more or less remotely the results of sin,—nature’s warnings that the world has gone wrong. As a necessary consequence of moral disorder they consti- tute an accidental form of order, the absence of which in such a world as ours, would be itself a final disorder and the greatest of dangers. Nothing so speaks to the soul as grief ; it is the furnace in which all sophisms melt like wax ; it brings us into contact with the mightiest realities, reveals within us forces of which we did not surmise the existence, gives dignity to the character and to the very features. Hence the instinctive respect of all men for mourners ; we bow before the afflicted ; and as Walter Scott says, the bridal party stands aside and makes way for the funeral procession. Job sitting in the ashes is the picture of man as he is: and “ oh, how that heap of ashes was glorified ”-by the lesson learned there! So has Christ glorified the earth by the suffering wrought upon it. Suffering is divine — it reigns over the universe: in his person it was a holy expiation, in the persons of his disci- ples it is a purifying discipline, helping them to know both INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 309 themselves and him, convincing them experimentally, that there may be concealed deeper joys in the denial of self than in its gratification, and thereby setting right the de- generate and perverted instinct of happiness. A God incar- nate is the chief of the brotherhood of sufferers, and the first of crowns was a crown of thorns. “Blessed are the poor in spirit : for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” Such was the first recorded utterance of the great Teacher; in his eyes the consciousness of utter poverty and spiritual destitution was the preparation for the possession of the fulness of God. Peter upon the mountain knew not what he said when he proposed to make tabernacles in which to rest in bliss, before the Lord had borne his cross ; but he thought otherwise when he told the scattered Hebrew believers that the God of all grace had called them to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after they should have suffered a while. As man, the Son himself learnt obedience by the things which he suffered ; and now, when the believer enters into the spirit of his Master, his sufferings become those of Christ in him,—thorns that have fallen from the Saviour’s crown: lessons moreover of sympathy and tenderness for others, for through them we discover the hidden springs to which we can guide those who are fainting in this wilderness. It is not merely perse- cution for righteousness’ sake that is a cross taken up for Christ, but any affliction or mortification whatever, to which we say our amen for Christ’s sake, is counted for a sacrifice of our will to his, and we set the seal of our free-offering upon it. The Christian repeats after his Master, “I lay it down of myself... this commandment have I received of my Father:” like his Master, he is at once priest and victim, and his life a willing sacrifice. It was by the marks of the nails that Jesus told Thomas to recognize him, and it is by our scars that we are known of him. It was by his suffer- ings that Jesus became ours for all eternity, and it is through Mrs. Stowe. Matt. v. 3, 4. Luke ix. 33. 1 Feter v. 19. Heb. v. 8. Col. i. 24. John x. 18. B. Pascal. Jobn xiii. 7. Luther. A. Vinet. A. Vinet. John xv. 2. W. A. Butler. 310 BOOK THE FOURTH. our sufferings that we are practically taken possession of for him, that he may live in us. What the immediate purpose of each dispensation may be we may not always know at present, but we shall hereafter. “ Our Lord God is like a printer who sets the letters backwards, so that we cannot read them. When we are printed off yonder in the life to come, we shall read all clear and straightforward.” Mean- while tears may dim, but must not blind the eye of faith : man may well bear sorrow since God has to endure evil. “Suffering is necessary to make Jesus of use to us, just as Jesus is necessary to make suffering of use.” It is when our hopes and dreams lie shattered around us, when we walk amid ruins, that God’s time is near. Some indeed are gently attracted to the feet of Jesus without passing through affliction, but even their piety is not mature until they feel that all were vanity without it; others see their imaginary heaven below broken up, spoiled and wasted, before they will consent to seek the real, the unsullied and everlasting heaven above. All alike learn that “happiness is no fruit of our nature,” that it does not grow there sponta- neously, and must be grafted on our being by a Divine hand, Then, as our salvation is but begun, and our resem- blance to our Master partial, we, for the most part, need the continuance of the same painful experience of the life that sin has made, in order to be kept awake to the true character of sin, and prevented from relapsing into illusions that too easily beset us. Even the branch that bears fruit 1s pruned by the great Vinedresser, “that it may bring forth more fruit.” Like every other opportunity of good, suffering may re- main unimproved, a talent in a napkin,—or worse, for if not turned to profit it sours and embitters: there are those “who know happiness neither in enjoyment nor in promise, to whom earth is no heaven, and yet heaven no hope,—exiles of both worlds;” but where the message from heaven is INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. Biel received and understood, there it is felt that one stroke of sorrow can carry with it the condensed experience of years, —quickening a spirit of believing, prayerful submission, and bringing about the wonderful practical paradox, that misfortune is more grateful than prosperity, and that accents of praise ascend from the lips of the broken-hearted which are not heard from those whose almost every desire is satis- fied. From the depths of the shaft the miner sees stars that are invisible to those who dwell upon the surface. “ As aman is changed himself, all things are changed to him, without any external alteration. As he ceases to be evil, they cease to be evil to him. As he becomes good, they become good to him.” So that the renewed man finds means of blessing in the very punishments called down upon the old. Christ did not come to deliver us immediately from suffering and death, but to teach us how to suffer and to die; he did not suppress suffering, but made it ours, —a part of our possessions, along with the world, and life, and death, things present, and things to come. The Christian who is without it is all the poorer; woe is him, what has he done that he should be forgotten ? “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations.” What audacious challenge is this? It may well rouse the heart-striken to scorn, unless God justifies his Word by making sorrow do the offices of love,—but that he does. “There is a supernatural, spiritual joy, which reposes at the bottom of the Christian soul in times of tranquillity, but which under affliction boils up and runs over, and which is most sensible and touching at those very moments when no joy whatever would seem possible. This joy of the spirit does not do away with the sorrow of na- ture ; neither does this sorrow quench that joy; they sub- sist beside each other, sorrow aetenne to joy, and joy preventing the excess of sorrow.” The Christian has his measure of ae trials and disap- A. Vinet. J. H. Godwin. 1 Cor. ili. 22. James i, 2. A. Vinet. John viii. 12. J. H. Godwin. Phil, iii. 10. Psa. exxix. 3. Jno. Loster, 2 Cor. ty. 17. oe BOOK THE FOURTH. pointments common to all men, and it is the purpose of God that they should be felt; nay, they are never more felt, for the nearer to Christ the stronger are the affections, and the more capable of suffering—the more vulnerable— the soul. And the Christian has to bear the burden of all sufferers known to him, of the oppressed, isolated, stricken and comfortless; while the ideal of perfection set before him keeps alive the perpetual and melancholy sense of his own short-comings; grief, in a word, has her settled post by his hearth; but there‘is also a mightier there—no pleasures can be compared to his pains. “He that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” It is by the sacrifices and sorrows of men for the good of others that they increase in love, and experience more and more the power of that hfe which makes poverty to become riches, and suffering joy, and death a gain, since death itself has been redeemed, and made blessed, and changed into a visit of angels, by the death of Jesus. However many their causes for sorrow, being limited and transient they are less than the causes for joy, which are infinite and eternal. The greatest of all sorrows, the one for which we can ask no consolation except its removal, is when we see those we love taking the road that leads to destruction. ‘This is pre- eminently the affliction of Jesus Christ himself, and in nothing does he more deeply sympathize with us. In short every pain which is lawful brings us so far into the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, as every victory over sin or sorrow makes us enter so far into the power of his resurrection. Then let the plowers make long their furrows, the seed of heavenly love is to be sown in them too deeply to be blown away ; we shall pass into the presence of God the more in his image, “the richer, the purer, the brighter, the happier, for all that naturally tended to pervert, to defile, and to destroy the soul.” “ Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 313 weight of glory,” with which the sufferings of this present time “are not worthy to be compared.” § 115. However exalted the place given to Godly sorrow, Christianity is no friend to self-imposed crosses. ‘The Devil is very fond of sadness,” said Luther, referring at once to the morbid self-inspection which keeps the sinner from his Saviour, and to the enervating, moping sentimentality which makes idols of our sorrows, extracts from them a secret sense of importance, absorbs us in the complacent contemplation of self; and above all, dispenses us from the grateful self-devotion which the simple acceptance of the consolations of the Gospel would call for. We stop short in the trial itself, instead of allowing it to lead us on to the bosom of God. Our blessed Master on the contrary, was one who could rejoice in spirit, whose happiness was the highest, as well as the purest that ever existed upon earth, whose preaching began with the beatitudes, who tells us through his most honoured servant—“ Rejoice in the Lord alway : and again I say, rejoice.” Aye, he has done better than to tell us to rejoice : he has given us the power,—shedding his own peace abroad in our hearts. Suffering is no good in itself, to be chosen for its own sake: its tendency is to paralyse and shut us up in self; while joy is the life of the soul, opening and dilating every , pore, so to speak, with its gentle heat. “The joy of Jehovah is your strength,” said Nehemiah to his weeping countrymen. Joy is the sign and the ornament of gratitude, writes a Chris- tian: “faith without joy is an altar without incense.” In the world reflection is an enemy of joy, and seriousness is a softened synonyme for sadness. In Christ joy increases as we dwell upon it and draw upon it. Grief offends his charity as sin his purity, unless it be the grief that prepares for joy. Paul took pleasure “in infirmities, in reproaches, in neces- sities, In persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake ;” but Rom. viii. 18. No room for asceticism. Luther. Luke x. 21. Phil, iv. 4. Neh. viii. 10. A. Vinet. 2 Cor, xa LO: Luke xi. 4. Matt. xxvi. 39. 1 Thes. v. 18. Theodore Parker 314 BOOK THE FOURTH. he never willingly drew them upon himself, and indeed tried to avoid them when it was possible. Trial can never be courted without presumption, and we are taught in the sense of our weakness, to say “lead us not into temptation.” The Christian has even the example of his Master to warrant him in wishing the cup of sorrow to pass away from him if possible. As well may he strive with all his energy to di- minish the sum of human suffering in general; he knows that so long as death is in the world there will always re- main pain enough for our moral education ; meantime, every evil he has helped to lessen or to remove is so far a positive good, which he seeks to transform into a yet higher good, of which it is the outward sign and effect, and which it is an invitation to seek,—the eternal speaking through the tem- poral redemption. ‘The Christian is literally called to give thanks for everything—for both prosperity and adversity,— the former beckoning, and the latter constraining him to the attainment of the same unspeakable good. Mediseval piety armed man against his own nature in its innocent tendencies ; a more healthy piety would have held that God is honoured by the normal development, use, dis- cipline, and enjoyment of every limb of our bodies and every faculty of our spirits. It must be admitted, however, that Christianity found man already armed against himself; we cannot, without blinding ourselves to facts and doing violence to our own conscience, refuse to recognize that we are not at peace with ourselves or our fellows. Now, human life must feel the effects of even the stilling of such anarchy ; civil war cannot be quelled without a struggle. This is the measure of truth in asceticism ; but how foreign has it shown itself to be from the spirit of a religion which is as wholly human as it is truly divine, and how poor do the mongrel pagan austerities of the middle ages appear beside the genuine pagan atrocities of India! Man attained at a very early period to prodigies of false mortifi- INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. 315 cation, because exaggeration costs us less than manly self- control. Where the essence of sin is understood to consist in a’ per- verted will there is no room for the materialist, manichean conception of evil, as necessarily bound up in our physical being. When yon devotee, stretched on the rack of asceti- cism ill-treats his body, he is mistaken as to the really guilty object, and all the tortures he inflicts upon himself are either vain attempts to pacify his conscience —a refined, circuitous way of escaping self-surrender—or else an exag- gerated, superfluous way of expressing it. The flesh which bleeds under his discipline is not that which we are called to crucify. The choice of the term jlesh to express the sinful principle in general only shows that sensuality is the most obvious form of evil. It is a figure of speech like that which puts “hands” for men; but, as it is by our moral powers that we are made the subjects of God’s moral govern- ment, it is there, in the very centre of our being, and not in that mere frontier of the man—his physical nature —that we are to look for the principle of his rebellion, or for the first germ of returning obedience. We are not to act as if we belonged to the bodies which we were meant to rule. The Christian has to exercise a prompt, and stern, and continuous control over his passions, to keep under his body and bring it into subjection ; but it is to be done through the right exercise of a renewed and strengthened will, not through any suicidal neglect or weak- ening of his bodily powers, which may indeed have a show of heroism, but it is the heroism of will-worship and weak- ness. The nature that is properly opposed to grace is a false nature, a foreign element superinduced upon our being and tyrannizing over it; our real nature, on the contrary, is restored by grace: and the idea of seeking the favour of God, or any spiritual good by the infliction of gratuitous torment upon ourselves is no innocent mistake, but one fertile in the Rom. vi'i. 4, 5, 8 Galavalie 1 Cor. ix. 27. A. Vinet. De Pressensé, Joel ii. 13. Isa. lviii. 6, 7. TH VOTELAKAL, in | Cor. vii. 5. B. Pascal. 316 BOOK THE FOURTH. most painful and humbling consequences. Experience has shown that the attempt to do more than God requires is the surest way of coming to do less; that for works of super- erogation in one direction, self will make itself amends by running riot in another, or even by a reaction in the same direction. No road has led to such deplorable scandals, to such abysses of iniquity as this has done, for the spirit of evil seems to haunt the doers of exploits—the professors of the extraordinary in religious matters—as his peculiar prey. “The only suffering of which Christianity proclaims the apotheosis is that which disarms suffering, which transforms, purifies, and makes it a stimulant to moral progress, in order that it may finally disappear in glory and that death may be swallowed up of life.” Hence, beyond occasional fasting, Christianity does not recognize any kind of bodily self- denial: and even'this has nothing expiatory, and nothing meritorious or in itself alone pleasing to God: “rend your hearts, and not your garments.” “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? When thou seest the naked that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh ?” Fasting is an appropriate expression of grief, and of intense pre-occupation of mind,—having been the latter in the case of our Lord’s miraculous fast; it gives a sensible form moreover to those ideas of unworthiness and dependence which should be habitually dominant in us. These reasons account for the degree of encouragement which the practice receives in the New Testament ; lessened, it should be ob- served, by the expulsion of an interpolation from the criti- cally amended text. , All life is full of instinctive symbolism. We feel that kneeling is a fit attitude for prayer: respect, says Pascal, INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. SiC means —“ put yourself to inconvenience ;” and so we do, we impose upon ourelves some slight discomfort, standing up, uncovering, etc., to intimate to those whom we thus honour that we are ready to do more at their bidding: we bow and make ourselves shorter than others, as a mute confession of their superior greatness; we clasp the hand of a friend, because the hand is the great organ of man’s activity, with which he gives himself ; in it we have his person condensed into dimensions that can be grasped. Again: we kiss the lips we love, because words that reveal the whole character drop from them. Fasting is just one shape of this every-day symbolism, appropriated for the expression of religious feeling; like the above mentioned instances, it can easily fall into mere conventionalism,—and, except so far as godly sorrow or humiliation, or earnest self-devotion speak through it, it is of no more value than the rest. Paul takes care to define good works as those that are for necessary uses. .... “good and profitable unto men ;” evidently intending to ex- clude the mere practices that phariseeism had created.