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THE DIVINE HUMAN

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD;

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
OLDER THAN THE CREEDS.

A MEMBER OF THE NEW-YORK BAR.

NEW YORK:
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY,
770, Broadway. 1S69.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 18S9, by
ANSON D. r. RANDOLPH AND COMPANY,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern
District of New York.

CAMBRIDGE :
PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON.

APOLOGETIC.

' I "HE following suggestions are offered by a
-1- layman, upon Inspiration and Atonement,
— two topics which, above all others, are now
uppermost in the popular mind, and drawing to
themselves the keenest popular interest. If it be
asked, What does a layman know of these mat
ters? it may be answered, first, that dogmatic
theology is a dead lion, whose roar has lost its
terror as well as its authority. We, the laity, are
a thousand to one of our theologic leaders ; and
it is full as important that the one should know
what the thousand think, as that they should
know what the one thinks. And, again, if the
suggestions are crude, they may still contain
enough of truth and gospel to lift dogmatic and
polemic theology out of the ruts in which it
has run since scholasticism built our creeds and
misinterpreted the New Testament. Systematic
divinity has so many decayed pins in its structure,
that the tokens of a general dry rot are apparent

IV APOLOGETIC.
from the lean and totter of every part, as it sways
and creaks in the winds of inquiry. No work
but Christ's can survive the keen search of modern
criticism ; and what that work was and is, is
not to be learned from authority and dogmatism
of man. Orthodoxy must establish its affirmations
at every step ; and all resort to church creeds and
symbols will be taken as an evidence of weak
ness, and conscious inability by intrinsic argu
ment to defend its bulwarks from demolition.
It is no longer recommendatory of a dogma, that
it is contrary to human reason, and abases human
pride : it must have intrinsic worth and unques
tioned authority, and make humanity wiser, bet
ter, holier, in all thought and speech and deed.
It is needless to sa}^ that these suggestions are
fragmentary, and do not aspire to that perfect
logical construction which the subject admits of
from abler hands.
The desire of the writer is, that Christianity
may secure a wider sway, and more lasting tri
umphs, by being placed upon her true founda
tions, upon which only she can rest, when the
blasts of scientific infidelity are howling around
her.

CONTENTS OF ESSAY I.

CHAPTER I.
Science has routed superstition, but may grow too daring,
making God impersonal. Personality of God proved
from intelligence, creation, fatherhood, providence.
Personality implies government, law, and a spiritual
system  3
CHAPTER II.
Spiritual laws revealed within man, or from without;
no perfect law in man. Naturalism a failure. Crea
tion of man necessitates a moral law; may operate
through second causes ; must come ab extra. We
have a book revelation ; what it claims, — written by
inspired men. What is inspiration? How did God
speak to men? — vision, dream, voice, trance, angel.
Is an inspired man always infallible ?  10
CHAPTER III.
Human judgment determines which books canonical.
Three theories of inspiration: 1. Man conduit-pipe;
2. Exaltation and divine guidance; 3. Genius. No
theory dogmatically settled. Barnes, Willson, Arnold,
Coleridge, Robertson. Do the Scriptures contain God's
message, or is every letter infallible? Romish dogma
of infallibility  22

VI CONTENTS.

CHAPTER IV.
Is exalted genius inspiration? It is, but not in Bible
sense ; not equal to Hebrew literature or Christian art;
disbelievers in miracles exalt human genius. Have the
naturalists exhausted nature? Modesty of scientific
dogmatism! Virgil's Pythoness  29

CHAPTER V.
Revelation from God proved by, — 1. Unity of plan and
aim; Jew did not see it; 2. By its wisdom and good
ness ; grandeur of Revelation, not only in subject,
but handling, ¦ — Psalms, Job ; 3. A living reformatory
power accompanied by a living spirit ; 4. Has elements
of cohesion and continuity. Why does philosophy re
ject the spiritual sense?  36
CHAPTER VI.
Is there a " human element " in Scripture? its admission
supposed dangerous. Who determined which books
are inspired? and when? and upon what evidence, in
ternal or historical? Who excluded Apocrypha and
twenty-four Patristic Epistles and Gospels? Council
of Trent adopted the first. Books gathered by fallible
men. No estoppel by "stare decisis." The " Church "
questionable authority. Prophecy always inspired. . 49
CHAPTER VII.
Inspiration of Old Testament not proved by New;
Christ's teachings on this point; apostles mistaken in
facts; different verbal relation of same events disproves
verbal inspiration, — instances : harmonies of Gospels;

CONTENTS. vii
synoptic Gospels taken from "memoirs" now lost;
opinion of Bishop Home, Robertson, Coleridge ; apos
tles no more infallible in writing than in speech ; Peter
and Paul differ  60
CHAPTER VIII.
Science discloses verbal errors in record; chronology un
certain; the immense numbers of Old Testament unre
liable; ancient Hebrew written in short-hand, — liabil
ity to error in transcription ; timid Christians fear to
own the truth. Objections : 1. It may unsettle faith, —
old objection to correct interpretation; 2. Cannot
separate human from divine element, — cannot do it
in Christ; 3. Tends to rationalism, — abuse of this
phrase  71
CHAPTER IX.
Other difficulties of the verbal and plenary theory ; not an
article of the early church ; diversities of style; trans
lations; spiritualizing and fanciful glosses. God in
spired the man. Prophecy and supernatural facts
prove it. Bible discloses a perfect " spiritual system,"
— finds us. Spiritual appropriates spiritual. Sym
bolic Psalms not true as fact, yet wholly divine in
spiritual significance; nineteenth Psalm spiritually
true, yet scientifically false. Historic facts separable
from ethical spirit. Bible not free from mysteries, but
will stand as God's revelation for ever; its- great mis
sion to re-create man in Christ's image  85

THE DIVINE-HUMAN

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD.

THE DIVINE-HUMAN

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD.

CHAPTER I.
TT is one of our hopefulest signs, that society
has outgrown many of the follies and super
stitions of its childish and unscientific ages ; for
childhood in nations, as in persons, is greedy
of marvels, is easily dominated by the imagina
tion, and corrected only by the slow and often
painful processes of experience and wisdom. The
fairy, the bogle, the elf, the hobgoblin, the witch,
the demon, — these assume a "local habitation
and a name," and are installed as veritable per
sonages in the Pantheon which the untaught
imagination creates ; and this imaginative and
believing faculty, so quick and susceptible, so
fully the child of poetry and dreams, — this has
been selected in all ages as the arena where
the forces of the unseen world have been ar-

4 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
rayed to alarm and capture the soul, and hold it
a slave to its vile and infamous distortions. And
how large a portion of popular literature, poetry,
and preaching, has gone to swell this tide of mis-
creations, and give to the youthful mind a false
and evil bias, which all the learning, philosophy,
and correction of riper age, is never able wholly
to overcome ! Would to God that our religious
culture had been free from this vice ! but this has
been far otherwise. The religious element is that
which has received most vigorous assailment,
and been subj'ected through all past ages to the
manipulations of ghostly imposition and craft.
On this field, Superstition has builded her loftiest
temples, and her most impregnable fortresses, —
over all this area which the imagination peoples
with the agents, elements, and forces of the Un
seen. On the plane of scientific experiment,
assertion meets with disproof or verification ; we
can handle it, test it, know of what it is made,
and how far it can be trusted : but into this shad
owy land, into which Imagination and Faith only
enter, where Reason is hardly permitted to peer
in at the door, neither the law nor the order of
the realm admits of examination or distrust. The
critical spirit carries a spell that exorcises the

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 5
whole race of "' airy nothings," and brings other
forces than the imaginative to act upon the beliefs
and conduct of life. In unscientific and uncrit
ical ages, men lose all sight of the agency of
second causes. Natural laws and forces beiner
unknown, in their existence and operation alike,
their workings were attributed to the immediate
interference and agency of the gods, of supernal
or infernal powers ; who brought about an eclipse,
sent warning portents in flood and fire and shoot
ing-star, guided the pestilence, gave victory to
the army, presided over the birth and death of
the race, and imparted charms and incantations
to their favorites. All this, and much more, of
imposture, ignorance, sorcery, and witchcraft, is
left behind among the discarded dreams of child
hood, or is only nursed in the benighted dens
where superstition still holds her orgies, and
weaves her necromantic spells for the gain which
Fraud extorts from Credulity.
But even the critical spirit may become wild
with its triumphs ; and, in its exultation over past
victories, may aim to sweep the supernatural (and
so God) from the universe ; annihilating the per
sonality of a First Cause, and enthroning second
causes in his place, giving to these a blind power

6 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
and energy to work out results in the departments
of matter and of mind which tax no intelligence
and admit of no choice ; and so Fate is God !
and inevitable causation, the law of material and
spiritual action alike. We ask, then, first, Is
there a personal God, — Creator and Upholder
of all that is seen and known? Is this universal
idea a myth of infant humanity, which its maturer
wisdom may discard? With many naturalists,
it is the fashion to admit the being of a God,
coupled with the idea that he is impersonal ; is
the universe, — or its spirit, like life; its motive
force or law, like gravitation ; that the universe
is formed and works on the principle of blind
harmonics, of elective and interpenetrative forces,
that spring and play into each other at the appro
priate juncture for securing the results that occur ;
like the nicely adjusted machinery of a perfect
manufactory, where the wheel turns, and the
crank works, and the pulley lifts, and the shut
tle flies, and the fabric unrolls, as the iron fingers
grasp their work, beautiful in finish and texture,
the result of it all. But the grand question recurs
unanswered, — Who made the wheel, and in
vented and adjusted the machinery? It is the
result of intelligence, infinite intelligence. But

INCARNA TE AND WRITTEN WORD. 7
how is there intelligence without personality?
Thought, calculation, judgment, invention, adap
tation of means to ends, — these in finite minds
argue personality, and why not of the supreme
and infinite mind? But they cannot be conceived
of as attributes of an impersonal God. More
over, the fatherhood of God, so universally
admitted as to be almost intuitive, implies person
ality, interest, thought, feeling, affection. Denude
God of all these personal traits, and he is no more
to man than the mist of the mountain-side, which
the morning sunbeam drinks up in an hour, —
the shadow of a shade, centring in himself no
reverence, no love, no homage, no devotion.
Man, in his joy or agony, may indulge in lofty
rhapsodies to the spirit of the universe, the stars,
the ocean, the earth ; but with no Father Al
mighty who holds him, and cares for him, he
floats a waif on the sea of events, abandoned to
the orphanage of Nature, that hears no human
cry, and gives back no heavenly sympathy !
Looking back into the past eternities, we gather
the evidences of creations at periods so remote
that the imagination staggers at the weight of
their calculation ; and yet the line is clear be
tween when they were not, and when they were.

8 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
When did animal and human life blossom out of
this tree of nature, irrespective of God, in a per
sonal and supernatural outgoing of divine energy ?
Who impressed upon matter its peculiar properties
and laws? Who set agoing the forces that play,
without clash or interruption, from central suns,
that light and warm, and hold in gravitating grasp
their planetary families, to the wandering comet,
and star-dust of the heavens, — elaborating new
worlds in the great womb of Nature. Who could
foresee all changes, anticipate and provide for all
contingencies, and uphold with a providential su
pervision the universe he had formed, but a per
sonal Deity? The eternity of matter, in existent
forms and properties, is a marvel no sane mind
can for a moment credit. It were a miracle be
yond all miracles ever thought of. But person
ality in Deity, and the creation of man with moral
forces and susceptibilities, imply government, and
government carries law in its right hand ; and
thus a spiritual order and system are the inevitable
correlates. Matter can no more exist without
gravitation than spirit without its laws and condi
tions, which bind it in harmonious action and
relation to God, and all associated beings that
people the spaces of his spiritual empire ; and

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 9
hence we come at once into the precise moral
system which revelation unfolds, the only one
which reason approves when most enlightened
by the culture which the world has thus far dis
closed.

IO THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE

CHAPTER II.
TF, then, spiritual and moral laws exist for man,
they must be revealed in one of two modes,
— either in man, or out of him. He must either
be a law unto himself, following the lead of pas
sion and appetite, — which have been discovered
by experience to contravene the law of his better
nature, bringing him into perpetual collision with
beings of like passions and propensities, — or he
must seek this law out of himself, in some dis
closure which God would be likely to make to
beings endowed with reason and the power of
choice. Matter makes no mistakes, and is inca
pable of violating the law of its nature ; there is
no conflict, because there is no freedom : but
spiritual beings carry no such law, and cannot in
the nature of things. The sages of antiquity, the
deep thinkers of old, felt after this law, and found
it not, and divined that it must one day come.
Many of Plato's speculations upon immortality,
and the necessity and substance of a divine com-

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. II
munication to man, were anticipative of Christian
ity, — the yearnings of enlightened reason after
the dawn which, it felt, must break, to satisfy the
cravings of its spiritual vision ; and the early
Fathers refer triumphantly to these views, in proof
of the fact of divine revelation. And so, when
positive law actually came, its obligation was
affirmed through moral reason, which instantly
approved of its supreme ends, which demanded
the choice of good, the exercise of all volitions
required to attain it ; and so the law became its
own witness to beings subject to moral govern
ment.* How could Deity reveal this law? Not through
matter, and the agencies of matter. The dis
closures of nature never rise above nature, discover
no law higher than themselves ; and hence the
mere naturalist is little wiser than his predecessor,
— a few more facts, a little higher and wider gen
eralization, a few more occult principles brought
to light. Nor is the idea that God governs the
universe through the agency of laws, or second
causes, at all inconsistent with the idea of his
personality, which is as much concerned in the
* See Hopkins's Law of Love, p. 89.

12 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
maintenance and integrity of these laws, as if he
acted fortuitously, and not uniformly. His love,
wisdom, power, providence, stand forth as con
spicuously in the reign of law, through which that
love, wisdom, power, and providence have their
manifestation, as in any conceivable effort of
supernatural interference. Is the love of a father
any better shown in fitful, occasional, and spas
modic bestowments, than in setting on foot a
chain of agencies, preconcerted to develop un
erringly the same fruits of beneficence, according
to rules which are never relaxed and suffer no
violation? and so God's fatherhood is better than
man's. Still, the laws or rules of our spiritual
economy must be revealed, not discovered. The
idea of an unselfish and subordinated will to an
enlightened reason and conscience, joined to the
tenderest feelings, and harmonizing with a uni
versal love, never sprang from the soil of natural
religion. It may dimly suggest the idea of a
lofty moral code, but cannot develop it, because
the main element of its power is wanting ; to wit,
exemplification. It must see God in Christ, and
the law embodied in phenomenal manifestation.
This is the key that unlocks the golden gate of
heaven, and sets man forward on his pathway to

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 13
the skies. The integrity of moral law needs en
forcement and vindication, as well as disclosure,
from a higher plane than the natural and sensuous.
Its intent, both as to precept and .penalty, must
be seen linked, not to an impersonal rule of con
venience, but to the august authority of a personal
God, who delegates no subordinate power to
justice or other impersonal attribute, but himself
is there to enforce, in conscious execution and
unerringly, every jot and tittle of his irrepealable
mandates. We have, therefore, a revelation of God in
nature and providence, in conscience and in his
tory : these are the groundwork of our natural
theology, — that which Socrates and Plato, Seneca
and Cicero, saw and practised. But, above all,
we have a book revelation ; and our deepest prob
lem is to solve what it is, and what it teaches.
Is this also from God? Is it improbable that he
would disclose his will in this manner? Should
not the Almighty Spirit give to the human and
fallible spirit, in some form, that which accords
with its necessities, and supplies the deficiencies
which the teachings of nature exhibit? "Human
ity feels after God if haply it may find him."
Shall he not then appear, to vindicate the rectitude

14 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
of his moral administration, and lead man by a
way he had not known ; will he not furnish light
in his darkness, joy for his sorrow, hope for his
despair, strength for his weakness, and spiritual
aids where all other and inferior helps are power
less and unavailing? He has revealed himself
on the plane of the natural : why shall he not
do it, on that of the spiritual? Completeness
and adaptation here are as imperative as in
the department of natural and material forces.
This book revelation, accordingly, purports in
its sixty-six separate histories, laws, prophecies,
psalms, messages, biographies, types, symbols,
— in its principles and doctrines, — to be essen
tially the disclosure of God's dealings, purposes,
laws, and intentions, as to the race, with the re
demptive economy by and through which man
may become Godlike, and meet to be partaker
of the celestial inheritance, out of which he has
lapsed and fallen by reason of his sin.
We waive all discussion now, as to the integrity
of the books of the sacred canon, — which are
genuine and which apocryphal. The church has
not been in entire agreement on this ; and, taking
up our English Protestant Bible, we reverently
ask, Is this the true and veritable Word of God to

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 15
us? How did he communicate it to men ? When,
where, in what manner, by what process? The
record was made by human fingers ; how were
they guided by the divine mind? Is it a revela
tion? what is revelation ? Is it inspired? what is
inspiration? Is it infallible? How much, and
what portions, are human, and what divine?
These are serious and reasonable inquiries, when
the bliss of eternity hangs on the result. They
may be asked : they should be answered as far
as possible, if answer can be found.
1 . What do the books themselves claim ? It is
not known, except traditionally, who wrote many
of the books of the Old Testament ; there is less un
certainty as to those of the New. The Pentateuch
is ascribed to Moses ; and by some, the book of
Job : but this is more than doubtful. In portions
of these Scriptures it is said, "God spake all these
words ;" and in other portions nothing is claimed,
as to any divine authority, but the record pro
ceeds with its annals or biography, like other
writings of antiquity, which purport to contain
what any historiographer might learn and write
without special or divine aid. Very large por
tions of the history of the Jews, — during the
theocracy, under their judges, prophets, kings ;

1 6 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
their glory, prosperity, renown, conquest, cap
tivity, exile, return; their rites and ceremonies,
their peculiar religious and social economy, — all
these seem to be related with the fidelity of or
dinary history or tradition, and preserved with
peculiar care by that jealous and exclusive people.
It is claimed in the record, that God wrote the
ten commandments on tables of stone, as there
given ; and so, also, that God commanded Moses
to speak thus and so to his people ; that God spake
to Moses face to face, as a man talketh with man,
— and yet that, when Moses desired to see his
glory, he hid him in the cleft of the rock, as no
man could see his face and live, it being else
where also affirmed that " no man hath seen God
at any time." It recurs, therefore, How did he
reveal himself in the earlier ages according to the
record? Until the fifteenth chapter of Genesis,
the language is, "And God said" unto Adam,
Eve, Cain, Noah ; " The Lord said " to Abraham,
&c. After that, " The word of the Lord came to
Abram in a vision," — not such a "vision," how
ever, as suspended his faculties, for he conversed
and argued with this " word of the Lord " in this
vision ; and next, the " angel of the Lord " found
Hagar by a fountain, and sent her home to her

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 17
mistress, with predictions of Ishmael's greatness,
as the " Word of the Lord " had predicted the fate
of Abraham's seed, when as yet he was childless.
And so, "three men" appeared to Abram, and
talked with him. Two of them, as angels, went
to Lot ; and " the Lord " showed to Abram what
he was about to do to Sodom. Next "God came
to Abimelech in a dream." The "angel of the
Lord" arrests Abram's hand in slaying Isaac.
"The Lord appeared to Jacob in a dream," with
the ladder of the ascending and descending an
gels, on his way to Haran. "A man "wrestled
with Jacob until the breaking day, and he said,
I have seen God face to face and live. Joseph
interprets Pharaoh's dreams by virtue of the
"Spirit of God"' that was in him. So "God"
appeared to Moses in the burning bush at Horeb,
and talked with him out of the bush ; and after,
at Sinai, and from the mercy-seat of the taber
nacle, he communed with Moses, though we are
told that God conversed with no prophet there
after, face to face, as with Moses. These are
specimens from the Pentateuch, and are charac
teristic of the modes of divine communication
recorded in the Old Testament. It was the
"Lord," the "Lord God," the "voice," the "an-

l8 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
gel," the "vision," the "trance," the "man." It
came in converse, in revelation, in inspiration, in
prophecy, in moral and ceremonial law, — each
and all in the line of miraculous interference when
God so communicated, but not claiming that the
writer of these histories had any such inspiration
in making the record thereof which is left to us.
The word inspiration occurs twice in the Scrip
tures, — once in the Old Testament and once in
the New. "There is a spirit in man," says Elihu
(Job, xxxii. 8), "and the inspiration of the Al
mighty giveth them understanding ; " but this only
affirms the superiority of man to the other orders
of the animal creation, in that the inbreathing of
God gives him " understanding ; " and this applies
to all men, — to the race, — and is in no sense
the inspiration of which we are speaking.
"All Scripture is given by inspiration of God,"
is translated, in the Vulgate, by Luther, and a
vast majority of Greek scholars, as " all Scrip
ture, divinely inspired, is profitable," &c, leaving
us uncertain what was meant by " all Scripture,"
— whether any thing more than the Pentateuch,
for which the Jews claimed inspiration by emi
nence, the New Testament being no part of the
sacred canon, and most of it then unwritten.

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD- 19
What is material in this text is, that there is such
a thing as " divine inspiration " in the Scriptures
referred to, whatever there may be of the human
element also ; and the implication is strong, that
what is profitable for correction, and instruction
in righteousness, is divinely inspired. So it is
said, to the Jew were committed the "oracles of
God," meaning that God revealed himself to the
Jews ; but what constituted these oracles is not
declared. Was it the Pentateuch, the prophets,
the psalms, the Apocrypha, or some portions
of it? How are we to know? So, too, where it
is affirmed, that " aforetime holy men spake as
they were moved by the Holy Ghost," the allega
tion is confined to their speaking, or prophesying
as it was then termed, and also to holy men,
when it is clear that these prophecies came from
unholy men also ; for Saul was once among the
prophets; and Balaam, in a trance, having his
eyes open, saw the goodly tents of the chosen
people, and a Star arise out of Jacob, under the
like inspiration, when the Spirit of the Lord came
upon him. And so Caiaphas spoke prophetically
as to the death of Christ. So Christ promised
the gift of the Holy Spirit "to lead his disciples
into all truth, and bring all things to their remem-

20 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
brance, which he had said unto them : " alleging
at the same time (Luke xxiv. 44), "that all things
must be fulfilled which were written in the Law
of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms
concerning me." So he quoted from the Psalms'
in his temptation, and read from the prophecy of
Isaiah in reference to himself, saying, "this day
is this Scripture fulfilled in our ears." In respect
to the first point, — the divine illumination prom
ised to the Apostles, — was this a pledge that the
Spirit should so dwell in them as that in thought,
speech, and writing, they should be for ever
thereafter absolutely infallible? If so, how came
Paul and Peter to differ so radically about the
necessity or allowance of Jewish ceremonies in
the Christian Church at Jerusalem? That they
were divinely inspired cannot be doubted ; but
how far, and in respect to what communications,
we cannot here learn. Paul writes some things
where he expressly disclaims divine agency, and
some other things where he " thinks " only he has
the mind of the Spirit ; and others he affirms by
the commandment of the Lord. Is not this the
key, after all, to this vexed and insoluble ques
tion, — a part divine, a part human, and a part
uncertain even to the writer? And no possibility

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 21
of untwisting the threefold cord, — better that it
should not be untwisted. Throughout the four
Gospels, in their history of Christ, they refer to
all the prophetical announcements concerning
him, — to his Virgin mother; the place of his
birth ; the circumstances of his life, betrayal,
crucifixion, and death, — to prove he was the
true Messiah, the Shiloh of Jacob ; that he was
the personage called wonderful, counsellor, &c. ;
and that he was the expected King of the Jewish
nation. Still this reference to prophecy did not
necessarily carry with it the authentication of
every thing written by that prophet, or by all the
prophets. There might still be the human and
the divine element, side by side, in the record.
And the same thing may be affirmed of all other
references and quotations of the Hebrew oracles
by our Saviour and his apostles. Besides, a refer
ence of the Jews to their own Scriptures was
peculiarly appropriate, to prove he was the true
and expected deliverer.

22 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE

CHAPTER III.
TF, then, we fail to find, in any one of the sixty-
six books called canonical, the claim of a
divine infallibility for every utterance ; if the
translation, admission into the canon of Scrip
ture, binding up with the remaining books, be
the work of human judgment and human hands ;
if no inspiration is claimed, in judging what writ
ings shall be admitted, and what rejected ; if no
inspiration be claimed for translator, — on what
authority rests the assumption of the verbal and
plenary infallibility of every letter and line, of
every comma, colon, and period, of the books
bound together, but originally separate works,
called the Book, or Bible?
Before examining the arguments which are
supposed to prove this plenary theory, let us de
fine more accurately what is meant by inspiration,
and make some references to the opinions of our
ablest divines, to show how far this is a settled
question in the Church.

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 23
1. There is a theory, that man was used as a
conduit-pipe, or organ, through whom God com
municated with man, — the mind passive, acting
simply under the mechanical influence of the
Holy Spirit, not speaking or writing its own
thoughts or words, but the thoughts and words
dictated by the Spirit ; that the message is there
fore as direct from God as if he spake in an audi
ble voice, or wrote with his own divine finger,
and any other than human agency had been se
lected. And this carries with it, as a conse
quence, that each book, so inspired, is verbally
infallible ; has been miraculously preserved, trans
lated, and admitted into the canon : for what
would the plenary inspiration avail, if human
fallibility has excluded such book from the canon,
as the Romanist claims in respect to the Apoc
rypha. 2. A second theory is, that the Spirit so quick
ened, elevated, enlarged, and opened the eye of
the human soul, that its disclosures of spiritual and
moral truths were infallible, while the writer was
left, in other respects, to his own learning and
judgment, and to color his narrative with the
opinions and historical notions of his age ; that,
in respect to all prophetical announcements, they

24 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
were delivered as received, the writers not know
ing, often, "what, or what manner of thing, the
Spirit that was in them did signify."
3. A third theory supposes the mind of the
speaker or writer, acting altogether freely, speak
ing entirely its own thoughts and words, but
deriving, from divine communication and enlight
enment, a higher tone, a correcter judgment,
and, from a deep insight, competent to speak of
spiritual things.
The first theory claims infallibility in all things ;
for it is God, and not man, that speaks. And if
science and fact are in conflict with the record,
all the worse for science and fact : the word must
stand if the heavens fall.
The second theory admits the existence of the
human and divine elements, — the fallible and
infallible : the thus saith the Lord, and thus saith
the writer ; the history, as he carefully gathered
it from the floating traditions and genealogies of
his people, selected from conflicting records, and
the lofty lyric sweeping out on the fiery pinions
of prophetic inspiration, and revelling, by antici
pation, in the consummation of glorious things,
yet to be accomplished in the latter days.
The third theory — defended more especially

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 25
by the French and German schools, which wholly
exclude the miraculous — holds that all great
and magnificent endeavor and achievement, — the
works of prophet, poet, orator, — of Shakspeare,
Isaiah, Milton and David, Ezekiel and Goethe,
Byron and Malachi, Bacon and Moses, — are in
the same sense inspired ; the truth in them infal
lible so far as true, and in no sense a divine,
supernatural revelation. Of course there can be
no prophecy, except the forecast of a wise pre
science ; and the Scriptures, which sparkle all
over with this lore, are in that respect mythical
and vain.
How far these theories are so settled as to be
withdrawn from further debate, we will now pro
ceed to consider.
Albert Barnes says, in his seventh lecture on
the Ely foundation, — "There is no more inviting
field on which a student of the sacred scriptures
who would wish to prepare something that might
be the great work of his life could more properly
employ his talents, than in endeavoring to deter
mine the yet unsettled questions about the inspira
tion of the Bible ; into the questions about the
mode of inspiration, — whether it extends to the
words as well as to the matter ; how far the sacred

26 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
writers availed themselves of their own knowledge
and observation, and the knowledge and historical
records in existence, when they wrote ; how far,
as inspired men, they are responsible for state
ments on other subjects than those pertaining to
the immediate purpose of inspiration, the ordinary
facts of history, or the statements of science ; how
far they were permitted to employ their own pow
ers, and how this is consistent with their being
inspired ; how the apparent discrepancies and con
tradictions are to be reconciled with the idea of
inspiration, — these are difficult points which have
not yet been met, and which, perhaps, none of
us are prepared to meet." And, again, p. 237, —
"What is inspiration at all? What is plenary in
spiration? Is it suggestion or superintendence
or control, or all combined? How far are the
faculties of men employed ? Were they kept from
error on all subjects ! How can the dates, gene
alogies, and apparent inconsistencies and contra
dictions, be reconciled with the proper idea of
inspiration ? These are questions yet to be solved ;
and happy will be the man that shall be raised up
to solve them." And behind this ripe biblical
scholar and critic, whose works are in all our
homes and hands, stand an illustrious array of

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 27
Christian scholars, of equal learning and ability,
who have held the same language, and enter
tained the same views. Arnold, Coleridge, Rob
ertson, Neander, Bayne, Schleiermacher, De
Wette, — men of deep piety and rare attainments,
who, although not agreeing^ perhaps, on any posi
tive theory, if a positive theory be possible, are yet
of one mind in respect to the unsettled state of
this question in the creeds of Christendom.
Do the books of the Bible together contain the
system of religion revealed by God? or are these
several books infallible authority in every utter
ance they give forth? These are the momentous
questions as yet unsettled, and which throw their
shadows, from these shores of time, afar upon
the deep abysses of eternity. Says Dr. Will-
son, in his article on the Anglican Church, —
:'The Word of God' is a phrase which begs
many a question when applied to the canonical
books of the Old and New Testaments, — a phrase
never applied to them by any scriptural authors :
our articles have no declaration, that the Bible
throughout was supernaturally suggested ; nor
what portions of it were owing to special divine
illumination ; nor the slightest attempt at defining
inspiration, whether mediate or immediate, wheth-

28 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
er through or beside or overruling the natural
faculties ; nor the least hint of the relation between
the divine and human elements in the composition
of the books." One may hold either of these
views without infringing the symbols of the
Church. Our churches mostly hold, that the
Scriptures of the Old and New Testament con
stitute (or contain) an inspired, infallible rule of
faith and practice : but it is not asserted that
they contain nothing more ; for they evidently
contain a vast variety of matters, neither practical
nor addressed to faith. To look no further, then,
we are not bound to defer examination, and put an
estoppel upon criticism, because we are committed
to any foregone dogmatic statement which it is
moral treason and impiety to question. The
Romanist bows consistently to the authority of
the Church in this particular, which insists rather
upon her own infallibility than upon that of the
canonical writings. But Protestants are bound
"to give a reason for the hope that is in them
with meekness and fear," and to avoid no exam
ination from a secret dread that it may prove un
satisfactory or disastrous. We can afford to stand
by the Truth, wherever it may lead us.

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD- 29

CHAPTER IV.
"XT 7E turn, then, to the third theory named in
the order, and inquire, whether inspiration
is synonymous only with exalted genius. We say,
popularly and loosely, of some one exhibiting
commanding powers at a great juncture of af
fairs, — in the field of thought or action, or both ;
the poet, the orator, the statesman, the divine, —
he was inspired ; he was an incarnate splendor,
— thought in effulgence, genius on fire; his
thought and deed were superhuman. Napoleon
at Lodi,' Shakspeare in Hamlet, Webster reply
ing to Hayne, Lincoln killing slavery with his
pen, — these are the mountain peaks of human
endeavor, the grand altitudes to which humanity,
in rare instances, bounds through the buoyant
helpfulness of a divine afflatus. They know not
how it comes, but every faculty and function is
alive with quick and spontaneous energy ; and,
instead of being goaded to its task, carries the
man, as on royal pinions, to heights where the

30 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
foot hath not trod, nor the eye of the eagle looked,
— the soul dominant, and swaying with lordly
power every energy of the man ; the brain lumin
ous ; the judgment clear ; the memory quick and
accurate ; the mind crystallizing upon combina
tions with intuitive precision and lightning velo
city. And this, it may be admitted, was the
inspiration of God. It has its field and its func
tion on the plane of human endeavor. It is a
divine stimulus that lifts the human into the range
of those achievements which make epochs in the
history of nations, and in the mutations of time.
But is this all that is meant where it is said, " the
Spirit of the Lord came upon him"? Where, in
all classical literature, do you find the counterpart
to the rapt visions of Isaiah and Ezekiel, to the
unearthly grandeur of Job, to the lofty lyrics of
David and Asaph, to the dedicatory prayer of
Solomon, to the sweet ethics of the sermon on the
mount? What inspiration so sublime as that of
the Hebrew muse, which has outlived all dynas
ties, survived all changes in literature and art,
is as fresh to the devout heart to-day as when,
with undazzled eye and wings tipped with fire,
she first rose refulgent over the harp-strings of
the sweet singer of Israel, never to fold them

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 31
more until the music of her strain shall be wafted
from the outmost verge of God's empire into that
seat of glory where his majesty is pavilioned and
his holiness abides. Survived all art, did I say?
Is she not the creator and fashioner of all that is
best, most suggestive, most devout, most truthful,
most enduring, in the painting and architecture of
the middle and subsequent ages? Can the cold
and classical figures or structures of the Greek
hold place for an hour with those sublimer crea
tions of Michael Angelo and Raphael ; with those
harmonious temples where every niche and finial,
every pillar and ornament, — the lofty nave, the
glorious arch, the glittering pinnacle, and "diadem
tower," — are but the notes of one grand anthem
of praise petrified into stone, the frozen music of
Christian art : to-day, the wonder and inspiration
of the nations? But it was so grand, so beautiful,
so exalted, because it embodied conceptions which
were not of earth, — flashes of supernal beauty,
that broke through our cloudy world from higher
orbs and loftier imaginations.
The inspiration of genius, — aye, indeed, those
wondrous suggestions that break in upon the mind,
like sunbeams through an opening cloud — that
disclosed gravitation to Newton, steam-power to

32 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
Watt, the locomotive to Stephenson, the lightning
alphabet to Morse, — that are ab extra, and the
"seeds of things," — what a dull and heavy way
would humanity travel without them ! How they
exalt our common clay, and inject into society its
capacity for progress, and its element of change !
The discoverer, the inventor, — the creator of new
thoughts, new combinations, new developments in
politics, literature, and art, — we build them mon
uments and garnish their sepulchres ; and we do
well. But humanity — in its larger scope, in its
wider possessions, in its healthier progress, in
its nobler instincts and loftier aspirings — is at
once their meed of praise, and their monument
of glory. These are the Chimborazo and Nevada
peaks, rising into rarer atmospheres ; crowned
with a purer light, — beacon-points of beauty,
seen and hailed from afar.
The theory, that exalted genius is inspiration,
is most tenaciously urged by those who exclude
all supernaturalism from the empire of Jehovah ;
who disbelieve miracles, and cannot tolerate the
thought that the Supreme Being should ever inter
fere with the laws and agencies once set agoing
by him, if indeed he so constituted things. But
are these philosophers quite sure that they have

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 33
penetrated the arcana of Nature deep enough to
have read all her secrets, and know the precise
boundaries where nature and the supernatural
meet, — where the one terminates and the other
commences ? Are they such adepts in mental and
spiritual psychology ; have they so weighed and
measured what is normal and what abnormal in
mental manifestation, that they are in no danger
of mingling what is sensuous with what is super-
sensuous? What do we know of the boundaries
of the natural? Centuries agone they were sup
posed to have been reached; but, lo ! they widen
with every epoch, and recede with every change :
they sweep outward with the roll of every star,
and inward with the beautiful mystery of every
atom. The telescope, the microscope, the layers
of the rock and sand, the tombs of vertebrate
and invertebrate life ; the boiling lava of to-day
and the old red sandstone and granite, with the
signet of eternity stamped upon it, • — all proclaim
that Nature has many secrets yet to disclose,
many wonders yet to display, many realms of
her wide outlying empire yet untraversed : and
that there may be points and junctures where
the finite clasps hands with the infinite ; and
Nature opens her bosom, and holds her wondrous
3

34 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
forces, subject to the wisdom and potency of her
God. Is this the modesty of Science? When New
ton, the greatest discoverer yet known, who de
tected the fine wires upon which the universe is
hung, — when he confessed himself but as a
child, gathering shells on the shore of the great
ocean which lay outstretched before him, shall
his pygmy imitators of to-day bar out Jehovah
from all special interference in the system he has
formed, and shut up his omnipotence to the uni
form maintenance of an undeviating rule, unless
its interruption be first sanctioned by the august
judgment of St. Comte, St. Parker, St. Draper,
and St. Buckle?
Inspiration, then, may come upon man, as well
as be generated within him ; — may be a foreign
force, as well as an internal elevation ; — may re
veal what is new and prophetical, as well as
bring past acquisitions into vivid prominence.
Scientific infidelity cannot disprove, but only
question, it; and prophecy and its fulfilment
make it certain.
It is certainly allowable, moreover, to recur
lo the opinions of the ancients on this subject,
where the Scriptures themselves are of no direct

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 35
authority ; their own validity being in question.
It was universally held, that their sages, oracles,
and priests were subjects of a divine frenzy or
ecstasy when under the inspiration of the gods,
— they were filled with a knowledge of events
to come, and gave their encouragement or warn
ing to the devotee. The great Pythoness is thus
described in the often-quoted lines of Virgil : —
" I feel the god, the rushing god ! she cries.
While thus she spoke, enlarged her features grew,
Her color changed, her locks dishevelled flew,
The heavenly tumult reigns in every part,
Pants in her breast, and swells her rising heart;
Still spreading to the sight, the priestess glowed,
And heaved, impatient of the incumbent god.
Then, to her inmost soul by Phcebus fired,
In more than human sounds, she spoke inspired."

2,6 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE

CHAPTER V.
"T)ERHAPS it is full as appropriate under this
head, as any other, to urge, that inspiration
is higher than genius or frenzy, as proved by
what Inspiration has actually done in the books
which present her image and superscription to
us, stamped with a divine signet.
The volume is made up, as we have seen,
of sixty-six different books, — by almost as many
different authors, various in style, capacity,
learning, — scattered through sixteen hundred
years of time, from the beginning, as recorded
by Moses, to the winding up of the Apocalypse ;
and yet there runs through all a unity of plan, a
harmony and similarity of moral intention and
aim, which make them seem in that sense like
the work of one mind. And we find, also, that
this unity is, or seems, an undesigned and un
conscious unity ; and yet it is so clear and plain
and understood by us, that one of the chief ob
jections to the book often is, that there are some

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 37
minute and verbal discrepancies between the dif
ferent authors ! We expect unity, and are hurt
if we are disappointed. But why look for unity,
if not inspired by one mind? Homer and Milton
and Shakspeare, Longfellow and Bryant, are all
poets : bind up their best works together, and
then look for the unifying spirit, the common
aim, the harmonious development of a great
plan, of which these several poems are constitu
ent parts, all sweeping to one grand result; and
see if we can find it. It is not there, and we
would say it was miraculous if it was. But we
expect it in these books ; and we find it in these
books. Is it any less miraculous, because Moses
and David and Isaiah and Paul and John are
the poets and historians and moralists, than those
we have mentioned? These books are but beads
strung upon one spiritual cord, whose ends are
linked to the two eternities. They can no more
get out of place, than a planet could shoot from
its orbit. Christ is the sun, and these the worlds
that sweep in harmonious adjustment about him.
He is the burden of the elder sage, whose record
is luminous with the morning beams of time, —
the seed of the woman, — the Shiloh of Jacob, —
the Prophet like unto Moses, — Leader and Me-

38 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
diator; he the wonderful counsellor, — the Lamb
led to the slaughter, — the Star of Israel, Con
queror and King : and so, as these prophetic orbs
flash past, they blaze, each with some new and
strange feature and reflection of the central power
that holds and guides them ; and so we see the
elder dispensation opening and preparing for the
new, the law becoming a schoolmaster to bring
us to Christ. As, in climbing some lofty moun
tain, we mark successive stages and reaches of
table-land, each spreading itself as a preparation
and foundation for higher ranges : so here, there
is involved a course of progressive teaching, an
orderly development and unfolding, as with un
even velocities, but yet progressive throughout;
sometimes protracted, interrupted, often languid ;
sometimes so dubious as to seem like retrogres
sion ; its step, sometimes the step of centuries,
yet majestically drawing nearer to the great dis
closure. "The root was long in showing tokens
of its presence ; the stem and leaves grew slowly :
but yesterday the bud emerged from its sheath,
and to-day it has expanded into the flower." *
And, mark ! this anticipative preparation and
progress ; this carrying of the new in the womb
* Progress of Doctrine, p. 44.

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 39
of the old, unconsciously ; this efflorescence of
Judaism into Christianity, of ritualistic form into
spiritual life and power, — is precisely what the
Jew never dreamed of, and would never have
intentionally consummated.
It was an organic development without personal
intent ; and no one was more surprised than the
unconscious agents through whose labors it was
accomplished. And even after Christ had gone
home to his Father, how the impregnation of
Judaism was manifested even in Peter, and had
to be corrected by the broad church polity which
Paul inaugurated and established ! True, the
ancient system may have been perfect in itself,
and adapted to the results it sought ; but, buried
in its types and shadows, germinant in its sym
bols and ceremonies, lurked the seeds of loftier
thoughts and better purposes, which the coming
eras, with the sunshine and shower of provi
dential unfolding, were to quicken into the world
wide principles of universal brotherhood and
love : and so the bloody altar of sacrifice was
removed from the Court of the Temple, and was
builded anew of better material, in the contrite
Spirit; and the Shechinah, that blazed between
the wings of the cherubim, was removed to the

40 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
holier shrine of the personal Soul ; and the propi
tiatory that covered the Israelites' sin, and gave
assurance that it was pardoned, was erected anew
in the heart and blood of the Great Sacrifice,
through whose redemptive economy alone can
sin be pardoned and destroyed.
Was all this the result of human genius, guided
fortuitously to such amazing results? It is of the
same character as the fortuitous concourse of
atoms creating a world, or a man. Genius is as
competent to effect the one as the other.
Moreover, this unity of intent and plan is but
half the argument. It might have been unific,
and yet not wise ; harmoniously strung, and yet
not working for good. Yet here we find not only
the presence of a common intent, in the widely
diversified works of prophets and apostles, but
a common scheme on which all are framed, —
one which the trial of eighteen hundred years has
demonstrated as the best, the wisest, the most
effective ever devised for lifting up humanity from
its degradation, and giving to it the purpose and
power of amendment and purification, — the very
" wisdom of God, and the power of God unto sal
vation," — vindicated as divine, not simply in its
abstract principles, but in its concrete and mani-

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 41
fested accomplishments. It may be further ob
served, says Isaac Taylor, that, in the fourteen
non-supernatural epistles, — i.e. , those where no
miracle is made the basis of their instructions, —
"while these writings breathe throughout with an
intense fervor, directed toward the one object of
securing and promoting personal and social virtue,
they do not in a single instance throw the stress
of any ethical argument upon the supernatural
attestations of the message." The greatest mira
cle God ever wrought was in the message itself:
it was its own witness, blazing all over, in itself
and in its history, with the proofs of self-vindica
tion. If human genius alone is capable of pro
ducing a literature equal to that of the Bible,
why has it not been done? Where is it? Surely
the spark should have been lighted ere six
thousand years had waxed and waned. These
books alone profess to contain divine revelation :
did Homer or Shakspeare or Milton make such
claim? Are they not loftiest in style, and widest
in range, and deepest in spiritual philosophy?
and yet how far beneath the tone of Christ's sim
ple lessons, or the lyric grandeur of prophet and
sacred bard ! Is this superiority owing to the
subject on which they respectively treat? Turn

42 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
to Confucius; to the Zenda-Vesta, the Vedas
and Shasters of India ; the Koran : they fall far
below the style of most of the secular poetry and
philosophy of their age. No ! the shepherd boy
— rising to the grandeur of a magnificent Oriental
prince, and gemming his path all the way from the
sheepcote to the throne with strains of penitence
or rapture, hung like sacred pictures, that embody
the devotion and reverence and joy of all subse
quent ages — has no rival and no peer. No ! the
lofty drama of Job, with its majestic simplicity of
simple suffering, with its stern and manly integrity
and vindication of providence, — though the thick
hail of God's deepest judgments girt in its sublime
pathos by the power of God — "in strange un-
Hebrew stories of Eastern astronomic mythology :
the old wars of the giants ; the imprisoned Orion ;
the wounded dragon ; the glittering fragments of
the sea-snake Rahab, trailing across the northern
sky ; " the unearthly magnificence of God's voice
and message from the whirlwind ; the preter
natural, Titanic, and enkindling glory that breaks
over its majestic close, — set it apart from all mere
human conceptions, and stamp it as inimitable,
unapproachable, divine. And here we are en
titled to urge, that there is in Revelation a living,

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD.

43

reformatory, and elevating power, superior to all
other moral forces ever promulgated, suited to
humanity in every stage of its degradation, and
which society could not spare to-day without
surging back into barbarism ; which no science
could compensate, and no philosophy supply ;
which no wisdom of man ever discovered, but
which was brought to light by men unskilled in
letters, professing to receive it from a higher
power, and to communicate it as the message of
God. And then mark its effect when it began
its practical operation upon the conscience and
the heart, — three thousand and five thousand
converted in a single day ! What did it mean ?
"New wine," said the Pharisaic scoffer. Yes :
he unconsciously uttered the sublimest of truths.
It was the new wine of God's spiritual vintage.
He was treading the press, and watching its flow
and effervescence until it should be fitted to be
drunk anew with him in his spiritual kingdom.
Was the presence and power of the Holy Ghost
in the early church the creation of fancy and
fanaticism? All history, sacred and profane,
attests the astonishing claims that were set up
in regard to it, as the wonder-working potency
of an unseen God. Was it a natural force, after

44 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
all, — begotten, like the dreams of modern en
thusiasm, in the mists of animal excitement,
through the occult play of clairvoyant and mag
netic forces, that were understood in their effects,
but not in their elements and principles? It is
separable from this whole class of marvels by
one radical distinction, which renders the chasm
impassable between them : the work of the Holy
Spirit then, now, and always, effected a complete
and permanent renovation of moral character and
life. These temporary enthusiasms ran high for
the moment, but died out directly the exciting
cause was removed, and left the heart and char
acter arid and barren of all moral and spiritual
results, or stimulated only by the malign emotions
of arrogance and spiritual pride ; and this will
be found true universally, on every repetition of
the power of each, to the end of time. Beside,
the genuine work of the Spirit had its issue in a
self-forgetful personal consecration of property
and life ; in world-wide sympathies, in fiery
persecutions and heroic martyrdoms, endured
and defied for a crown which an earthly ambition
would not clutch, and could neither appreciate
nor covet. And so this same power had in it
elements of cohesion and continuity, which have

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 45
been instrumental in effecting greater changes in
political and social life, than all other agencies
which the world has ever seen or felt. The unity
of race and languages, the brotherhood of man,
the wide, underlying principles of order and
social law, the power of sympathy and forgive
ness of injuries, — all these, ingrafted upon the
heart of man by the Holy Ghost, create such an
array of facts, in his history, as demand other
answers and explanations than a sneer. Beside,
the subjects of this influence were the purest,
truthfulest, best, wisest, men of their times ;
seeking no applause, hunting after no notoriety,
goaded into no false raptures : but living lives
of all soberness and sincerity, knowing whereof
they affirmed, and appealing to the God of the
Spirit that dwelt in them. What account does
the positive philosophy, that sees only the glitter
of genius in these records, give of all this? It
is utterly ignored as a fact, or set down to the
enthusiasm of sect, or the dreams of delirium ;
but is God's truth to be thus dealt with? If
inspiration be genius only, how strange that its
subjects should oftenest be the very men who
manifested genius in nothing else ! What sort of
genius had the twelve disciples? Judas had a

46 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
genius for money, perhaps ; but these unlettered
peasants, modest and docile, not beyond the fish
er's boat and net even after the crucifixion, had
no more genius for dreams of elevation, rank,
influence, socially or intellectually, than anticipa
tions that their assumed successors would one day
fish for men, clothed in scarlet and gold, with
mitres and tiaras on their foreheads, with kings
holding their stirrups, and devout nations pros
trate before them. With all their dreaming, they
never dreamed of this : they had no genius for
such foreshadowings. And let it not be forgotten,
that this power of the Holy Ghost to enlighten,
chasten, change, comfort, and sustain the soul,
is as firmly held to-day in all Christendom as in
the hour of its first promulgation. Not a believer
in Christ who will not aver, that his conviction of
sin and his love of God, his sense of pardon and
peace, his hope and joy in this house of his pil
grimage, his expectation of future blessedness, —
in fine, all his spiritual exercises, — were begotten,
cherished, and carried forward by the help and
agency of this same good spirit of God ; and this
confession comes from a consciousness of the
fact, as clear and indubitable as that of his own
existence.

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 47
Does a philosophy that refers all phenomena
to the senses ignore the spiritual sense? Or, if
sensation be the ultimatum, why are the results
ascertained by the sight, or the touch, more reli
able than those of the moral consciousness, espe
cially in a realm where sight and feeling cannot
go, and spiritual intuition is sole witness and
judge. How insane this conflict between informa
tion derived from animal sensations, and those
which are spiritual, as if man's nobler part was
nothing, and he lived and died as a brute, having
a little higher reason, capable of a wider reach
of intellect and larger powers of observation, but
nothing grander, — no surviving soul, no moral
life, no spiritual consciousness of good or evil,
no blessed eternity, no God, this spark of life
escaping into the great life-reservoir of the uni
verse when this fitful fever is over ; and this round
of recurring life and death to go on for ever !
Ixion's wheel, turning, turning perpetually, with
out purpose or end ! We are confident, then,
from the foregoing considerations, that the Bible
contains much more than what human genius, or
human effort, however frenzied or excited, could
put into it. It contains God's messages to man.
Does it contain any thing else?

48 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
Is every word, between its covers, the word of
God, — infallibly true, without any admixture
of human imperfection or alloy ? This point now
claims our attention.

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 49

CHAPTER VI.
TT is claimed by the advocates of a verbal,
literal, plenary inspiration, that the admis
sion of a human element in the Bible is fatal to
its claims of acceptance and authority as a whole,
because no line of discrimination can be drawn
between what is of God and what is of man,
and therefore each reader's judgment is made
ultimate in respect to what he will receive, and
what reject ; that the Church has always taught
the divine authority of the entire canon, and that
the foundations of faith will soon be unsettled if
we seriously question it. These reasons, if valid,
are weighty and conclusive ; and it therefore
behooves the inquirer to step cautiously over this
delicate ground, making sure footing as he passes,
that he may not land in the sloughs and quag
mires of infidelity, or become bewildered in the
wilderness of the positive philosophy from which
we have sought thus far to rescue him. Let us,
first, without irreverence or captiousness, look
4

50 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
some of the difficulties of this theory in the face,
and then consider the points above stated in their
order. First, then, by what rule of divine discrimina
tion do we determine which of all these ancient
books presented for our acceptance are of divine
authority, or have any divine element in them?
The Hebrew nation, at the time of Christ, main
tained the divine legation of Moses, and the
authority of the Pentateuch as left by him ; while
no such claim was made or admitted for the
Hagiographia, or the other sacred books. Who
collected these books together is not known,
or when ; it is usually referred to the times
of Ezra, although several of them were written
after his day. By whose discrimination were
these other books admitted into the sacred canon,
with the stamp of inspiration? How comes it
that the book of Ruth and Esther, Ecclesiastes,
the Songs of Solomon, or even the Psalms, pos
sess any divine authority? What authentication
even has the Mosaic cosmogony in geologic or
astronomic disclosures? How many times is the
obvious meaning of that relation to be altered to
suit the facts of modern science ? Who excluded
the great mass of ancient contemporaneous litera-

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 51
ture and morals from its place beside what was
admitted to be genuine?
The difficulties here are twofold, external and
internal, — one relating to the outward proofs and
evidences of their divinity, the other to the dis
crepancies and apparent contradictions and im
possibilities contained within the books themselves.
Our first difficulty lies in determining what, books
are to be deemed canonical at all. There are
excluded from the canon of the Old Testament
fourteen books claimed by some to be of divine
authority; who did this, when, and why? There
were excluded from the New Testament twenty-
four books written during, or immediately after,
the apostolic times by Polycarp, Ignatius, and
others; including gospels, acts, and epistles. All
these, together with the books of Jude, James,
2d and 3d John, and 2d Peter, and the Apoca
lypse, were at first excluded, though a part are
now admitted. Who excluded all these at the
first, and admitted a part afterwards ; when, and
why? The canon of the Old Testament was made up
by the Council of Trent, March 8, 1546, from
such evidence, gathered from the Fathers, as they
judged of authority, in and by which the Apoc-

52 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
ryphal books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Serach,
Baruch, the Maccabees, Daniel, Esdras, Eccle-
siasticus, Bel and the Dragon, and Manasses, were
admitted as of divine authority. These have been
since excluded by Protestant Christians. Why
were they so admitted ; and why and when were
they subsequently excluded? Was it upon any
extrinsic evidence; and, if so, upon what? Was
it traditional ; on what was that tradition founded?
Was it on internal or intrinsic evidence ? we have
that as fully as they, — nay, we have it much more
full and exhaustive; and, if upon the character
of this internal evidence, what is that but bring
ing the human judgment to determine what and
where rests the divine element in these ancient
records, — nay, further, whether there be a divine
element in them at all ; accepting the very thing
in others far less qualified, that we deem sacrilege
in ourselves, with all the accumulated scientific
wisdom, critical power, and searching analysis,
which minds better trained than the world ever
yet saw bring to this investigation? Why is it
more allowable to exclude a whole book on its
internal evidence, than parts of a book for the
like reason? The whole book is excluded be
cause human judgment finds in it only the human

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 53
element ; why not a part or parts of a book for
the same reason ? or does the presence of a divine
element anywhere in the record transmute every
thing it contains into the pure gold of infallibility ?
The same train of argument may be applied to
the books of the New Testament. They were
all written and collected within one hundred and
twenty years after the crucifixion ; and those ex
cluded, many of them, about the same time. We
have those books before us, and all the evidence
possessed by those who passed judgment on them.
Nor are we to be deluded at this day by any as
sumption of supernatural enlightenment in the
corporate and collective church body or council,
passing judgment in the premises. There was
little enough of the divine in the judgment of
men who celebrated the virtues of celibacy and
celestial virginity, and inaugurated some of the
most crying abuses in the Christian Church, un
der which the world has groaned for fifteen cen
turies. No : they were but men. Some of them
stars of the first magnitude in their generation,
some of them the worst men the world ever saw,
more barbarous and infamous than the Pagans
they met and conquered. This arrogant assump
tion of Church infallibility is the germ or seed-

54 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
plant of the pretence of infallibility we are now
considering : every book admitted into the canon
was infallible, because the Church said so. We
call for proofs, and are answered by astonishment
and bluster, and the danger of treading with un-
sanctified feet on holy ground. If the positive
philosophy has done no other service in its scien
tific department, it is to be praised for this, that
it has smitten to the dust this crown of sacerdotal
pride and authority, and routed for ever the array
of ghostly forces by which humanity had been so
long and so cruelly dominated and enslaved;
wresting its enlightened reason and intelligent
faith from its infamous and mercenary clutch.
Doubtless, in its zeal, it has gone too far ; but
time and a wider generalization will teach it, that
there is a realm of the supernatural, and "more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of
in its philosophy." Human, fallible men, then,
have assumed to judge what books are canonical
and what are spurious ; and we may sit down
contented with their judgment if we see fit : but
upon what principle is an interdict to be put upon
a re-examination of these grave questions, and
the ground of them. Had church or council or
conclave exclusive and paramount jurisdiction in

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 55
former ages ; and is the doctrine of stare decisis
to be invoked to stay for ever all new evidences
to reverse or modify their decrees? We have
reversed them already on questions of church
principles and church polity : why not in more
vital things?
We argue, then, from all this, that as the human
judgment has determined what books are to be
deemed to contain any divine element, so we are
entitled to judge further in which and where the
divine element and the human element exist or
coexist ; and this judgment is to be made up
from all the lights which reason, science, philoso
phy, history, faith, and experience are able to
afford, and with a reverent regard to the sacred-
ness of the subject, and its close connection with
the weal or woe of our immortality.
We should not fail to remember, however, that
the Church has never yet determined that these
records, literally and verbally, in every letter and
line of them, are infallible, except with the most
important proviso, that the Church is to interpret
what they mean ; which thus lodges the element
of infallibility rather in the church than in the
record, for church interpretation is of the most
pliable and india-rubber character, — "this is my

56 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
body" to be construed literally; "I am the vine,"
"I am the door," metaphorically : the first literally,
because of the use that might be made of it as an
element of priestly power in the mystery of the
mass ; the last figuratively, because no such use
was possible.
We stand, then, upon the human selection of
the books, — some only out of many, and some
of these vastly questionable ; human translation
into new languages from the Hebrew and Greek ;
human interpretation of the text so translated.
Can we stand upon the dogma, that every letter
and line of what is so selected, translated, and
interpreted by human decision and wisdom, is
verbally and infallibly divine, — the very voice
of God, without question or mistake? We think
not. We admit, — nay more, we claim and insist
as vital to Christianity, — that there is in these
records a human and fallible element, running
through their cosmogony, chronology, history,
biography ; that the writers, although inspired
men, made use, in the impartation of their mes
sages, of the traditions, knowledges, sciences,
and histories, as understood in their day; that
they not only described natural phenomena ac
cording to appearances, as has long been ad-

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 57
mitted, but often incorrectly, and yet according
to their understanding of them ; that intermingled
with the burden of their prophecy was the wail
of their human anguish and human sympathy ;
that while as apostles they were to take no thought
how or what they should speak, because it was
given or suggested to them, in the same hour,
what they should speak in answer to their ene
mies, or in confirmation of the claims of the Son
of God as the Christ, yet this did not dispense
with, or supersede the use of, their own knowl
edge and faculties in enforcement or illustration
of the themes and topics thus supernaturally sug
gested. And so, while the burden of Egypt or
Tyre or Nineveh swept in panoramic view before
the spiritual vision of the rapt prophet ; while
the terrible pictures of coming events cast their
shadows before, unrolling preternaturally what
the after ages in their long vicissitudes would
fulfil, — the prophet was left to paint the visions
with colors from his own laboratory of thought,
and tell what he saw in human language, still
pointed and intensified by the supernal imagery
which divine revelation had so disclosed.
The first argument bearing upon this point,
we have already partially considered ; to wit,

58 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
that, while these records are written by men, they
do not, for the most part, themselves claim that
there is no human element in them. In the his
tory of the creation of the world and its inhab
itants, and of the names, genealogies, and ages
of those who lived before the flood, of the re-
peopling of the earth, and the dispersion from
Babel ; of the patriarchal times and scenes, — all
is told without an}' statement of the source whence
the information was derived, — whether from tra
dition, or ancient writings, or monuments, or
hieroglyphics ; and the same remark applies to
much of those Hebrew annals which run through
the Pentateuch, the Judges, the Kings, and even
down to the captivity. But when the narrator
comes to speak the language of a lawgiver, or
breaks into prophecy, there immediately shines
over the record a diviner light, because he touches
profundities, and reaches heights, which partake
themselves of the supernatural. In gathering up
what tradition had preserved, or earlier records
embodied, human diligence and candor were equal
to the emergency ; but in disclosing to humanity
a moral and spiritual code, such as no human
wisdom had ever equalled or superseded, and in
lifting the veil from future ages to bare to the

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 59
eye what God would do in after times, then
came, as was needed, the informing power and
inspiration of the Almighty. But more in respect
to this divine element by and by.

60 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE

CHAPTER VII.
TT has been asserted, that the infallibility of the
Old-Testament scriptures is established by
references in the New, by quotations made from
them by Christ and his apostles ; but no proof
of the infallibility of a whole book arises from
any reference to a single prophecy contained in it.
So far as the prophecy was concerned, such fulfil
ment proved its truth, but by no means authenti
cated every thing historical, cosmical, or doctrinal,
uttered by the same writer. It was the things
written in the books of Moses, the Prophets, and
Psalms, concerning Christ, that were to have com
plete fulfilment, and so he informed his amazed
disciples after his resurrection ; and although he
came not to destroy the Law and the Prophets,
but to fulfil, yet in referring to the law of reprisals,
the lex talionis, the eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth, of the Hebrew code, he repudiated
the whole system, with the authoritative announce
ment, "But I say unto you, Love your enemies,"

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 6 1
&c. What he came not to destroy was the im
perative and eternal obligation of the moral pre
cepts, which were infallible ; what he came to
alter and annul, were those politic and Mosaic
institutes, which were wise for the culture of a
rude and unintellectual people, but no longer ap
plicable when a larger development had been
attained, and a higher life become practicable.
The new flower shot out from the old stem,
through the opening bud of prophecy ; and
Christianity became an efflorescence of Judaism,
colored and beautified with its subtlest spirit, and
charged with the weight and wisdom of its sub-
limest harmonies. So that, while he advised his
hearers to obey the instructions of those "who sat
in Moses' seat," it was only so far as these teach
ings were in accord with the higher underlying
principles of thought and action which it was his
great mission to inculcate. Moses was but initia
tive and rudimental : the finality and spiritual
completeness were in Christ. Nor do the writers
of the New Testament anywhere claim, that their
messages are absolutely free from all human mix
ture or imperfection, or that their records were '
any more infallible than their words or teachings.
The promise of "another comforter" belongs to

62 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
all of Christ's followers, and would prove every
Christian infallible. How, then, should Paul be
so mistaken, when he called the High Priest a
"whited wall," — as he was, — not knowing he
was High Priest? Nay, on the plenary and ver
bal theory, how could Paul and Peter differ so
radically? how should the same events be so
differently related as to particulars by different
evangelists? Take the voice which came from
heaven at the baptism, as instanced by Professor
Stowe, Matt. ii. 17, — "This is my beloved Son
in whom I am well pleased;" Mark i. 11, "Thou
art my beloved Son," &c. ; Luke iii. 22, "Thou
art," &c, "in thee I am well pleased." Compare
the quotations of Matthew and Luke (chap, iv.)
from Deuteronomy, viii. 3, and see how they dif
fer. So in respect to the centurion : Luke, vii.
2-10, has it, that he sent the elders of the Jews
to Jesus to heal his servant, and did not see him ;
Matthew, viii. 5-13, has it, that the centurion
applied in person, and held a conversation with
the Master. So, read 2 Sam. xxii. for David"s
psalm of thanksgiving for deliverance from Saul,
and read the same (Psalm xviii.) as it stands in
the collection, and note the verbal differences in
almost every verse. So the one hundred and

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD- 63
eleven verses of Matt, v., vi., and vii., condensed
in different language in Luke. Which is the
true reading in all these discrepant relations, oh
the verbal theory of absolute infallibility? and
why have we " Harmonies " of the Four Gospels
but upon the admitted fact that they differ in
language, and often in facts ? What need of all
this if the language is inspired, and inspiration
and infallibility are synonymous?
And here we should advert to the argument or
suggestion of Froude, in his criticism on the gos
pel histories, in which he supposes, that, imme
diately after the resurrection, the mother and
brethren and disciples of Christ would naturally
bring together, as they had a vivid recollection
of the facts, the principal stirring incidents of
his life and death, with his sayings and works ;
a sort of incomplete and fragmentary "memoirs,"
which may have been extant for some time, even
after the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark,
and Luke, were written, and which formed the
materials from which these several writers drew
their histories, in addition to the recollection of
Matthew, as neither Mark nor Luke were apos
tles. This fact, if so, would account for the
verbal discrepancies observable in these Gospels,

64 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
where accounts are given evidently of the same
events. It would account, further, for the fact,
otherwise never yet explained, that Justin Martyr,
who was born in the year 89, and lived to the age
of seventy-six, never once speaks of either of the
evangelists by name ; and yet it is clear, from his
writings, that he was perfectly familiar with the
history of the events recorded by Luke, the facts
of which he quotes from something which he
styles memoirs "of the apostles ; " while, in quot
ing from the Apocalypse or the Old Testament, he
uniformly names his author. So Tatian, Barna-
bus, Clement, Polycarp, each, in quoting the
language of the Gospels, quotes it often, in differ
ent persons and tenses, with additions not found
in the Gospels at all, or any thing like them.
Did they quote also from these memoirs, the com
mon source of all these histories? and, whether
they did or no, they evidently had never dreamed
of such a thing as verbal infallibility. It would
be most surprising, when the disciples after the
resurrection were scattered everywhere, preach
ing Jesus, that, for ten, twenty, thirty years, not a
scrap of written memoir should have been made
of him by the mother that bore him, by the dis
ciples that loved him as a friend and worshipped

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 65
him as a God. Think, if such a being should
appear to-day, how the literature of the age would
be crammed with the evidences of his doings and
his fame ; the whole body of the New Testament,
dating from about the year 50 to 90, according to
the most reliable chronologies.
Nor do the best Christian writers set up this
claim for verbal infallibility. Bishop Home, in
his introduction to the study of the Scriptures,
defines inspiration as the "imparting of such a
degree of divine assistance, influence, or guid
ance, as should enable the authors to communi
cate religious knowledge to others without error."*
"When it is said the Scriptures were divinely
inspired, we are not to understand that God
suggested every word, or dictated every expres
sion. From the different styles in which the books
are written, the different manner in which the
events are related and predicted, it appears that
the sacred penmen were permitted to write as
their several tempers, understandings, and habits
of life directed ; and the knowledge communi
cated to them by inspiration in their writings,
was applied by them in the same manner as any
knowledge acquired by ordinary means. Nor is
* Vol. 1. p. 229.
s

66 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
it to be supposed they were inspired in every fact
which they related, or in every precept which
they delivered. They were left to the common
use of their faculties, and did not stand in need
on every occasion of supernatural communication,
which was afforded only when necessary. Nor
does it follow, that they derived from revelation
the knowledge of those things which might be
collected from the common sources of human in
telligence. Some of their books were compiled
from sacred annals, written by prophets and
seers, from public records and documents of
uninspired men." — "Whatever may be true re
specting the historical portions, we may be fully
convinced that the prophetical parts come from
God;" and much more from this eminent divine
to the like import.
Robertson, the late eloquent divine of Brighton,
says, "The inspiration of the Bible is a large
subject. I hold it inspired, not dictated. It is
the word of God, the words of man : as the
former, perfect ; as the latter, imperfect. God the
Spirit, as a Sanctifier, does not produce absolute
perfection of human character ; God the Spirit,
as an Inspirer, does not produce absolute per
fection of human knowledge. I believe Bibli-

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 67
olatry to be as superstitious, as false, and almost
as dangerous, as Romanism."
"This doctrine in question," says Coleridge,
" petrifies at once the whole body of Holy Writ,
with all its harmonies, and symmetrical grada
tions, the flexile and the rigid, — the supporting
hard, and the clothing soft, the blood which is
the life, the intelligencing nerves, and the rudely
woven but soft and springy cellular substances,
in which all are imbedded and tightly bound
together, — this breathing organism, this pan-
harmonicon, which I have seen stand on its feet
as a man and with a man's voice given to it, the
doctrine in question turns into a colossal Mem-
non's head, a hollow passage for a voice, that
mocks the voices of many men, speaks in their
names, and is yet but one voice and the same,
and no man uttered it, and never in a human
heart was it conceived." And then he breaks
out in that grand climacteric, which demonstrates
beyond all argument the existence of the human
element, with a force and grandeur unequalled
in all his wonderful compositions : —
" Curse ye Meroz, curse ye bitterly the inhab
itants thereof," sang Deborah. Was it any personal
wrong, rapine, or insult she or the house of Lapidoth

68 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
had received from Jabin or Sisera ? No : she had
dwelt under her palm-tree in the depth of the moun
tain ; but she was a mother in Israel, and with a
mother's heart, and the vehemency of a mother's and
a patriot's love, she had shot the light of love from
her eyes, and poured the blessings of love from her
lips upon those who had jeopardied their lives unto
the death against the oppressor. As long as I have
this image of Deborah before my eyes, and while I
throw myself back into the age and country of this
Hebrew Bonduca, in the not yet tamed chaos of the
spiritual creation, — with this impassioned, high-
souled, heroic woman, I feel as if I were among the
first ferment of the great affections. In all that is
fierce and inordinate, I am made to know and be grate
ful for the clearer and purer radiance which shines on
a Christian's path ; while in the self-oblivion of these
heroes of the Old Testament, their elevation above all
low and individual interests, the entire and vehement
devotion of their total being to their Master, I find
lessons of humility, and rousing examples of faith and
fealty. But let me once be persuaded that all these
heart-awakening utterances of human hearts, of men
of like passions with myself, — their sorrowing, rejoic
ing, suffering, triumphing, — are but a Divina Corn-
media of a superhuman ventriloquist ; that the Royal
Harper, to whom I have so often submitted myself as
a many-stringed instrument for his fire-tipped fingers
to traverse, while every several nerve of emotion, pas
sion, thought, that thrills the flesh and blood of our
common humanity, responded to the touch ; that this

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 69
sweet Psalmist of Israel was himself a mere instru
ment, — a harp, an automaton, — poet, mourner, sup
pliant, all is gone, — all sympathy, all example: I
listen in awe and fear, but in perplexity and confusion
of spirit." *
Nor is it at all likely, in the nature of things,
that what human hands have written should pos
sess any greater infallibility than what human
lips have spoken. Is not the promise, that Christ
will be with his ministers in preaching his Gospel
to the end of time, clear and explicit? while no
such promise can be found in respect to their
writings. And is it true, therefore, that every
minister is inspired in his messages, and utters
only what is absolutely and infallibly true ? Even
the apostles differed about ceremonies and ordi
nances, and Peter was supposed to be wrong :
where was his infallibility ? It was of the same
character as that of his pretended successors. In
this thing, his human judgment was at fault :
it was a matter, so to speak, which inspiration
could not stoop to meddle with. But is there any
practical difficulty whatever in Christian experi
ence receiving and feeding on the spiritual and
* Coleridge's Works, vol. v. p. 592.

70 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
moral truths which come to it from the preacher's
lips, and rejecting or laying aside what is er
roneous? It is done every sabbath in all the con
gregations of the land.

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 71

CHAPTER VIII.
TDUT the absolute and verbal infallibility of
every Bible utterance is disproved by many
and accumulating facts, every day brought to
light in astronomic, geologic, meteorologic, chron
ologic and cosmic science. It is said that John
Wesley, to the day of his death, distrusted the
Copernican system, and believed that the sun
went round the earth, because the Bible said so :
if this was true, he only followed the learned
theologic doctors who refuted Columbus, and im
prisoned Galileo.
It may be replied, that this was owing to an
incorrect and faulty interpretation ; that matters in
biblical history are described according to ap
pearances. But did not the Church, in expound
ing the Pentateuch, always account the six days
of creation as periods of twenty-four hours, and
the sabbath of rest as a natural day, until geology
made a new interpretation of the record a neces
sity? when it was discovered, as Tayler Lewis

72 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
demonstrates in his three separate books, that
these days should have been regarded as eons,
immeasurable periods, stretching through incon
ceivable abysses of time, and God's sabbath of
rest now in progress ; and that the command,
that man should rest on the seventh day of the
week, was duly enforced to the Jew by the con
sideration, that God rested when the work of
creation was finished, doing his holy work of re
demption in his long sabbath ; and so man should
cease from servile employ, and dedicate one-
seventh of his time to the holy work of worship
and religious culture. Had geologic science re
mained as it was before the days of Murchison,
Hugh Miller, and Dana, would the Mosaic cos
mogony have been brought into the condition in
which it stands to-day? Yet our faith need not
have staggered, had it been proved that Moses
himself supposed these creative time-periods were
natural days.
Then, again, the chronology of the Hebrew
histories cannot be reconciled by more than one
thousand years. Moreover, the antiquity of man,
and his existence on the globe for over six thou
sand years, are fast becoming more than proba
bilities. If his creation followed upon the tertiary

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 73
period, the post-pliocene, when every thing was
in readiness, and his habitation prepared sub
stantially as it now is, how long is it since the
commencement of that period? More than thirty
thousand years has it taken to wear away the
rock at Niagara to its present point, between
Table Rock and Goat Island, from where it origi
nally started, from the water-marks in the rocks
along the shores, according to Sir Charles Lyell.
From fifty to sixty thousand years do the alluvial
deltas at the mouth of the Nile indicate, especially
as the remains of human handicraft, brick, are
found at the depth of sixty feet below the peri
style of the obelisk of Heliopolis. And so, valley
and cave and rock and bone, all testify to periods
five, perhaps ten, times that which the received
chronologies would indicate. It is needless even
to allude to the proofs, which are increasing every
day, that since man was created, he has inhabited
this globe, perhaps even thirty thousand years.
So, also, when the Hebrew records come to
speak of numbers, they are now admitted by the
best biblical scholars to be out of all proportion
often to the subject to which they are related;
and loud complaints are uttered of the falsification
of these numbers by the Jewish transcribers. Six

74 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
hundred thousand fighting men crossing the Red
Sea, under Moses, demanding over two million
of souls in all, and forming a moving city of
tents over thirty miles in circumference, — larger
than New York and all its contiguous and sister
cities put together, — with flocks and herds, for
use and sacrifice, in proportion. Abijah has four
hundred thousand men, and Jeroboam eight hun
dred thousand, of which half a million fell in
one battle ; and all drawn from a country of less
extent than four counties in the State of New
York. Napoleon depopulated France for half a
million of men and boys, to prosecute his cam
paign to Moscow ; and the immense armies of
our late war, drawn from thirty -four States, never
together equalled this Hebrew throng, i Chron.
chap. xii. enumerates three hundred and forty
thousand eight hundred and twenty-two warriors
that went to Hebron, to crown David king, and
were there three days eating and drinking, beside
an unnumbered host with them ! And we may
remark, in these vast numbers, how seldom the
hundreds are used, as if the multitudinous array
could only be expressed by thousands. " Ten
thousand times ten thousand, and thousand of
thousands," seems to have been a line of familiar

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 75
numerals to the Hebrew imagination. So the
startling numbers of animals said to be sacrificed
on occasions of high feasting and worship : the
blood of so many would have swelled from brooks
into a river on which a navy might float !
But time would fail to speak of all the dif
ficulties that cluster about the idea of a verbal
and literal inspiration. I have named but a speci
men of them ; to which I ought to add, that, in
respect to the Old Testament, all the text of it
was originally written without vowels or double
letters of any kind, very much after the manner
of writing short-hand to-day, — without vowel
points, — the pronunciation even being traditional,
and passing down from instructor to pupil, and
so written out from this imperfect short-hand since
the Christian era, and after the Hebrew became
a dead language. What wonder, then, that it
has imperfections? the great marvel and miracle
is, that it has no more. Let any man to-day
undertake to write out the short-hand notes of a
stenographer, taken fifty years ago, and see how
near he could get to the sense and actual meaning
of the symbols. "The fact is," says a recent
writer, "the Hebrew tongue was so imperfect a
language, until the vowels were added to it, that

76 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
the Old Testament, as originally written, was
only a sort of help to the memory and traditionary
teachings of fallible scribes and priests, to whom
were committed the oracles of God. A ' word '
and a ' pestilence ' were expressed by the same
consonants, and whether it was the one or the
other depended on the context, or the authority
of the living teacher ! But it was a language
which, while it expressed the loftiest inspiration
of thought at every line, seems to have been con
structed on purpose to render the idea of verbal
infallibility peculiarly improbable, — a language
that leaned upon the inward inspiration of the
living fallible teacher, in every letter and line of
it, for support and intelligibility. Let any Hebrew
scholar take up the unpointed text of the ancient
Hebrew, and he will find that he has the language
of that unpointed original yet to learn." *
Having thus considered and disproved, as we
imagine, the proposition, that inspiration is sy
nonymous with human genius, and shown that it
is something, higher, deeper, holier, than the un
aided intellect of even Shakspeare or Milton ever
conceived (although these are unfair examples,
as their genius was impregnated with, and em-
* Curtis, p. 173.

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 77
ployed so largely upon, Christian topics, that it is
impossible to separate them : the efforts of Pagan
scholars, to whom Christianity was unknown, are
only in point here) ; having also shown that there
is a human element in the Scriptures, and that,
consequently, they are not infallible, but liable to
mistake, — we were next to consider, in order,
some of the objections which have been urged
against admitting that any part of the Bible is, or
may be, incorrect and less than divine.
1. It is feared it will result in unsettling the
foundations of our faith, if it be admitted for a
moment that any part or portion of what we have
always regarded as God's word should be found
to be only the word of man. But the simple
answer to all this is, Is it true? Was a Christian
life ever promoted or strengthened by the incul
cation of error, or the belief of falsehood? If
you lie to your child to produce obedience, are
you and the child made better or worse? Beside,
it is not true that the foundations of Christian
faith and hope rest upon the footing of a verbal
inspiration of the Scriptures. No : the soul takes
up and appropriates what is fitted to its spiritual
and moral states arid necessities. It relies upon
the great disclosures of immortality ; upon its love

78 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
of goodness and truth ; upon its groundings in
virtue, justice, and loyalty ; upon its conformity
more and more to God's image and likeness, as
exemplified in Christ ; upon those inward work
ings of the soul by which it becomes meet to be
partaker of the heavenly inheritance and heir
of celestial royalties. Standing on these Pisgah
tops, round which the rays of the divine glory
are falling, it sees heaven open, and Jesus stand
ing at the right hand of God. With faith and
hope' and love and penitence and holy fear, and
filial confidence, and loyalty, blazing like a per
petual Shechinah, on the altar of the soul, and
irradiating, like the pillar of fire, all the dark
places and sorrowful ways of its earthly pilgrim
age, — tell me if there be any danger of stum
bling or loss, should this earthly habitation prove
to be millions of years older than it had been
taught to believe, or that many historical and
natural facts related turn out to be different from
what the writer evidently supposed. Did any
such disastrous results follow the correction of
ancient errors respecting the flatness of the earth ;
the dissipation of the supposed " firmament," with
the stars peering through its windows and loop
holes, scintillations of the glory beyond ; the post-

INCARNA TE AND WRITTEN WORD. 79
ponement of the end of the world, which the
apostles all deemed so near at hand ; and many
other pious hallucinations, too numerous to men
tion? And yet these same fears were as loudly
and honestly expressed then as now ; and the
same holy horror was felt at new glosses and in
terpretations as are now expressed in respect to
the correction of the facts which modern learning
has demonstrated to be false. No : the danger,
if any, presses from another direction. It is in
culcating the dogma of verbal inspiration and
infallibility, and then upon this blind belief open
ing the blaze of scientific and critical learning,
which proves to the most sceptical the inaccuracy
of many things before deemed unquestionable ;
and then, in the amazement of the shock and re
coil, there is danger, that a disappointed credulity
may break away from all revelation, and sweep
recklessly into the darkness of infidelity. Never
fear the truth, and never fear to teach it. God
will take care of the faith of his people, and pilot
them safely through all the perils of their journey,
especially all perils coming from a knowledge of
the facts of his natural and supernatural king
doms. 2. But how, says the objector, are you to sepa-

8o THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
rate the divine from the human in revelation ;
and if human judgment can be permitted to effect
this, what security is there that it may not in the
end fritter away the whole record? This argu
ment is conclusive to many minds, and begets a
sort of suspense of faith ; believing there is a
human element, and yet fearing for the safety of
the ark of God, if it should prove true.
The first observation pertinent here is, that we
have already attempted to separate the divine from
the human in the canonical and apocryphal books,
ourselves pronouncing authoritatively which con
tains the divine element, and which the human.
This judgment may be right, and it may be
wrong. We may possibly have rejected some in
which the voice of God might have been heard,
should we reverently listen ; and have admitted
some for which man alone was responsible.
Luther called the epistle of James an epistle of
straw, and we find much divine teaching in it
notwithstanding. The Council of Trent found
the divine voice in all the apocryphal books,
while we think otherwise. What terrific disasters
have followed on these several conflicting judg
ments? We have all the books, admitted and
rejected ; and may thus avail ourselves of all they

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 8 1
teach of good : and do in fact avail ourselves of
it in this very way. Is there any faintness at the
heart of Christendom to-day, by reason of these
discrepancies? Nor would any greater difficulty
follow any further selection in this same depart
ment. In truth, each hearer or reader silently and
unconsciously makes it for himself every time he
reads or listens to the reading of the records.
He may not, in so many words, discredit so
much, and admit the rest ; but he permits it to
pass by and over him ; he gives it a quiet and
decorous hearing, and then dismisses it as some
thing which is to enter in no way into the web
and woof of thought or character. His treatment
of the message indicates plainly, that he does not
regard it as divine. I admit that in so doing he
may be mistaken ; but I am now concerned only
with the fact that this selecting process is carried
on, and not with the accuracy of its results.
3. But if such separation of the divine and
human cannot be accurately made once for all,
and that become true for every other man which
is true for me, it is only another indication of
God's wisdom, in so intermingling the food for
the soul with that which tempers it to our aliment
and good, that we can incorporate into our intel-

82 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
lectual, moral, and spiritual system that which is
suited to our wants and necessities. To supply
the needs of our human infirmity, the divine aid
must condescend to the plane of the human,
using human instrumentalities, and pouring the
divine floods through the channels of human
adaptation, that we may not be dazzled and
blinded by the light, which, when properly re
ceived, is the life of the soul. And so Christ
veiled and blended his uncreated effulgence in
human conditions, and while he spake as a man
was dutiful as a son, generous and loving as a
friend, yet rayed out his power with the au
thority of God. Will you point to the man, in all
the ages, who ever yet drew the line of separation
between the human and the divine element in
Christ; or could say, with authority, here the
divine ended and the human alone was left? And
if this be impossible, and the attempt savors some
thing of blasphemy, who shall say that may be
done with the written word, when with the incar
nate word it is impossible? Can you separate
spirit from matter in your own being, — the life"
from the texture which life animates, thought
and affection from the brain through which they
act? No ; and yet you live and act and feel, and

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 83
are no less efficient in the duties and responsibili
ties of life, than if you could file away every
faculty and function of your being in a nicely
labelled and appropriate psychological depart
ment. Man is not the flute or organ, and God's voice
the music. No : the tones are human not less
than the instrument; but all along there breathes
through their harmonies diviner notes, and blends
the music of a loftier song than mortal mind con
ceived or mortal lips could utter.
4. But, says the objector, it tends to rationalism
and the weakening of authority in religion. If
this is said in the Papal sense, it is its best re
commendation : we are intently bent on such
rationalism, and the weakening of all such au
thority. It is only a blind credulity that ignores
the processes of the understanding, and bows ser
vilely to the decrees of a spiritual despot, not the
first element of Christianity in it all. But if the
objection carries with it the idea that we are to
submit every allegation of Scripture to the arbit
rament of reason before giving it credence, we
deny that it has any such tendency. When God
speaks, man should reverently hear and obey.
That he should utter what the reason could not

84 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
discover is to be expected, and marks the divinity
of the message ; that the unmistakable stamp of
supernaturalism should blaze out all over the
record is exactly the signet of its genuineness.
Inspiration never supplied the deficiencies of hu
man indolence, any more than the insolence of
human pride. Is there any danger we shall cut
loose from a spiritual system and the ethical ob
ligations of a universal religion, because we dis
miss a priest or Levite who affects a mysterious
knowledge of spiritual things, when we know
him often to be a mere dolt or charlatan in mat
ters of literature, science, or philosophy? Quack
ery in any department is always superlatively
profound. As we distrust more and more human
authority, so we cling closer to the authority of
God.

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 85

CHAPTER IX.
T TAVING thus disposed of the objections usu
ally urged against giving up the dogma of
a verbal and plenary inspiration of the whole
record, it remains to state some of the difficulties
in maintaining it, in addition to those before
mentioned. We have already seen that this was
not an article of the early church : it has been
developed by degrees since the era of the Refor
mation, and, mainly, since the Westminster As
sembly gave the sanction of its authority to the
doctrine : it was founded on no reason, but was
simply a dogmatic statement put forth for the
acceptance of the churches.
So the great diversities of style and thought,
the discrepancies already adverted to, show that,
while the uniform object and intent was the reve
lation and enforcement of moral and religious
truth, suited to man's fallen nature as working in
the lines and surrounded by the forces of a spirit
ual system, it came to us clothed in the mental

86 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
habits and variant modes of expression, figure,
illustration, and allusions, which men of different
types of mind and intellectual culture present;
showing that, while man delivered God's mes
sage, it was God also who spake through and
in him. The voice was the voice of Jacob, while
the hands were the hands of Esau. Were it
God's voice only, we should expect uniformity of
style and find it.
So, too, the translator would need the same
spirit of infallibility as the writer, and especially
in putting into intelligible form the ancient, un
pointed, and unvowelled Hebrew. Of all trans
lations, the more modern are admitted to be most
correct ; and this is just as we should expect, as
we now have profounder scholars than Jerome,
or the Seventy, or the Doctors of King James, or
Tindale or Wickliff or Luther?
This idea of verbal infallibility has been the
prolific mother of more absurd glosses, and fanci
ful and spiritualizing interpretation of the text,
than all other sources put together. Hidden
meanings searched for in the history, in the words,
in the letters ; some fanciful analogy paraded as
the true sense and occult meaning of it all. Every
parable, every miracle, had its spiritual counter-

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 87
part, in which its true significance lay concealed ;
the Bible was a riddle, to be spelled out by the
skill of the initiated. Every letter was divine,
because, wrapped up in its coatings like a precious
seed within its shell, lay its mysterious and germi-
nant life, to be called forth by the masterly breath
of spiritualized interpretation.
But, more than all, these views of verbal infal
libility place God in nature, and God in revela
tion, in direct and irreconcilable antagonism.
God is One : " with him is no variableness, nor the
shadow of turning." God in nature we can see,
feel, handle, understand, — not, it is true, the
First Great Cause, and all the modes of his work
ing in the pre-historic ages ; but the facts and
laws of nature are being laid bare to the scientific
eye with an accuracy that leaves no room for
question or mistake. Every institution of learn
ing is filled with these developments. The eager,
anxious minds of the young are filled with
them ; and grave professors are in deep solici
tude as to how far they are to invalidate the
verbal inspiration of the record. There is mis
take somewhere on the literal theory : is it in
the scientific facts? That is impossible. What
remains but either that the records of inspiration

88 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
are all human and fallible, or partly human and
partly divine.
We have adverted to so many of the proofs
that the Bible contains a divine communication
already, that we might safely leave the argument
here ; having found that it was something more
than the outpourings of human genius, and yet
a genuine inspiration coming to man's ears and
heart through the agency of fallible humanity.
But the gravity of the theme requires a more
formal and logical statement of this our main and
affirmative proposition. We suppose, then, what
ever else may be true of it, that the inspiration
was of the man, and not simply of the language
he uttered, or the sentiment he conveyed. If God
spake to Moses or Joshua or Samuel by a person
age, and in an audible voice, such message was
addressed to his attention and memory. Just like
a communication received from a friend, he would
be required to impress it upon his memory, so as
to reproduce it in its substantial integrity, without
special reference further to its mere verbal dress
ing ; and the same remark applies to the vision
or the dream. These were penned down, or
delivered afterwards, as they were remembered ;
and perhaps the record of it written many years

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 89
after by another hand. How long after God ap
peared to Abraham in a dream did Moses, or
whoever wrote it, transcribe this ; and from what
record was it taken? So Balaam blessed Israel,
taking up his parable and speaking what God
bid him ; and this prophecy seems to have been
uttered in a trance, while the Spirit of the Lord
was upon him, but recorded long after, and
probably from tradition.
The inspiration, then, did not dispense with or
supersede human faculties, — attention, percep
tion, memory, judgment, — and the free use of
them all. There was such an infusion and inter-
penetration of human faculty by a divine strength
and spirit, that the mind was nerved, exalted,
stimulated ; the imaginative faculty winged with
fiery vigor, and glorified with supernal light : but
this was not all. There was added or put into
this human vehicle what it was to carry or de
liver, — matters which otherwise it could not
know ; something ab extra the mind ; information
coming to it from without, not self-originating ;
a supersensuous panorama hung up before the
soul in its trance or vision or dream, which it was
to note and remember and transcribe in the sym
bols of language fit for its expression to others.

90 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
But while this communication to the man was
divine, the language and imagery of the man
were human, as much as the man was human who
employed it. So when the message was by an
audible voice, it was a voice uttered to the pro
phet, and not in or through the prophet. The
man stood all the while between God and the
people ; and three things must always concur
to make the message verbally divine, — first,
that the prophet has a communication in human
speech, not ideally but verbally; second, that
he delivers the exact language ; and, third, that
the historian write it in that literal and exact
phraseology. How much Bible truth will bear
this test? So that, approximately, we arrive at
this result : When the writer of Scripture dealt
with the human, with that in nature or life or
history, which had in it only the human element ;
what he might know by tradition or observation
or reflection or history, — he was left to employ
those human faculties which in uninspired men
lead to the same results ; but when there broke
over his soul visions of the supernatural, as in
new revelations or prophecy, whether these con
cerned the affairs of heaven or of earth, man's des
tiny in time or in eternity, there came with them

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 91
the voice of God unquestioned and infallible,
which the intuitions of conscience, as well as the
unfoldings of history, stamp with unmistakable
verification. Then, again, every prophetical announcement
uttered by the writers, — those relating to the
Messiah ; those predicting the fate of nations,
kings, empires, cities ; the burden of Egypt, Tyre,
Nineveh ; the fate of Jerusalem and of the Jews,
— all these and more, with which the sacred
record is gemmed, and which the ages affirm and
exemplify, with a steady, wonderful, and ever
growing fulfilment, so convincing that it requires
the hardihood of a debauched atheism to deny it,
— all these are none other than the voices of God
to man ; for no human wisdom could forecast
these great events which come rolling up in their
order, out of the mutations and developments of
time. God's eye alone sees them ; God's hand
alone controls them. Natural religion may dis
close God's natural attributes ; and these were
known dimly to Socrates and Cicero and Seneca,
to the moralists and philosophers of Paganism.
But God's moral attributes, and the wonders of
his spiritual kingdom, his redemptive system of
grace and glory, the unimagined mysteries of im-

92 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
mortality, must be revealed : they are supernatural
facts, and demand supernatural disclosure. And
so the historic economy of the early Hebrew ages
was rudimental of all that followed, and is fol
lowing to-day : one spirit, one purpose, one plan,
runs like a golden thread from Adam to Christ.
It was unrolled as fast as humanity could bear it ;
down, down, into the future ages, it winds and
sparkles, capable of binding into one harmonious
whole the church of the Living God, which he
hath redeemed out of the whole earth . He spake in
prophecy and miracle, in history and providence ;
but last of all, by his Son. He came in human
ity as well as to humanity, and thus declared
God, not in word and idea only, but in vivid and
practical exemplification. Heaven stooped to
earth ; and the beatitudes of the Godhead shed
their radiance and beauty over all its wayward
and weary populations. The impartation of
moral and religious truth, and the inculcations
of duty, in addition to its prophetical office, seem
to be the burden of inspiration ; and as we find
these in the record, so they " find us." Accepting
" God in Christ " as the end and burden of it all,
as related to man's deliverance from sin, the
Christian has no practical difficulty in finding the

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD- 93
divine element, for it "finds him." The medicine
goes after the disease to cure it. The divine
strength leaps into human impotence, to give it
vigor ; the divine wisdom makes human ignorance
wise, divine peace displaces human sorrow, and
divine forgiveness covers and counteracts human
sin ; divine hope spans the human death-couch
with immortal glory, and gives all the meaning
it has to this round of trial and care men call life.
Not find the divine voice ! it goes after the lost
sheep of the house of Israel ; it cries in the wil
derness of time. Through all the mistakes and
imperfections of men, — writers and readers and
preachers, prophets and teachers, — it speaks to
the soul with an authority not to be evaded or
misunderstood. In reading these precious revela
tions, we are not to call in aid the critical faculty,
that we may separate as we go along the human
from the divine. We may, indeed, set that down
as human which our knowledge has proved to be
such, in science or in history ; but how slight and
unimportant and uninfluential is all this to the
true body and genuine import of these Scrip
tures ! spots on the sun, motes in the sunbeam, a
handful of chaff in a granary of wheat, a few
dry stems in a field of verdure, just enough to

94

THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE

prove a human element, and save the divine from
rejection. We are not, then, to suffer disturbance
from the inroads of textual and historical criti
cism, or be haunted by the grim suspicion, that
what so purifies and cheers us is not after all
divine. No ; but sitting down to this feast as
of God's providing, eat lovingly and thankfully
what is fitted to our spiritual nature ; for on it
alone can we feed and live : " not in the parch
ment or the ink ; not in the vocables or phrases
or language ;" not in the style, prosaic or poetic,
in which it is conveyed to us ; not in the transla
tion or glosses ; but in the divine thought and sen
timent wrapped up in the language, and which
requires as much divine aid and enlightenment
for its recipiency as for its communication, — does
the potency and heavenliness of the message re
side. Isaac Taylor, in his " Spirit of Hebrew
Poetry," page 77, instances the twenty-third Psalm
as wholly divine, and as yet wholly human ; the
latter in respect to its artificial construction, its
metrical composition. " Every phrase and allu
sion is metaphoric, nothing literal, — the Lord
a shepherd of souls — green pastures — still wa
ters — paths of righteousness — valley of the
shadow of death — rod and staff — table — anoint-

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 95
ing oil — overfull cup — house of Lord — ever
lasting abode."
But figures and symbols are incidents of the
human mind ; they are adaptations to its limits ;
they are the best that can be done in regard to
the things of the spiritual life. But divine thought
is not conditioned in any manner, certainly not
by metaphor or symbol. Now look again at this
ode, with its array of human metaphor or symbol.
"In its way down three thousand years or more,
it has penetrated the depths of millions of hearts ;
it has gladdened the homes of destitution and dis
comfort; it has whispered hope and joy amidst
tears to the utterly solitary and forsaken, whose
only refuge was Heaven. Beyond all range of
calculation have these dozen lines imparted a
power of endurance under suffering, strength in
feebleness, and kept alive the flickering flame of
religious feeling in hearts nigh to despair ; " and
this through the divine element begetting a tran
quil trust in God, and a loyal and unshaken re
liance upon his love and faithfulness. In its
relation to the religious life and health of the
soul, it is wholly divine, fraught with life-giving
energy. So, too, may a psalm be poetically and divinely

96 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
true, and at the same time scientifically false.
Look at the nineteenth Psalm, describing the sun
as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
rejoicing as a strong man to run a race, " his
going forth is from the end of the heavens, and
his circuit unto the ends of it ; " and yet, as to us,
he has neither circuit nor going forth. But the
inspired import of the magnificent image, couched
in this figure, is as true, and will remain so to the
end of time, as if it embodied the astronomic
verity, according to the teachings of Galileo.
The misconception of the poet, as to the facts of
physical science, in no way affects the grandeur
or significance of the sublime lesson he was read
ing to the soul of the glory and majesty of God,
as declared to man in the universe around and
above him, or in the law, designed to purify and
save him.
And so I might designate a thousand instances,
from poetry sacred and profane, where the sweet
est of moral and spiritual truths are conveyed
through figures and symbols scientifically false,
yet perhaps, as in the rising and setting of the
sun, apparently and popularly true ; for it may
yet be true that the sun has his circuit, for it is
conjectured, that the universe with which we are

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 97
immediately connected moves, in its grand orbit
of six hundred millions of years, round one of
the fixed stars in Pleiades. Is this the sweet in
fluence of Pleiades referred to in Job ? Who can
tell? Nor does the existence of the human ele
ment invalidate the divine any more than the
presence of the divine renders the human of per
manent and eternal obligation. What ! because
Moses did not head a procession of two millions
over the Red Sea, am I therefore absolved from
the obligations imposed by Christ our Master?
Because Jeroboam did not lose three hundred
thousand warriors in one battle, are virtue and
truth, benevolence and love, no longer Christian
duties? Because the sun and moon did not stand
still for Joshua to smite his enemies, am I there
fore licensed to cheat and lie and steal ?
And so, on the other hand, because Moses
directed the killing of all the Moabite women
who had been married, and the making slaves
of the young, is this allowable in modern war?
Because Samuel hewed Agag in pieces, may we
lawfully murder prisoners of war in cold blood?
Because the ancient patriarchs and prophets had
hundreds of wives and concubines, is Mormon
polygamy a divine institution? 7

98 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
Many things were done as political necessities,
in the early ages, which in us would be the bold
est of crimes ; and so we mark the progressive
steps of humanity from barbarism to Christian
civilization, from the rude to the refined, from
the immature concrete to the comprehensive ab
stract, from empirical instances to general laws ;
the world educated, in brain and heart, out of its
rough and unspiritual states into the pure ethical
condition contemplated in the sermon on the
mount. What remains, then, but that we receive
the Scriptures as containing the pure word of
God, and all things necessary to our Christian
culture in time, and our eternal felicity in the life
which is to come ? Nothing essential to this is of
man : he is the medium of its communication ;
but the truth is of God. Did a devout and loving
soul ever yet mistake it? Is not the promise,
that Christians should be let into all truth, as ap
plicable to its reception as to its communication?
Are we not to try the spirits? Is there not a
spiritual consciousness in the spiritual body, as
well as in each member of it, that selects and
appropriates to its needs the divine element with
an intuitive and infallible science. No need of
selections and criticisms and separations. The

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 99
human element is no more than the blur of a type,
or the mispaging of a sentence, and where it
clearly exists, it compasses often a divine end ;
but it accounts for all mistakes, and covers all
imperfections. The record is still the Word of God, and the
only living reformatory power that has survived
the changes which have come over all the works
of man. His kingdoms, dynasties, policies, phi
losophies, religions, — these have flourished and
fallen, gone like the Pharo's lights, that have dis
appeared one by one from all the high headlands
and promontories of the world. Star after star
has faded, light after light gone out; all but this,
which grows brighter and purer as the ages wane,
not because it shines from towers whose founda
tions rest on the rocks of Time, but because its
life is fed, and its radiance glitters, from the fin
gers of God.
We have thus tried to find out the truth in this
much-vexed question of biblical inspiration and
infallibility. There is room, doubtless, for honest
questions and differences. We think, to a candid
mind the suggestions we have made should not
be wholly unsatisfactory. Not that the subject is
cleared of all mystery ; for, in the nature of it,

IOO THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
it is incomprehensible. We believe as a fact,
that there are three persons or manifestations,
yet one God ; but no human intellect ever yet
comprehended the fact, nor could a thousand
Nicene Councils state it in apprehensive formula.
We believe that we are body and soul, matter and
mind, acting and interacting to make up the man ;
but did any one ever yet explain the modus of
these influences? We believe God's Spirit, acting
on the human spirit, — by suggestion, by re
straint, by purification, — makes it over in his own
spiritual image; but no man, from Nicodemus —
who staggered over the mystery — up to this
hour, ever comprehended the way of its opera
tion. Life, light, heat, gravitation, magnetism,
electricity, mental force, all beyond our compre
hension ; and yet every one of them working on
the plane of the natural. How, then, can spirit
ual things, whose realm is in the supernatural
only, — however it may subordinate and mould
all nature to its uses, — how shall these be made
easy for reason to grasp, or intellect to fathom?
With the frivolities of a fastidious and intellectual
sophistication, with the ironies and mockeries of
an epicurean criticism, with the bitter scorn often
concealed beneath an affectation of candor, — with

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. IOI
none of these have we any patience, sympathy,
or communion. Their well-bred affectations are
but the concealments of an infidelity growing out
of the rank soil of a profligate life. There is a
secret hope, that man is without God in the world ;
that scientific facts may at length dissolve this
faith of the ages, and carry the sanctions of moral
and spiritual law away with it. There is exulta
tion in the ranks of these scorners when any new
development seems to make inroads upon the
verbal accuracy of the record? Vain and delu
sive hope ! shallow and baseless exultation !
They are not looking for truth, but for confirma
tion of a lie held fast in the right hand. "Their
unbelief is not the product of reason, the upshot
of an argument, or the result of a determined
controversy. No : this infidelity or atheism or
pantheism, which walks the streets with a noise
less camel-tread, breathing in the ear from be
hind, — this rife infidelity is the natural outspeak
of intellectual and scientific sophistication, and of
that relish for frivolous and forbidden pleasures,
which renders the tastes fastidious, lulls the moral
consciousness, falsifies the social affections, and
so perverts the reasoning faculty that evidence
produces an effect in an inverse ratio to its actual

102 THE DIVINE-HUMAN IN THE
force. What then? Will the Bible be shorn of
its power, and lose for ever the hold of its grasp
on the fear and faith of the nations? Will men
no more confide in God's Fatherhood, or Christ's
love, or the Spirit's comfort? Will the sinner no
more repent, the saint no more rejoice ? Will the
bow of glory that spans the death-bed, dissolve
like the iris when the sun is set, and the Immortal
Hopes, that stand like white- winged angels at
the tomb's portals, fold their pinions and steal
away for ever? Is the earth, with all its busy
populations, "to swing blind and blackening in
the rayless air"? God forbid! Never! no,
never !
Clothed though it be in a human vesture, like
the Saviour of its prediction and its history, it is
yet the wisdom of God and the power of God
unto salvation. It shall take its effect upon hu
man nature in all its diversities and manifesta
tions ; gentle as the dew, germinant as the rain,
irresistible as the fiat of Omnipotence ; for that
which has gone forth out of his mouth shall not
return unto him void. High above the range of
all that is beautiful in philosophy, wonderful in
science, refining in art, controlling in morals,
authoritative in law, imperative in legislation, —

INCARNATE AND WRITTEN WORD. 103
goes sounding through the ages the potent whis
pers of the still, small voice. What the thunder,
and the tempest, and the wild winds, could not
do, it will accomplish. They can only smite and
kill and destroy. But this, this only, can re
create and harmonize, exalt and glorify ; building
up nations, as well as men, on the stabilities of
truth and virtue, stronger always as they hold
more firmly to the record in which lie couched,
yet luminous, the eternal verities of God.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
OLDER THAN THE CREEDS.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
OLDER THAN THE CREEDS.

PART I.
2 Cor. v. 15: "And he died for all, that they which live
should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him
which died for them, and rose again."
r I "HE grand power of the Cross is its motive
power. It operates to save men by no mag
ical process of necromancy or legerdemain, but
by its influence upon their lives and characters.
As the healing of the bitten Israelite in the wil
derness was not simply in the serpent lifted up,
but by the faith in God's word with which he re
garded it ; so the cross of Christ has its healing
and cleansing from the bite of sin, by the faith
and love in the soul which looks to it ; for " as
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so
also shall the Son of man be lifted up, that who
soever believeth in him should not perish, but
have everlasting life;" "and I, if I be lifted up,

108 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
will draw all men unto me." It is through be
lieving, and by being drawn to Christ, that his
death operates to save; it is, therefore, only as
men are found believing, and exhibiting the fruits
of faith, that Christ's work takes effect in and
upon them. It must be remembered also in this
connection, and when speaking of the cross of
Christ, that whatever part or feature of his work
is at any time spoken of, it is usually inclusive of
the whole. Thus the cross, the death, the blood,
the sufferings, the incarnation of Christ, epitomize
and represent the whole redemptive economy, —
all that he was or did or suffered, from his con
ception to his crown ; from his infancy in Bethle
hem's manger to his exaltation at the right hand
of God in the heavens. Sometimes one feature
of his life or office- work or sacrifice, falls in
more appropriately and appositely to illustrate
and enforce the theme in hand, and sometimes
another ; as in that season of the year, and amidst
those solemnities which celebrate his infancy at
Christmas, all those incidents which go to make
our ideal of a beautiful childhood, as well as the
amazing condescension of God in humanity, are
most useful and fitting. And so every incident
in his career has in fact a twofold significance, —

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 109
one as it manifests the love of God to us, and the
other as it calls for a corresponding love in us,
and by us ; and showing how the devout and the
practical are but parts and different showings of
the same life of God in the human soul.
As Adam was the first man in the flesh, so
Christ is made the second Adam "as a quickening
spirit." As Moses was prophet and mediator be
tween God and his people, so Christ, like unto
Moses, is made the mediator of a new covenant,
founded on better promises. As Aaron was high
priest, to offer gifts and sacrifices ; so Christ, at
the end of the world, at the consummation of the
ancient and ritualistic economy, offered himself
once for all, and became at once both priest and
sacrifice. As the outspread wings of the cheru
bim and the golden plate covered the propitiatory
or " mercy-seat " above the ark, so Christ becomes
our Propitiatory, covers, remits, pardons our sins
through the faith we exercise in him. And so he
is the Captain of our salvation, by whose aid and
skill we conquer ; our Exemplar, whose work
and spirit we are to imitate ; our Prophet, to whose
words of warning we are to listen. And so, when
the deeper springs of gratitude and sympathy are
to be touched, the immeasurable splendors of his

IIO THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
Godhead are contrasted with the lowliness and
weakness and sorrow and sacrifice of his earthly
career; taking upon him our nature, made under
the law, subject to all the afflictions and punitive
evils which encompass humanity, shrinking from
no scorn, no sorrow, no sacrifice, no suffering,
not even death itself, that so he might get himself
beneath our deepest degradation, in the intimacy
of a Godlike sympathy and the power of a God
like exaltation. And so, when his apostles
preached "Jesus and the resurrection," it was
Jesus before the world, in the world, beyond the
world. And so when that cross was lifted up,
it was the same cross planted in God's heart from
the eternities ; for it is only by a cross of sacrifice
that the sting of sin can be removed, and that
cross borne on the bleeding shoulders of God.
Oh, this dread mystery of sacrifice and suffering !
Yet out of it are the issues of life everlasting. Is
God impassive ? Is he not full of affection, and
so, by the necessities of his nature, in s}rmpathy
and feeling for every wandering and godless soul.
And this brings into prominence the first an
nouncement of the Apostle, " He died for all."
His death, and the manner of it, was so marked
an event in his career, that it might well be used,

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS- III
and carry with it the weight and significance of
? all that preceded, and all that followed. So the
resurrection is often used in the same connection,
and any exposition is narrow and unsound that
limits either to the mere verbal expression. Death
is the usual termination of man's connection with
time, and all the events that occur under the sun ;
and if that death is connected with, or results
from, the preparation of a whole life, which has
been passed in equipment to make it a heroism or
a sacrifice, we may well give a prominence to the
death ; for the issues of the whole life are gath
ered there. All the study, all the toil, the self-
denial, culture, training, schooling, devotion,
sacrifice, — the whole life and character, — are
condensed and crowded into this great heroism,
come out in eternal bloom in this one transcend
ent issue. And so the patriot who lays down his
life in battle for his country ; and so the philan
thropist, whose toils and efforts are one long death
while he lives in hospitals and sicknesses ; and so
the servant of Christ who renounces all the world
can proffer, and dies, like Heber and the noble
army of ancient martyrs, that the glad tidings
may reach the dead in sin, — all in their measure
crown a life of consecration and nobility, by lay-

112 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
ing it on the altar of humanity and of God.
Christ's death, or redemptive work, was for all :
it was for humanity, for the race. It had, and
could have, no exclusiveness in its own nature.
It was fitted to work the same blessed effects in
every human heart and life ! " As face answers
to face in a glass, so the heart of man to man : "
what destroys sin and begets faith in one, destroys
sin and begets faith in another, and Christian
experience, the world over, verifies this. If it is
not effective upon all, it is not that it is inappro
priate, but that it is not embraced. Nor are any
provisions of God wasted ; for one soul needs the
full power that is in them, and the world aggre
gately needs no more. What is it but God's ter
rible oath, that he has " no pleasure in the death
of the sinner," but will pardon, yes, has already
pardoned him, if he will repent and believe? It
is his proclamation of amnesty to a world of rebels.
It is for every one who has renounced his alle
giance to God. " Come unto me, all ye ends of
the earth, and be ye saved, for I am God : " is the
proclamation wasted and void, if all that hear fail
to come?
Not only is it true that Christ's mission and
work was for all, but the mode is also disclosed

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 13
of how it is to be made effective in and upon us.
Now was the fit occasion, if ever, for Paul to lay
the sure foundations of scholastic soteriology ; he
was on the high theme of Christ's vicarious suf
ferings and death. He comprehended the whole
race of Adam within the designed benefits of that
amazing sacrifice. Why was it necessary? what
was it for? were the great questions pressing
directly upon his attention. Now when he speaks
he will surely anticipate the dogmatic theology
of modern orthodoxy ; he will discourse of God's
vengeance duly glutted in the cross, or Justice
satisfied and sheathing her bloody sword, of sin
ners enough chosen and purchased by their exact
equivalent in agony. Surely, he will tell of the
covenant of works with Adam, and federal head
ships, and all of Adam's posterity sinning in him,
and imputations of criminality against the fact.
Now was the appropriate opening for settling for
ever these high questions, and putting all disbe
lievers in the governmental and commercial sys
tems for ever to silence. If the facts were s.o, it
was a high misdemeanor, not to say crime, in the
apostle to let such an occasion for righting the
world slip by. But hear him, " and that he died
for all," "that" what? that Justice might be satis-

114 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
fied in wreaking the penalties of sin on him?
No ! " but that his death might wring the inherent
selfishness out of the human heart, might be
made the motive force of a new and unselfish life,
"that they which live should not henceforth {i.e.,
after being made acquainted with this great fact)
live unto themselves, but unto him that died for
them, and rose again. What a wonderful sim
plicity and beauty in all this ! And how God
works in and through man in accordance with the
law of the human mind and soul ! As if he had
said, naturally every man lives to and for him
self and seeks his own. Men are miserable and
sinful because and as they get into this condition
of selfish isolation, gathering about them and
theirs what of wealth and comfort and honors
and ease and fashion they can clutch, and build
ing walls of adamant between their hearts and
the broken hearts of their suffering fellow-men?
Now stop, immortal man, and see the wickedness
as well as folly of all this. " Go to now, ye rich
men," &c. What will you do when God deals
with you as with Job, strips you naked, stirs up
your nest, and gives to the howling hurricane the
bed of down where your young were nestled?
What then will come of selfish isolation but an-

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 15
guish and despair? The sympathy and love of
mankind are your only hold upon your race :
cut these ligaments, and you float a waif upon
life's currents, the sport and orphanage of nature ;
for even God rejects a heart devoid of all feeling
for its kindred, for "if a man love not his brother
whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom
he hath not seen." Every thing about you is
organized for a different result, — home, society,
the body-politic, — all penetrated through and
through by a principle of mutual dependence and
relationship. Selfishness is suicide, stabbing your
own soul. It is at war with all that is wisest and
best in your own reason and conscience. It is a
mean, miserly, cowardly quality, without dignity,
respectability, or manhood. And now, if nothing
else can move you, look at that cross, and him
who suffered on it; who for our sakes became
poor, that we through his poverty might be rich ;
who humbled himself, &c, that, through and by
all those overpowering motives which such devo
tion and sacrifice awaken, you may likewise
learn the great secret of spiritual power that
dwells in sacrifice, and live henceforth not unto
yourself, but unto Him that died for you and rose
again. This is a leverage more powerful than

Il6 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
that of Archimedes; for it lifts the world, holds
it, like gravity, in harmonious circuits round the
great Sun of Righteousness. And now it may
be observed, —
i. That we are instrumentally affected, and
brought into this law of sacrifice, by looking at
the example of Christ. There is no cause for
the alarm that some feel, lest we should degrade
and discrown the Sariour by regarding him sim
ply as our Pattern of all goodness, gentleness,
sympathy, and love. No : the example he set
before us was that we should follow it, and tread
in his steps ; and so anxious was the apostle to
follow him that he prayed that he might know
even the "power of his resurrection, the fellow
ship of his sufferings, being made conformable
to his death." " Follow me," says he, " as I follow
Christ." Why not an example to us? Was he
not manifested to take away sin? and can those
who war with principalities and powers do better
and more valiantly than fight with the weaponry
which Christ wielded, and arm themselves with
the armor in which he conquered? Are we called
to duty? Look to Him who marked the path of
duty all the way from Jordan to Calvary with his
blood. Are we called to have faith? Look at

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 17
Him who healed the sick, restored sight to the
blind, fed the multitude, and walked the waves,
through faith. Are we called to prayer? See
the frequenter of the lone mountain-peak, where
he uttered in the ear of God the plaints of his
sorrowful soul. Are we called to self-denial?
Think of the glory he laid by, that he might deny
himself and take up his cross. Are we called to
sacrifice? Who knows it, or ever knew it, as he
did, even to the laying down of his life? To
sympathy? "Touched with a sympathy within,
he knows our feeble frame," &c. Ah ! was there
ever an ideal so perfect, so safe, to follow, as this
actual being? No other like him since the ages
began, nor ever will be till their close ! What
human model without its imperfections, its ex
cesses, or its deficiencies ? If beautiful as a dream,
yet, here or there, there is defect in form or atti
tude or coloring. But this manifestation of God
in humanity is a portrait on which humanity may
gaze for ever without idolatry, and pattern after
for ever without fear of rivalry. I shall be satis
fied, says the Psalmist, when I awake in thy like
ness, — Christ's likeness. What a beatitude of
supernal beauty and delight !
2. This selfishness is conquered, moreover, by

Il8 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
the gratitude which the consideration of Christ's
death and sacrifice awakens. There are natures
upon whom the calls of duty fall powerless, who
are restive under the discipline of rules and com
mands, who rebel more fiercely as authority lifts
her sword, but who melt in contrition and grati
tude when they become conscious that a great
boon has been conferred upon them without re
quest, without knowledge even, — some dread
calamity averted, of which they had no warning,
and could not prevent; some wondrous benefit,
coupled with sacrifices which were all unthought
of, and are even now incomprehensible. How
the heart heaves and labors as it takes it in !
Some young, beautiful, devoted mother, who gave
her life for her child ; some friend enduring sick
ness and penury, that another might have abun
dance. Love does strange things, even among
the lapsed children of sin. And now what has
God done for us? Without our knowledge or
asking, builded heaven with glory ineffable ;
paving its streets with star-dust, and filling its
temples with himself, that his people may rejoice,
and throwing open its gates so wide that every
prodigal may enter and live for ever. And when
he feeds on the husks, shall he not say, " In my

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 19
Father's house is bread enough and to spare : I
will arise and go to my Father?" and when he
comes back he realizes, by faith, the forgiveness
which precedes all spiritual comfort and all well-
grounded hope ; and these are new and super
added elements, by which the life of self is
driven out, and the life of Christ implanted.
Think you the pardoned prodigal, with the hot
tears of his father's forgiving love yet warm upon
his cheek, would go back to his wassail and
want? Would not that forgiveness seal for ever,
to the last throb of his repentant heart, the loy
alty once lost, but now regained ; the sacrifice
once scorned, but now desired, that he might
soothe and comfort the heart he had once torn
and outraged by his impiety?
3. And so God brings, in and over the renewed
soul, a loyal and ready acquiescence in all those
appointments designed to humble self, and devote
the life in sacrifice to Christ and his little ones.
Because more and more Christ lives in his people,
it is a life not their own, and yet shaping and
moulding theirs into its own image and likeness.
It is not the apprehension of this great truth in
tellectually or morally, but a divine life, entering
into the heart, and building itself royally into the

120 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
character by its spiritual indwelling and sanctify
ing power. It colors and ennobles thought and
aspiration ; it stimulates ambition ; it impels to
duty ; it wings praise like an archangel ; it opens
heaven to the eye of faith, and sees all the glori
fied train in full array, a cloud of witnesses to
the goodness and faithfulness of God.
And now let me say, that this outcasting and
repression of self, and living unto and for him
who died for us, in all modes of ready and willing
sacrifice, is the great central law of God's moral
and spiritual kingdom. Heaven itself is pillared
on this law. God's empire is throned not more
on sovereignty than on sacrifice. Love itself is
sacrificial ; and God is love. The redemptive
system sprang from the depths of the divine com
passions ; and Christ himself was this manifested
love. Read the throes of his Father's heart in
all the tender pleadings and expostulations which
come like a wail and lament from prophetic lips.
"How can I give thee up, O Ephraim?" &c.
Who has sacrificed more for man than God?
All that men may do for each other bears no
comparison to this, — the plan, the purpose, the
means, the life, the teachings, the sorrow, the
scorn, the cruelty, the death, the resurrection,

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 121
ascension, and advent of the Spirit, all the out
come of that sacrificial love which runs like a
golden thread through all God's dealings with
our race, and fastened for ever to his great
loving heart in heaven. And akin to this, and
working side by side with it, is that other wide
underlying principle which human selfishness is
so slow to learn, — the ultimate gain of sacrifice,
announced in those enigmatic words, " He that
findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth
his life for my sake shall find it." He who pre
fers his own comfort, enjoyment, ease, honor, to
that of others, shall lose his life ; for if he is
gratified in what he seeks, a selfish life is a life
lost. But how generally do all these accumula
tions slip from the grasp of the pursuer ! and
then in the penury he feared, in the sorrow he
would have avoided, in the dishonor and shame
he could not think of facing, he reaps as he has
sown, and suffers not simply loss, but damage
fanged with the agonies of unavailing remorses.
But a life lost in sacrifices, — there is a perennial
bloom in that. Lost ! it is only the buried seed.
It seems to die : hunger bites it, cold benumbs it,
labor wearies it, watchings sap its strength, and
the eye closes when its last look of love is given ;

122 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
but in that seed there is germinant and immortal
life. It has even now sent up its stem to the
clouds, and made all the heavens radiant with its
coronal of glory ; while its delicious perfume
goes up a sweet-smelling savor to God. Was a
life of devotion and sacrifice ever lost? Never!
No patriot on the battle-field, no soother of the
dead and dying, no watcher by the sick man's
pillow, no weeper over human woe, no enlight-
ener of the ignorant, no guide to the benighted
and wandering, ever lose their reward; not
simply God's approval in the day of account,
— which includes every thing truly, — but they
leave a wake on the billows of time, they become
a spiritual force in the mutabilities of society that
can never be lost or die out. Some humble life
seemingly lost lies long in the womb of history,
like the grain three thousand years old in the
tombs and pyramids ; but God giveth it a body as
it pleases him : its resurrection hour will strike.
And lo ! it springs up in flower and fruitage, that
shall never wither or decay. History repeats it
self in everlasting reproduction over all the realms
of Christian sacrifice. Will the influence of
Christ's sacrifice ever be lost? Is it now on the
wane ? Can it ever know any alteration or abate-

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 123
ment? Shall it not stand forth with an influence
hale and potent that shall outshine and outlive
the stars? And so of every other sacrifice, pro
vided only it be for Christ, not for whim or fancy,
not to fly from the world, not for affectation or
singularity ; but for an intelligent and honest love
of the Great Sacrifice, who has disclosed to men,
that this law of sacrifice is yet, in the highest
sense, a law of recompense, — saving the life that
is lost for his sake.
How little has man in his wisdom comprehended
of this deepest of all philosophies, — this gain in
losing, this life in dying, this fruition in depriva
tion, this wealth in poverty, this strength in weak
ness, this having nothing yet possessing all things,
— which informs and vivifies the whole round of
Christian duties, and underlies the whole circle
of Christian sacrifices ! And yet how prominent
it stands in the forefront of those jubilant utter
ances which break from the lips of Paul, as he
recounts the loss and the gain of his apostolic
warfare !
If the foregoing views may be relied on as
correct, we see the folly of all those speculations
upon the efficacy of Christ's work, which would
limit it to an elected class, as though it would be

124 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
wasted and lost in part, if provided for all, }'et
secured to few ; as though it was a transaction
irrespective of man ; the payment of so much
suffering for so many souls in a vulgar and com
mercial sense, and only those were provided for
who actually came, and God was insincere in
offering life and salvation to every creature ; con
signing to damnation those who rejected a Saviour
never provided for them, and refusing a pardon
never intended to be given. To this complexion
comes this absurdity of a limited atonement, and
a provision for the redemption only of God's elect.
This scholastic heresy has been more highly dis
honoring to God, and a fouler stumbling-block in
the way of man's salvation, than all the scoffing
and ribaldry that infidelity ever uttered. What
limit was there to God's proclamation of pardon?
None : it was wide as the woe it sought, and
ample as God's unstinted love, could make it.
"He died for all," says the apostle. Who dare
contradict him, and say it was for part only of
our lapsed humanity? No reason is hinted at in
God's oracles for any necessities for this in the
exigencies of the divine government, as some
have imagined ; but everywhere it is made a
moral and spiritual leverage to awaken the

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 25
humari consciousness to the fact of sin and re
pentance, and so produce in man those moral
dispositions which bring him within the gracious
provisions of God's redemptive system, where he
may be pardoned through faith, and enlightened
and sanctified by the Spirit of truth. Christ came
to reconcile man to God ; and his own life was
part of this system of reconciliation, operating as
we have seen upon the conscience and heart, to
melt and mould it into his own image, through
this law of unselfish sacrifice. " Oh, the depth
both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! "
We see, moreover, that "living unto him who
died for us and rose again," supposes in us prin
ciples, and a character of virtue all our own;
real virtue and true principles, not imputed where
they have no existence in fact, but imputed be
cause they have a real and substantial existence ;
for God admits of no shams or pretences. His
imputations are according to truth. He imputes
sin where it is, and not where it is not. He im
putes righteousness where it is, and not where it
is not. There can be no transference of inno
cence to guilt, nor of guilt to innocence : it would
confound all moral distinctions and accountabili
ties, and carry ruin and disorder through all ranks

126 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
and orders of being. A pardoned sinner, born
of the Spirit, has in him the germs of a righteous
ness which need but opportunity to evolve in a
loyal and righteous life. And God accepts the
principle, because the performance is embedded
in it ; and this is the righteousness of Christ, cr
Christ's mode or plan of making a sinner right
eous, — not the personal righteousness of Christ,
transferred over and imputed to the sinner as his,
as some ignorantly teach and believe ; but the
sinner's own righteousness, yet assisted in its
growth and development by the presence and
power of the indwelling Christ. This whole
scholastic doctrine of imputation, as taught in
some schools of theology, is the veriest moon
shine of a distempered fancy ever conceived in
the brain of dreamers, who daub the fair temple
of God with untempered mortar. Christ a sinner,
— God stained with human guilt, — not in fact,
but by pretence and imputation, that the universe
may see how justly he was punished on the cross,
for sins which that same universe all the while
knew he had never committed ! Can human
audacity and blasphemy go further?
We learn, moreover, that there never is, or
was, or can be any conflict in the divine attributes

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 27
or counsels respecting us. God is one, and God
is our Saviour. He sent his Son, who was the
outcome of his Father's purpose and love ; and
hence this imaginary conflict between Justice and
Mercy — the one anxious to smite, and the other
more anxious to spare — had no existence except
in the heated brains of system-builders wiser than
God. God is of one mind; who can turn him?
and yet he is conceived often as if the Father
had one mind, one heart, one will ; the Son,
another heart, intelligence, and will ; and the
Spirit likewise : and so we paganize Deity, and
become tritheists and idolaters. As thinks and
feels and wills the Father, so thinks and feels
and wills the Son and the Holy Spirit. The in
finite God is one, yet he is finited in a triune
manifestation or personality, in condescension to
human conception ; for thus only is God accom
modated to our knowledge and needs.
Let us reverently and anxiously inquire, What
has Christ's work effected in our behalf? Has it
wrought in us those blessed results, — conviction
for our sin, repentance toward God, and faith in
our Lord Jesus Christ, which will eliminate from
our souls our native selfishness, and teach us
henceforth to live not unto ourselves, but unto
him who died for us, and rose again.

128 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT

PART II.
Micah vi. 6, 7, 8 : "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before
him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will
the Lord be pleased with thousand* of rams, and ten thou
sands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good ; and what
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
Micah vii. 18, 19: "Who is a God like unto thee, that par-
doneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the rem
nant of his heritage? he retaineth not his anger for ever,
because he delighteth in mercy. He will turn again, he will
have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities;
and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depth of the seas."
HP HE inquiry of the 6th verse, "Wherewith
shall I come before the Lord ? " was the cry
of humanity, the world over, ever since the idea
of a Supreme Being became lodged in its intel
ligent consciousness. The constitution and course
of nature bespeak a great First Cause or Causes,
and the vicissitudes of human life, and the flow
of historic events, a governing and providential
power, whose purposes are omnipotent, and whose

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 29
ways are past finding out. Disease, calamity,
death, track man with a certainty no skill can
baffle, and no wisdom foresee. But whether this
dreadful power be beneficent or demoniac, whether
the embodiment of goodness or of wrath, baffles
inquiry ; for sometimes in the guise of one, and
again in that of the other, do the heavens smile
and the thunders roar. And so the old Persian
magi deduced the idea of a dual force, two gods
antagonistic; each divine, yet one diabolic; one
the object of love, — being love itself, — the other
to be soothed and placated by offerings and sacri
fices, to allay his ire, and hold in abeyance his
vengeance. And gradually the idea of a su
preme beneficence faded out of the pagan heart,
and their worship degenerated into a system of
sanguinary and disgusting demonology ; their
gods, the most loathsome and frivolous idols of
wood and stone, four-footed beasts and creeping
things, hideous mockeries of humanity, — Bel
and Nebo, Dagon, Ashtaroth, Moloch, — whose
altars smoked with human victims, captives taken
in war, or children dedicated to the god. And so
ideal gods, as in Greece, supplanted these grosser
and sensuous demons, as a more refined taste and
imagination succeeded these earlier and ruder

I30 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
distortions of fear. But while demonology be
came more classical and poetic, it retained all its
cruelty, and demanded the dearest idols of the
heart for its sanguinary altars. And so the Ro
man gathered his Pantheon, or assemblages of
the gods ; and the Gaul, Scandinavian, Briton,
and Druid bowed, to the mandate of the priest,
at the demon's shrine ; and thus even in Mexico,
where no tradition of a sacrifice had reached,
" the Aztec priest upon the teocallis beat the wild
war-drum made of serpent's skin," while up the
vast sides of that mount of sacrifice wound the
frantic devotees, that upon their ancient altar-
stone might flow, in crimson floods, the blood of
young men and maidens. Do we not remember
the beautiful and pathetic lines of Tennyson, called
"The Victims," in which this pagan demonology
is embodied? What marvel, then, that God's
chosen people, surrounded and touched at every
point by this pervading demonology, should at
length come to regard the God of Abraham
(Jehovah) as embodying the same wrath principle
in his nature, and as demanding his sacrifices, by
way of satisfaction or appeasement, like the gods
of the heathen; nay, not only so, but should
cause their own children to pass through the fires

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 13 1
of Moloch, and give their sons and their daughters
in expiation of their sins, — the fruit of their body
for the sin of their soul ! It was the fact and the
practice of this which put the inquiry into the
prophet's lips. It was the inquiry of pagan fear,
without God; and the answer was, "Yes: he is
pleased with burnt offerings and calves of a year
old, with thousands of rams, and ten thousands
of rivers of oil. Give the fruit of your body for
the sin of your soul : it will buy his favor, earn
his forgiveness, satisfy his wrath or justice.
He can be propitiated only with blood." But God
looked down upon this dreadful perversion and
mockery of his economy, — which, when truly
apprehended, indicated ever the cleansing and
homage of the worshipper, offering him no satis
faction for sin, but only an acknowledgment of
gratitude that provision was made for its forgive
ness without money or price, — and through the
prophet's lips rang out, upon such baseness and
recreancy, the blasts of his vehement and burn
ing indignation. "For when ye offer your gifts,
when ye make your sons to pass through the fire,
ye pollute yourselves with all your idols even unto
this day : and shall I be inquired of by you, O
house of Israel? As I live, saith the Lord God,

132 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
I will not be inquired of by you." Ezekiel xx.
31. — "Bring no more vain oblations: your new
moons and your sabbaths, your calling of assem
blies, I cannot away with ; it is iniquity, even the
solemn meeting. And when ye spread forth your
hands, I will hide mine eyes from you ; yea, when
ye make many prayers I will not hear : your
hands are full of blood." Isaiah i. 13-15. Even
the blood of their own children ! At the advent
of our Saviour, surrounding paganism had lost
none of its horrors, nor allayed any of its thirst
for blood. The Jew, after his return from cap
tivity, was not the same open idolater as before ;
but he did not the less prostitute the forms and
ceremonies given by Moses to purposes and ends
they were never intended to subserve. He col
ored them with the perversion of a pagan diabo
lism, on the one hand ; or degraded their beautiful
and significant types into a paltry and frivolous
ritualism of phylacteries and robes, of bands and
tippets, of days and times and new moons, of
mint and rue and cummin, so often and so severely
rebuked by our Lord, who never once in the
course of his ministry alluded directly to this idea
of divine satisfactions or expiations for sin. Yet
the doctrine he taught concerning the being and

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 133
nature of God, especially his Fatherhood, and
the way of salvation pointed out in the parables
of the unforgiving servant and of the Prodigal
Son, cut up root and branch, then and for ever,
the whole theory of satisfactions and equivalents
as effectually as if he had made it the theme of
distinct and specific reprobation, because it cut
away, in the doctrine of God's Fatherhood, the
whole foundation of diabolism, on which the
theory of expiation was founded. The placation
of demons rested upon expiations, — the fruit of
the body for the sin of the soul. But the Prodi
gal's loving Father needed no satisfactions to
himself or his justice, but only the satisfaction
of pouring over his repentant and returning prod
igal the unstinted ocean of his forgiveness. What
mockery to talk of equivalents for love, — the
love of a father or mother's heart, much more
that of God's ! Neither the word nor the idea
of satisfactions to justice or God, as a motive or
ground of forgiveness, occurs in the New Testa
ment. The idea is a contradiction, or felo de se,
as I shall show further on. For the first three
centuries, the church was struggling for toleration
and life, and had little leisure to attack the specific
and gigantic errors which prevailed in the pagan

134 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
nations around her ; and when afterwards she
came to settle her articles of faith, and propose
her dogmatic creeds, she found that this same
pagan element was largely incorporated with,
and blended in, the Hebraistic Christianism, that
looked upon Christ as the fulfilment literally of
every type of the Jewish economy, which the
church had come to regard as foreshadowing sat
isfactions and expiations, which, although not to
be seen anticipatively, might be found in the light
of retrospection, — visible by the stern lights of
history, though not to be seen from the bow.
And so, for twelve hundred years more, it matters
little what the church taught, or what councils
decreed, or popes or cardinals or monks preached,
until the voices of the Reformation broke upon
the ear of Europe, and loud protests rang over the
hills of Germany and England against the abuses
and despotisms of the prelacy, and the errors of
the papal power. Many glaring evils were at
tacked ; many noble principles were established,
— a free Bible, the right of private judgment,
justification by faith : but many errors were not
yet seen to be such in the dim light of those
morning hours. Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, Me-
Ianchthon, Zwingle, saw men as trees walking.

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 35
They were not agreed on many things now
deemed essential : they united on many points
now deemed erroneous. " Soteriology, or the
doctrine of Christ's satisfaction of divine justice
for human sin, was never established in the sym
bols of dogmatic theology until the middle of the
sixteenth century," says Professor Shedd, in his
"History of Christian Doctrine." We do not
deem it yet established, with all deference to the
learned professor ; on the contrary, what there
ever was of it is now crumbling and ready to
vanish away.
Men usually have their ideas colored by the
institutions and style of thought most prevalent
and popular in the age in which they live ; and
hence the views of the leaders and thinkers of
the Reformation on the attributes and govern
ment of God necessarily took the type and im--
press of the governments among men with which
they were familiar. These were simple unmixed
despotisms, both in State and Church. Francis I.
in France, Charles V. in Spain and as emperor
of Germany ; Henry VIII. in England, the Great
Anglican Pope ; Leo X. in Italy, temporal king
there, and spiritual potentate everywhere, — all
reigning by right divine and the grace of God,

136 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
which meant, as Motley says, "the steel-gloved
fist." The only prevailing idea of government at
all, was that of God's anointed ones ruling des
potically, and for their own pleasure and glory,
in the State and in the Church. Autocracy, civil
and ecclesiastical, stood like a mail-clad giant,
and swayed over Europe his sword of vengeance
and of doom. Only here and there, in the Swiss
Alps, were there signs of restiveness against the
tyranny of Savoy, as the echo of those peaks
were awakened by the cry for liberty.
What marvel, then, that God's sovereignty,
and God's decrees, and God's glory and will,
should stand prominently forth in the fields of
theology, as that of the king and the pope did in
the theatre of man's civil and political relations?
On the last, the people were nothing but puppets
in the fingers of the king and the priest, to be
squeezed at their pleasure for gain or glory. And
so, on the first, man, as the subject of govern
ment, was regarded simply as a being created to
stand by his sovereign's will in certain govern
mental relations, interwoven in a scheme of divine
policies, in which his personal good and happi
ness were no more concerned than that of a
wheel or cog in the ongoing of a vast and com-

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 137
plicated machine. Systematic divinity and God's
glory were supposed to swallow the whole man,
and make it necessary " that he should be willing
to be damned that he might be fit to be saved."
Calvin's Christian Institutes stand Upon the twin-
pillars of decrees and sovereignty, doctrines well
enough in some aspects, but held out of all rela
tion to other cognate and equally important truths.
Entertaining these views of the absoluteness of
God as a moral governor, sharpened by the severi
ties with which he punished the Israelites for their
sin ; and regarding it as their function {i.e. the
Reformers), to comprehend and be satisfied with
the principles upon which that moral administra
tion was conducted, so that no damage should
accrue to the stabilities of his wide outlying em
pire of spiritual powers, by a supposed conni
vance at sin, if it be seen to be too easily for
given, — this figment of divine satisfaction to
justice in the person of Christ was invented, that
it might be known through the wide universe,
that, in this mysterious way, " God was a just
God, and yet a Saviour ; " and that, on the cross,
sin was at once punished and forgiven. Very
crude and strange reasoners, some of these early
fathers ! The first thing that strikes us, in look-

138 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
ing at this scheme, is its inconsistency with the
scheme of sovereignty we have just considered,
— a sovereignty which carries on its forefront the
undisputed right, without question by man or
angel, to have mercy upon whom he will have
mercjs and to harden whom he will. And yet
dogmatic divinity feared for the stability of the
moral universe, and the integrity of the loyal
orders of his empire ; that all would lapse into
one wild weltering chaos of rebellion, unless it
could be made manifest that justice was satisfied,
and punishment for sin meted out to somebody :
God's sovereignty held to be so absolute that no
being had a right to question it, at one moment ;
and, at the next, so weak that it must explain the
how and the why, and pour over its doings the
lustre of self-vindication before a trembling sinner
will accept the richest boon it can give him. " A
convicted sinner," says Professor Shedd, "cannot
accept forgiveness unless he sees it is offered in a
way not to infringe the government of God."
Did the prodigal refuse forgiveness until he first
called for an explanation, and was satisfied that
it could be accorded with safety to the principles
of his father's government? What theological
drivel this, — putting the most royal bestowments

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS- 139
of sovereignty to the humiliating task of justify
ing its purposes and acts to the finite satisfaction
of a being it saved from ruin everlasting, whose
poverty it relieved, and whose guilt it pardoned !
God's infinite being and government on trial,
before the culprit who had all along defied and
disregarded both, that he might first be convinced
that no damage would come to either, if he con
descended to accept of the mercy they freely
offered him ! Could human insolence and auda
city go further? And yet this is precisely the
position in which this fiction of governmental sat
isfactions leaves this infinitely important question.
And as to the supposed influence of this punish
ment of Christ for human sin, upon the loyal
hosts of heaven, if they have looked into this
mystery far enough they have learned the truth.
Nor is their steadfastness to rest in shams and
subterfuges. They know full well that it was
man that sinned, and that to man God had said,
"The soul that sinneth it shall die." They knew
also that Christ was sinless. What, then, must
be the horror and consternation, carrying a thrill
of agony through all those shining ranks, to see
God's own Son — the brightness of his Father's
glory, and the express image of his person ; nay,

140 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
God himself manifest in the flesh — punished on
the cross for sins he never committed, and suf
fering the equivalent of a world's damnation, that
he might satisfy the penalties of a law he never
violated? Well might they be dismayed, and
inquire anxiously, Where are the stabilities of
moral government? what is justice? and what is
law and what is truth ? in such a system of insta
bilities and surprises. If they ask, How does
this satisfy violated law? they are told that
Christ, being sinless, assumed, or pretended to
be guilty of, human sin in the aggegate, — of
all sins committed up to his day, and of all
sin now committed and to be committed to the
end of time, — and, taking them all upon his
soul, expiated their guilt, and so opened a way
for God's forgiveness of the sinner. This aban
dons for ever the idea of executing penal satis
factions upon the sinner, but transfers the stress
of their demands to a substitute. But this only
evades, without satisfying, legal penalties : the
law is foiled in its vindicatory demands, and is as
really defrauded by a theory of substitution which
it did not contemplate, as by forgiveness simply
without this ecclesiastical apparatus. But it will
be seen further, that this whole theory of substi-

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 141
tution has no foundation in the principles of moral
government. It is utterly impossible, a theologi
cal dodge and cheat. Penal enactments, to be
such in reality, must reach and correct the party
offending. The exact thing threatened must be
done, else there is no terror in the frown of pen
alty. If it can be shifted off upon another, and
the sin cherished, while the penalty crushes an
other, and that other guiltless, it is simple mock
ery to talk of law under such a system. Law
carries vindication in its teeth, and thinks it foul
scorn to wreak its retributions where sin has
not grown its harvests. Nay, neither Truth nor
Justice permit law to reap where sin has not sown,
nor gather where it has not strewed. It is demon
strable, moreover, that, in a spiritual system,
there is but one mode of separating penalty from
crime ; and that is by repentance of the sin, and
the forgiveness of the sinner : otherwise, a pre
mium is placed on violation of law, by turning
over its retributions upon some soul willing to
bear them. There is enough of this now in the
great law of sacrifice, which makes sin a mystery
of evil to all connected, being without turning its
consequences into penalties, and severing these
from the soul that breeds them. Can you shrivel

142 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
your hand in the consuming flame, and your
' neighbor only feel the burn, and you be harm
less? Can you riot in debauchery for years, and
your temperate friend stand forth to society a
drunkard and vagabond, and you be pure and
guiltless? Can you commit the sin, and he bear
the penalty? Never! The penalty inheres in
the sin ! Spiritual death is in the transgression,
and not elsewhere, and can be avoided only by
the putting away of sin.
And now behold another marvel of scholastic
divinity, to get rid of this first monstrous assump
tion of substitution ! Christ, it is said, not only
assumed our place to suffer penalty, but our guilt,
and so suffered justly ; so dying, to satisfy justice !
It is simply shocking to speak of such blas
phemies; an I yet they are taught, in our theo-
logic schools, as the pillars of Christian ortho
doxy ; and the mind that shudders over them is
supposed not to be sound on the atonement. This
idea was invented, because it was seen that the
simple theory of substitution, the innocent for
the guilty, would shock the moral sense so rudely
that it would fail of acceptance unless a rider
was thrown on to hold it ; to wit, that Christ was
actually guilty of our sins : not in fact (they

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 143
dared not assert this) , but by assumption or . pre
tence or imputation ; that somehow he was justly
chargeable with them, while at the same time his
personal holiness became, by a like mystery, im
puted or carried over to his people, on the principle
of cross-remainders. Sin, we are assured, is the
transgression of law. It is the personal act of a
free voluntary agent. There are sins of igno
rance ; these, in a spiritual system, God winks
at, so to speak. But the sins we daily and delib
erately commit, will these metaphysicians tell us
how the sin or guilt of them is capable of trans
ference? By what psychological process can it
be done? The intent of one mind, in the doing
of a prohibited act, passed over as the actual in
tent of a different mind, which at the same time
was actually unconscious of the intent so supposed
to be transferred ; so that by such transference it
becomes a sin and guilt in the innocent recipient,
deserving of damnation, — is this theology or
insanity? Still it was not so hard to swallow by
men who believed that all human generations,
to the end of time, were actually present and
sinned in Adam, and if infants are left to perish,
it is the just penalty of personal sin. We have
mostly repudiated this lighter heresy as infamous ,

144 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
to the greater, orthodoxy we cling as a sheet an
chor. But has it ever been considered how a God
of truth and justice could punish his Son for sins
of which he was not in fact, but only assumed to
be, guilty? How does this satisfy justice? Or
is justice a blinded demon, that only demands so
much suffering and blood, and cares not where it
comes from ? What is justice but God's mode of
dealing justly with his angels and men? How,
then, is justice satisfied by piling agony upon
innocence, that guilt may go free? It is con
founding all moral distinctions, and rolling back
the universe into chaos. Such a procedure, while
it subserves no governmental purpose, either of
sovereignty or divine vindication, is the rankest
conceivable injustice, cruelty, crime, and would
be tolerated as a rule of action in no civil govern
ment under heaven. It is worse than barbarism ;
for it is barbarism under the name and aping the
prerogatives of the sublimest celestial wisdom
and virtue. Did any of these wiseacres who
insist in piling human guilt upon the soul of
Christ tell us when it was taken off? Could he
repent of it and so be forgiven? No ! Could it
be cleansed by expiation and suffering ? This is
impossible, because guilt is never removed by ex-

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 45
piation : the enforcement, to the letter, of the
severest retributions, never extirpates the guilt
of the offender. After the prison has ejected
him as before, after the gallows has claimed
him as before, — the stain is in the soul with all
its crimson dyes, untouched by the satisfied pen
alties of law. The law is never satisfied or made
honorable by the infliction of its threatenings, else
hell, to the law, is as satisfactory as heaven ; and
disobedience, with punishment, as desirable as
loyalty. No : law is dishonored whenever the
penalty is enforced, as well as when it is unen
forced. Law is honored only in the observance
of the precept, and so Christ magnified the law
and made it honorable by his obedient and loving
life, in doing the will of his Father ; in the sinless
perfection of a character that stands for ever as a
marvel and model of the grand possibilities of
manhood, under a law not too strict for a sinless
and God-given nature ; testifying thus " that the
law was holy, and the commandment holy and
just and good." I am aware that theologians for
the last forty years, connected with what is called
the new school of divinity, have attempted to
modify this revolting doctrine so far as to hold,
that although Christ was man's proper and real

I46 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
substitute to suffer for sin, yet that he could not
have endured the penalty of the law, nor have
been chargeable with our guilt by assumption
or otherwise. Because, first, the penalty of
sin was eternal death, the remorses of a guilty
conscience, and such like ingredients of torture,
which Christ never experienced. And, again,
his holy nature made it impossible that he could
really be charged with guilt; "but," in the lan
guage of Dr. Barnes, in his celebrated sermon
on the "Way of Salvation," " he endured so much
suffering, bore so much agony, that the Father
was pleased to accept of it in the place of the
eternal torments of all that should be saved by
him." But a moment's reflection will discover
this to be a double cheat of Justice, who needs to
be blind when theology is in question. For, first,
he is cheated of his proper victim, by slipping a
third party in his place; and, again, he is de
frauded in his penalty, by substituting sufferings
which the Father is pleased to accept as equiva
lent, or a consideration sufficient for all who
should be saved. Who does not see that the
sovereignty that could alter by a hair's-breadth
the denounced penalty, either as to victim or suf
ferings, could just as easily dispense with the

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 47
whole? Nor is disobedience any more tolerated
in the one case than in the other. Was an im
penitent soul ever yet deterred from sin by con
sidering that Christ had paid its penalty or its
equivalent? Never ! such a thought has no moral
force on human obduracy ; the governmental rela
tions supposed in the case, never yet touched a
human soul : they have no adaptation to such a
result. It is God's law and God's love that are
" the schoolmasters to bring us to Christ," not the
nice balancing of toil and torture against the
worth of so many souls ; plunging the sword just
so deep, and smiting with just the fierceness
which should counterbalance the salvation of just
the number who shall finally slip from the devil's
gripe and escape the wrath to come. And the
monstrous horror in- this case, as in the other,
consists in the assertion, that while the Father
knew, and the whole universe knew, the Son to
be perfectly innocent, immaculate as God, nay,
the very incarnation of God, that his, the Father's,
burning wrath, real, honest, lay upon the soul of
Christ, as if he truly believed he had merited and
deserved the punishment due to sin ; and all this
astounding tragedy, at which the earth rocked
and the sun veiled his splendor, had its origin in

148 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
a series of pretences, deceptions, and unrealities,
utterly unaccountable to reason, and without a
particle of warrant in the Word of God.
Calvary a tragic sham ! innocence treated as
guilt by infinite wisdom ! holiness tortured as sin
by infinite justice ! person and penalty altered by
infinite truth ! forgiveness tendered after the debt
is satisfied by infinite sovereignty ! God of mercy,
what a blasting caricature of every divine at
tribute !
And now, when these theologic doctors come
to sum up the value and efficacy of the atone
ment, while they insist it was principally in the
"blood" or "death" of the victim, they still feel
compelled to attribute some merit to the dignity
of the sufferer ! Yet they deny that deity suf
fered, but only held up the humanity of Christ,
that it might be able to bear the full blasts of the
divine fury against sin, itself standing aside, ex
cept in the way of support. Without stopping to
inquire by what rule suffering buys or earns favor
from the party inflicting the blows, — its principal
benefit being always deemed subjective to the
party suffering,- — it is matter of profound wonder
how, on the principle of exchange, barter, and
substitution, such value can be given to Christ's

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS.

149

blood or death, as to merit and weigh down the
salvation of the whole Church of God, from the
days of Abel until the sounding of the final
trump. For, after all, it is only the Son of man
who dies. God did not die ; God could not die :
terrible as the cross truly was, it is Humanity that
is crucified. "But," says Owen, vol. v. p. 389,
"the worth of the atonement is external to it,
doth not arise from it, but merely depends upon
the intention and will of God ; " in other words,
after all this play of imputations and cross-pur
poses ; after all this theological thimble-rigging ;
these shifts and contrivances ; this stretching up
into the heavens to construct governmental props
to God's throne, for fear his empire might suffer
untimely disruption ; after all the doctrinal neces
sities, which have filled hundreds of tomes to set
them forth, — the grand machinery has no in
trinsic merit, efficacy, or adaptation fer se to its
purposes and ends, but rests solely on the will of
God, without which it is valueless. The whole
scheme, from root to bud, resting in the divine
purpose, referred back to the sovereignty of God,
which might therefore have dispensed with the
whole of it, and saved men as the New Testament
declares on the simple conditions of faith and

150 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
repentance. "To this complexion has it come at
last." The governmental theory breaks down,
in the very instant its top-stone is raised with
shoutings ; and the whole superstructure lies a
mass of ruins and rubbish, only as it is put in
order and made subservient to the purposes of
the divine sovereignty! "Why, then, did Christ
die?" sa}^ the trembling believer, who has never
thought upon his subject, as though no death of
one for another could be vicarious and sacrificial,
unless it was also penal, substitutional, and expi
atory ! Why did he die ! Because, being human,
he must pass from the earth through the gate of
death, that by his resurrection, as the first-fruits
of them that slept, he might give to his people
the pledge of his divinity, and the assurance that
they also should conquer death, and rise again to
be ever with the Lord. Why did he die ! Be
cause the redemptive economy were incomplete
if any element it now comprehends had been
lacking. Why was he born? why baptized?
Why did he teach and heal? why did he weep and
suffer? why did he fast and pray? why falsely ac
cused and scourged ? — why any of it, as well as
why the death? One was no less expiatory than
the other. He lived and taught to satisfy justice

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 151
as really as he died. It was the crowning work,
as the resurrection was the completion, of his
mission; and then, when we come to look at its
influence upon humanity, how sublimely it lifts
itself above all these scholastic systems we have
been considering, and becomes the "wisdom of
God and the power of God unto salvation ! Truly
he lived for me, he died for me, says the penitent
soul. Without him and all of him, every jot and
tittle of his work, no soul of man would have
been saved. The precise motives which his mis
sion affords, especially in the giving his life to its
completion, are the only motives which the wis
dom of God ever devised to penetrate a sin-
stained soul with the consciousness of its guilt
and misery. How great is sin, if such an agency
alone can counteract and kill it ! How eminent
the danger, if such means alone can avert it !
How blessed is God, if, at such cost and humilia
tion and blood, he comes after the lost ones of his
empire, and sends them messages of affection
and forgiveness ! This — this is the power of the
cross, — the cross seen by the sinner's eye in the
heart of God ; the cross borne on the bosom of
Christ from the eternities, carried through all
his weary days of watching and sorrow, and

152 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
crimsoned with his blood, as the epoch of God's
purposes of mercy rolled on to their sublime ac
complishment. No power in the cross but that
of expiation ! Then you have never seen " God
in Christ reconciling the world unto himself,"
using it as a redemptive agency, entering into the
deepest springs and sources of human sympathy
and contrition, and breaking the obduracy of sin
by the gentleness of its tender and touching
avouchments. Shall I bring an expiatory offer
ing to God, the fruit of my body for the sin of my
soul ? No ! no ! leave that to the followers of
Dagon and Juggernaut : " For who is a God like
unto him, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth
by the transgression of the remnant of his heri
tage, who retaineth not his anger for ever because
he delighteth in mercy." " Thou wilt subdue
their iniquities, and cast all their sins into the
depths of the sea."

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 153

PART III.
" With his stripes we are healed."
TN the examination given to this subject thus
far, I have endeavored to show, that the idea
of literal expiation was wholly of pagan origin,
the promptings of fear to placate and appease its
demons ; that the idea of substitutions of persons
and penalties not contemplated in the law is even
worse than the original dogma ; that it is a ma
chinery that breaks down the moment it is set
agoing, and neither vindicates law nor rebukes nor
chastises sin ; that it tarnishes instead of vindicat
ing God's honor ; that it involves moral contradic
tions and impossibilities, and has no groundwork
of necessity in the stabilities of government ; that,
in fine, it turns the whole system of free grace
upside down, by calling for purchasers, equiva
lents, and satisfactions, so that God's free forgive
ness of sin is only in seeming, as each soul was
the result of a bargain or covenant, which had
received its consideration on the cross, and while
pardon was proclaimed, it was only, after all, the

154 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
fulfilment of pledges it were foul dishonor not to
redeem and acknowledge. We might have shown
further, that this notion of infinite supererogato^^
merit by the Saviour, laid up in the treasury of
the Church, to be dispensed when and how the
priest should determine in the shape of dispensa
tions and indulgences, soon grew into such con
venient enginery of sacerdotal authority that its
voluntary relinquishment was not to be thought
of. "But, after all," says the inquirer, "revolting
as this doctrine seems to human reason, and im
possible as it appears that it should subserve any
governmental purpose, is it not in the first place
a dictate of nature, and is it not further revealed
as God's mode of salvation, and therefore to be
accepted, whether it can be comprehended in all
its bearings or not ; and has not God put the seal
of his sanction to its truth, by the success which
has attended its proclamation since the days of
the Reformation?"
ist. Then is the " satisfaction theory " a dictate
of nature ; for it has been insisted by its advocates
that, if so, it is a premonition and prophecy that
it is of God. I have insisted on the fact, that it
is an invention of man, — of fallen, degraded,
degenerate humanity; that it is the outcome of

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 155
his terror and his guilt, the invention of a priest
hood of demons, to whom God says, "Thou
thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as
thyself, but I will reprove thee." For what was
God in the old paganisms but a tyrant, immensely
enlarged and projected into the field of the in
finite, a gigantic warrior, leader, king ; filled with
all human passions, burning with all human
wraths, ablaze with all forms of human ven
geance, yet capable of appeasement and placa
tion by such appropriate and costly satisfactions
as his accredited vicegerents might prescribe.
And this is the precise and all-sufficient reason
why this whole theory is false, for " God's ways
are not our ways." " The world by wisdom knew
not God," could not anticipate his demands, but
placed them in the lowest ranges of the creature's
own being, and amidst the vulgarest and basest
instincts of his own unchecked depravity. It
,was so eminently human, that in no way or sense
could it be divine. No reasoning can be so il
logical and inconsequent as that which certain
theologic neophytes import from the chairs of
professors, which claims the divinity of the "sat
isfaction" theory, because humanity invented it,
or something akin to it, as demanded by their

156 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
sense of what God ought to do and demand, in
order that he might uphold his throne, and keep
in his hands the safeguards and assurances that
hold in stability the concerns of his august em
pire !
2. Still the question recurs, Is the doctrine
clearly found in the divine records? for, if so,
we must accept it, however it may stagger reason,
or strain to the utmost the strength of our faith.
And, before proceeding to this examination, let
me say, that no system of dogmatic theology can
be constructed out of types and symbols, especially
where those dogmas respect vast governmental
relations. They are too shadowy and unsubstan
tial. They touch and illustrate a subject, or a
character, often at a single point only, without
application or significance further, beyond that
single point. They often mean more or less than
the subject calls for ; for instance, Christ is called
" our passover." But the point aimed at was to
secure his acceptance by the Jew ; it being im
mediately added, "who was sacrificed for us."
There is no parallel to be run between every cir
cumstance of selecting, keeping, slaying, roast
ing, and eating the paschal lamb by the outgoing
Israelites, and the sacrifice of Christ upon Cal-

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS- 15 7
vary ; and, should this be done, there is no single
element in it which gives countenance to an ex
piatory and satisfaction system. So neither can
a ceremonial observance originate or uphold alone
a system of moral principles. These principles
being first disclosed and applied authoritatively,
are then and thereafter capable of renewal and
enforcement by an outward symbol or ceremony,
which gives them a perpetual freshness and power.
Like baptism or the Lord's supper, cut these off
from the ideas they were intended to symbolize,
and the wit of man would never again get the
lost clew or reunite them. The same remark ap
plies to most of those prophetical announcements
which are now generally admitted to be Messianic ;
which had little or no significance to the Hebrew
of a contemporary age, which meant little but
enigma and mystery even to the prophet who
wrote them, but now shine so clearly in the light
of actual fulfilment, that we wonder how they
could be so blinded and mistaken ; forgetting all
the while that prophecy before the fact is a riddle,
to be unfolded and read only by the light of its
after accomplishment. How many theories of
the end of the world, the time and manner of
Christ's second coming, and a thousand other

158 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
speculations about the beast, the dragon, the white
horse of the Apocalypse, and the seven heads and
ten horns and the little horn of Daniel, are now
extant, by the various dreamers and interpreters
of prophecy yet unfulfilled ! How many set times
have there been for the sounding of the final
trump ! Now it must not be forgotten, that the
like mist and dimness veiled the clearest of an
cient prophetical disclosures, and put the mind as,
much at fault over what now seems clearly ac
complished, as what yet remains for fulfilment.
But, whether fulfilled or unfulfilled, what solid
ground is there in these fragmentary, figurative,
and poetic allusions — flashes and glimpses into
the hidden mysteries of God — on which to erect
a framework of moral government, and lay the
sure foundations of a dogmatic creed, to be forced
upon the Church of God in spite of the most un
answerable arguments against it?
3. Another preliminary remark of vast conse
quence. If Chrisf came to die that he might
satisfy justice, and show by penal endurances
God's abhorrence of sin, no word that he uttered
during his life, or after his resurrection, indicates
that he was himself aware of the fact. Have we
ever duly considered the weight of this significant

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 159
truth? Not an assertion or allusion which, by
the keenest torture of criticism, can be made to
bear the stress of any such interpretation. No :
whatever evidences the dogma may have, it gets
none from the principal agent in the great trans
action, — the one who knew best, could have dis
closed most infallibly this secret of the divine
counsels, — nay, upon whose shoulders rested the
pillars of this very government, to be sustained
only by the shedding of his heart's blood ! Strange
indeed, when it is deemed so vital to the sound
ness of Christian faith to-day, that Christ himself
should have sealed his lips, and given no clew to
find our way into the high governmental signifi-
cancies of such an amazing transaction ! Respect
ing the fact of his death, the cruelty of it, the
wickedness of it, the consequences of it to him
self and his people, including his resurrection
and ascension and the shedding forth of the Holy
Ghost, he was not reticent; nay, he mournfully
provided for its remembrance to the end of time :
but what it accomplished Godward, what were to
be its governmental bearings upon law and justice
and penalty, and the high concernments of Jeho
vah's empire, he did not disclose even by a pass
ing allusion, but treated the whole melancholy

160 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
tragedy before him as if such an aspect of it had
no existence. Respecting his giving his life " a
ransom " for many, I shall speak directly. I know
it has been urged, that there is progress in doc
trine in the New Testament ; that Christ furnished
the material in his life and teachings, but did not
construct a theology, which was left for his apos
tles, who through the Spirit constructed dogmas
which bind the Church as really as if uttered by
our Lord. But it remains here to find the mate
rials of any such theory. We have the Old
Testament, and the life of Christ possessed by
the apostles : it is not there, and we deny their
right to interpolate it. "If I, or an angel, from
heaven, preach any other doctrine, let him be
accursed," says the apostle, in the vivid literalism
with which he adhered to the teachings of Christ.
4. Once more, and as preliminary to our search,
let it be remembered, that we admit to the full,
nay, insist as the basis of our faith, upon the true
scope and significance of all that class of Scrip
ture quotations which set forth the fact that God in
Christ was in vicarious sacrifice for man, "gave his
life for us," "died that we might not die," "bore
our griefs and carried our sorrows," came into
the condition of our lapsed humanity, and was

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. l6l
thus made subject to our temptations, sorrows,
and distresses : for he could bear our griefs only
by sharing them, in the close intimacy of a heav
enly sympathy ; he could carry our sorrows only
by letting the crushing burden of our woe be
taken off, and held by a loving heart, that knows
by experience the sting of every grief, and can
open the springs of alleviation and comfort. So
grand and glorious does this doctrine stand forth
in the redemptive economy, that it dwarfs all
others. Coming up to the full measure of human
need and divine mercy, it leaves no room for
placations and satisfactions and expiations. It
bears on its front the marks of so royal a largess,
such free grace and goodness, that all ideas of
bargain or contract pale into insignificance.
Without Christ's whole work, from its conception
in the divine councils to its close, — if it shall
ever close, — salvation would have been impos
sible ; not that the divine clemency to man would
have been less, but that the appropriate spiritual
condition in man could never have been produced
by any other or different agency, which would
have made the communication of that clemency,
in the shape of forgiveness, safe or effective.
In other words, its power and fitness is in recon-

162 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
ciling man to God, and not God to man ; and so
the Scriptures abundantly affirm. God was in
Christ, not to placate himself, or make himself
willing to have mercy ; not to adjust, and set in
harmony any of the wheels of governmental on
going which were grinding in disastrous collision.
No ! Man's sin was not unanticipated, had no
such disarranging force in the principles of the
divine administration. Man before knew good :
he now knew both good and evil by the sharp
bite of experience. And these divine forces of
redemption, operating to disclose God's love, as
yet unaltered and unwearied, were the very forces
needful for our return and recovery ; for crime,
instantly it exists, hides itself from God among
the trees of the garden : its normal consciousness
is that of fugacious fear. It trembles at its
own upbraidings ; and if thereafter it becomes
hardened and defiant, it is the hardy reaction of
terror, hunted to its last hiding-places by the
wolfish cry of its harrowing remorses. God is
only a consuming fire and terror to the sinner,
because conscience holds over him the scorpion
lash of its retributions ; and, independently of
Christ as a redemptive spiritual force, he has no
knowledge that there is for him any remedy or

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 63
any hope. And here let me affirm, once for all,
that it is this simple view of Christ as a forgiving
God, who gives, through the ideas and emotions
we entertain concerning him, repentance and re
missions of sins ; in whom as the God of all
grace we believe, rejoicing in hope of his glory,
— it is this, and this alone, on which the faith
and piety of the Church has been fed so long and
so lovingly, out of which all her endurances,
heroisms, and martyrdoms have grown ; and not
the dry dogmas of governmental satisfactions,
which figure chiefly in our creeds, catechisms,
and colleges, where they are drilled into the
memory as a branch of orthodoxy, but never be
come rooted in human affection, or control in any
degree the conduct or the life. Thank God for
that at least !
I cite a class of proof-texts, referred to by an
eminent author, as proving this theory of expia
tion. They are specimens, but so in point, that,
if the doctrine exists at all, it must be in them, or
some of them. " Behold the Lamb of God, which
taketh away the sin of the world ; " John i. 29.
This might be of some significance, if it were
first made to appear that " expiation " was the only
mode of removing sin. But it never removes or

164 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
takes away the sin, however it may punish it.
The sin remains even after the penalty of it has
been satisfied. Now the beauty and glory of the
gospel is, that it does not strike at all at the penal
ty, but at the sin, which sets the penalty in play.
If this is removed, there is nothing for penalty to
feed on; and so his name was "Jesus," because
" he shall save his people from their sins." And
here the allusion was to a lamb, or the scape
goat, which was turned into the wilderness after
the sins of the people had been confessed upon
his head. The Jews would understand by this,
that Christ was so to provide for the carrying
away or deportation of their sins, that by faith in
him they should be wholly forgotten, lost in the
wilderness, buried in the depth of the sea. No
germ of an expiation theory here !
" Hath given himself for us an offering and a
sacrifice to God;'' Ephesians v. 2. I remark,
first, upon this passage, that it is one which de
rives its significance from its reference to the
sacrificial offerings of the Hebrew economy.
The high priest took the offering of the devotee,
slew it, burned or ate it ; and this ceremonially
atoned, or brought God and man together, —
man offering his sacrifice in token of loyalty, and

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 65
God accepting it, and pronouncing his forgive
ness ; and so the rebel was ceremonially clean.
What proofs does the satisfaction theory derive
from this? Was the offering of the Jew "to ex
piate his sin and satisfy justice"? Never! or, if
so offered, was obnoxious to the divine majesty.
Now Christ offered himself, his whole life and
work, in sacrifice for us to God. "This is my
beloved son, in whom I am well pleased," was
the approval of his Father, whose heart was in it,
equally with the heart of the Son. It was "to
God," because he sent his Son to do it, and every
step of it was taken beneath the beaming eye of
his love ! His council planned it, his wisdom
provided it, and it was executed as to him and
for him ! There is surely no proof in this for
expiation ; and if the death of Christ was expia
tory, why not that of James and John? Did not
Christ say to them, "Ye shall indeed drink of the
cup that I drink of, and be baptized with my
baptism," referring directly to his sufferings and
death? " He is the propitiation for our sins : and not for
ours only, but for the whole world;" 1 John ii. 2.
"He loved us, and sent his Son, the propitiation
for our sins ; " 1 John iv. 10. The dogma which

1 66 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
propitiation is supposed to imply and prove is,
that human sin wrought wrath in the bosom of
God, which was about to be executed, when the
Son, of gentler feeling and on mercy bent, inter
posed, and covenanted in due time to propitiate,
placate, or satisfy justice in respect to all those
who should ultimately be saved ; that his dying
agonies especially were so given, and God was
thus propitiated toward the elect. So industriously
has this view been circulated, that it has gone into
the definitions of our lexicons, and forms the staple
thought of half the hymns in our books of devo
tion ; and yet it derives not one particle of proof
from this matter of propitiation. The reference
is evidently to the covering of the mercy-seat over
the ark, between the hovering wings of the cheru
bim, called the propitiatory, the place where
God had chosen to manifest his mercy, and pro
nounce the pardon of his people. It had no
reference whatever to the means of securing this
pardon. How beautiful, then, the thought that
Christ is our propitiatory, through whom, and by
whose agency in and upon us, our sins may be
pardoned, covered, and blotted out of remem
brance ; that Christ has become God's mercy-
seat, through whose life and death, purer and

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 167
dearer than the gold of the ark, we are made
acceptable to God, that we might live through
him ! This exhausts the entire meaning of this
reference, and yet it has been made to bear the
main weight of this edifice of "satisfaction," with
which the creeds of Christendom have been dis
figured. So the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is a maga
zine from which the advocates of this theory draw
their strongest weapons. This chapter is pro
phetical and highly figurative. We do not look
for literalism in such highly charged dramatic and
tragic utterances. " He bore our griefs, and car
ried our sorrows," not literally, for your griefs
and mine had no existence then ; but griefs and
sorrows akin to ours, coming out of the same
fountain of evil from which all human sorrows
flow, that, touched with a feeling of our infirmi
ties, he might give to us all the sympathy and
aid of a kindred nature, who had sounded to the
bottom the deeps of mortal grief and woe.
And so he was " wounded for our transgressions
and bruised for our iniquities, and with his stripes
we are healed." But for human iniquity, he
would not have been wounded ; and the healing
of our souls comes only through his redemptive

l68 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
agency, — his sorrows, afflictions, stripes. For
these must all be borne, that a leverage, baptized
in tears and blood and death-sweat, in the gar
den and on the cross, should be created, strong
enough and tender enough to reach the chief of
sinners, and break in pieces the flinty rock of sin.
If the whole chapter has a look of substitution,
it is fully explained by the idea, that Christ suf
fered and died that we might not suffer and die ;
for, without him, we must die eternally. But this
is wide as the poles from the theory of transferred
penalties and guilts and satisfactions, of which
we are now speaking.
" Being justified freely by his grace, through
the redemption that is in Christ Jesus : whom
God hath set forth to be a propitiation, through
faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness
for the remission of sins that are past, through
the forbearance of God, . . . that he might
be just, and the justifier of him which believeth
in Jesus;" Rom. iii. 24, 25, 26. This is part
of an argument to show that men are justi
fied by faith, and not in consequence of works,
or what they can do, to earn salvation. "Justify"
is here used in a forensic sense, and means to
treat as innocent, to acquit of wrong, and pro-

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 169
nounce acceptable. This can be done only, first,
by strict obedience to God in thought, word, and
deed, rendered only by the angels ; and, second,
by the plan and in the mode prepared by Christ
through the repentance and faith of the soul
once involved in the death of sin. It is freely, —
by his grace or favor, — not "bought." The "re
demption" includes the effect of Christ's work
upon the soul, — it is a redemption from sin, and
so from punishment, — is internal, and not ex
ternal to it. Christ is the medium, mediator, or
propitiatory, through whom this clemency is ten
dered. It is his mode of making a sinner right
eous, introducing a principle of genuine and
honest loyalty and love and true faith, in which
are wrapt all the elements of righteousness, rudi-
mental if not efflorescent ; and, in this way, God
is a just God, while he is yet a merciful Saviour.
Not that he treats all men upon the principles of
rectilinear justice. No such thing ! No man
has his just deserts : none could stand a moment
if God was strict to mark iniquity. But God, in
this mode of mercy, is unjust to no one. " Is
thine eye evil because I am good?" says God's
infinite love to the sticklers for justice. Mercy is
exercised in a way to honor the law, because

170 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
God has already written his law upon the heart,
and put it within the mind. It would be safe to
forgive in all cases where sin was abhorred and
faith reigned ; for there heavenly loyalty is again
reinstated, and upon a firmer footing after the
bitterness of sin is past.
In all these texts, we find no proof to uphold
this dogma of governmental exactions and expia
tory sufferings. We find Christ's coming and
work necessitated by the exigencies of human
sin and misery, called for by it, so that, in a most
dreadful sense, our sins crucified our Lord ; but
nowhere that sinners were purchased, body and
soul, from the devil, who held them captive (as
the Church held for twelve hundred years) ; nor
from the Father, by a transaction wholly external
to the sinner, and with which he had no more to
do than sheep sold in the shambles. When our
Lord's sacrifices are spoken of as a "price," it is
not in the vulgar sense of a bargain, but as a
price of infinite condescension and love, given
freely that we might live. But is not his work
called an atonement, and were not atonements
expiatory? What expiation was there in the
prayer of Moses when, on the mountain, he
prayed God to turn away his wrath from Israel ?

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 171
there was no smoke of incense, no altar-fire, no
flow of blood; and yet Moses says, "I will make
an atonement for you." An atoner is a mediator or
a " middler," as Wycliffe has it (and see Trench
on Words), a daysman who brings variant par
ties together, irrespective of the means of such
reconciliation. No one figure (and it is only a
figure) has been used more unsparingly to build
up this theory of satisfactions than that which
represents our Lord as a "ransom," — "He gave
his life a ransom for many." Used as a similitude,
it has been literalized into a fact ; and in all the
earlier systems, even down to the times of Anselm,
this ransom was deemed to have been paid to the
devil, to whom we belonged as slaves by reason
of Adam's apostasy ; and as it was wrong to use
power simply against the Evil One, a considera
tion by way of ransom was given to him for all
the elect. This is largely insisted on by Irenseus,
although Origen appends to this the conceit, that
in the bargain the tempter was overreached by
infinite wisdom, and made the unwitting agent of
befooling himself and defeating his own aims : -
lie supposing that if those whom Christ came to
save could be induced to reject and destroy him,
he would secure the whole race to himself for

172 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
ever ; whereas it turned out that this very rejec
tion and crucifixion were essential parts of God's
plan in the redemption of man ! After Athanasius
and Anselm, this doctrine of satisfactions began
to be spoken of as a satisfaction, not to the devil,
nor yet to God, but to "justice," as though an im
personal attribute or quality of God had assumed
a potential personality, and had claims which
must be satisfied before forgiveness could be ex
tended to the guilty ! There is often great misti
ness in these statements in regard to the supposed
claims of "Justice ; " and high dogmatisms as to
what God could do, or could not do, in re
spect to sinful man, without the permission of
this theological autocrat "Justice," were pro
nounced and indulged. God was no longer the
sovereign, having mercy upon whom he would
have mercy, but the executor and dispenser of
pardons according to certain metaphysical and
scientific necessities, founded on philosophical
principles, determined by the methods of Aristotle,
and the demonstrations of logic ! And the stick
lers for this waning heresy even now bewail the
fact, that, in all the post-apostolic and early
patristic literature, there is no enunciation of
the " metaphysical ground" of this vital pillar of

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 73
modern orthodoxy. No ! it remained for Athan
asius and Anselm and their fellows down to the
Reformation, and, after that, for Luther and Cal
vin, to indulge in the comforting and delectable
blasphemy following : " Had Christ been mur
dered by robbers, his death would have been no
kind of satisfaction ; but when he was cited as a
criminal, accused and crushed by witnesses, and
condemned by a judge, we understand by these
tokens that he sustained the character of a wicked
criminal." In whose eyes, do you suppose he
means? for it was not true even in the eyes of
Pilate, — no, but in the eyes of God's justice, who
knew all the while what a stupendous and lying
tragedy it was, how falsely he was accused, and
how villanously murdered !
And again he says, — "Nothing had been ef
fected if Christ had only died a corporeal death ;
but it was incumbent on him also to feel the se
verity of divine revenge, in order that he might
both ward off wrath and satisfy a righteous sen
tence. Wherefore we wonder not if it be said he
descended into hell, since he endured that death
which is inflicted by an angry God on the wicked."
And Luther's language is even fouler than this.
Why was it that the clear heads and fervent piety

174 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
of these champions of the Reformation did not
revolt with horror from such a compound of lying
and blasphemy? Because Calvin undertook the
production of a comprehensive and logically con
structed system of theology, that should embrace
the whole universe of moral being and agencies,
and be a law and a philosophy both to God and
man. Nothing so vast had ever been attempted.
He was only twenty-seven years of age, a convert
from Romanism of only four years' standing.
Educated in all the follies and doctrines of the
Papacy, he took the materials offered, principally
as he found them, except in reference to the errors
against which Protestantism was a specific protest.
But this doctrine — by this time linked with the
notion of Christ's passive sufferings to satisfy
justice, and active sufferings to lay up a stock of
supererogatory righteousness — fitted in so well
with the cognate follies of imputations against
the fact, and the validity of decrees and elections,
that he incorporated it as necessary to the build
ing he was so laboriously constructing. Luther
was an iconoclast, but yet there were many idols
he failed to break : he bowed in the house of
many a Rimmon to the day of his death. And
so our later symbols, by Westminster Assemblies

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 175
and Synods of Dort and more modern councils,
have adopted all these figments of a finical age,
and all these inventions of theological-system
builders, who are in sad lament that they find
such imperfect warrant in the New Testament for
this stupendous machinery which their creeds are
now made to carry. The covenant of works with
Adam ! pure fiction ! where is it? who ever saw
it? On trial for all his posterity ! where is it
nominated in the bond? Who told Adam this?
Covenant of grace ! councils of eternity ! where
is the evidence? Well has an author asked,
"What herald convened it? who composed it? or
what meaning can we affix to it that is not inex
pressibly degrading? Oh, unhallowed, impious,
miserable invention of the human brain, which
yet has been accepted as inspiration ! Men in
perplexity summon councils to debate and discuss
for the removal of difficulties. But is this the
Great God ? " In council with whom ? with him
self? What an abuse of language ! and a world
to be saved or lost, through a bargain which he
drove with himself, for God is one ; and men bap
tize this compound of folly and inanity with the
name of 'theology ' ! Can we wonder that thought
ful men repudiate these dogmas as fast and as far

176 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
as they understand them ? for it may be affirmed
without the fear of contradiction that seventy out
of every one hundred genuine Christians will deny
at once that any such doctrine is contained in our
standards. They do not so understand it ; and
when it stands up stripped of its subterfuges, in
its true pagan dress, they utterly disclaim any
belief in it. They must avouch the standards in
joining the Church ; but a mind just emerging
from its death-struggle with sin, and burning with
love from the consciousness of the fact that Christ
lived and died to save it, is not greatly concerned
with the philosophy of this fact and its govern
mental relations God-ward, so long as its aspects
man-ward are of such touching and tender signifi
cance. And this is just the reason why the dogma
has not long ago been routed from the symbols of
the Church. It has kept its place by skulking.
Embedded in our creeds, it has held in its arms,
and hidden its own deformities behind the central
sun of Christianity ; the doctrine of Christ's vicari
ous sacrifice for us. To the common apprehen
sion this fact is exhaustive of the whole redemptive
scheme. God is not discerned as the offended
party, burning with revenges, and securing,
through bargains and contracts and satisfactions,

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 77
a series of high transactional appeasements, grow
ing out of himself as incarnate, and offered to
himself as unincarnate ! No such drivelling
inanities are thought of; but the grateful soul
believes, that "God so loved the world that he
sent his Son," at infinite cost to his own heart,
and at a sacrifice the mind of Gabriel through
eternity can never fathom; that the blessed Son,
always beloved of the Father, not more when he
said, "Lo! I come to do thy will, O God," and
"thy law is within my heart," than when, in his
agony of temptation in the garden, the blood-
drops from his forehead ensanguined the grass
where he knelt, while an angel strengthened him,
or when given over to the murderous wrath of man,
who was killing the body by torture, he exclaimed,
" My God ! my God ! why hast thou forsaken
me?" And so all the heart of the triune God
was in the winepress of that shocking tragedy,
and went out in pulsations of ineffable love over
the very blinded wretches who enacted it, and
whose life eternal hung upon its awful issues.
And here, in the cross, we strike the key-note of
God's council and plan for the extirpation of sin
and the recovery of man to himself, — not by
stern precepts or penal thunders, not by an array

178 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
of sovereign forces by which he holds the world
in the hollow of his hand, but in the more ade
quate showing forth of himself. Always long-
suffering, always in patience, always in sacrifice,
always in the burden of a yearning love, and the
outgoing of an exhaustless compassion ; but now,
the Good Shepherd takes up his crook, and starts
into the mountains after the wanderer ; now the for
giving Father sends his obedient Son to win back
the disobedient prodigal. The epochs of earlier
demonstrations were complete, the waxing and
waning ages had rolled on, and now the Redemp
tive Star arose over Bethlehem's manger, — bright
er, clearer, nearer, more potential in the beauty
of its lustre, until angels and men saw God in
Christ, reconciling the world unto himself. And
this same law of sacrifice in which God moves
and acts, is the same law by which fallen human
nature is made over in the image of Him that
created it, — first, as a force operating through
the understanding and upon it, and then as a
force operating upon the heart and in it : " Christ
in you ; " "I in them, and thou in me ; " Christ in
humanity, in the sympathy of burdened affections,
tender solicitudes, and helpful ministrations. It
is not in our philosophies to soften the rough

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 79
places of existence ; it is not in our sciences to
fathom the councils or explain the ways of the
infinite ; it is not in our metaphysics to harmonize
and make peace in the disordered and discordant
realms where sin has effected its moral unhinge
ments. Ah no ! We are drawn upward by the
cords of love, by the showing of sorrows and
afflictions and sacrifices and burdens which
nothing but the heart of love could bear. The
wildest sorrow that ever drove its shaft into the
bosom of humanity, Christ has known it before
us. In all our afflictions he was afflicted. In all
our soul agonies, except our shame and remorses
for sin, which a holy being could not feel for
himself, he yet felt for us, in the intimacy of a
sympathy that knew all our temptations and strug
gles, and came near us to relieve and to save.
This is the electric fire which has flashed from
heart to heart, the world over and the ages through,
since it quivered in tongues of flame on Pentecostal
brows. This has drenched the soul of Penitence
with sorrow ; lighted the eye of Faith with a
brilliance reflected from the open doors of
heaven ; hallowed the dungeon's gloom with
glory ; quenched the violence of martyr fires ;
and shot a light of unearthly gladness in the van

l8o THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
of all the civilizations that have followed its her
alding, and scattered blossoms in the way of feet
that are weary, and hearts that, unsatisfied, are
pining for rest. This, too, is the living vinculum
which binds the heart closest to the heart of Christ ;
for we become one with him, not more by that
interpenetrative spirit of comfort and communion
received directly from his indwelling, than by fol
lowing close upon his example as a Saviour and
sacrifice, so becoming, in our turns, priests, medi
ators, workers of redemption after his holy pat
tern ; in all the dark ways of sin and sorrow
travelled by our fellow-pilgrims, filling up in our
unwearied endeavors for the light and life of men,
in our prayers and example and working, "the
sufferings of Christ that remain," — remain for
his people to continue what he began ; to fill up
the plan, round out the perfect ideal ; to carry up
the superstructure of which he laid the foundation
and provided the materials, "until its top-stone
shall be laid with shoutings of grace, grace unto
it." Ah, the dignity of this co-working with
Christ, not in the field of a vapid sentimentality,
but on the theatre of manly working and doing
and suffering in a cause of which sorrow and
sacrifice are the alpha and the omega ; until re-

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. l8l
demption shall have completed the beneficent
designs of God to our race, and renovated man
rejoice in the recovery of all that was lost in
Eden, fortified, and made for ever steadfast and
sure, by the royal authority of Him who shall
reign King of Saints for ever, and for ever!

182 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT

PART IV.
Psalm lxxxix. 14: "Justice and judgment are the habitation
of thy throne : mercy and truth shall go before thy face."
TT seemed an insoluble problem to the Re-
A formers of the sixteenth century, how God
could exercise justice and mercy, at the same
time, toward the same being. They found the
divine records ablaze, all over, with praise to
Jehovah as a merciful Father ; his love, kindness,
forbearance, gentleness, forgiveness, shone forth
in all historic facts, like stars in the night of
man's extremity ; and yet, following it all, was
the voice of his justice, which they believed must
be satisfied, and could suffer no violation without
utter ruin to all governmental arrangements.
Beside, what would become of law without its
penalty, never to be remitted? what of truth, if
the threat proved abortive? How could judg
ment have sway, and what restraint upon high
treason to heaven, if the traitor escaped punish
ment? True, the sweep of these objections and
difficulties expunged mercy entirety from the
attributes of God. "Justice" and "judgment"

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 83
and "truth" could not be the "habitation of his
throne," and yet "mercy go before his face." It
went beyond their conceptions, how God could
be a just God and yet a Saviour of a race once
stained with sin. They insisted that one class of
attributes were exclusive, and utterly destructive
of the other ; and the great achievement of dog
matic theology has been the invention of a modus
by which this difficulty was supposed to be solved,
and a logical reconciliation effected of these con
flicting ideas ; and high hosannahs have been
sung and sounded through all Christendom over
what is now lauded as the chief corner-stone of
all sound orthodoxy on this vital point of Chris
tian faith.
The Psalmist did not perceive the difficulty
which so staggered modern theologians. None
of God's ancient prophets, seers, and holy ones,
were troubled with any such inconsistencies.
They felt the hand of justice ; they withered be
neath the lash of law : but, at the same time, they
lauded the mercy that remitted the penalty, and
praised Jehovah as the " Lord God merciful and
gracious, slow to anger,, and abundant in good
ness and truth, who pardoned their iniquities, and
buried them in the depths of the sea."

184 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
I propose to show, —
1. That the difficulty which so perplexed the
minds of our early theologians had no real ex
istence, but was founded in false and insufficient
views of moral government, of what justice and
mercy, combined in the divine character, de
manded ; that in truth there was no moral enigma
to be solved, no contradiction to be reconciled,
except in the misconceptions of their own minds
in bringing down Jehovah to the petty dimensions
of some earthly tyrant, and shaping his govern
ment by the principles of human ethics and the
logic of the schools ; and
2. That this lauded solution is worse, by far,
than the difficulty it pretends to solve ; that it
makes havoc with mercy, truth, justice, right
eousness, and every attribute of Jehovah, and
plunges the processes of the divine administration
into the blackness of darkness for ever : the solu
tion is more mysterious and inexplicable than the
problem to be solved.
1. In God's moral government there is no an
tagonism between justice and mercy, simply be
cause that government is not only kingly and
magisterial, but paternal and equitable ; for while,
as a Lawgiver, he announces the precept to be

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 185
followed and the penalty of its violation, yet as a
Father he proclaims the conditions which his
infinite wisdom and love have annexed to this
law. Side by side with the " fiery law" of Sinai —
the ten precepts implied in the "thou shalt not,"
without a penalty in the law annexed to either —
stand the conditions upon which rewards and
punishments are meted out to the subject : " But
if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he
hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do
that which is lawful and right, he shall surely
live: he shall not die;" Ezekiel xviii. 21. And
so, again and again, are the conditions by which
mercy "saves the repentant soul alive" announced
by God's prophets and messengers, as if in anti-
' cipation of the absurd glosses and interpretations
which might be put upon the announcement, "The
soul that sinneth it shall die," — die, as is claimed,
without remedy, mercy, or forgiveness. The
paternal nature of God makes all his threatenings
and promises conditional : they could not be other
wise. In the family relation, it is not deemed
incongruous that rewards and punishments should
be so graduated by the conduct of the child. We
deem it a hideous and revolting tyranny, if for
one offence, or many offences, the feet of the boy

1 86 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
are driven from the door, and the home where
his infancy was nurtured, and where he was
rocked to rest above the beatings of a mother's
heart. We call such parents monsters, and as
such does Christ regard them, when he draws
the touching picture of the prodigal's father hold
ing his repentant child to his forgiving heart, and
lavishing upon him the tokens of his irrepressible
love, "forgiving him until seventy times seven."
But in our rage for systematic divinity, we deny
to God the liberty to exhibit in his great family
these traits of mercy which so win our reverence
and love when shown by a fellow-mortal ! Justice
in the family may be conditioned by mercy, both
in exercise toward the same offender, while the
order of the household is yet maintained, and
rebellion stayed ; but we cannot conceive how in
the larger household of our infinite Father, he
can be left free to act upon any such principles !
No : penalty must always have its gorge ; law,
its satisfactions. Penal exactions can never be
remitted, only transferred : there must be only
satisfactions and appeasements ! No free pardon,
no unbought forgiveness, no pouring the unstinted
waves of God's yearning heart over his repentant
and returning children, unless that heart is first

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 187
set in motion by equivalents, and drawn out by
ransoms and a price ! That God's love originated
the redemptive agencies that lead to man's recov
ery, and sent the Logos, or human manifestation
of himself, to turn the wanderer's feet back to his
heavenly home, seems to be wholly ignored ; and
"burning thrones" are set up, and fires lighted
of such fury as to be soothed or extinguished only
in blood. "If I be a Father," says God, "where
is mine honor?" Shall he not be permitted to
display, on the high theatre of his moral admin
istration, those traits of considerate and beautiful
affection which so halo the Head of our earthly
households. Not only have all these views been strangely
overlooked, but scholastic divinity has never
seemed to have any true conception of God's
justice in the scheme of his administration. In
their rigid, narrow, materialistic, and unspiritual
logic, the divine government is supposed to pro
ceed on the theory of administering strict recti
linear justice in all cases, from breach of precept
to infliction of penalty, without hindrance or con
dition (excepting always their strange device of
inflicting the penalty upon one not deserving it),
when it is clear as the sun at noonday that no

l88 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
moral government of human beings is possible on
any such hypothesis. Rectilinear justice ! would
it not have slain Adam with his first sin, arrested
Eve with the apple in her mouth, and stripped
this fair world of God's crowning work, while
Paradise was in its morning bloom, and put an
arrest upon the "quiring of the young-eyed
cherubim," as he chanted the glory of that dawn
ing prime ? Surely, from the beginning no human
being in time has been subjected to strict recti
linear justice ! It would depopulate earth to-day
of saint and sinner alike. How dare sin-stained
men talk of strict justice, playing with its fiery
bolts as unconcerned as children at the crater of
a volcano, under the fancy that by some theologi
cal juggling it would strike some one beside them
selves ?
No : justice and mercy are inseparably linked,
go hand in hand. Each is tempered by the other,
and there is no clash of claims in their mutual
workings. Injustice there is none ; but strict
justice without mercy will execute the mandates
of spiritual laws only after a scheme of probation
is exhausted. Justice deals with retributions, and
measures its deserts to sin ; but always under the
sway of wise counsels, and for purposes which

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 189
they alone demand, — always as a co-efficient of
mercy in respect to divine law and human con
duct. As an agency to waken a sense of re
sponsibility in the conscience, and arm law with
its sanctions, and press obligation upon the soul,
it is indispensable ; but when this schoolmaster
function has been performed, and the sensibilities
of the soul awakened, it is Mercy that, with tear
ful eye and softened and melting heart, lays her
forgiving hand on the head of Penitence, as she
kneels subdued by the conscious forces of love
before the altar of God's reconciliations. The
power of law and justice may possibly compel an
outward and ritualistic obedience, — the forced
submission of the slave earning salvation ; but the
power of grace alone originates a spontaneous
and loving loyalty, that springs in the depths of
the soul, welling up into life everlasting.
By what royal prerogative is it that justice is
supposed to dominate mercy in the divine attri
butes? Which lies back deepest in the eternities,
— the love, goodness, nobleness, in which Jeho
vah essentially dwells, and has ever dwelt ; or the
justice which follows instituted government, and
flames out retributively on the track of its infringe
ment? Or, if these attributes can be conceived

190 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
of only as coeval and co-ordinate, who shall dare
to say that God has no right or power to remit
penalty on conditions always announced, and en
tering as moral and spiritual forces into the frame
work of his righteous administration?
Part and parcel of the same economy, they are
forces so to speak that attack fallen humanity on
different planes of its nature, — the one arousing
and convicting the conscience alive to the recti
tude of law, and the sinfulness of its violation,
and addressing the reason and understanding ;
the other showing the pulsations of a Father's
heart beating beneath the vestments of outraged
sovereignty, ready to forgive, on condition of
sorrow and amendment ; retribution threatened
here, compassion shown there ; one administering
desert, the other bestowing what infinitely tran
scends desert. One originates correction, the
other administers pardon to the penitent. Sal
vation is the result of both, and would not or
dinarily flow from the separate action of either.
What God hath joined together, let not man put
asunder. Is the Most High, then, to dispense with his
justice, or is he to dispense with his mercy, —
which? We reply, he is to dispense with neither.

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS- 191
The one arms law with its sanctions ; the other
bathes the repentant rebel with its tears. They
act as co-ordinate and interpenetrative powers, —
grandly just, yet tenderly forgiving ; insisting on
obedience, and still providing that lapse shall not
work such perpetual undoing as to make all re
covery impossible. The one limits the audacity
of presumption ; the other prevents the horror of
despair. The one shows law to be the harmony
of the universe ; the other sweetly wins the soul
to comply with its blessed requisitions. Not only
are these attributes interacting, but they mutually
magnify and exalt each other. There is no heart
in retribution : it is a result of violated law, in
natural, physical, and spiritual life as immutable
as the roll of the stars. Fire will burn, and water
drown, and gases suffocate, and weights crush,
and starvation kill, and fatigue weary, and dis
sipation destroy, and sin rob and ruin the soul.
These administrations of penalty by justice are
ever sure, and nothing but miraculous agency can
avert them. To be rid of their fearful exactions,
the sin^of the body and of the soul must come
out of them. Mercy never quarrels with the pen
alty : she weeps over the sin. To get at this,
" she puts on the soul itself her secret supernat-

192 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
ural touch, and the soft inward baptism of her
feeling, — even that which she has unfolded so
powerfully in the facts of the cross : all dewing
it thus with her tender mitigations, keeps it in the
possibility of good."
The redemptive economy strikes at the sin ;
and while justice seeks its punishment, or rather
cannot prevent its punishment while the sin is
there, grace seeks its extirpation by forgiving
freely the past, and writing the new law of love
in the heart, and putting it in the mind : so that
the new life, so fed, supplants the law of sin and
death, and "grace reigns through righteousness
unto eternal life by Jesus Christ, our Lord." It
should never be forgotten, that penalty clings to
sin, and cannot be separated without an infringe
ment of the order of the universe, and the inevi
table results of spiritual laws. It is well said,
"these threatenings only declared, in general,
what the grand causalities of justice were bring
ing to pass, acting by themselves ; and the specific
variations to be issued by the interactions of mercy
show no abandonment of justice, and support no
charge of discrepancy, as long as the retributive
causalities continue under their naturally immuta
ble laws ; " for justice itself is only a name used

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS.

*93

for convenience to denote the consequence at
tached to certain moral, legal, or spiritual viola
tions. In a most terrible sense, spiritual laws
execute and vindicate themselves, not less than
natural laws. The only way of escaping their
penalty is by ceasing their infraction. As long
as the finger is in the flame, it will feel the pain
of the burning : as long as sin is cherished by the
soul, its sting and taint will corrupt the springs
of moral life, and bring misery with it. Not
even mercy can remove the penalty without also
removing the sin ; and this done, the penalty goes
with it.
One is amazed and saddened at the libraries
that have been written to prove this mortal an
tagonism between justice and mercy in the divine
administration, which a true definition of penalty
or retribution, the arm of justice, might have ren
dered unnecessary. A misconception of what
penalty is, — an idea that it was an arbitrary
misery, annexed by statutory enactment to sin,
which could be remitted at pleasure, — was in
stilled into the popular mind, which could not see
that it was an inevitable necessity, existing in the
nature of things, as irrepealable as the law of
gravitation, and that the only mode of avoiding
13

194 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
the sword of justice was to avoid the sin. Justice
is never cheated, never thwarted ; for whatsoever
a man soweth, that shall he also reap. While sin
is sown, the harvest will be sin and misery : when
righteousness is sown, the fruits of righteousness
will appear ; and justice and mercy will walk
lovingly on the heights of heaven, in sweet and
everlasting accord. It is only by the boldest of
figures that justice is exalted to the rank of a per
sonal demigod, filled with avenging thoughts and
feelings. It is a mode of divine procedure, —
consequential retribution in action, the reaping of
life's harvest field, which comes the same in kind
and quality, but larger in bulk, than the seed
which the soul all along has scattered.
2. Not only did the radical misconception of
the nature and offices of justice in a moral sys
tem, which we have above considered, prevail ;
to wit, that justice and mercy were in collision on
the same field : but the modus invented to recon
cile them in that system was the strangest that
ever entered into mortal conception. Standing in
irreconcilable antagonism, yet both must have
full sway, which could only be done, as was sup
posed, by the theological juggle of permitting
Justice to wreak its wrath upon one innocent of

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS.

195

sin, that a violated law might be satisfied by pun
ishing one who had never broken it, that judicial
satisfactions of penalty might be reaped on a field
which sin had never sown or polluted, in order
that through a path thus opened by the destruction
of all justice, truth, righteousness, and holiness
in God, the bleeding feet of Mercy might travel
in her mission of love ; and justice, truth, right
eousness, and holiness shine more conspicuously
through the very machinery which effected their
total annihilation ! Was there ever before such a
moral chaos? and then followed the quibbling as
to whether the God or the man had paid the pen
alty, — or whether paid at all, or only an equiva
lent; whether the dignity of the victim did not
compensate and alleviate the keenness of the tor
ture ; whether the price paid secured the salvation
of many or few, how it operated as an appease
ment and placation in the case of infants ; and a
thousand other theological fictions, such as always
swarm about an untruth, and press for solution
when a radical point is a falsehood or mistake.
Like the motion of the heavenly bodies on the
Ptolemaic theory, all is confusion and complexity.
Nothing harmonizes, nothing stands and acts in
its appointed place and relation. Every motion

196 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
is a surprise and a revolution ; and we stand in
fear that all may yet rush into undistinguishable
ruin. But now Copernicus announces the true
law ; and every planet and flashing orb at once
wheels into the line of its appointed orbit, and
sweeps sublimely along the path of its revolution.
All is seen now in its true relation to the great
central law which holds and guides the universe :
there is no surprise, for there is no aberration.
All is held in the grasp of an harmonious adjust
ment, and apparent disorder is seen to be only
the stately steppings of nature's most orderly on
going. So a great moral and spiritual truth
explains and corrects all mistakes and miscon
ceptions in the spiritual realm. God's moral
government is seen to need no human vindica
tions, no props from a false logic and a fictitious
theology. His justice and mercy, his righteous
ness and truth, can never work inharmoniously :
they are all centred and grounded in his Father
hood. Mercy is as reluctant that law should be
broken as Justice. Mercy does not abrogate the
law, but transfers it, from tables of stone to fleshly
tables of the heart ; writes it, not with pen and
ink in statutes and penal sanctions, but puts it
within the conscience, safe beneath the cherubic

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 197
wings of love. Mercy extracts the poison, and
so Death has no agent to execute his behests ;
freely forgiving the past, because it is seen to be
exceeding sinful and is repented of, Mercy plants
within the soul, not the law of a carnal command
ment, but the power of an endless life.
How dare men invent subterfuges and mock
truths, to vindicate the supposed dilemmas in the
government of the great God : doing theologically
the rankest injustice, and calling that satisfying
justice ; practising cruelty upon the innocent,
and calling that an equivalent for the punishment
of guilt ; putting a malefactor's crown on the
head of God's own Son, and loading him down
with imputed guilt, — following thus in the track
of the lying, blaspheming Jew, and the cruel,
treacherous Roman ; echoing the cry of High
Priest and Pharisee that he was worthy of death ;
and then, in face of all this cruel trifling, impu
dently asserting that in this very falsehood and
misconception lies the whole moral power of the
gospel? Equivalents and substitutions and satis
factions are the potent spells that work these won
ders ; and men are saved, not because they quit
sinning, which is only a consequence, but because
they are first made to see that the penalty of their

198 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
sins is shifted over upon another, and they go
free ! !
In human society, what is thought of the man
who is willing to shift the burden and penalty of
his misdoing upon the head of an innocent com
panion, and will let him bear the dishonor and
punishment which the real culprit merits? We
call him cruel, unjust, cowardly, mean-spirited,
a hypocrite and knave. But all this is reversed
in theology, and is actually made a ground of
virtue and rejoicing. Christ became so great a
power because, in revealing the heart of God to
the heart of humanity, he touched the springs of
reconciliation by suffering and sacrifice, which
gain the heart's sympathy, and sweep the whole
moral nature on its blessed tides. And when the
windows of the soul are so opened, the golden
sunlight of God's smile illumines all within, and
a superhuman strength inflows, that lifts the be
liever into his royal altitudes of faith and love
and joy. It is not the substitutional idea, but the
sacrificial, rolling up in such power and majesty,
by the way in which that sacrifice was made, and
the persistence and completeness of its accom
plishment, through sorrows and a death all fore
seen as unavoidable if he would get a hold on the

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 1 99
human soul, such as no craft of devil could ever
destroy or annul. And so the historic Jesus is a
power, no less than the ascended and living Jesus.
From the manger to the cross, his doings and
utterances are the germs and seed-plants of im
mortal life to all who catch their significance, and
become impregnated with their divine character.
How truthful and appropriate the language of Dr.
Young ! —
" The instinct of justice in human nature is un
questionable, but the instinct of mercy is deeper,
and is never wanting in noble human souls. It is
God-like to forgive, to forgive freely. Man never
rises so nearly to the divine, as when out of a
a pure, free, self-forgetting, irrepressible love, he
forgives causeless wrong done to him. No pre
cept of Christ has more indubitably the stamp of
heaven upon it, than that gem of all gems which
enriches the New Testament, and which can be
found nowhere else, 'Love your enemies.' Never
did the Saviour of men breathe out upon the
world more of the deepest spirit of God, than
when on the cross he prayed, 'Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do.' It is
divine, it is the divinest of all divine things, to
forgive. We feel it; we are sure of it; there is

200 THOUGHTS ON THE ATONEMENT
no arguing against it. It is an indestructible in
tuition of reason and conscience. God would not
be God to his human creatures ; the object of
deepest veneration, admiration, and love, — if he
could not and did not forgive, forgive freely and
for ever !
"But eternal justice abides nevertheless, and,
wherever sin is, justice brings down its inevitable
doom in terms of the universal law, ssin is death.'
This brief dark sentence might have summed up
the entire history of man and of earth : on the
ground of mere justice alone, nothing else could
have transpired. But there is such an attribute
as divine mercy, — pure, free, unprompted mercy.
From the beginning, and through many agencies
and influences, Mercy has wondrousty interposed
not to defraud Justice, but to destroy sin, — to
destroy sin which is death, and to create holiness
which is life. At last by one amazing interven
tion God's uttermost was put forth to secure the
double effect. By love, whose breadth and length
and depth and height no mind can compass, sin
in the soul is slain, and the indestructible life-
germ of holiness is implanted ; Justice receives
all its own, for with the death of sin its claim is

OLDER THAN THE CREEDS. 201
at an end, while pure Mercy takes forth the ran
somed to beautify and bless them for ever, in the
world of light and life and love."*
* Life and Light of Men, p. 119.

Cambridge : Stereotyped and Printed by John Wilson and Son.

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