Nor is it in its perpetuity alone that the efficacy of the Christian sacrifice transcends the atonements of the law; it removes a higher order of ritual transgressions. It cannot be supposed, indeed, that Messiah's life is no nobler offering than that of a creature from the herd or flock, and will confer no more immunity. Accordingly, it goes beyond those "sins of ignorance," those ceremonial inadvertences, for which alone there was remission in Israel; and reaches tovoluntaryneglects of the sacerdotal ordinances; insuring indemnity for legal omissions, when incurred not simply by the accidents of the flesh, but even by intention of the conscience. This is no greater boon than the dignity of the sacrifice requires; and does but give to his people below that living relation of soul to God which he himself sustains above. "If the blood of bulls and of goats ... sanctifieth to the purifying of theflesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purify (even) your conscience from dead works (ritual observances) to serve the living God!" Let then the ordinances go, and the Lord "put his lawsinto the mind, and write themin the heart"; and let all have "boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by this new and living way which he hath consecrated for us"; "provoking each other to love and to good works."
See, then, in brief, the objection of the Hebrews to the Gospel; and the reply of their instructor. They said: "What a blank is this; you have no temple, no priest, no ritual! How is it that, in his ancient covenant, God is so strict about ceremonial service, and permits no neglect, however incidental, without atonement; yet in this new economy throws the whole system away, letting us run up an everlasting debt to a law confessedly unrepealed, without redemption of it or atonement for it?"
"Not without redemption and atonement," replies their evangelical teacher; "temple, sacrifice, priest, remain to us also, only glorified into proportions worthy of a heavenly dispensation; our temple, in the skies; our sacrifice, Messiah's mortal person; our priest, his ever-living spirit. How poor the efficacy of your former offerings! year after year, your ritual debt began again: for the blood dried and vanished from the tabernacle which it purified; the priest returned from the inner shrine; and when there, he stood, with the interceding blood, before the emblem, not the reality, of God. But Christ, not at the end of a year, but at the end of the great world-era of the Lord, has come to offer up himself,—no lamb so unblemished as he; his voluntary and immortal spirit, than which was nothing ever more divinely consecrate, becomes officiating priest, and strikes his own person with immolating blow; it falls and bleeds on earth, as on the outer altar, standing on the threshold of the sanctuary of heaven: thither he ascends with the memorials of his death, vanishes into the Holy of Holies of the skies, presents himself before the very living God, and sanctifies the temple there and worshippers here; saying to us, 'Drop now for ever the legal burdens that weigh you down; doubt not that you are free, as my glorified spirit here, from the defilements you are wont to dread; I stay behind this veil of visible things, to clear you of all such taint, and put away such sin eternally. Trust, then, in me, and take up the freedom of your souls: burst the dead works, that cling round your conscience like cerements of the grave; and rise to me, by the living power of duty, and a loving allegiance to God.'"
So far, then, as the death of Christ is treated in Scripture dogmatically, rather than historically, its effects are viewed in contrast with the different order of things which must have been expected, had he, as Messiah,notdied. And thus regarded, it presented itself to the minds of the Apostles in three relations:—
First, to the Gentiles, whom it drew in to be subjects of the Messiah, by breaking down the barriers of his Hebrewpersonality, and rendering him spiritual as well as immortal.
Secondly, to the unbelieving Jews; whom his retirement from this world delivered from the judgment due to them, on the principles of their own law, both for theirgeneralviolation of theconditionsof their covenant, and for their positive rejection of him. His absence reopened their opportunities; and to tender them this act of long-suffering, he took on himself the death which had been incurred by them.
Thirdly, to the believing Jews; the terms of whose discipleship the Messiah's death had changed, destroying all the benefits of their lineage, and substituting an act of the mind, the simpler claim of faith. It was therefore a commutation for the Ritual Law, and gave them impunity and atonement for all its violations.
With the last two of these relations, beyond their remarkable historical interest, we have no personal concern. The first remains, and ever will remain, worthy of the glorious joy with which Paul regarded and expounded it. God has committed the rule of this world to no exclusive prince, and no sacerdotal power, and no earthly majesty; but to one whose spirit, too divine to be limited to place and time, broke through clouds of sorrow into the clearest heaven; and thither has since been drawing our human love, though for ages now he has been unseen and immortal. An impartial God, a holy and spiritual law, an infinite hope for all men, are given to us by that generous cross.
It is evident that all three of the relations which I have described belonged to the death of Jesus,in his capacity of Messiah; and could have had no existence if he had not borne this character, but had been simply a private martyr to his convictions. The foregoing exposition gives a direct answer to the inquiry, pressed without the slightest pertinence upon the Unitarian, why the phraseology of the cross is never found applied to Paul or Peter, or any other noble confessor, who died in attestation of the truth; why "no record is given that we are justified by the blood of Stephen;or that he bare our sins in his own body, and made reconciliation for us."[22]I know not why such a question should be submitted to us; we have assuredly no concern with it; having never dreamt that the Apostles could have written as they did respecting the death on Calvary, if they had thought of it only as a scene of martyrdom. We have passed under review the whole language of the New Testament on this subject; and in the interpretation of it havenot even oncehad recourse to this, which is said to be our only view of the cross. We have seen the Apostles justly announcing their Lord's death as aproper propitiation; because it placed whole classes of men, without any meritorious change in their character, in saving relations: declaring it astrict substitutefor others' punishment; on the ground that there were those who must have perished, if he had not; and that he died and retired, that they might remain and live: describing it as asacrifice which put away sin; because it did that for ever, which the Levitical atonements achieved for a day: but we have not found them ever appealing to it either as a satisfaction to the justice of God, or an example of martyrdom to men. The Trinitarians have one idea of this event themselves; and their fancy provides their opponents with one idea of it; of the former not a trace exists, on any page of Scripture; and of the latter the Unitarian need not avail himself at all, in explaining the language whereof it is said to be his solitary key.
Nowhere, then, in Scripture do we meet with anything corresponding with the prevailing notions of vicarious redemption; everywhere, and most emphatically in the personal instructions of our Lord, do we find a doctrine of forgiveness, and an idea of salvation, utterly inconsistent with it. He spake often of the unqualified clemency of God to his returning children; never once of the satisfaction demanded by his justice. He spake of the joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth; but was silent on the sacrificialfaith, without which penitence is said to be unavailing. Nor did he, like his modern disciples, teach that there aretwo separate salvations, which must follow each other in a fixed order: first, redemption from the penalty, secondly, from the spirit, of sin; pardon for the past, before sanctification in the present; a removal of the "hinderance in God," previous to its annihilation in ourselves. If indeed there were in Christianity two deliverances, discriminated and successive, it would be more in accordance with its spirit to invert this order;—to recall from alienation first, and announce forgiveness afterwards; to restore from guilt, before cancelling the penalty; and permit thehealingto anticipate thepardoninglove. At least, there would seem, in such arrangement, to be a greater jealousy for the holiness of the divine law, a severer reservation of God's complacency for those who have broken from the service of sin, than in the system which proclaims impunity to the rebel will, ere yet its estrangement is renounced. If the outward remission precedes the inward sanctification, then does God admit to favor the yet unsanctified; guilt keeps us in no exile from him: and though the Holy Spirit is to follow afterwards, it becomes the peculiar office of the cross to lift us as we are, with every stain upon the soul and every vile habit unretraced, from the brink of perdition to the assurance of glory: the divine lot is given to us, before the divine love is awakened in us; and the heirs of heaven have yet to become the children of holiness. With what consistency can the advocates of such an economy accuse its opponents of dealing lightly with sin, of deluding men into a false trust, and administering seductive flatteries to human nature?[23]What! shall we, who plant in every soul of sin a hell, whence no foreign force, no external God, can pluck us, any more than they can tear us from our identity,—we, who hide the fires of torment in no viewless gulf, but make them ubiquitous as guilt,—we, who suffer no outward agentfrom Eden, or the Abyss, or Calvary, to encroach upon the solitude of man's responsibility, and confuse the simplicity of conscience,—we, who teach that God will not, and even cannot, spare the froward, till they be froward no more, but must permit the burning lash to fall, till they cry aloud for mercy, and throw themselves freely into his embrace;—shall we be rebuked for a lax administration of peace, by those who think that a moment may turn the alien into the elect? It is no flattery of our nature, to reverence deeply its moral capacities: we only discern in them the more solemn trust, and see in their abuse the fouler shame. And it is not of what menare, but of what theymight be, that we encourage noble and cheerful thoughts. Doubtless, we think exaggeration possible (which our opponents apparently do not) even in the portraiture of their actual character: and perhaps we are not the less likely to awaken true convictions of sin, that we strive to speak of it with the voice of discriminative justice, instead of the monotonous thunders of vengeance; and to draw its image in the natural tints provided by the conscience, rather than in the preternatural flame-color mingled in the crucibles of hell.
In makingpenalredemption andmoralredemption separate and successive, the vicarious scheme, we submit, is inconsistent with the Christian idea of salvation. Not that we take the second, and reject the first, as our Trinitarian friends imagine; nor that we invert their order. We accept them both; putting them, however, not in succession, but in super-position, so that they coalesce. The power and the punishment of sin perish together; and together begin the holiness and the bliss of heaven. Whatever extracts the poison cools the sting: nor can the divine vigor of spiritual health enter, without its freedom and its joy. That there can be any separate dealings with our past guilt and with our present character, is not a truth of God, but a fiction of the schools. The sanctification of the one is the redemption of the other. The mind given up to passion, or chained to self, or anyhow alienated from the love and life divine, dwells, whatever be its faith, in the dark and terrible abyss;while he, and he only, that, in the freedom and tranquillity of great affections, communes with God and toils for men, understands the meaning, and wins the promises, of heaven. Am I asked: "What, then, is to persuade the sinful heart thus to draw near to God;—what, but a proclamation of absolute pardon, can break down the secret distrust, which keeps our nature back, wrapped in the reserve of conscious guilt?" I reply; however much these fears and hesitations might cling round us, and restrain us from the mystic Deity of Nature, they can have no place in our intercourse with the Father whom Jesus represents. It needs only that Christ be truly his image, to know "that the hinderance is not with him, but entirely in ourselves";[24]to see that there is no anger in his look; to feel that he invites us to unreserved confession, and accepts our self-abandonment to him,—that he lifts the repentant, prostrate at his feet, and speaks the words of severe, but truest hope. Am I told, "that only the gratitude excited by personal rescue from tremendous danger, by an unconditional and entire deliverance, is capable of winning our reluctant nature, of opening the soul to the access of the Divine Spirit, and bringing it to the service of the Everlasting Will"? I rejoice to acknowledge, thatsomesuch disinterested power must be awakened, some mighty forces of the heart be called out, ere the regeneration can take place that renders us children of the Highest; ere we can break, with true new birth, from the shell of self, and try and train our wings in the atmosphere of God. The permanent work of duty must be wrought by the affections; not by the constraint, however solemn, of hope and fear; no self-perfectionating process, elaborated by an anxious will, has warmth enough to ripen the soul's diviner fruits; the walks of outward morality, and the slopes of deliberate meditation, it may keep smooth and trim; but cannot make the true life-blossoms set, as in a garden of the Lord, and the foliage wave as with the voice of God among the trees. I gladly admit that, to a believer in the vicarious sacrifice, thesense of pardon, the love of the Great Deliverer, may well fulfil this blessed office, of carrying him out of himself in genuine allegiance to a being most benign and holy. And perceiving that, if this doctrine were removed, there is not,in the system of which it forms a part, and which else would be all terror, anything that could perform the same generous part, I can understand why it seems to its advocates anessentialpower in the renovation of the character. But great as it may be, within the limits of its own narrow scheme, ideas possessed of higher moral efficacy are not wanting, when we pass into a region of nobler and more Christian thought. Shall we say that the view of the Infinite Ruler, given in the spoken wisdom or the living spirit of Christ, has no sanctifying power? Yet where is there any trace in it of the satisfactionist's redemption? When we sit at Messiah's feet, that transforming gratitude for an extinguished penalty, on which the prevailing theology insists, as its central emotion, becomes replaced by a similar and profounder sentiment towards the Eternal Father. If to rescue men from a dreadful fate in the future be a just title to our reverence,never to have designedthat fate claims an affection yet more devoted; if there be a divine mercy in annihilating an awful curse, in shedding only blessing there is surely a diviner still. Shall the love restored to us after long delay, and in consideration of an equivalent, work mightily on the heart,—and shall that which asked no purchase, which has been veiled by no cloud, which has enfolded us always in its tranquillity, nor can ever quit the soul opened to receive it, fail to penetrate the conscience, and dissolve the frosts of our self-love by some holier flame? Never shall it be found true, that God must threaten us with vengeance, ere we can feel the shelter of his grace!
In truth, the Christian idea of salvation cannot be better illustrated, than by the doubt which has been entertained respecting the proper translation of my text. Some, referring it to spiritual redemption, adhere to the common version; others, seeing that the Apostle Peter is explaining "bywhat power or by what name" he had cured the lame man at the temple gate, refer the words to this miracle of deliverance, and render them thus: "Neither is therehealingin any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we can behealed." It matters little which it is; for whether we speak of body or of mind, Jesus "saves" us by "making us whole"; by putting forth upon us a divine and healing power, by which past suffering and present decrepitude disappear together; which supplies the defective elements of our nature, cools the burning of inward fever, or calls into being new senses and perceptions, opening a diviner universe to our experience. The deformed and crooked will, bowed by Satan, lo! these many years, and nowise able to lift up itself, he loosens and makes straight in uprightness. The moral paralytic, collapsed and prostrate amid the stir of life, and incapably gazing on the moving waters in which others find their health, has often started up at the summons of that voice, though perchance "he wist not who it was"; and, going his way, has found it to be "the sabbath," and owned the "work" of one who is in the spirit of "the Father." From the eye long dark and blind to duty and to God, he has caused the film to pass away; and shown the solemn look of life beneath a heaven so tranquil and sublime. Even the dead of soul, close wrapped in bandages of selfishness,—that greediest of graves,—have been quickened by his piercing call, and have come forth, to learn, "when risen," that only in the meekness that can obey is there the power to command, only in the love that serves is there the life of heart-felt liberty. To call, then, on the name and trust in the spirit of Christ, is to invoke the restoring power of God; to give symmetry and speed to our lame affections, and the vigor of an athlete to our limping wills. There is not any Christiansalvationthat is not thus identical with Christianperfection: "nor any other name under heaven given among men, whereby we may be (thus)made whole." Let all that would "be perfect be thus minded"; seek "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ"; and they shall find in him a "power to become the sons of God."
The Nature of the Atonement, and its Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life.ByJohn M'Leod Campbell. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1856.
The Nature of the Atonement, and its Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life.ByJohn M'Leod Campbell. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1856.
This is a strange book. A Greek would have hated it. A Puritan would have found it savory, even where it was unsound. Rosenkranz, who has written on theÆsthetik des Hässlichen, would have been thankful for such a fund of illustration. Cumbrous, tiresome, monotonous, it has few attractions for the natural man, who may have a weakness in favor of pure English and nice grammar. It despises the graces of carnal literature, and treats all the color and music of language as the Roundheads treated a cathedral, silencing the "box of whistles" and smashing the "mighty big angels in glass." And yet, if you can get over its grating way of delivering itself, you will find it no barbaric product, but the utterance of a deep and practised thinker, charged with the richest experiences of the Christian life, and resolute to clear them from every tangle of fiction or pretence. Beneath the uncouth form there is not only severe truth, but great tenderness and beauty,—a fine apprehension of the real inner strife of tempted men, and an intense faith in an open way of escape from it, without compromise of any sanctity. The author, though not tuneful in his speech, has the gifts of a true prophet; and often enables one to fancy what Isaiah might havebeen if he had heard nothing but the bagpipe, and had set his "burdens" to its drone. Whether Mr. Campbell's style has been formed north of the Tweed, we know not. In any case, it is trained in the school of Calvinism; is untouched therefore by any feeling for art; and runs on with a sort of extemporaneous habit, insufficiently relieved by occasional flashes of grotesque and forcible expression. It is only in exterior aspect, however, that he presents the features of the rugged old Calvinism: and though the first-born of that system and its younger sons are distinguished like Isaac's children, "Esau is a hairy man, and Jacob is a smooth man," yet no true patriarch of the school can be so blind as not to see beneath our author's goat-skin dress, and know that he is other than the heir. In fact, the peculiarity of this work as a theological phenomenon is, that it is a destruction of Calvinism without any revolt from it,—an escape from it through its own interior. Its postulates are not denied. Its phraseology is not rejected. Its statement of the problem of redemption is in the main accepted. Its provision for the solution,—the Incarnation of the Son,—is sacredly preserved. Yet these elements are put into such play as to make it checkmate itself on its own area. Its definitions are shown to be suicidal; and its sharp-edged logic is used to cut through the ligaments that constrain and shape it.
We have spoken first of thestyleof this book, because it strikes the reader at the outset, and is not unlikely to repel him if he is not warned. Of one other feature, derived from the same school, we must say a word, to qualify the admiration and gratitude which we shall then ungrudgingly tender to the author. In common with all the great masters of the "Evangelical" school, he is too much at home with the Divine economy; knows too well how the same thing appears from the finite and the infinite point of view; can tell too surely how a mixed nature, both divine and human, would feel on looking from both ends at once; and altogether goes with too close a search to the "secret place of the Most High." Not that he speaks unworthily on these high themes; we havenothing truer to suggest, except more silence. But we must confess that when a teacher lays down the conditions of divine possibility, expatiates psychologically on the sentiments of the Father and the Son, and seems as though he had been allowed a peep into the autobiography of God, we shrink from the sharp outlines, and feel that we shall believe more if we are shown less. With so many soundings taken, and so many channels buoyed, the sense of the shoreless sea is gone, and we find only a port of traffic, with coast-lights instead of stars. The temptation to this theological map-making has always proved peculiarly strong among the disciples of Geneva: and the reason is to be found in the very nature of the problem they have attempted to resolve. Religion has two foci to determine,—the divine nature and the human. Athanasius and the Greek influence fixed the doctrine of the Godhead: Augustine and the Latin Church defined the spiritual state of man. The one, it has been said, produced a theology; the other, an anthropology. In the construction of the former, it is obvious that the appeal could be made only to positive authority, whether of Scripture or the Church. On the Nicene question no one could pretend to have personal insight or scientific data: it must be decided by arbitrary vote on impressions of testimony. But for establishing a doctrine of humanity, the living resources of consciousness and experience were present with perpetual witness; every proposition advanced could be confronted with its corresponding reality: the disciple could not help carrying the dogma inward to the test of his self-knowledge. The scheme of the Trinity partook of the nature of aGnosis, which dwelt apart from the stir of phenomena, and, having once set and crystallized, could only be hung up for preservation. The dogmas of human depravity and helplessness partook of the nature of aScience, coming in contact with the facts of life and character at every point. Moral experience had something to say to them: and unless they could keep good terms with it, they could not hope to hold their ground. Hence the Augustinian divines have been constrained to seek aphilosophyof religion, andto collate the text of their Scriptural system with the running paraphrase of actual life. No writers have contributed so much to lay bare the inmost springs of human action and emotion; have tracked with so much subtilty the windings of guilty self-deception, or so found the secret sorrow that lies at the core of every unconsecrated joy. If we must concede to the Roman Catholic casuists and the problems of the confessional the merit of creating an ethical Art embodied in systems of rules, we owe to the deeper Evangelical spirit, whether in its action or its reaction, the ground-lines of an ethical Philosophy;—or, if you deny that such a thing as yet exists, at least the true idea and undying quest of it. The disciples of Augustine, belonging to an anthropological school, have been naturally distinguished by a reflective and psychologic habit.
If it was the function of the Greek period to settle the doctrine of God, and of its Latin successor to define the nature of man, it was the aim of theReformation, leaving these two extremes undisturbed, to find the way of mediation between them. So long as the great sacerdotal Church, living continuator of Christ's presence, was intrusted with the business, private Christians wanted no theory on the subject; all nice questions went into the ecclesiastical closet and disappeared. But as soon as ever the hierarchy fell out of this position, there was an immense void left to be filled. On the one hand, Infinite Holiness, quite alienated; on the other, Human Pravity, quite helpless: how was any approximation to be rendered conceivable? True, the great original Mediation on Calvary, which the papal priesthood pretended to prolong, remained; for it was fixed in history. But it lay a great way off, a fact in the old past; and its intervention was required to-day by Melancthon, and Carlstadt, and a whole generation quite remote from it. How was its power to be fetched into the present? how applied to men walking about in Wittenberg or Zürich? This was the problem which flew open by the cancelling of the Romish credentials: and the various answers to it constitute the body of Protestant theology. Inone point they all agree, that, to replace the priestly media that are thrust out,Personal Faithis the element that must be brought in. In what way this subjective state of the individual mind draws or appropriates the efficacy of the Incarnation; in whatorderthe redeeming process runs among the three given terms,—the alienated Father, the mediating Son, the believing disciple; whether any part of the process is moral and real, or all is legal and virtual;—these are questions which the Reformation has found it easier to open than to close. But answer them as you will, they entangle your thoughts in the mutual relations and sentiments of three persons; and cannot be discussed without establishing some principles of moral psychology, as the common grounds of intercommunion between minds finite and infinite, and dealing with hypothetical problems of divine as well as human casuistry. Hence the inevitable tendency of the doctrine of Mediation to venture on a natural history of the Divine Mind,—to construct a drama of Providence and Grace, with plot too artfully wrought for the free hand of Heaven, and traits too specific and minute for reverent contemplation.
It is deeply instructive to observe the pulsation of religious thought in men. Revealed religion is ever passing into natural, and natural returning to re-interpret the revealed. We can almost see the steps by which sacred history was converted into dogma; while dogma, assumed in turn as the starting-point, is ever producing new readings of the history. This world may be regarded as ahuman theatre, where the Wills of men perform the parts; or as the stage ofDivine agency, using the visible actors as the executants of an invisible thought. Its vicissitudes, presented in the former aspect, yield only history; in the latter, give rise to doctrine. Noticed by Tacitus, the life of Christ is a provincial incident of Tiberius's reign, and his death a judicial act of Pontius Pilate's government. In the three first Gospels and the book of Acts, the crucifixion is still the act of wicked or misguided men, inflicted on an expostulating victim; not, however, without beingforeseenas the appointed precursor of a resurrection.The event is thus in the main simply historical; but with a divine comment which gives it an incipient theological significance. It appears under another aspect in the Gospel of John; there, Christ not only foresaw, butdeterminedhis own death: his life "no man taketh it from him," but he "lays it down of himself"; he is not merely the submissive medium, but the spontaneous co-agent of a Divine intent. Finally, in St. Paul,—to whom the person and ministry of Christ were unfamiliar, who, as a disciple of his heavenly life, looked back upon them from a higher point,—the historical aspect almost wholly disappears in the ideal; and the cross becomes the Gospel, the wisdom of God and the power of God, the self-sacrifice of the Son the reconciling way to the Father, the very focus and symbol of all the mystery and mercy comprised in humanity. The movement of thought through these successive stages is obvious. An event is at first accepted as it arises. But in proportion as its concrete impression retires, the need becomes more urgent to find its function: instinctive search is made for all those elements, accessories, and effects of it, which promise to bring out its meaning and idea, until at last its doctrine absorbs itself, and enters the human mind as a permanent factor of positive religion. It is thus that the great antitheses, of Law and Gospel, of the Natural and the Spiritual man, of dead Works and living Faith, of self-seeking enmity and self-surrendering reconciliation with God, have settled upon the consciousness of Christendom, and grown into the very substance of its experience. They have become part of its natural religion. But in this character they may, conversely, be taken as the initiative of a new version of the history whence they sprung. They could not be born into unmixed and formed existence at once; but, like all new affections, must feel their way out of an early indeterminate state, into clear self-apprehension and settled purity. The testimony of the Christian conscience needs time to become articulate and collected. The shadow of human guilt may lie so dark upon the mind, the dawn of the divine holiness may so dazzle the inward vision, that blindness in partmay linger for a while; and the eye, in very opening to Christ's healing touch, may fail to see. Once accustomed to the new light of life, men are no longer occupied with it alone, but find in it a medium for truer discernment of objects around. The special sentiments awakened by the Gospel test themselves afresh, like any other theory, by being fully lived out, and tried as experiments upon the soul. The type of character,—the edition of human nature,—in which they take embodiment, becomes a distinct object of critical appreciation; and while all its deep expressive traits speak for the inner truth whence they are moulded, every mixture of disharmony or defect calls for some revision of idea. In the thirsty spiritual state to which men were reduced on the eve of the Reformation, they drank up with intense eagerness the most turbid supplies of evangelical doctrine. With purer health and finer perception they become aware that not all was water of life; and that coarse notions of the nature of justice, the conditions of mercy, and the measurement of sin, were intermixed and must become mere sediment. Cleared of these, the theory is taken back to the facts of revelation, and so washed through them, that they may also emerge as from a sprinkling of regeneration. Through such re-baptism does our author, furnished with a purified conception of "atonement," pass the history of Christ.
In looking for the whereabouts of the atonement, we are guided, as in search for the pole-star, by two pointers whose indications we are to follow. Its function was double,—to cancel a guilty past, to make a holy future: and it must be of such a nature as to disappoint neither of these conditions. In determining its form, the great anxiety of theologians hitherto has been to fit it for itsretrospectiveaction, and disembarrass the problem of salvation of the burden of accumulated sin. It is Mr. Campbell's distinction that he lays the superior stress on itsprospectiveaction, and requires that it shall positively heal the sickness of our nature, and evolve thence a real and living righteousness. God's moral perfectness could be satisfied with nothing less. If, indeed, He looked on ourguilt merely as an obstacle to our "salvation," and desired to remove it as a hinderance out of the way,—if He rather sought a pretext for making us happy than a provision for drawing us to goodness,—then the work of Christ might be so devised as simply to tear out the defiled page of the past, and register an infinite credit not our own, without inherent care for ulterior personal holiness. But were it so, the divinelovewould amount only to an unrighteous desire for our happiness, and the divinerighteousnessto an unloving repulsion from our sin. Such spurious analysis corresponds with no reality; and in the truth of things there can be no heavenly affection that is not holy, nor any holiness that is not affectionate.
"While in reference to the not uncommon way of regarding this subject which represents righteousness and holiness as opposed to the sinner's salvation, and mercy and love as on his side, I freely concede that all the Divine attributes were, in one view, against the sinner, in that they called for the due expression of God's wrath against sin in the history of redemption: I believe, on the other hand, that the justice, the righteousness, the holiness of God, have an aspect according to which they, as well as his mercy, appear as intercessors for man, and crave his salvation. Justice may be contemplated as according to sin its due; and there is in righteousness, as we are conscious to it, what testifies that sin should be miserable. Butjustice, looking at the sinner not simply as the fit subject of punishment, but as existing in a moral condition of unrighteousness, and so its own opposite, must desire that the sinner should cease to be in that condition; should cease to be unrighteous, should become righteous: righteousness in God craving for righteousness in man, with a craving which the realization of righteousness in man alone can satisfy. So also of holiness. In one view it repels the sinner, and would banish him to outer darkness, because of its repugnance to sin. In another, it is pained by the continued existence of sin and unholiness, and must desire that the sinner should cease to be sinful. So that the sinner, conceived of as awakening to theconsciousness of his own evil state, and saying to himself, 'By sin I have destroyed myself. Is there yet hope for me in God?'—should hear an encouraging answer, not only from the love and mercy of God, but also from his very righteousness and holiness. We must not forget, in considering the response that is in conscience to the charge of sin and guilt, that, though the fears which accompany that response are partly the effect of a dawning of light, they also in part arise from remaining darkness. He who is able to interpret the voice of God within him truly, and with full spiritual intelligence will be found saying, not only, 'There is to me cause for fear in the righteousness and holiness of God,' but also, 'There is room for hope for me in the Divine righteousness and holiness.' And when gathering consolation from the meditation of the name of the Lord, that consolation will be not only, 'Surely the Divine mercy desires to see me happy rather than miserable,' but also, 'Surely the Divine righteousness desires to see me righteous,—the Divine holiness desires to see me holy,—my continuing unrighteous and unholy is as grieving to God's righteousness and holiness as my misery through sin is to his pity and love.' 'Good and righteous is the Lord, therefore will he teach sinners the way which they should choose.' 'A just God and a Saviour'; not as the harmony of a seeming opposition, but 'a Saviour,becausea just God.'"—p. 29.
From this justly-conceived passage the characteristics of Mr. Campbell's theory may already be divined. He sets his faith on a concrete, living, indivisible God, whom you can never understand by laying out His abstract attributes one by one, with their separate requirements, and then putting them together again to compute the resultant. He insists on the absolute dominance of a moral and spiritual idea throughout the revealed economy: of this nature is the evil to be met,—sin and estrangement; of this nature is the good to be reached,—righteousness and reconciliation; and only of this nature can be the mediation which effects the change; related upward to the Father and downward to men, in a way accordantwith the laws of conscience, and intelligible by its self-light. He craves, therefore, a natural juncture, a real causal nexus, between the several parts of the process, to the exclusion of all forensic fictions and arbitrary scene-shifting and sovereigntours-de-force. In short, he will have no tricks passed off, noquasi-transformations upon the conscience; he feels the moral world to be above the range of mere miracle; any change in it irreducible to its solemn laws wouldipso factofall out of it and become a mere dynamical surprise. Ofphysicalmiracle our author avails himself to the full amount; the incarnation of the Son of God being, with him, as with others, the central fact and essential medium of Christian redemption. But the august power thussupernaturally set up—the Person at once divine and human—works out his great problemnaturally, without requiring the suspension of one rule of right, or holding any magical dealings with the character of God or man. His problem, therefore, is to show how the life and death of Christ—considered as God in humanity—were fitted, and alone fitted, to blot out the sins of the world before God, and to introduce among men a new state of real righteousness and eternal life.
The common Evangelical scheme of redemption so far affects to be deduced from certain general principles, and to render the way of redemptionconceivable, that it is stigmatized asrationalisticby Catholics and Anglicans. It is so, however, only in the sense of hanging well together, and serving the purpose of atheological Mnemonicto those who want a religion ready more than deep. In the higher sense, of occupying any natural ground of reason, it does not earn its reproach. The propositions which it lays down, as to the inability of a holy nature to forgive unless circuitously and with compensation, and as to the commutability of either penal liabilities or moral attributes, are without any support from our primary sentiments of right and wrong, and could be carried out by no sane man in the conduct of life. The doctrine is taught in two principal forms;—the earlier and more exact scheme of "Satisfaction," elaborated by Anselm of Canterbury,and perfected by Owen and Edwards; and the modern theory of "Public Justice," maintained in the writings of Dr. Pye Smith and Dr. Payne, and prevailing wherever the first decadence from the old Calvinism is going on. The first of these prepares its ground by laying down these principles as fundamental;—that the connection between sin and suffering is inviolably secured on the veracity of God; that "when we have done all, we are unprofitable servants," and have only rendered our strict due; that, far from "doing all," we have done and can do nothing, except accumulate guilt, which, measure it as you will,—by the majesty of the authority defied, or the multitude of the offenders and their sins,—is practically of infinite amount. Here, then, is a case of utter despair: infinite debt; nothing to pay; remission impossible; punishment eternal; death unattainable. But we are brought into the labyrinth on one side, to emerge from it on the other. Whilemencan only multiply demerit, there are natures conceivable to which merit is possible. A Divine Person, laying aside a blessedness inherently his, and assuming sorrow not his own, and doing this out of a pure love, fulfils the conditions; and when the Son takes on him our humanity, the act, carried out unto the end, has a merit in it which in amount is a full set-off against the guilt of men. Still, this only leaves us with two opposite funds—of infinite good desert and infinite ill desert—which sit apart and unrelated. In due course, the one ought to have a boundless reward, the other a boundless punishment. But to render his affluence available for our debt, the Son consummates his self-sacrifice, substitutes himself for us as the object of retribution, and dies once for all,—one infinite death for many finite hereafters of woe. The Father's justice is satisfied; the allotment of suffering to sin has been accurately observed; His desire to pardon is released from its restraint. Having dealt with the person of the Son as if it were mankind, He may deal with mankind as if they were the Son, and look upon them as clothed with a perfect obedience.
The wholly artificial structure of this scheme, which is itsgreatest condemnation, has been its chief security. It is by approaching within conducting-distance of reality, that a doctrine elicits resistance and meets the stroke of natural objection; and if it only keeps far enough aloft in the metaphysic atmosphere, it may float along unarrested from zone to zone of time. Men know not what to make of propositions so much out of their sphere, so evasive of any real encounter with their consciousness, and are apt to let them pass for their very strangeness' sake. But surely we are bound to demand for them some "response of conscience," and, with Mr. Campbell, to demur to such of them as will not bear this test. Limiting ourselves to themediatorialpart of the theory, we will assume the problem of moral evil to be correctly stated, and only ask whether, from the supposed case of despair, the offered solution affords any real exit of relief. Nor do we assume this for argument's sake alone. We can perfectly understand any remorseful sense, however deep, of human unworthiness; any appreciative reverence, however intense, of Christ's self-sacrifice. Set the one under the shadow of the Father's infinite disapproval, the other in the light of His infinite complacency; so far we go; there let them lie. But what next? Here, on the left hand, is Sin with its need of punishment; there, on the right, a perfect Holiness with its merits. While they are thus spread beneath the Father's eye, they break up their inviolable alliances; each moral cause crosses over and takes the opposite effect. If such change took place, theseatof the fact must be sought partly in the consciousness of Christ, partly in the Father's view of things. In reference to the first, must we say that the Crucifiedfelt himselfunder Divine wrath and punishment, and esteemed that wrath to bejust,—the fitting expression of his own inwardremorse? If so, can we affirm that his consciousness was veracious? or did he not feel, in regard toothers'sins, sentiments and experiences that are false except in relation toone's own? And, ascending to the other point of view, shall we affirm that the Fathersaw sinin the Son and was angry with him; so that, in the hour of sublimest obedience,the words ceased to be true, "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased"? And on the other hand, what is meant when it is said that beneath the Divine eye men in their guilt are seen "clothed with" a perfect righteousness? Is such an aspect of themtrue? or is it akin to an ocular deception? We seem to be reduced to this dilemma;—the change of apparent moral place implied in "imputation" is either a faithful representation, or aquasi-representation, of the reality of things. If the latter, then the Divine consciousness is illusory, and the world is administered on a fiction; if the former, then the moral law, in assuring us of the personal and inalienable nature of sin, gives a false report, and there is nothing to prevent a circulating medium of merit from passing current through the universe. Mr. Campbell's deference for the great advocates of this marvellous doctrine does not obstruct his perception of its difficulties.
"I freely confess," he says, "that to my own mind it is a relief, not only intellectually, but also morally and spiritually, to see that there is no foundation for the conceptions that when Christ suffered for us, the just for the unjust, he suffered either 'as by imputation unjust,' or 'as if he were unjust.' I admit thatintellectuallyit is a relief not to be called to conceive to myself a double consciousness, both in the Father and in the Son, such as seems implied in the Father's seeing the Son at one and the same time, though it were but for a moment, as the well-beloved Son, to whom infinite favor should go forth, and also as worthy, in respect of the imputation of our sins to him, of being the object of infinite wrath, he being the object of such wrath accordingly; and in the Son's knowing himself the well-beloved of the Father, and yet having the consciousness of being personally, through imputation of our sin, the object of the Father's wrath. I feel it intellectually a relief neither to be called to conceive this, nor to assume it as an unconceived mystery. Still more do I feel itmorallyandspirituallya relief, not to be required to recognize legal fictions as having a place in this high region, in which the awful realities of sin and holiness, spiritual deathand spiritual life, are the objects of a transaction between the Father and the Son in the Eternal Spirit."—p. 310.
The second form of mediatorial doctrine, to which we have referred as the modern type of Calvinism, has arisen from the endeavor to evade some of these perplexities. The riddle that haunts its teachers is still the same,—how it can become possible to show mercy to sinners; but the difficulty in the way is differently conceived, and therefore met by a different expedient. It is not an obstacle in God, arising from his personal sentiment of equity, which must be satisfied; but springs out of the necessity of consistent rectitude, and adherence to law in his administrative government. The Father himself, it is intimated, would be quite willing to forgive, were there nothing to consult except his own disposition. But it would never do to play fast and loose with the criminal law of the universe, and, notwithstanding the most solemn enactments, let off delinquents on mere repentance, as if nothing were the matter beyond a personal affront. Something more is due toPublic Justice. If the due course of retribution is to be turned aside, it must be in such a way and at such a cost as to proclaim aloud the awfulness of the guilt remitted. This, we are told, is accomplished by the sufferings and death of the Son of God, which were substituted for our threatened punishment, not as its quantitative equal paid to the Father, but as a moral equivalent in the eyes of men. Their validity is thus conceived to depend by no means on their particular measure, but on the meritorious obedience of love which was their sustaining and animating soul, and which, being on the scale of a Divine nature, gave infinite value to the smallest sorrow. Within the casket of his grief was held such a priceless righteousness, that, on beholding it, the Father might regard it as an adequate plea for acts of mercy to sinners. He does not indeed impute to them the actual moral perfectness of Christ, so as to see them invested with it, any more than he imputed to Christ their guilt, and frowned on Calvary. It is theeffectsonly of that holiness which he imputes; he offers to men the benefits of it, without reckoning it as really theirs,and giving them thelegal standingwhich its possession would bestow.
No doubt this scheme gets rid of the penal mensuration and moral conveyancing of the older Calvinism. It shifts also the bar to free mercy away from the inner personality of God, and sets it in his outer government. But when we again attempt to seize themediatorial expedient, what is it? It is said to be a display of the enormity of that guilt which needs to be redeemed at such a cost. But is that needreal? Have we not been told that it has no place in God? Does he then hang out a profession that is not true to the kernel of things, but only a show-off for impression's sake? If Eternal Justice in its inner essence doesnotrequire the expiation provided, why in its outer manifestation pretend that itdoes? As nothing can become right for "the sake of good example" that is not right in itself, so is "Public Justice," unsustained by the sincere heart of reality, a mere dramatic imposture. Mr. Campbell has supplied us with a forcible statement of this truth:—
"Surely rectoral or public justice, if it is to have any moral basis,—any basis other than expediency,—must rest upon, and refer to, distributive or absolute justice. In other words, unless there be a rightness in connecting sin with misery, and righteousness with blessedness, looking at individual cases simply in themselves, I cannot see that there is a rightness in connecting them as a rule of moral government. 'An English judge once said to a criminal before him: You are condemned to be transported, not because you have stolen these goods, but that goods may not be stolen.' (Jenkyns, 175, 176.) This is quoted in illustration of the position, that 'the death of Christ is an honorable ground for remitting punishment,' because 'his sufferings answer the same ends as the punishment of the sinner.' I do not recognize any harmony between this sentiment of the English judge and the voice of an awakened conscience on the subject of sin. It is just because he has sinned and deserves punishment, and not because he says to himself that God is a moral governor, and must punish himto deter others, that the wrath of God against sin seems so terrible,—and as just as terrible."—p. 79.
Even were the expression backed up by reality, we cannot but ask about the fitness of the medium for the thought to be conveyed. God's horror at guilt is publicly proclaimed by the most awful crime in human history! To explain the difficulty of letting off the offender, he exhibits the anguish of the innocent! The spectacle would seem in danger of suggesting the wrong lesson to the terrified observer,—of raising to intensity the doubt whether, in a world that gives its silver to a Judas, its judgment-seat to a Pilate, and the cross to the Son of God, any Providence can care for rectitude at all. Even when the death of Christ is contemplated exclusively as aself-sacrifice, without remembering the guilt which compassed it, we are at a loss to understand how it could be "an honorable ground for remitting punishment." What difference did it make in the previous reasons of the Divine government, so that penalties right before should be less right afterwards? If Catiline were undergoing his just retribution at the date of the Last Supper, what plea was there for releasing him at or before the date of the resurrection? That obedience rendered and suffering endured by one soul should dispense with the liabilities of another, is a supposition at variance with the personal and inalienable nature of all sin; and to say that God "imputes theeffects" of Christ's holiness to those who are not partakers in the cause, is to accuse the Divine government of total disregard to character and evasion of moral reality. The old Calvinism represents the Father as having an illusoryperceptionof men,as ifthey were clad in a divine righteousness. The new Calvinism represents him as having indeed a true perception of their unrighteousness, but, notwithstanding this, falsifying the truthin action, and proceeding as if the facts were quite other than they are. Inasmuch as unveracious vision is intellectual, while unveracious practice is moral, the younger doctrine appears to us a positive degradation of the elder, not only in logical completeness, but in religious worth. Both of them make the redeeming economyproceed upon afiction; but there is all the difference between unconscious and conscious fiction; between an inner "satisfaction" brought about by an optical displacement of merit, and an outward "exhibition" set up for the sake of impression. The theory of Owen, stern as it is, bears the stamp of resolute meaning consistently carried through into the inmost recess of the Divine nature. The newer doctrine is the production of a platform age, which obtrudes considerations ofeffecteven into its thoughts of God and his government, and can scarce refrain from turning the universe itself into a theatre for rhetorical pathos andad captandumdisplay.
With good reason, therefore, does our author feel that this whole subject is in need of reconsideration. His own doctrine diverges from its predecessors at a very early point, and is seen at its source in the following proposition of Edwards, as cited by Mr. Campbell:—
"In contending that sin must be punished with an infinite punishment, President Edwards says, 'that God could not be just to himself without this vindication, unless there could be such a thing as a repentance, humiliation, and sorrow for this (viz. sin) proportionable to the greatness of the Majesty despised,'—for that there must needs be 'either an equivalent punishment, or an equivalent sorrow and repentance'; 'so,' he proceeds, 'sin must be punished with an infinite punishment'; thus assuming that the alternative of 'an equivalent sorrow and repentance' was out of the question. But, upon the assumption of that identification of himself with those whom he came to save, on the part of the Saviour, which is the foundation of Edwards's whole system, it may at the least be said, that the Mediator had the two alternatives open to his choice,—either to endure for sinners an equivalent punishment, or to experience in reference to their sin, and present to God on their behalf, an adequate sorrow and repentance. Either of these courses should be regarded by Edwards as equally securing the vindication of the majesty and justice of God in pardoning sin."—p. 136.
The side of the alternative which Edwards abandoned, ourauthor takes up and follows out. The work of Christ, as a ground of remission, consisted in the offering on behalf of humanity of an adequate repentance. Adequate it could not have been but for his Divine nature; which attaches to his holy sorrow an infinite moral value, to balance the infinite heinousness of the sin deplored. The only reason why human penitence does not in itself avail to restore, lies in its imperfect purity and depth. Through the cloud of evil, and with the eye of self, we are disqualified for true discernment of sin as it is: both the limits of a finite nature, and the delusions of a tempted and fallen one, hinder us from appreciating the measure of our guilt and misery. Even when our better mind reasserts itself, our very compunction carries in it many a speck of ill, and our repentance needs to be repented of. But were it not for this, there would be "more atoning worth in one tear of the true and perfect sorrow which the memory of the past would awaken," "than in endless ages of penal woe." It is not the inefficacy, but the impossibility, of due penitence that constitutes our fatal disability; to be relieved from which we need to be taken out of ourselves, to be identified with a perfect spirit; our humanity must cease to be human, and become one with the Divine nature. This is precisely the condition which realized itself in Christ. As God in humanity, he had perfect sympathy with the holiness of one sphere, and the infirmities of the other; he saw the whole amount of the world's moral estrangement, not only with infinite pity for its misery, but with infinite horror at its guilt. He could both make a plenary confession for us, and respond unreservedly to the Father's righteous judgment; could bear our burden on his heart before heaven, and utter theMiserereof holy sorrow, which our most plaintive cry can never approach. This is the true nature of his sufferings. He "made his soul an offering for sin," yielded it up to be filled with a sense of our real aspect beneath the Omniscient eye, and an Amen to its condemning look. Hence his sorrows had nothingpenalin them, any more than the tears of a devout parent over a prodigal child are penal. They areincident to that attitude of soul which a perfect nature cannot but have in the presence of a brother's sin. They are altogether moral and spiritual; and their efficacy as an expiation is that of true repentance; expressing at once our entire confession, acceptance of the Father's just displeasure, and sympathy with his compassionate grieving at our alienation.
At the same time, this mere retrospective confession would not of itself avail, were there no better hope for the future of mankind. But our Mediator's own experience in humanity, his consciousness of intimate peace and communion with the Father, opened to him the other side of our nature, assured him of its secret capacity for good, and filled him with hope in the very moment of contrition. As his sympathy could have fellowship with our temptations, so could ours have fellowship with his righteousness; and the light of Divine love that rested actually on himself was thereby a possibility for the universal human soul, and was already hovering round with longing to descend. It was on the strength of this assurance that his intercession on our behalf was presented; it would never have pleaded for indemnity in relation to the past, but as the prelude to a real righteousness, a true partnership in his life of filial harmony with God. The validity of his transaction on our behalf consisted in its perfect seizure of the whole reality, its entire "response to the mind of the Father in relation to men"; sorrow for their estrangement, conviction of their possible return, and desire to draw them into the spirit of genuine Sonship.
It was needful, then,—so we conceive our author's meaning,—that the sentiments of God towards the world's sin and misery should quit their absolute position, and should come and take their station in humanity; and from that field should turn their gaze and expression upward to meet the Father's downward and accordant look. As this "Amen of the Son to the mind of the Father" constitutes the essence of the atonement on the Divine side, so does it consist on the human side in "the Amen of each individual soul to the Amen of the Son." The reproduction in us of the filial spirit ofChrist,—his confession, his pleading, his trust,—is our fellowship with him and reconciliation with God.
"This is saving faith,—true righteousness,—being the living action, and true and right movement of the spirit of the individual man in the light of eternal life. And the certainty that God has accepted that perfect and divine Amen as uttered by Christ in humanity is necessarily accompanied by the peaceful assurance that, in uttering, in whatever feebleness, a true Amen to that high Amen, the individual who is yielding himself to the spirit of Christ to have it uttered in him is accepted of God. This Amen in man is the due response to that word, 'Be ye reconciled to God'; for the gracious and Gospel character of which word, as the tenderest pleading that can be addressed to the most sin-burdened spirit, I have contended above. This Amen is sonship; for the Gospel call, 'Be ye reconciled to God,' when heard in the light of the knowledge that 'God made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him,' is understood to be the call to each one of us on the part of the Father of our spirits, 'My son, give me thine heart,' addressed to us on the ground of that work by which the Son had declared the Father's name, that the love wherewith the Father hath loved him may be in us, and he in us. In the light itself of that Amen to the mind of the Father in relation to man which shines to us in the atonement, we see therighteousness of God in accepting the atonement, and in that same light the Amen of the individual human spirit to that divine Amen of the Son of God is seen to be what the Divine righteousness will necessarily acknowledge as theend of the atonement accomplished."—p. 225.
In this view, it is not the rescue from punishment, not any favorable change in our legal standing, not any imputed righteousness, that Christ's mediation obtains, but a real transformation of soul and character through the divine infection and infusion of his own filial spirit. Only in so far as his mind thus spreads to us are we united to him, or in any way partakers of his gift of life. Personal alienation can have noreversal but in personal return; nor can anything "extraneous to the nature of the Divine will itself, to which we are to be reconciled, have part in reconciling us to that will." The fear of hell is not repentance; the assurance of heaven is not salvation; nor under any modification can the desire of safety, or the consciousness of its attainment, constitute the least approach to holiness. The good alone can touch the springs of goodness; and the divine and trustful life of Christ must speak to us on its own account, and win us by its own power, or not at all. Not that it acts on us merely in the way ofexample. We do not so stand apart from him in our independent individuality, that by an external imitation we can copy him, and become, as it were, each another Christ, repeating in ourselves his offering of propitiation. He is the Vine, of which we are the branches. The sap is from him, drawn through the eternal root of righteousness, and does but flow as a derived life into us. The Son of God is not a mere historical personage, to be contemplated at a distance in the past, but ever with us in the power of an endless life; still succoring us when we are tempted, and ministering to conscience a present help and peace. It is not, therefore, byfollowinghim, but byabiding inhim, that we have our fellowship in his harmony with God.
The essence, then, of the scheme of redemption, in the view of our author, seems to be this: that the Divine nature entered humanity to open the Fatherliness of God by living the life of perfect Sonship; and that, having awakened that life in us by this its visible realization, he sustains it by the inner presence of his Spirit. It is one of the obvious consequences of this doctrine, that no exclusive or exceptional value is to be ascribed to thedeathof Christ. It is simply the final and crowning expression of the same filial mind which is the continuous essence of his whole existence upon earth. Nor does the theory attach importance to anysufferingsof Christ, as such; but only as media and measures of moral expression. Had men sinnedas spirits, his reconciling work would not have involved death at all: but since in our constitution mortalityis "the wages of sin," his response to the Divine mind in regard to sin would have been incomplete, had he not honored this law and tasted its realization. Not to lose sight of the main features of the doctrine in pursuit of details, we must pass without notice many curious and subtle thoughts of our author on this part of his subject. Indeed, everywhere the reader who has patience with the entangled style will find deep hints and delicate turns of reflection. But we must withdraw to a little distance from his system, and endeavor to look at it as a whole; fixing attention especially on the central point of all,—themediatorial provision, which replaces the penal "satisfaction" of the elder Calvinism, and the "exhibition of rectoral justice" of the modern divines.
Instead of an infinite punishment endured or represented, the theory offers us an infiniterepentanceperformed. Repentance for what?—for human sin. Repentance by whom?—by Him "who knew no sin." Is this a thing that can be? Is vicarious contrition at all more conceivable than vicarious retribution? It is surely one and the same difficulty that meets them both. On what ground is the transfer of either moral qualities or their effects regarded by our author as impossible?—because at variance with our consciousness of the personal and inalienable nature of sin. But not less is this truth contradicted when we say that the guilt may be incurred by one person, and the availing repentance take place in another. Nor can any imagination of Christ's state of mind identify it with penitence. Mr. Campbell himself describes it (p. 135) as having "all the elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin of man—a perfect sorrow—a perfect contrition,—all the elements of such a repentance, and that in absolute perfection—all—excepting the personal consciousness of sin." This exception, however, contains just the essential element of the whole. Penitence without any personal consciousness of sin is a contradiction in terms; and the requisition of the Divine law is, thatthe sinnershall turn from the evil of his heart, not that the righteous shall make confession for him. The entire moral value ofcontrition belongs to it as the sign of inner change of character from prior evil to succeeding good; and it admits of no transplantation from the identical personality which has been the seat of the evil and is the candidate for the good.
Further, it seems a paradox to say, with our author, that true repentance is impossible to man, who alone needs it; and can be realized only by the Son of God, in whom there is no room for it. It would indeed be a hopeless realm to live in, which should annex to all sins both an imperative demand and an absolute disqualification for adequate contrition, and first open the fountain of availing tears in holy natures that have none to shed. It is, in truth, of the very essence of repentance to have its seat in mixed and imperfect moral beings: and our author lays upon it quite an arbitrary requisition, when he insists that, to pass as adequate, it must contain a perfect appreciation of the sin deplored,—a view of it coincident with that of God. Under such an aspect as this it could never have appeared to us, though we had remained guiltless of it, and recoiled from it: and we can hardly be required to reach, in the rebound of recovery, a point beyond the station which would have prevented the fall. Many errors in theology arise from applying absolute conceptions to relative conditions, and forgetting that religion, as realized in us, is a life, a movement, a progress, and not an ultimate limit of perfection. Repentance is a transitional state, to which it is absurd to apply an infinite criterion: it is a change from the worse to the better mind, and cannot need the resources or belong to the experience of the best. To pronounce it impossible to the wandering and fallen, and make it the exclusive function of the All-holy, implies the strangest metamorphosis of its meaning.
But how, it may be asked, could a paradox so violent find favor with an author everywhere intent on the exclusion of fiction from Christian theology? To refer a moral act to thewrong personality, to toss about a solemn change like penitence between guilty and innocent, as if its particular seat were a matter of indifference, is so serious an error, that itcould never enter a mind like Mr. Campbell's, unless under some plausible disguise. Can we find the shape under which it has recommended itself to his approval?
The sentiment ascribed to the Son of God in regard to sin,—wanting as it does the essential penitential element of personal compunction,—is simple sorrow for others' guilt, founded on perfect apprehension of its nature. But this attitude of soul in him awakens the conscience of his disciples, and is reproduced in them by fellowship. Spread into their consciousness, it is no longer clear of the immediate presence of sin, but, falling in with it, assumes the missing element, and becomes repentance. When the Christian sense of evil, which ever partakes of true contrition, is thus contemplated as a transmigration of the Mediator's own spirit into the soul, the two are so identified in thought, that what is true only of the human effect is referred to the Divine cause; and the moral sorrow of Christ is regarded aspotentiallyequivalent to repentance, because that isactuallythe form of the corresponding phenomenon in us. If this, however,explainsour author's position, it hardlyjustifiesit. Intercession for others in their guilt maymove themto remorse for their own, but is a fact of quite different nature. As attributes and expressions of character, the two phenomena are not to be confounded; and as affecting our relation to God, there is the obvious and admitted distinction, that intercession avails not for those who remain impenitent, and would not be needed for the spontaneously penitent. The sorrowful expostulations of the Son of God have only so far a reconciling effect as they become the medium, in the hearts of men, of an awakened contrition, aspiration, and faith. We cannot conceive them to haveimmediatelyaltered—as repentancedoes—the personal relation between God and the transgressors of His will; else the change would be a change in the Divine sentiment whilst its objects still remained unchanged. The effectwaitsfor its development in souls melted and renewed. And thus the atoning sorrow of Christ becomes simply a provision for a healing penitence in men.
The ascription of "repentance" to Christ is curious in another point of view. It arises from a blending together ofhisconsciousness andhis disciples'; from slurring the lines of personality between them; from regarding their spiritual state as an organic extension of his, and his as the vital root of theirs. In his endeavor to recommend it to us, our author instinctively runs into abstract expressions in speaking of mankind; fusing down concrete men into "humanity"; referring to the Mediator as "God inhumanity"; and so, dealing with our nature as if it were a single existence, carrying or turning up all its individuals as partial phenomena of one essence. On the other hand, in our endeavor to correct his doctrine, we have had to lay stress on the inalienable and separate character of all particular persons, taken one by one; to insist on the solitude of each responsible agent, and the impassable barriers which forbid the transference of moral attributes from mind to mind. Which of these two modes of conception is the truer? For according as we incline to the one or the other,—according as we treathumanityas the organic unit of which individual samples of mankind are numerical accidents, or take each man as an integer, of which the race is a multiple,—shall we lean towards mediatorial or towards direct religion. We are firmly convinced thatnodoctrine ofmediation—in the strict sense implying transactions with God on behalf of men,as well asin the opposite direction—can be harmonized with the modernindividualism; and that it is precisely in the attempt to unite these incompatibles, that the forensic fictions to which Mr. Campbell objects, and the moral fiction in his own theory to which we object, have had their origin. They are mere artificial devices to compensate the loss of that realistic mode of conception in which alone a true atoning doctrine can rest in peace. So long as you contemplate the Redeemer as a detached person, not less insulated in his integrity of being than angel from archangel or from man, the difficulty will remain insuperable of making his moral acts avail forother human individuals, unless by a fictitious transference, against which conscienceprotests. Punishment by substitute, righteousness by deputy, vicarious repentance, are notions at variance with the fundamental postulates of the Moral Sense: and in the attempt to defend them we are liable to lose the solemn, living, face-to-face reality of the strife within us, and to weave around us a web of legal and formal relations, as little like any heart-felt veracity as a chancery decree to a law of nature. In proportion as the soul is pierced with a sharper contrition, and attains a deeper and clearer insight into her own unfaithful disorder, will the inherent impossibility of any foreign exchange of righteousness become apparent, and the desire to be shielded from punishment will pass away: nor is the conscience truly awakened which does not rather rush into the arms of its just anguish than start back and fly away. And the more you hold up to view the holiness of Christ, the darker will the personal past appear to grow; for self-reproach will say: "Yes, I see him as the holy Son of God; the guiltier am I that the vision did not keep me from my sin." Talk to such a one of Christ's transactions on our behalf, as "federal head" of a redeemed people; and his misery will take no notice of the cold pretence, unless to think, "Whatever engagements he made for me, I have broken them all." In short, while Christ is regarded simply as an historical individual, with the chasm of an incommunicable personality between him and us, no ingenuity can construct, except from the ruins of moral law, any other bridge of mediation than the suasion of natural reverence, by which his image passes into the heart of faith.