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we find a Manichæan notion that Satan had a claim on men as the heirs of death, which could not be released until Christ consented for a while to be prisoner to the Enemy. But even this claim was little respected, in the forceful escape of Him who could not be holden of death.

There is, however, a large class of passages which represent Christ as our Passover, our Ransom, made a sacrifice for us, and redeeming us by his blood. And many who discard the commercial view of Atonement, suppose these passages prove a vicarious suffering of Christ, in such sense that his death is a substitute for our punishment; not itself penal, but a substitute for the penalty of God's law. It is supposed also that without

this substitute, there would have been legal or juridical obstacles to the pardon even of the penitent. To us this view appears to involve a necessity on the side of God, either in His nature or in the exigencies of His government, incompatible with the freeness of pardon; and we are ready to ask if there is not some other view, which will satisfy the scriptural terms we have alluded to, and save the full import of the doctrine of grace.

Now one of the most common objections to the doctrine of forgiveness simply on occasion of repentance, which is equally an argument for the need of redemption, is that repentance would then save us; we should need no other Savior; and why, then all the outlay and expense of Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection? The objection seems weighty and decisive. But it manifestly rests on the assumption of man's proper immortality. If sin does not bring death, then repentance would do all that can be done. It would be change of character, sanctification and redemption; and to pardon the sinner then, would be simply to let him alone; it would be to do nothing; it would be nothing.

But if sin is the beginning of death, then pardon is more than not to punish; it is the arrest of punishment; the rescue from death. It is no more an idle thing; it involves a great, if not a divine work. The work of redemption is more than a continued preservation of the sinner's being. It is more than the correction of errors and of evil habits; more than sound instruction. It is

the staunching of wounds inflicted by sin; it is the healing of a fatal malady. It is the work of a Physician more skillful than all medical art or moral treatment; of a balm which no search of man can discover. And Christ's miracles of healing bodily disease seem to have typified this higher power of restoring health to the dying soul.

He also raised the dead. But the gift of life to those who perish may be more difficult than creative power. The one is a work of might, which could have replaced the perishing race as easily as it was created. The other is a work not of power alone, but of persuasion and love. The gift of being to nothingness meets no obstacle. To give new being and life to that which is corrupt, perverse, reluctant, opposed, wayward and willful, is a work wholly against obstacles. It was needless to God; yet for our sakes he has preferred the methods of love to those of might; a plan of recovery to that of replacement; condescending to restore us from the wreck and ruin which we were, that we might be renewed in the image of God.

And here, it may be, we find a reason, either in the nature of things or in the bounty of God's love, why our resene should be effected by an incarnation and the work which followed it. Would God recover any creature of his, through much inevitable pain and suffering, standing aloof and at a distance? Is not His love too tender, are not His sympathies too warm, for that? Do we admire even the human benefactor that founds great institutions for the relief of woes on a grand scale, while he deigns not to reach out his own hand to a poor degraded fellow man in token of love? And what we wish, almost require, that a human benefactor should do that we may love him, might not God freely do, to win our warmest affection? Might not He whose tender mercies are over all His works, and who regards, not without concern, the sparrow's fall, be resolved that His erring creatures should not suffer more in the pangs of their convalescence than He would suffer with them and for them? But if God would thus meet our case, it must be, perhaps, by assuming our form, by an incarnation in which He may reach the depths of our degradation, feel all our sufferings, come into our very

graves with His heart of love and His power of life. And all along this course, in which through the shades of death He shows us the path of life, Christ may suffer as we can not, because we are so fallen. As the delicate, refined woman, of noblest feelings, fitted to adorn a palace, suffers more for a loved but inebriated husband than he can feel, so may we not conceive the anguish of the Redeemer, approaching the crisis of his humiliation, dying at the hands of those whom he would save?

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In this view, Christ was "made perfect through sufferings," and all his pain and agony was needful that we might be reached and won. He has so identified himself with us that our sufferings and death have become His. He has gone with us through all the forms of sin's penalty which we must, or which He could endure, that He might stand by and save us from its fatal stroke; himself appearing as one of the guilty, bered with the transgressors," saving us at the expense of his own blood. Yet his death alone was not the procuring cause, the judicial reason, of our salvation. When our theology stops here, it surely misinterprets the exclamation, "It is finished!” and it must linger in perplexity, as did the disciples who understood not that Jesus should rise again. The entire Romish system of dead works is derived from this misconception of Christ's work. "The penalty of our sins was eternal death. But Christ did not suffer eternal death; and woe unto us if he had suffered it!" Rather, in the moment of Christ's submission to death He gained His advantage over the Adversary, with whom, to use a metaphor of the early Christians, He wrestled. In that moment also he reached the deepest fall of man, and might repose in the tomb secure of the full completion of His work. "He died for our offences, and was raised for our justification." The Redemption was complete in the Resurrection. And as justification denoted rescue from the sentence of death, it might, in common with the term "salvation," signify the giving of life.

And here we may add a closing word respecting the divinity of Christ. Believing that Christ was Immanuel, we must say

1 Socinus, Prælec. Theol., c. 18. Bibliot. Frat. Pol. I. 571; comp. 576, 665; -Catech. Racov. q. 267.

there can be no more unfortunate argument for His divine nature than that so often adduced from the supposed necessity of an infinite sacrifice for an infinite guilt. Of this we have already spoken, and we need not amplify the criticism of it. We prefer to derive the divine nature of the Redeemer, not from the greatness of the evil He has removed, but of the good He has achieved; not from that which He has undone, but from the nature and vastness of that which He has done. We are happy to know that Calvin himself condemns the reasoning of those who affirmed that none but an infinite Saviour could redeem. "Osiander," he says, "betrays his folly in objecting that justification exceeds the power of angels and men; since it depends not upon the dignity of any creature, but upon the appointment of God." God is not bound, so that He may not empower whom he will, by His commission, to bring about His plans. And if man's salvation were only a judicial procedure,

an official and outward work, then the concessions just named might even cut off the argument for Christ's divinity. Whereas, if salvation is an inward work, by which men are in any proper sense "born of God" and made "partakers of the divine nature,” it seems to require a divine power. But does not Christ claim such power, when he says "I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it again;" and, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly"? and when we are told, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men"? And we are the more willing to ask the attention of Christians to the life-giving power of Christ, of which His resurrection is the pledge for man's resurrection, because the fact is one of which the early Socinians are so full, and the argument is the favorite one of Athanasius. Divested of its appendages, may not this element of Christ's work open a way of grateful, practical union among believers, which alone can make an intellectual harmony either possible or desirable?

1 Institutes, b. 3, c. 11, § 12. Compare Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, 1. 2. c. 65.

CHAPTER XI.

PARADOXES OF PENALTY.

"Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men."

$ 1. FEAR AND SHAME.

As the prevalent doctrine of the divine penalty has multiplied future "punishments," so it has led to a frequent misquotation of Paul's language, as if he had said, "the terrors of the Lord." But the context, and the entire argument of Paul, show that his expression had no reference even to the doom of the lost; much less to any manifoldness of their pains. He alludes rather to the MAJESTY of Christ, as a Lord and Judge whose favor he hoped to gain. Making his appeal from the poor judgment of the brethren in Corinth respecting himself and his motives, he declares that the love of Christ constrains him in all his acts, whether he appear to them sober or beside himself. And in this appeal he is confident of the approval of their better judgment, as well as of the approval of God. "We are made manifest unto God, and I trust also are made manifest in your consciences." It was not the terror of condemnation that moved Paul to persuade men; but a feeling of reverence analogous to that which is due to the civil ruler, -"fear to whom fear,”—but incomparably more elevated and ennobling; the fear of a trusting, finite creature, before a loving, infinite Father; and which is best expressed in Heb. xii. 28: "Wherefore we, receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably, with reverence and godly fear."1

1 The same word (póẞoç) is used here as in Rom. xiii. 7, and 2 Cor. vii. 1; Eph. v. 21; 1 Pet. i. 17; iii. 2. For the view we have presented, see Bloomfield.

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