CHAPTER I.

THE MEANING OF VICARIOUS SACRIFICE.

IT is a matter of sorrowful indication, that the thing most wanting to be cleared in Christianity is still, as it ever has been, the principal thing; viz., the meaning and method of reconciliation itself, or of what is commonly called the vicarious sacrifice. This fact would even be itself a considerable evidence against the gospel, were it not that the subject matter—so vast in the reach of its complications, and so nearly transcendent in the height of its reasons—yields up easily to faith its practical significance, when refusing to be theoretically mastered, as yet, by the understanding.

There has been a litigation of the sacrifice going on for these eighteen hundred years, and especially for the last eight hundred; yet still it remains an open question with many, whether any such thing as vicarious sacrifice pertains to the work of salvation Christ has accomplished. On one side the fact is abjured as irrational and revolting. On the other it is affirmed as a principal fact of the Christian salvation; though I feel obliged to confess that it is too commonly maintained under definitions and forms of argument that make it revolting. And which of the two is the greater wrong 38and most to be deplored, that by which the fact itself is rejected, or that by which it is made fit to be rejected, I will not stay to discuss. Enough that Christianity, in either way, suffers incalculable loss; or must, if there be any such principal matter in it, as I most certainly believe that there is.

Assuming now, for the subject of this treatise, the main question stated, our first point must be to settle What is to be understood by vicarious sacrifice. a just and true conception of vicarious sacrifice, or of what is the real undertaking of Christ in the matter of such sacrifice. For in all such matters, the main issue is commonly decided by adjusting other and better conceptions of the question itself, and not by forcing old ones through into victory, by the artillery practice of better contrived arguments.

This word vicarious, that has made so conspicuous a figure in the debates of theology, it must be admitted is no word of the Scripture. The same is true, however, of free agency, character, theology, and of many other terms which the conveniences of use have made common. If a word appears to be wanted in Christian discussions or teachings, the fact that it is not found in the Scripture is no objection to it; we have only to be sure that we understand what we mean by it. In the case, too, of this particular word vicarious, a special care is needed, lest we enter something into the meaning, from ourselves, which is not included in the large variety of Scripture terms and expressions the word is set to represent.

Thus we have—“made a curse for us”—“bare our sins”—“hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”—“made to be sin for us”—“offered to bear the sins of many”—“borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”—“wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities”—“tasted death for every man.” The whole Gospel is a texture, thus of vicarious conceptions, in which Christ is represented, in one way or another, as coming into our place, substituted in our stead, bearing our burdens, answering for us, and standing in a kind of suffering sponsorship for the race.

Now the word vicarious is chosen to represent, and gather up into itself all these varieties of expression. It is the same word, in the root, as the word vice in vicegerent, viceroy, vicar, vicar-general, vice-president, and the like. It is a word that carries always a face of substitution, indicating that one person comes in place, somehow, of another. Thus a vice-president is one who is to act in certain contingencies, as and for the president; a viceroy, for the king. The ecclesiastical vicar too, was a vicar as being sent to act for the monastic body, whose duties were laid as a charge upon him; and the pope is called the vicar of Christ, in the same way, as being authorized to fill Christ’s place. Any person acts vicariously, in this view, just so far as he comes in place of another. The commercial agent, the trustee, the attorney, are examples of vicarious action at common law.

Then if we speak of “sacrifice,” any person acts in a way of “vicarious sacrifice,” not when he burns upon an altar in some other’s place, but when he makes loss 40for him, even as he would make loss for himself, in the offering of a sacrifice for his sin. The expression is a figure, representing that the party making such sacrifice for another, comes into burden, pain, weariness, or even to the yielding up of life for his sake. The word “vicarious” does not say all, nor the word “sacrifice,” but the two together make out the true figure of Christ and his Gospel.

In this sense it is that Christianity or the Christian salvation is a vicarious sacrifice. It does not mean What vicarious sacrifice does not mean. simply that Christ puts himself into the case of man as a helper; one man helps another without any vicarious relationship implied or supposed. Neither does it mean that Christ undertakes for man in a way of influence; one man tries to influence another, without coming at all into his place. Neither does the vicarious sacrifice imply that he simply comes under common liabilities with us, as when every citizen suffers for the wrongs and general misconduct and consequent misgovernment of the community to which he belongs. Nor that he simply comes into the track of those penal retributions which outrun the wrongs they chastise, passing over upon the innocent, as the sins of fathers propagate their evils in the generations of their children coming after. The idea of Christ’s vicarious sacrifice is not matched by any of these lighter examples, though it has something in common with them all, and is therefore just so much likelier to be confounded with them by a lighter and really sophistical interpretation.

On the other hand, we are not to hold the Scripture terms of vicarious sacrifice, as importing a literal substitution of places, by which Christ becomes a sinner for sinners, or penally subject to our deserved penalties. That is a kind of substitution that offends every strongest sentiment of our nature. He can not become guilty for us. Neither, as God is a just being, can he be any how punishable in our place—all God’s moral sentiments would be revolted by that. And if Christ should himself consent to such punishment, he would only ask to have all the most immovable convictions, both of God’s moral nature and our own, confounded, or eternally put by.

Excluding now all these under-stated and over-stated explanations we come to the true conception, which is that Christ, in what is called his vicarious The positive conception. sacrifice, simply engages, at the expense of great suffering and even of death itself, to bring us out of our sins themselves and so out of their penalties; being himself profoundly identified with us in our fallen state, and burdened in feeling with our evils. Nor is there any thing so remote, or difficult, or violent, in this vicarious relation, assumed by Christ as many appear to suppose. It would rather be a wonder if, being what he is, he did not assume it. For we are to see and make our due account of this one fact, that a good being is, by the supposition, ready, just according to his goodness, to act vicariously in behalf of any bad, or miserable being, whose condition he is able to restore. For a good being is not simply one who gives bounties 42and favors, but one who is in the principle of love; and it is the nature of love, universally, to insert itself into the miseries, and take upon its feeling the burdens of others. Love does not consider the ill desert of the subject; he may even be a cruel and relentless enemy. It does not consider the expense of toil, and sacrifice, and suffering the intervention may cost. It stops at nothing but the known impossibility of relief, or benefit; asks for nothing as inducement, but the opportunity Love a vicarious principle. of success. Love is a principle essentially vicarious in its own nature, identifying the subject with others, so as to suffer their adversities and pains, and taking on itself the burden of their evils. It does not come in officiously and abruptly, and propose to be substituted in some formal and literal way that overturns all the moral relations of law and desert, but it clings to the evil and lost man as in feeling, afflicted for him, burdened by his ill deserts, incapacities and pains, encountering gladly any loss or suffering for his sake. Approving nothing wrong in him, but faithfully reproving and condemning him in all sin, it is yet made sin—plunged, so to speak, into all the fortunes of sin, by its friendly sympathy. In this manner it is entered vicariously into sacrifice on his account. So naturally and easily does the vicarious sacrifice commend itself to our intelligence, by the stock ideas and feelings out of which it grows.

How it was with Christ, and how he bore our sins, we can see exactly, from a very impressive and remarkable passage in Matthew’s Gospel, where he conceives that 43Christ is entered vicariously into Usus loquendi in the sacrificial terms. men’s diseases, just as he is elsewhere shown to bear, and to be vicariously entered into, the burden of their sins. produce the passage, at this early point in the discussion, because of the very great and decisive importance it has; for it is remarkable as being the one Scripture citation, that gives, beyond a question, the exact usus loquendi of all the vicarious and sacrificial language of the New Testament.

Christ has been pouring out his sympathies, all day, in acts of healing, run down, as it were, by the wretched multitudes crowding about him and imploring his pity. No humblest, most repulsive creature is neglected or fails to receive his tenderest, most brotherly consideration. His heart accepts each one as a burden upon its feeling, and by that feeling he is inserted into the lot, the pain, the sickness, the sorrow of each. And so the evangelist, having, as we see, no reference whatever to the substitution for sin, says—“That it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying—‘Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses.’”¹¹Matth. vii, 17. And the text is the more remarkable that the passage he cites from Isaiah, is from his liii chapter, which is, in fact, a kind of stock chapter, whence all the most vicarious language of the New Testament is drawn. Besides the word bare occurs in the citation; a word that is based on the very same figure of carrying as that which is used in the expression, “bare our sins,” “bare the sins of many,” and is moreover precisely the 44same word which is used by the Apostle when he says [Βασταζετε] “bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” If then we desire to know exactly what the substitution of Christ for sin was, and how far it went—what it means for example that he bare our sin—we have only to revert back to what is here said of his relation to sicknesses, and our question is resolved.

What then does it mean that Christ “bare our sicknesses?” Does it mean that he literally had our sicknesses transferred to him, and so taken off from us? Does it mean that he became blind for the blind, lame for the lame, a leper for the lepers, suffering in himself all the fevers and pains he took away from others? No one had ever such a thought. How then did he bear our sicknesses, or in what sense? In the sense that he took them on his feeling, had his heart burdened by the sense of them, bore the disgusts of their loathsome decays, felt their pains over again, in the tenderness of his more than human sensibility. Thus manifestly it was that he bare our sicknesses—his very love to us put him, so far, in a vicarious relation to them, and made him, so far, a partaker in them.²²This most natural and certainly great and worthy meaning for the passage from Matthew is so far off from the dogmatic and prosy literalism of many, that they are able to see scarcely any thing in it. Bishop Pearce, just because the passage does not meet his notion of Isaiah’s famous Christological chapter, and does not signify any thing true enough in itself, imagines that it must be an interpolation! Dr. Magee (Vol. I., pp. 313-355) expends more than forty pages of learning on it, contriving how he may get the Prophet and Evangelist together, in some meaning that will make room for a more literal and penal bearing of sins than there can be of sicknesses. By a heavy practice on the Hebrew verb in the first clause, and the Hebrew noun in the second, he gets the “took” converted into “took away” and the sicknesses into “sorrows;” reading thus—“Himself took away our infirmities and bare our sorrows.” But it happens most unfortunately that the Greek word of the evangelist [ελαβε] will not bear any such meaning as “took away,” but insists on signifying only that kind of taking which appropriates, or receives, or even seizes by robbery; and the Greek word [νοσος] never means any thing but “sickness;” save when it is used as an epithet in speaking figuratively of the “diseases of the mind.” The fact is that the evangelist translates the prophet well, and the English version translates the evangelist well, and the vicariousness resulting is a grand, living idea, such as meets the highest intelligence, and yields an impression that accords with the best revelations of consciousness, in the state of love. Every true Christian knows what it is to bear the sins of wrongdoers and enemies in this manner, and loves to imagine that, in doing it, he learns from the cross of his Master—being almost raised into the plane of divinity himself, by a participation so exalted. There was never a case of construction more simple and plain than this, and it has the merit, if we receive it, of carrying us completely clear, at once, of all the fearful stumbling blocks which a crude, over-literal interpretation has been piling about the cross for so many centuries. There is no stranger freak of dullness in all the literary history of the world, and nothing that is going to make a more curious chapter for the ages to come, than the constructions raised on these vicarious forms of Scripture, and the immense torment of learning and theologic debate that has occupied a whole millenium in consequence. The long period, preceding, when Christ was regarded as a ransom paid to the devil, will be more easily qualified by allowances that save it in respect.

Here then we have the true law of interpretation, when the vicarious relation of Christ to our sins comes into view. It does not mean that he takes them literally upon him, as some of the old theologians and a very few moderns appear to believe; it does not mean that 46he took their ill desert upon him by some mysterious act of imputation, or had their punishment transferred How Christ takes our sins upon him. to his person. A sickness might possibly be transferred, but a sin can not by any rational possibility. It does not mean that he literally came into the hell of our retributive evils under sin, and satisfied, by his own suffering, the violated justice of God; for that kind of penal suffering would satisfy nothing but the very worst injustice. No, but the bearing of our sins does mean, that Christ bore them on his feeling, became inserted into their bad lot by his sympathy as a friend, yielded up himself and his life, even, to an effort of restoring mercy; in a word that he bore our sins in just the same sense that he bore our sicknesses. Understand that love itself is an essentially vicarious principle, and the solution is no longer difficult.

See how it is with love in the case of a mother. She loves her child, and it comes out in that fact, or from it, Motherhood friendship. Patriotism vicarious. that she watches for the child, bears all its pains and sicknesses on her own feeling, and when it is wronged, is stung herself, by the wrong put upon it, more bitterly far than the child. She takes every chance of sacrifice for it, as her own opportunity. She creates, in fact, imaginary ills for it, because she has not opportunities enough of sacrifice. In the same manner a friend that is real and true takes all the sufferings, losses, wrongs, indignities, of a friend on his own feeling, and will sometimes suffer even more for him than he does for himself. So also 47with the patriot or citizen who truly loves his country, even though that love is mixed with many false fires that are only fires of ambition or revenge—how does it wrench his feeling, what a burden does it lay upon his concern, by day and by night, when that country, so dear to him, is being torn by faction, and the fate of its laws and liberties is thrown upon the chances of an armed rebellion. Then you will see how many thousands of citizens, who never knew before what sacrifices it was in the power of their love to make for their country’s welfare, rushing to the field and throwing their bodies and dear lives on the battle’s edge to save it!

Thus it is that every sort of love is found twining its feeling always into the feeling, and loss, and want, and woe, of whatever people, or person, or even enemy, it loves; thus that God himself takes our sinning enmity upon his heart, painfully burdened by our broken state, and travailing, in all the deepest feeling of his nature, to recover us to himself. And this it is which the cross and vicarious sacrifice of Jesus signify to us, or outwardly express. Such a God in love, must be such a Saviour in suffering—he could not well be other or less. There is a Gethsemane hid in all love, and when the fit occasion comes, no matter how great and high the subject may be, its heavy groaning will be heard—even as it was in Christ. He was in an agony, exceeding sorrowful even unto death. By that sign it was that God’s love broke into the world, and Christianity was born!

Here, then, as I conceive, is the true seed principle of 48the Christian salvation. What we call the vicarious sacrifice of Christ is nothing strange as regards the Nothing superlative in the principle of the cross. principle of it, no superlative, unexampled, and therefore unintelligible grace. It only does and suffers, and comes into substitution for, just what any and all love will, according to its degree. And, in this view, it is not something higher in principle than our human virtue knows, and which we ourselves are never to copy or receive, but it is to be understood by what we know already, and is to be more fully understood by what we are to know hereafter, when we are complete in Christ. Nothing is wanting to resolve the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus, but the commonly known, always familiar principle of love, accepted as the fundamental law of duty, even by mankind. Given the universality of love, the universality of vicarious sacrifice is given also. Here is the center and deepest spot of good, or goodness, conceivable. At this point we look into heaven’s eye itself, and read the meaning of all heavenly grace.

How much to be regretted then is it, that Christianity has been made so great an offense, to so many ingenuous and genuinely thoughtful souls, at just this point of vicarious The great offense of the cross a contribution of theology. sacrifice, where it is noblest to thought, and grandest, and most impressive to feeling. There ought never to be a question over its reality and truth to nature, more than over a mother’s watch and waiting for her child. And yet there has been kept up, for centuries, what a strain of logical, or theological endeavor—shall I call it high, or 49shall I call it weak and low—to make out some formal, legal, literal account of substitution and vicarious sacrifice, in which all God’s quickening motivity and power are taken away from the feeling, and nothing left but a sapless wood, or dry stubble of reason, for a mortal sinner’s faith to cling to. Nothing is so simple, and beautiful, and true, and close to feeling, as this same blessed truth—Jesus the Lord in vicarious sacrifice; and yet there is made of it, I know not what, or how many riddles, which to solve, were it possible, were only to miss of its power; much more which to miss of solving, is only to be lost in mazes and desert windings where even faith itself is only turned to jangling. How often has the innate sense of justice in men been mocked by the speculated satisfactions of justice, or schemes of satisfaction, made up for God; how often has the human feeling that would have been attracted and melted, by the gracious love of Jesus, coming to assume our nature and bear our sin, been chilled, or revolted, by some account of his death, that turns it to a theologic fiction, by contriving how he literally had our sin upon him, and was therefore held to die retributively on account of it.

At the same time, there have been thrown off into antagonism, a great many times, whole sects of disciples, who could see no way to escape No vitality in a Gospel without vicarious sacrifice. the revolting theories of vicarious sacrifice, but to formally deny the fact; and then what evidence have they given of the fact, as a distinctive integral element of Christianity, by their utter inability, in the way of denial, to maintain the vitality 50and propagating power of Christian society with. out it. If God’s love has no vicarious element, theirs of course will have as little; if he simply stands by law and retribution, if he never enters himself into human evils and sins, so as to be burdened by them, never identifies himself with souls under evil, to bear them—enemies and outcasts though they be—then it will be seen that they, as believers, are never in affliction for the sin of others, never burdened as intercessors for them; for there was in fact no such mind in Christ Jesus himself. On the contrary, as God stands off, waiting only by the laws of duty and abstract justice, moved vicariously to no intervention, so will they lose out the soul-bond of unity and religious fellowship with their kind, dropping asunder into atoms of righteous individuality, and counting it even a kind of undignified officiousness to be overmuch concerned for others. Christian society is by that time gone. The sense of God, translating himself into the evils and fallen fortunes of souls, in the vicarious love and passion of his Son, was the root of it; and that being gone, the divine life takes no headship in them, they no membership of unity with each other. They are only incommunicable monads—the Christian koinonia is lost or abolished. “I will take care of myself, answer for myself, and let every other do the same”—that is the Christianity left—it is duty, self-care, right living atomically held before moral standards. As to the church, or the church life, it no longer exists; Christ is the head of nothing, because he has never come into the cause, or feeling, or life of any, by coming 51into their lot. So necessary is the faith of a vicarious sacrifice to the maintenance of any genuine Christian life and society. Without and apart from it individualties are never bridged, never made coalescent, or common to each other. The chill that follows must in due time be fatal. No such mode of necessary unfellowship can live.

By this experimental proof, it can be clearly seen how necessary to the living Gospel and church of Christ is the faith, in some true sense, of a vicarious sacrifice. And what that sense may be it is not difficult, I think, to find. We have already found that love itself contains the fact and is the sufficient and easy solution.

But there is an objection to be encountered even here, before the solution will be satisfactory to some; it is that if love, love in God, and love in all Objection that God must be unhappy in love. beings created and uncreated, is an essentially vicarious element or principle; if it moves to the certain identification of the loving party with evil minds and their pains, and the assuming of them, to be a burden on its feeling, or even a possible agony in it; then, as long as there is any such thing as evil and death, love must be a cause of unhappiness, a lot of suffering and sorrow. In one view it must, in another it will be joy itself, the fullest, and profoundest, and sublimest joy conceivable. There was never a being on earth so deep in his peace and so essentially blessed as Jesus Christ. Even his agony itself is scarcely an exception. There is no joy so grand as that which 52has a form of tragedy, and there is besides, in a soul given up to loss and pain for love’s sake, such a consciousness of good—it is so far ennobled by its own great feeling—that it rises in the sense of magnitude, and majesty, and Godlikeness, and has thoughts breaking out in it as the sound of many waters, joys that are full as the sea. And this, too, corresponds exactly with our human experience. We are never so happy, so essentially blessed as when we suffer well, wearing out our life in sympathies spent on the evil and undeserving, burdened heavily in our prayers, struggling on through secret Gethsemanes and groaning before God in groanings audible to God alone, for those who have no mercy on themselves. What man of the race ever finds that in such love as this he has been made unhappy? As Christ himself bequeathed his joy to such, so has he found it to be a most real and dear bequest, and that when he has been able, after Christ’s example, to bear most and be deepest in sacrifice for others—even painful sacrifice—then has he been raised to the highest pitch of beatitude. The compensations of such a life transcend, how sublimely, the losses. As they did with Christ, so they do with us, so they will in all beings and worlds. Therefore when we say that love is a principle of vicarious sacrifice, how far off are we from casting any shade of gloom on the possibilities and fortunes of this love. We only magnify its joy and brighten its prospect.

Thus we take our beginning for this great subject, the grace of the cross, and the Christian salvation. As yet we have scarcely passed the gate, but the gate is 53open. This one thing is clear, that love is a vicarious principle, bound by its own nature itself to take upon its feeling, and care, and sympathy, those who are down under evil and its penalties. Thus it is that Jesus takes our nature upon him, to be made a curse for us and to bear our sin. Holding such a view of vicarious sacrifice, we must find it belonging to the essential nature of all holy virtue. We are also required, All good beings in the principle of vicarious sacrifice. of course, to go forward and show how it pertains to all other good beings, as truly as to Christ himself in the flesh—how the eternal Father before Christ, and the Holy Spirit coming after, and the good angels both before and after, all alike have borne the burdens, struggled in the pains of their vi. carious feeling for men; and then, at last, how Christianity comes to its issue, in begetting in us the same vicarious love that reigns in all the glorified and good minds of the heavenly kingdom; gathering us in after Christ our Master, as they that have learned to bear his cross, and be with him in his passion. Then having seen how Christ, as a power on character and life, renews us in this love, we shall be able to consider the very greatly inferior question, how far and in what manner he becomes our substitute, before the law violated by our transgression.

I should scarcely be justified in concluding this chapter, if I did not first suggest, for the benefit of some, who may recoil from this profoundly earnest truth of sacrifice, as one that rather shocks, than approves itself 54to, their feeling, that it is a kind of truth not likely to be realized, without experience. It will seem to be a Experience wanted to know this truth of sacrifice. truth overdrawn, unless it is drawn out of the soul’s own consciousness, at least in some elementary degree. Some theologians, I fear, will not be taken by it, because it has never sufficiently taken hold of them. Mere understanding is an element too sterile and dry to know this kind of truth—it seems to be no truth at all, but a pietistic straining rather after something better than anybody can solidly know.

Let me stop then here, upon the margin of the subject, and without any thought of preaching to my reader who parts company with me thus early, put him on a practical experiment that will let him a great way farther into this first chapter of divine knowledge, than, as yet, he thinks it possible to go. The problem I would give you is this; viz., that you find how to practically bear an enemy, or a person whom you dislike, so as to be exactly satisfied and happy in your relationship. If you can stand off in disgust, or set yourself squarely against him in hatred, or revenge, then do it and bless yourself in it. If that is impossible, try indifference, turn your back and say, “let him go and fare as his deserts will help him.” If there is no sweetness in this, as there certainly is none, then begin to pray for him, that he may have a better mind and that you may be duly patient with him. This will be softer, and you may begin to feel that you are a good deal Christian or Christian-like, towards him. And yet there will be a 55certain dryness in your feeling, as if you had only come into the formality of good. Then go just one step farther—take the man upon your love, bear him and his wrong as a mind’s burden, undertake for him, study by what means and by what help obtained from God, you can get him out of his evils, and make a friend of him—God’s friend and yours—do this and see if it does not open to you a very great and wonderful discovery—the sublime reality and solidly grand significance of vicarious sacrifice. Christ will be no more any stone of stumbling in it, the truth itself no more an offense, or extravagance; for you now have in your heart, what is no stone at all, but a living and self-evidencing grace by which to solve it. The offense of the cross—how surely is it ended, when once you have learned the way in which God bears an enemy! The quarrels of the head will be smoothed away how soon, by the simple methods of a wise and loving heart. The recoil you were in is over. In the problem how to bear an enemy you have found your Gethsemane and sounded for yourself the tragic depths of good—depths of joyful as of sorrow-burdened feeling—and so you understand how easily, believe in what glorious evidence, the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus for the sins of the world.

CHAPTER II.

THE ETERNAL FATHER IN VICARIOUS SACRIFICE.

IT has been a fatal source of. difficulty and mental confusion, as regards the vicarious sacrifice and saving work of Christ, that it has been taken to be a superlative kind of goodness; a matter of sacrifice outside of all the common terms and principles of duty or holy obligation; an act, or enterprise of self-sacrifice, not provided for in the universal statutes and standards of moral perfection. The assumption has been that Christ went out of obligation, out of law and beyond, to do the sacrifice, and was just so much better than perfect in good, because he would have been perfect in good, if he had declined the undertaking. Thus it has been a formally asserted point of theology, that his undertaking was “optional;” that which he might, or might not assume, and which, if he had chosen to decline, would have raised no sense of defect before his own standards of excellence. This too has been taken for a point fundamental, as regards the satisfaction for sins accomplished in his death, that he raised a superlative merit in it to be set to our account, only by doing optionally what he was under no obligation, on his own account, to do. What he ought to do for himself, 57or in his own obligation, could not avail for us, but only for himself. What he did, or suffered beyond this, was a merit in excess, that could be and was accepted for our justification, or the substitution of our just punishment.

Every such attempt to scheme the work of Christ, and put him in the terms of the understanding, begins, we ought easily to see, by removing The fiction of a superlative merit. him beyond all terms of understanding. Hence the painful confusion of ideas, the artificial mock speculations, the conclusions that are shocking to all natural sentiments of right and justice—the imputations that are figments, of merits that are inconceivable, accomplishing satisfactions with God that are as far as possible from satisfying men—all which have infested, for so many centuries, the history of this great subject. Plainly enough we can mean nothing, by a merit that is outside of all our standards of merit. If Christ was consenting, optionally, to what he might as well have declined; if he was just so much better than he ought to be on his own account; then the surplus over is any thing, or nothing; we may call it merit, but we do not know what it is; we may balance it against the sins of the world, but we can not be sure of a grain’s weight in it. What can we think, or know, of a goodness over and above all standards of good? We might as well talk of extensions beyond space, or truths beyond the true. Goodness, holy virtue, is the same in all worlds and beings, measured by the same universal and eternal standards; else it is nothing to us. Defect is sin; overplus 58is impossible. God himself is not any better than he ought to be, and the very essence and glory of his perfection is, that he is just as good as he ought to be. Nay it is the glory of our standards of goodness themselves, that they are able to fashion, or construct, all that is included in the complete beauty of God.

Here then is our first point, when we attempt the cross and sacrifice of Christ; we must bring every thing back under the common standards of eternal virtue, and we must find Christ doing and suffering just what he ought, or felt that he ought, neither more nor less. That which is to be intelligible must be found within the bounds of intelligence. If we can not find a Saviour under just our laws of good, we shall find him nowhere. Looking for him here, we shall not fail to find him.

Do we then assume that Christ, in his vicarious sacrifice, was under obligation to do and suffer just what he did? Christ fulfilling standard obligations. Exactly this. Not that he was under obligations to another, but to himself. He was God, fulfilling the obligations of God; just those obligations in the eternal fulfillment of which God’s perfections and beatitudes are eternally fashioned. We transgressors had no claims upon him, more than our enemies have upon us; there was none above him to enforce such obligations. All that he endures in feeling under them, he endures freely, and this it is that constitutes both his greatness and joy. There is an eternal cross in his virtue itself, and the cross that he endures in Christ only reveals what is in those common standards of good, which are also eternally his.

I shall discuss this matter more fully, at a more advanced stage in the argument. For the present I prefer to handle the subject in a manner less speculative showing that, as Christ is here discovered All good beings in this law of sacrifice. in vicarious sacrifice, so all good beings, God in the Old Testament before Christ, the Holy Spirit in the times after Christ, and the good created minds both before and after, are and are to be, in one accord with Christ, enduring the same kind of sacrifice. It will seem, it may be, that I am going a long way round in such a canvassing, but the result will be that a platform is gained, where the sacrifice of Christ is at once less peculiar and far more intelligible. Indeed when it is made plain, as a fact of holy Scripture slumbering hitherto in its bosom and hidden from adequate discovery, that vicarious sacrifice is the common property of holy virtue in all minds, uncreated or created, the problem of such sacrifice will be effectually changed, and most of the questions in issue will be superseded, or already settled. This present and the two succeeding chapters will accordingly be occupied with a Scripture review, as in reference to the point stated.

If it be true that love is a principle of vicarious sacrifice, then it will be so, not in Christ only, but as truly in God the Supreme, or the God of revelation The Supreme Father in vicarious sacrifice. previous to Christ’s coming. I say “as truly” it will be observed, not of course that he will have done, or endured, the same things. Not even Christ did the same things in his 60first year as in his last, and yet he was just as truly burdened with our evils and suffering in our lot; for the main suffering of Jesus was not, as many coarsely imagine, in the pangs of his body and cross, but in the burdens that came on his mind. In these burdens God, as the Eternal Father, suffered before him. He had his times and eras appointed, his conditions of preparation, his modes of progress, and the incarnate work was to be done only in the incarnate era; but the design was nevertheless one and the same throughout, and was carried on in the same deep feeling and suffering sympathy, from the first. In the ante-Christian era, it may even have been one of the heaviest points of sacrifice, that there must be so long a detention, and that so great love must be unexpressed, till the fullness of time was come. So that, when Christ came it was even a kind of release, that the letting forth of so great love into healing, and sympathy, and cross, and passion, was now at last permitted.

A great many persons have forced themselves into a false antagonism, by the contrast they have undertaken to raise between the Old Testament and God the same in the Old and New Testaments. the New. And yet even such will agree, returning so far to the just opinion, that God is God every where, one and the same in all ages and proceedings, instigated by the same impulses, clothed in the same sympathies, maintaining the same patience, under the same burdens of love; acting, of course, in the Old Testament history, for the same ends of goodness that are sought in the New. They will 61formally disclaim, too, the opinion that trinity supposes a distinction of characters in God, maintaining his strict homogeneity as pertaining to his strict unity. They go farther, they assert, as regards the infinite character, that God is love, that Christ came into the world, because God loved the world. Still further, when it is objected to their schemes of atonement, that they seem to imply an opinion that God is made gentler and more gracious by the sacrifice of Christ, they disclaim any such thought as that God is ever mitigated in his dispotions—the change, they say, is wrought in us, or in the conditions of public justice, by which God’s pardons were restricted.

And yet the false antagonism just referred to remains. After all such disclaimers, it has power to feed and keep in vogue a whole set of false impressions, or prejudices, by which the God of the Old Testament becomes another and virtually different being from the Saviour of the New; a kind of Nemesis that needs to be propitiated by suffering, and is far as possible, in himself, from being in any relation of vicarious and burdened feeling for mankind. After the point of difficulty has been turned in their schemes of atonement, by the protestations referred to, they go their way, as if said protestations had no meaning at all, giving in to a kind of partisanship for one Testament against the other, and for one God against the other God. As some disciples took to Paul, and some to Apollos, so they take to Christ, and are much less drawn to the God of the law. There is no comfort in such a prejudice; they are consciously 62troubled by it. They have a certain sense of something unworthy and false in the preference. It offends their reverence, it raises the suspicion of some latent superstition in their modes of thought and belief. And so it damages, not their peace only, but their piety itself. They never can think worthily of God, or serve him evenly and with satisfaction, as long as they regard his personal manifestations, with predilections that set him in virtual disagreement with himself.

All such predilections it will easily be seen are without foundation. On first principles they are and must No progress in God. be fictitious; for there is and can be no such thing as internal progress in God, that is in his character; he was never inferior to what he now is, and will never be superior—never worthier, greater, more happy, or more to be admired and loved. And yet there is certainly a considerable contrast in the ways of God, as presented in the Old Testament and in the Gospel of Christ. There he maintains a government more nearly political and earthly; here more spiritual and heavenly. There he calls himself a man of war; here he shows himself a prince of peace. There he is more legal, appealing to interest in the terms of this life; here he moves on the affections and covers the ground of eternity. There he maintains a drill of observances; here he substitutes the inspirations of liberty and the law written on the heart. There he operates oftener by force and by mighty judgments; here by the suffering patience of a cross.

Laying hold of this contrast, and quite willing to 63sharpen it by exaggerations, a great many, taking on the airs of philosophy, turn it, without any scruple of reverence, to the disadvantage, or discredit of revelation. Affecting great admiration of Christianity, they declare that the God of the Old Testament is a lower being and not the same; a barbarian’s God, a figment evidently of barbarism itself. And of those who class as believers, it results, in a different way already described, that many are afflicted in the feeling, that the God of the law is a God in justice and retributive will—doubtless good in some sense, but less amiable—and that Christ presents a better side of deity, to which they must instinctively cling, in a preference not to be restrained. They will even profess sometimes to find shelter in one, against the stormy judgments of the other.

What now shall we say to this? If God is one, a strict unity, always in the same perfect character and feeling, what account shall we make of this contrast? And by what method shall we make it appear that he is still the same, bearing the same relation of feeling to men’s evils and sins, working in the same great principle of love and sacrifice?

The solution is not difficult, if only we make due account of the fact that, while there is no progress, or improvement, in God, there is and should But the government of God makes progress. be a progress in his government of the world. Taken as a plan of redemption and spiritual restoration, it must be historical and must be unfolded in and by a progressive revelation. Beginning at a point where men’s ideas are low and their 64spiritual apprehensions coarse, it must take hold of them, at the first, in such a way as they are capable of being taken hold of. What is political and legal, what appeals to interest and operates by stormy judgments. impressing God’s reality by authority, and force, and fear, working chiefly on the outward state—breaking into the soul by breaking into the senses—will be most appropriate; nothing else in fact will get fit apprehension. There will not even be a language, at first, for the higher ideas of God and religion; such a language must be formed historically, under a growth of uses, generating gradually a growth of ideas. Thus if we conceive that holy virtue is constituted by a free obedience to law, the law will have to be set in first, by a drill of observances, and then, when it has been long enough enforced by a restrictive method, ideas may rise, inspirations come, and the soul may pass on to seize in liberty, what it has bowed to in fear. This holds true of every man, and, in a certain broader sense, historically, of a people or a world. The day of ideas, thoughts, sentiments, words quickened to a spiritual meaning, must of necessity come after, and be prepared by a long and weary drill in rites, institutions, legalities and heavy laden centuries of public discipline. But God will be the same in this day as in that, in that as in this, cherishing the same purpose, moving on the senses, out of the same feeling, in the schoolmastering era of law, as in the grace of the cross itself. Becoming, at the first, in a certain sense, a barbarian people’s God, he only submits to conditions of necessity by 65which he is confronted, in preparing to be known, as the God of love and sacrifice, and Saviour of the world. Neither is it any discredit to him that the subjects of his goodness must be manipulated outwardly and roughly, and brought on thus historically, till some higher capabilities of feeling and perception are developed.

To simplify the general subject as far as possible, take, for example, the single point in which the hasty and shallow thinkers of the unbelieving world Partisanship of the old religion. have been most commonly scandalized; viz., the exclusiveness of the old religion. God, they insist, is the Creator, Lord, and Father of all men—not of any one people; but this old religion holds him forth in promise as the God of a chosen people, taking them as clients in specialty, apart from, and, in some sense,. against the whole world beside. How very unlike to the God of Christianity, erecting a kingdom of universal love and suffering sacrifice. And yet plainly there was no other way to get hold of the low sentiment of the world and raise it, but to begin thus with a partisan, chosen people’s mercy, and get himself revealed by light and shade, as between his people and others; creating a religion that is next thing to a prejudice. He could not be revealed, as any one may see, in his own measures, but only in such measures as he found prepared. To bolt himself into men’s thoughts, when they had no thoughts, was impossible. He could only come into such thoughts and sentiments as there were. The little, darkened, partisan soul must know him as 66it can, and not as he is. The nations, too, of that day boasted each a god of their own, whom they took and praised, for what he could do for them, and against the gods of the other nations. A god was no god who could not perch on their banners, and fight out their wars, trampling all other gods by his power. Hence the necessity that Jehovah should choose him a people. And so it was that by overtopping all other deities, in his glorious protectorship, he finally made himself known as God over all—the true Supreme and Saviour of all.

If he had announced himself, at the very first, as the God alike and Saviour of all men, if he had been forthwith incarnate and had shown himself in Moses’ day, by the suffering life and death of his Son, the history would have been a barren riddle only. They were not equal to the conceiving of any such disinterested sacrifice; and the fact that it proposed. a salvation for all men would have been enough, by itself, to quite turn away their faith. I verily believe that Jesus, coming, thus and then, would not even have been remembered in history. And yet there was a promise, long before, of which nobody took the meaning, that, in this one people, somehow, all nations should be eventually blessed; and the prophets, too, as the religious sense grew more enlarged, finally began to break out in bold and strong visions of a universal kingdom and glory; in which it may be seen that God was preparing, even from the first, to be finally known as the Lord and Saviour of the whole world.

Does he then, by condescending to the lowness of barbarous mind, and consenting to begin with a religion of prejudice, when there was no higher sentiment to begin with, or be revealed in—does God’s love suffers by detention. he by choosing out one people, in this manner, show that his character is equal to nothing higher? Ah, what struggles of suffering patience had he rather to endure, in these long ages of training, under such narrow and meager possibilities! Nowhere else, it seems to me, not even in the cross of Jesus itself, does he reveal more wonderfully the greatness and self-sacrificing patience of his feeling. And the fact breaks out, all along down the course of the history—appearing and reappearing, by how many affecting declarations—that he is waiting for a better possibility, waiting to open his whole heart’s love, and be known by what he can bear and do for the world of mankind. Nor was there any moment of relief to him so blessed probably, as when he came to Mary with his “all hail,” and broke into the world as God with us; God now come at last, to disburden his heart by sacrifice. The retention before was a greater burden on his feeling, we may well believe, than his glorious outbirth into loss and suffering now.

Taking now this very crowded, God in sacrifice by Scripture testimony. insufficiently stated solution of his relation to the times of the Old Testament, you will find it borne out, in every point, by a careful review of the whole Scripture; and that Christ, in his vicarious sacrifice, only represents the feeling of God in all the preceding ages.

The principle of love, as we have already seen, is itself a principle of vicarious sacrifice, causing every one that is in it to be entered into the want, woe, loss, and even ill-desert of every other; bearing even adversaries and enemies, just as Christ bore his. But God is love and is so declared in every part of the Scripture; and what have we in this, but the discovery that he is a being, in just such a relation of sympathy and burdened feeling for men, as Christ was. He did not show it by the same outward signs, and therefore could not so powerfully and transformingly impress the fact; and yet he was in the same precise love, waiting, as we just now said, to find relief in a more adequate expression. Yet how often, how affectingly, did he express, in words, the painful sympathy and deep burden of his feeling. As when the prophet says—“In their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and pity, he redeemed them, and bare and carried them, all the days of old.” How tenderly does he watch the turning of the ages—“grieved forty years” for his people in the wilderness—“rising betimes” to send his messengers—protesting that he is “weary”—that he is “broken with their whorish heart”—“that he is filled with repentings”—calling also to his people to, see how “the Lord their God bare them as a man doth bear his son”—apostrophizing them, as it were, in a feeling quite broken, “Oh, that there were such a heart in them, that they would hear me and keep my commandments”—“How shall I give thee up, Ephraim, how shall I deliver thee, Israel?”—and 69again, “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, and with loving kindness have I drawn thee.” It is as if there were a cross unseen, standing on its undiscovered hill, far back in the ages, out of which were sounding always, just the same deep voice of suffering love and patience, that was heard by mortal ears from the sacred hill of Calvary.

And then, when Christ himself arrives, what does he say but that, “God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son?”—not that he came to obtain God’s love, but that God’s love sent him and was here to be magnified, in the sacrifice of life he would make. And who is Christ but God manifest in the flesh, reconciling the world unto himself; the express image and word of God; that is God expressed as he is, so that he that hath seen him hath seen the Father; working always for, and to declare, the God that sent him. Neither does he conceive, that he is introducing a new kingdom and order, that is worthier of God, and in better feeling. He declares that he came not to destroy the old system, or law, but only to fulfill it and carry it on to the glorious realization of its ends, opening things that have been kept secret, but have all the time been working, from the foundation of the world; nay, that his kingdom is a kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world; prepared that is in God’s love, fixed in his purpose, working in his counsels. What then was Christ in his vicarious feeling and sacrifice, what in his Gethsemane, but a revelation in time, of just that love that had been struggling always in God’s bosom; watching 70wearily for the world and with inward groanings unheard by mortal ears.

But there is, after all, some one will say, a something in Christ that is more gentle and better to feeling—less Christ not better, but more adequately expressed. severity, kinder, softer terms of good. There certainly is a fuller, more adequate, expression of God’s love; and so a greater power of attraction, thus of salvation. And yet there are denunciations of future evil in his teachings, that, taken as they stand, are as much more fearful than any which are found in the Old Testament, as they relate to what is more future and of longer duration. I will not here discuss them, I only say that, take what view of them is possible, it does not appear that Christ, in bearing the world’s evil, does at all consent to the possible immunity of transgression. If he might consent to that, then he might well enough consent to the continuance of transgression also, and so be excused from the sacrifice of the cross altogether.

God then is such a being from eternity as must, by the supposition, be entered, even as Christ was, into all God then is just what Christ shows him to be. that belongs to love; entered into patience, long suffering, and sacrifice; burdened in heart for the good of enemies; taking on his feeling the wants and woes of enemies. This is no new thought, no optional, superlative goodness taken up by Christ in the year One, of the Christian era; but the whole deity is in it, in it from eternity. And the short account of all is—“For God so loved the world.”

Holding now this view of God—the same which the Psalmist boasts when he sings, “For God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the Current misconceptions. earth”—we encounter a large body of current misconceptions, mostly under Gospel terms of expression, which require to be modified if we are to hold the truth understandingly.

Thus we speak of Christ as a mediator, and as doing a work of mediation; which is Scriptural, but we often conceive that he is literally a third being, Mediation. coming in between us and God to compose our difficulty with him, by gaining him as it were to softer terms. But he is no such mediator at all, nor any mediator, such as does not leave him to be God manifest in all God’s proper feeling. No, he is a mediator only in the sense that, as being in humanity, he is a medium of God to us; such a medium that, when we cling to him in faith, we take hold of God’s own life and feeling as the Infinite Unseen, and are taken hold of by Him, reconciled, and knit everlastingly to him, by what we receive.

We call Christ our intercessor, too, and conceive that we are saved by his intercession. Does he then intercede for us in the sense that he goes before God Intercession. in a plea to gain him over to us, showing God his wounds, and the print of his nails, to soften him towards us. Far from that as possible; nothing could be more unworthy. Intercession means literally intervention, that is a coming between; and it is not God that wants to be softened, or made better; for Christ 72himself is only the incarnate love and sacrificing patience of God; but the stress of the intercession is with us and in our hearts’ feeling—all which we simply figure, objectively, when we conceive him as the priest that liveth ever to make intercession for us. We set him before God’s altar, in a figure of eternal sponsorship, urging the suit of peace; though the peace he obtains by the suit of his sacrifice, comes, in fact, from our mitigation, not from the mitigation of God.

Other modes of speaking, supposed to be understood in their Scriptural meaning, will not be accommodated by the conception that unites the God of Pacification. the old time and the Christ of the new, in the same vicarious feeling, but will require to have their colors softened by similar explanations. And it will not be difficult, I rejoice to believe, for any genuinely thoughtful, right-feeling soul, to lay hold of the possibility thus offered, of a conception of God that does not mock his attributes, or set them at war with each other. How distracting and painful, how dreadfully appalling is the faith that we have a God, back of the worlds, whose indignations overtop his mercies, and who will not be satisfied, save as he is appeased by some other, who is in a better and milder feeling. We might easily fear him, but how shall we love him; and where, meantime shall we find that glorious, all-centering unity in the good, which our sufficiently distracted soul longs for in the God of its worship? What can we do as sinners, torn already by our own evils, with two Gods, a less good, and a better—this latter, suffering and even dying 73to compose and sweeten the other? Where shall our heart rest when our thought itself is bent hither and thither, and torn by a God in no unity with Himself?

Here then I think we may rest in the full and carefully tested discovery, that whatever we may say, or hold, or believe, concerning the vicarious A cross in God’s perfections from eternity. sacrifice of Christ, we are to affirm in the same manner of God. The whole deity is in it, in it from eternity and will to eternity be. We are not to conceive that our blessed Saviour is some other and better side of deity, a God composing and satisfying God; but that all there is in him expresses God, even as he is, and has been of old—such a being in his love that he must needs take our evils on his feeling, and bear the burden of our sin. Nay, there is a cross in God before the wood is seen upon Calvary; hid in God’s own virtue itself, struggling on heavily in burdened feeling through all the previous ages, and struggling as heavily now even in the throne of the worlds. This, too, exactly, is the cross that our Christ crucified reveals and sets before us. Let us come then not to the wood alone, not to the nails, not to the vinegar and the gall, not to the writhing body of Jesus, but to the very feeling of our God and there take shelter. Seeing how God bears an enemy—has borne or carried enemies all the days of old—we say “Herein is Love,” and in this grand koinonia—this fellowship of the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ—our very unworthy and very distracting preferences are forever merged and lost.