CHAPTER IV.

THE GOOD ANGELS IN VICARIOUS SACRIFICE.

IT has been a great hindrance, we have seen, to all right conceptions of what is called the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus Christ, that the attempt has been kept up, so persistently, to solve it as a matter one side of all the common principles of duty—a superlative goodness, too good to be obligatory on Christ, or any one else; an optional sacrifice, when undertaken by him, that overtops all requirement and makes a virtue better than even perfect law can frame a notion of. And so, by a kind of prodigious goodness above his obligation, Christ raises a fund of surplus merit, to even the account of all the world’s wrong doing under obligation. There ought to be some difficulty in getting well through any such kind of solution; for after all the principles of duty, or virtue, have been thrown into confusion, no rule is left to work by, in the settlement of any thing.

In this view, or on this account, I have undertaken to show the universality of just what we discover most distinctly in the work and sacrifice of Christ; that every good being, just according to his degree in good, will bear evil beings and suffer in feeling for them and take, 92as it were, their bad lot on himself; that, as Christ did it, so did the Father before Christ in the dispensation of the Old Testament; also that the Holy Spirit, after Christ, is continually doing it, in his continued work of intercession. Vicarious action, feeling, suffering, therefore, is not peculiar to the Son, but is even from eternity in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and in one as truly as in the others.

What I now propose is to carry the same conclusion a degree farther, or to bring it a step nearer down to All good intelligences in vicarious sacrifice. us; viz., to show that all holy beings created are in exactly the same vicarious spirit and suffering way of love as Christ was, only not doing and suffering exactly the same things. This may seem, in one view, to signify little as regards the extension of my subject; for if the uncreated three are in the very same love as Christ from eternity, bearing for love’s sake all the burdens of all enemies, and suffering a Gethsemane in feeling on their account, it of course adds nothing as regards authority, to show, that all created subjects, the glorified men, the angels and seraphim of the heavenly worlds, are also in the same. But we are looking, it must be observed, not after authority, but after commonness, or a common platform of principles in vicarious sacrifice; and therefore it signifies even the more to find all the holy intelligences of God’s empire in it, with Him, and with Christ; for it brings the Christly sacrifice down just so much closer to our human ranges of life and character, and our common obligations of duty and sacrifice. 93It shows, in fact, that Christ’s vicarious action is no prodigious matter, no monstrosity of goodness, but that all created holy beings have their perfection and blessedness in the same.

On this point we have several distinct modes of evidence.

1. A negative evidence, created by the impossibility of assuming the contrary. Nothing would more certainly shock our conceptions of glorified Shocking to think otherwise. minds, or of what is proper to their holy character, than to hear it affirmed that they are ignorant of sacrifice, never afflicted for the want, or woe, or fall of others; that, in fact, they would never think of being burdened with concern for an enemy, or of bearing any loss or sacrifice for his sake. Is that the kind of virtue, or character, that distinguishes the glorified state? Is it by such minds, in such a spirit, that Christ is to be appreciated, and is it such that are to have their joy in society with him?

2. It is agreed that angels and all glorified minds are in the principle and life of love; and love in angels works according to its own nature, as Their love puts them in a way of sacrifice. truly as it does in God or in Christ; for it is a power universally that takes hold of its objects and of all their woes, wants, wrongs and even enmities, to bear them as a weight on its afflicted sympathies. As certainly, therefore, as the angels and good minds of the upper world are fixed in the sway of love, they will run out their sympathies to others 94and will burden their hearts with concern for the un. worthy and the wicked; ministering unseen, where they may, in warnings and secret guidances. If they are in Christ’s love, they will have a Gethsemane and a cross in that love, and will be fulfilling their unseen mini3try in the same key with his.

3. It signifies much that they are drawn to Christ with such evident sympathy, and are with him so Their sympathy with Christ shows them to be. constantly, at every stage, and in every principal crisis of his work. The interest they have in him is visibly toned and tempered, by their common interest with him in his objects. Ages before his coming, they are moved with mighty expectation, “desiring to look into these things.” “Highly favored! blessed among women!” is the eager and strongly reverent salutation they bring to Mary’s mortal womanhood. When the child is born, they break into the sky, filling it full of heavenly hymn—“Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace.” In his temptation, they crowd about him to support him by their ministry. In his agony, one comes to strengthen him. In his trial, he is sure that he can have twelve legions to help him. They watch by the tomb where he sleeps; they roll away the stone when he wakes; and sitting there, one at the head and another at the feet, in forms more glorious than sculptured stones, they mark the now vacant place of his rest. With a delicate reverence, they tenderly fold the bloody napkin up and the bloody linen clothes, and lay them apart by themselves; and they say to Mary, with what tenderness, 95and, as it were tearful homage, “Come see the place where the Lord lay.” Almost, of course, they are with him in his ascension, when his work of sacrifice is done, and he goes up in the train of their innumerable company.

All these, now, as I readily admit, are rather indications than positive proofs. And yet there is such a zeal in their sympathy as indicates no partial accord, but a thoroughly complete oneness with him. Appearing most punctually when he sinks lowest in sacrifice, flocking to him in his agony and always when his soul is troubled, what can we imagine but that they suffer with him; pained for his enemies even as he is, and bearing the same burdens for them? Otherwise their sympathy itself could be scarcely better than an offense to his feeling. But there is a more direct kind of evidence—

4. In the ministry they maintain themselves; for they have a ministry, side by side with that of Jesus, in which we may see distinctly what Their ministry is in Christ’s way of sacrifice. and how much of sacrifice they are able to bear, and do in fact bear, for mankind. I am well aware of the general unbelief or practical Sadduceeism, as regards “angel and spirit,” that is likely to impose a look of myth or hollow fantasy, on any thing which can be said of the angelic ministries of the Scripture. Any appeal made to them in a matter of argument is likely to bear a specially unsolid, or even flighty and visionary character, in the estimation of such as mean to believe in them, and would even be offended by the intimation that they really do not. 96I can not stop to argue the question of such ministries. I will only suggest that I am discussing a purely Scriptural matter, on grounds of Scripture evidence, and that such ministries are not heartily believed, probably because the supposed visitants are taken to be only phantasms, or apparitions, and not real beings. For if there be any thing in our doctrine of immortality, there ought to be a world of real intelligences and glorified minds outside of this; beings that have a character, as truly as we ourselves expect to have, and that, having a character, will have sympathies and a disposition to be occupied in good works; beings, many of them, who have gone out from our own human society, and are bound to it by the dearest affinities of love and customary friendship, and will want to be engaged, if possible, in ministries of good to others left behind. Let it also be noted, that they are represented as ministering only to the heirs of salvation; that is to such as are fenced away from their invisible access by no contrary affinities; for it may be that all good minds have immediate access to such as are good, and that no conditions of sense, or walls of distance, ever shut apart, or in the nature of things can, such as, in God’s love, are made inherently common to each other. Besides, how completely will it take away the fantastic look of these celestial brethren and their visitations, just to conceive them as coming into the world, because they are pressed by the same love as Christ was, and drawn, by the sublime necessity of their own perfect character, to bear our lot of shame and loss, in a similar extension of their suffering sympathy.

This now we shall find is the exact conception held of them at all points in the representations of Scripture. Some of them we are expressly taught, The Scripture shows them as in sacrifice. and we know not how many, are men, or the spirits of men, once living on earth; just as soundly real as they ever were, or as we ourselves are to day. And what is more they are only acting in character, precisely the same kind of character which they lived in as members of our race. They were men who bore great burdens of toil and suffering for the people of their times, and only learned to bear them in that manner for the people of all times. They found a cross in their virtue itself, even as Christ did, and all that we discover, in their ministries among us now, is that they have not forgotten their cross, or grown tired of it.

Thus we are expressly informed that the angels of the transfiguration are Moses and Elias; and they spake with him, most naturally, of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. By which we are to understand, not that they informed him of his crucifixion, for that he knew already, but they joined their feeling to his, and comforted him by their suffering sympathy, and the assured sympathy of the heavenly worlds. For which, too, they had been effectually trained by their own former trials and burdens of love on earth; Moses when he cried, sinking under such burdens, “I can not bear this people,” and Elias when he groaned underground in his cave, “I have been very jealous for the Lord of Hosts.” And who was that angel in John’s 98vision who said, “I am of thy brethren the prophets?” Was it Daniel who fasted in such broken plaints of sorrow for his people and country? or was it Jeremiah who cried, “O that my head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears?” All these, and other such holy men of old, had borne the cross of love in their time, and have not forgotten it, now that they are classed as angels. The ministries they fulfill are only their old ministries enlarged and made perfect. They lived in vicarious sacrifice before they went up, and the tragic joy they had in it draws them to it now.

Meantime we shall find that, in all which is told us of these angelic ministries, they are set in close analogy with the ministry of Christ himself. They are with Hagar by the fountain of the wilderness, as Christ with the woman at Jacob’s well. They are with Elijah the starving prophet in his sleep under the juniper tree, offering him their cake which they have baked upon the coals, even as Christ prepared his fire of coals, and the fish and the bread, that his hungry friends, on landing from their boats, might receive the token of his divine hospitality. They had such a feeling of tender sympathy for innocent children, coming forth into a rough world of sin and sorrow, that they took hold, every one, of some one child, or more than one, to become their unseen guardians—“Verily I say unto you their angels do always behold the face of my father”—even as the incarnate Lord himself clave to the children everywhere, and laid his hands and his dear blessing on them, saying—“of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”

How deeply their feeling is entered into the great tragedy of sin, and all the lost conditions of the fallen state under sin, we may see, on a large Concerned for sin as God is. scale, when they are shown, before the great salvation promised has arrived; “desiring to look into these things,” and breaking out afterwards when it is complete—ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands—in the song of their own deep, always suffering love, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain.” Also in what Christ says himself, testifying—“Verily I say unto you there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.” Which joy he still further explains by showing how it springs up with his own, growing on the same root of care, concern and suffering sympathy; how they rejoice with him, because, with him, they are looking always after lost men, even as a shepherd after his one lost sheep, or a housekeeper looking after her one lost piece of money; and therefore, he and they together, when they have found their lost one, have their burden of sorrow, as he represents, fall off, in a blessed and rebounding joy.

It is worthy, too, of special remark that Christ conceives them coming to men, in a ministry Concerned for the sick and poor as Christ was. to the body strikingly correspondent with his own—restrained by no fastidious disgusts, averted by no disrespect of the humble and dejected lot of the poor. They do not spurn, they can not even neglect, the dying beggar at the rich man’s gate. No matter whether it be a story of fact, or only 100a parable, the figure they make will be in character, in one as truly as in the other, and the picture he gives will, in either case, reveal them in a manner worthy of our study. The beggar is in a most sorry plight. He wants a nurse, a physician, and friends, and withal, a place in which to die. But of all his kinsmen, if he has any, there is none that will be charged with a care so unwelcome and loathsome. He goes a begging thus at the street corners and elsewhere, till finally having reached the shelter of a rich man’s gateway, or the arched corridor of stone leading into the court of his house, his round is ended, and he lies down there, till the round of life also may be finished. He asks the pity of a few crumbs for his famishing body. Perhaps he gets them, and perhaps he does not. This at least he does not get; viz., that tender human sympathy which every humblest creature wants in his last hours.

Thus he fared with men; but there were two classes of beings, in a different key, who came to his help in their wonted acts of ministry—the dogs, I mean, and the angels—the dogs from below, esteeming him to be another and superior kind of creature; the angels from above, rating his significance and dignity as much higher, as their mind was capable of higher thoughts. Behold them here at hand, the dogs and the angels together, in a strange companionship of ministry, round the flinty bed of the poor abject and son of sorrow; they dispensing their low natural surgery on his ulcerated body, and these, beholding in him an heir of glory 101and a future peer with them in their heavenly dignities; watching by him as volunteer nurses, strengthening him inwardly by the touch of their own brave hearts, and waiting, as the pulse beats low and the breath slackens to a full stop, to hail him as a brother made free, and convoy him home. Wonderful picture in the light and shade of it, signifying much, not only as regards the tender fidelity of their ministry to the bodily condition of men, but a great deal more as a revelation of the fact, that they are able to encounter so much necessary revulsion of feeling and really painful sympathy, in doing their works of mercy. No one looking on the picture can fail to be struck by the very close analogy between their way and that of Christ himself. Neither they nor he can perform such works of sympathy on the loathsome subjects of bodily disease, without a great expenditure of suffering. The very pity that draws them to such works is itself a heavy load to bear, and is just as much heavier as their love is stronger, their sympathy closer, and their feeling more delicate.

See how it was with Christ, in that most tender, but strangely compounded and really fearful scene, the raising of Lazarus. Death, who took him on his way foul days ago, is to be called back and required to let him forth alive. Jesus struggles, we can see, with great emotions, partly tender, partly painful. He weeps, he groans in spirit, and is troubled. It is as if his feeling were in contact all through with death’s foul work, as well as with the griefs of the friends—glad, for the disciples’ 102sakes, to the intent they may believe, and yet scarcely able to meet the ghastly appearing of the dead brother whom he will evoke by his call. Indeed, if we carefully study the pathology of this scene we shall see the feeling of Jesus struggling in it, with surges of painful commotion, scarcely less proper to be called suffering, than the agony itself.

So when the angels of God come to help the poor forlorn beggar off, in his release to life. That fastidious feeling which might torture us, in coming to a fellow mortal in such loathsome plight, they make nothing of; it will not trouble them, for they suffer no false disgusts. But that purity which has put them so far aloof from sin, and from all its foul incidents, their finer tastes, their more delicate, celestial sensibilities—all these are yet present to him, body and soul, not without pain, and lifting, as it were in sympathy with him, to bear him out of his foul cave and start him on his flight. So the beggar dies and is carried up, escorted home to Abraham’s bosom, as the Saviour represents, by their angelic company. Christ bore him in his passion, and they, too, have borne him in their passion, now no longer a burden either on his feeling or on theirs. I will only add—

5. That the Scriptures speak of these angelic ministries, in terms that indicate an impression of sacrifice Conceived in the priestly character. in them, and a vicarious engagement of their suffering love. The very word minister—“ministering spirits sent forth to minister”—has a Christly meaning, as if they were on a mission of service, and sacrifice, and holy pains-taking, like that 103of Christ the Lamb; enduring contradiction, wounded feeling, heaviness of heart, and struggling on, through rains of love, to accomplish their charge of guardianship. They are also spoken of in terms that bear a priestly character as being intercessors for men. Such terms are figures, of course, and objective representations, even as they are when applied to Christ himself. Thus we find that, as Christ is called our Advocate with the Father, a priest that liveth ever to make intercession, so Christ testifies concerning these angels standing in their ministries—“they do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.” To behold the face of God, in this manner, is to have a priestly access, and be able to maintain a priestly intercession, even as the high priest enters the holy of holies, to make answer and suit for the people. So when Christ declares—“there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth,” he means by “the presence of the angels of God,” the presence of God made glorious by the priestly retinue of his angels, and these electrified with joy, that the labor of their heart is crowned, and their suit of reconciliation is triumphant.

We have it then as a point established by Scripture evidence, that the glorified spirits, or angels of God, being in the love of God, are also in that The vicarious principle to be universal. kind of sacrifice, or vicarious engagement, which love, in its own nature, supposes. And so the gulf between sacrifice in uncreated and created minds is effectually bridged. Make as much as 104we will, or possibly can, of the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, and, as being the incarnate presence and ministry of God himself, too much can not be made of it, still there is no superlative, over-good, kind of goodness in it. Calling it good by the only standard of goodness, perceiving distinctly that love, in any and every moral being, will burden itself for all sin and suffering, and hasten, by its own everlasting impulse, to take the woes of others on its feeling, we at once have Christ made intelligible and yet as sublimely preëminent, as the stature of his person, and the transcendent power of his divine ministry and suffering require him to be. What we call his merit will not be diminished, but it will be no such merit as exceeds the standards of character. It will not be a something which theology has found, to fill out a theologic and contrived exigency, but it will be a divine; patience and sorrow, revealing God’s love to our hearts; a grace, because it is the grace of a character; a salvation, because it is a power of salvation.