CHAPTER VI.

GOD’S RECTORAL HONOR EFFECTIVELY MAINTAINED.

TO maintain the precept and enforce the sanctions of law, are not the only matters of concern to be provided for, in the promulgation of forgiveness; a third matter, much insisted on, is that the magistrate himself keep good his Rectoral Honor and the Legal Justice of his magistracy. Regarded as the administrator of instituted government, he is practically the government himself, and is looked upon as being the government. Hence if it should happen that, in the introduction of a free justification, God’s magisterial character—his Rectoral Honor and Justice—is let down, or loses the necessary impressiveness, the damage incurred will be fatal. And this, it will be remembered, was one of the alleged forms of detriment, or damage, to be apprehended, unless some kind of satisfaction is made to God’s justice. All the compensation theories have a principal respect to this supposed necessity. For how shall God be just, and have respect in the character of justice, unless he executes justice? or unless he somehow has his justice satisfied, by volunteer pains contributed for that purpose?

Hence the many, variously turned contrivances of 365substitution, by which this point is supposed to be carried, and a ground of justification prepared that saves the justice and public honor of God, in a release of his penalties. These various schemes or theories are made up in the terms, official substitution, penal suffering, expiation, judicial satisfaction, ransom, purchase, bearing the curse, payment of the debt, and the like; used sometimes interchangeably as being, to some extent, equivalents, or more commonly set up, each by itself, as the idol figure of some peculiar doctrine dominated by it.

Our New England teachers, for nearly a century past, have commonly taken a form of representation that has not as yet obtained general currency, The New England scheme of substitution. any where else. Pressed by the difficulty of any scheme that supposes a literal satisfaction of God’s justice, or the release of the guilty obtained by the penal suffering of the innocent—because it so profoundly shocks the most immovable, and most nearly innate convictions of our moral nature—also by the new-sprung inference of universal salvation that inevitably follows; viz., that, if Christ has borne the punishment of the world, no principle of justice in God will allow him to inflict that punishment again upon the transgressors themselves—pressed by these difficulties they began to conceive that Christ, in his cross, maintained the righteousness of God without punishment, by what was expressed, to the same effect as in punishment, of God’s abhorrence to sin. Christ, they conceived, has simply shown, by 366his death, the same abhorrence to sin that would have been shown by the punishment of the guilty. The righteousness of God therefore stands erect and fair, even though punishment is released.

Of this latter and later mode of doctrine I will speak first and briefly, recurring afterwards to the older, which turns on the penal suffering of Christ, and the maintenance and satisfaction thereby of God’s justice.

There is no room for scruple in affirming, that every thing done by Christ gets its value, under laws of expression, No fault that it turns on what is expressed. or, as in modern phrase, under terms of esthetic representation; christianity as a power on the world, is expression. Nay, the incarnation itself is what is expressed, and not what is contained, or suffered quantitatively as a compensation to justice, in the incarnate person. Punishment itself, apart from the matter of penal enforcement, considered in the last previous chapter, has besides a most sacred and noble efficacy in what it expresses of God—the determination of his will, his righteousness, in a word his rectoral fidelity to the law. This expression, too, is wanted as being the equivalent of a like impression; for nothing is expressed to us, save as it is impressed in us, in the same degree. And in just this way the gospel itself is resolvable into expression, because it is wanted in a way of impression; which is the real effect and mode of its value.

Thus far we have no difficulty; but the question still 367remains whether a fit compensation is really made for the release of punishment, by what is expressed of abhorrence to sin, in the sufferings of Christ? That no compensation is wanted—justice and forgiveness being co-factors, working together in the instituted government of God, and the justice-factor being even confirmed in its vigor, by the revelation of future punishment and the inauguration of Christ as the judge of the world—was abundantly shown in the last chapter, But consenting, for the present, to waive this advantage, we accept the question, whether any expression made of abhorrence to sin is a proper and sufficient substitute for punishment?

And here it occurs to us, at the outset, as a very obvious fact, that abhorrence to sin expresses almost nothing that would be expressed by punishment. Abhorrence to sin no fit equivalent of justice. Abhorrence is a word of recoil simply and not a word of majesty. There is no enforcement, no judicial vigor in it. I may abhor what I am only too weak, or too much in the way of false pity, to handle with the due severity. It does not even require a perfect being to abhor sin, especially in the wicked forms of it—that is to draw back from it, as being disgusted and shocked by it. But there is no such drawing back in justice. Justice moves on in the positive vigor of the wrath-principle, girded with inflexible majesty, for the doing upon wrong of what wrong deserves. To put forward an expression therefore of God’s abhorrence to sin, as a substitute for justice, is to give it the weakest possible 368substitute. If the abhorrence could be shown keeping company with justice and justice with it, there would be no deficiency, but to make a governmental sanction out of abhorrence by itself, and publish a free forgiveness to sin, on the ground of it,: is to make forgiveness safe by a much less positive and weaker way of handling than forgiveness itself. All doubt on this point ought to be forever ended, by simply asking what kind of figure, as regards efficiency, any government of the world would make, dropping off its punishments and substituting abhorrences?

But this abhorrence theory encounters another objection equally fatal, in the fact that really no abhorrence No abhorrence expressed in Christ’s death. at all to sin is expressed in the suffering death of Christ. All manifestations of goodness and purity are implicit evidences of such abhorrence, but beyond that we discover no evidence more direct. To what in the transaction of the cross can God’s abhorrence, by any possibility, fasten itself? Does God abhor the person of Jesus? No. His character? No. His redeeming office? No. The sins of the world that are upon him? They are not upon him, save in a figure, as the burden that his love so divinely assumes. His standing in the place of transgressors? He stands not in that place at all, as having their moral desert upon him—only in their place as a good man stands in the place of his enemy, to bear his wrongs and make his own violated feeling the argument of pity and patience with him. Where then does the abhorrence of God take 369hold of Christ or of his death at all? What does it find in him, or about him, or on him, or under him, that can be any wise abhorrent? If it should be said that God really abhors nothing in him, but only lays severity upon him, to be taken by us as the sign of his abhorrence, then how does it appear that the severity laid upon him has any moral significance at all, if it is not penal suffering? If he is put in our place to suffer the penalty of our sins, then we can easily see abhorrence to our sins expressed in his suffering. But mere severities and pains laid upon him, even though God violated his own deep sympathies and loving approbations to do it, can only show the fact of something very abhorrent somewhere, and is much more likely to raise abhorrence in us, than to signify God’s abhorrence to us.

It will be found accordingly, if the language of those who take up this abhorrence theory is carefully watched, that they have a latent reference back Latent resumption still of the penal suffering. always to Christ, as being in some penal condition, without which our sin is no way concerned with his suffering, or his suffering with it. The object was to get away from the very repulsive idea of a penal character in Christ’s suffering, and so from the appalling objections that seemed to be incurred by it; but when the point of difficulty is once turned by the softer word “abhorrence,” we look back and find the penal suffering held mentally in reserve, in order to get the Divine Sufferer into an attitude, where God’s abhorrences can be imagined to adhere to him, or find expression through him. Thus it will be said 370continually, that “God’s abhorrence to sin was laid upon his Son”—which means, if it means any thing, that God’s judicial indignations were laid upon him; that God withdraws from the Son in the agony and upon the cross, to signify his displeasure, that is, his judicial displeasure; nay, the doctrine will sometimes be even doubled round again so as to say that God’s “justice is satisfied” in his death; only to be doubled back, of course, when the objections incurred by the scheme of penalty are to be met; for then it will be answered that Christ does not suffer penally, but only in a way to let God’s abhorrence to sin be expressed through his suffering.

I conclude, on the whole, that this New England expedient of conceiving the substitution of Christ, as being only God’s way of showing his repugnances to sin by the suffering of Christ, instead of doing it by the punishment of the guilty, has in fact, no base of reality, even to those who resort to it, save as it reverts to the older scheme of penal suffering and resumes all the methods of that scheme. Indeed it will even be found, that Dr. Edwards, having taken the ground⁴⁷⁴⁷Discourses on Atonement, Park’s edition, p. 31. that “the death of Christ manifests God’s hatred of sin, in the same sense as the damnation of the wicked,” still carries out his reasonings, under the very scheme of penal suffering that has been renounced, to a point of excess in that scheme that is abundantly shocking; viz., to the conclusion that “the sufferings of Christ were agreeable to God.” “If, by mere pain,” he says,⁴⁸⁴⁸Page 35. “be 371meant pain abstracted from the obedience of Christ, I can not see why it may not be agreeable to God. It certainly is in the damned; and, for the same reason might have been, and doubtless was in the case of our Lord.”

To pursue this particular scheme or doctrine farther appears to be unnecessary, after we have found it lapsing always in the older doctrine it undertook to qualify, or displace. To this older doctrine we accordingly return.

Here it is conceived that God, as a ruler, must execute justice because he is just—if not upon the guilty, then upon Christ their substitute. Justice Immutable Justice only not sufficiently just. he must have, the inexorable, everlasting wrath [οργη] of his judicial nature must be satisfied; and as it was to be satisfied by the penal suffering of transgressors, so it can only be satisfied, in case of their release, by a full compensation of penal suffering offered by their deliverer. Now if it were simply conceived that God, by a necessary, everlasting charge upon his moral nature, is fated to be the absolute Nemesis of wrong,—unable therefore to avert himself, or be averted, till every iota and least speck of it has gotten its full desert—there would, at least, be a certain sublimity in the conception. But there is no such thought as that; the inexorable justice [wrath] wants only suffering it is conceived for its satisfaction, and the suffering of innocence will be just as good as the suffering of guilt, if only there is enough of it; 372which is about the same thing as to say that God’s justice is so immovably set on having its due of pains and penalties, that it will be just as well satisfied in having them, apart from all relations of justice. There was never a doctrine that more obviously broke itself down by its own simple statement. Nor is it any wise relieved, when it is added that the pains and penalties which justice obtains for satisfaction are not exacted, but yielded by consent; for then we have a kind of justice under all most sounding epithets of majesty, immutable, necessary, sovereign, which is yet willing to get its pains and penalties by contract!

I ought perhaps to say that, under the general phraseology of this doctrine, there appears to be some variety Softened or varied forms of the doctrine. of impression indicated by a softening, or modified definition of terms. Many do not understand by God’s justice any vindictive attribute or instinct that must have satisfaction, but only a character of public justice, or general justice, that is necessary to be maintained, by a firm and exact distribution of penalty, in order to keep the instituted government in respect and authority. These only want the character of public justice made good, by some other expression—commonly by that of abhorrence—when that which is made by punishment is taken away. Some can not satisfy themselves in what manner the needed compensative expression is made, and not finding how to explain the difficulties met, take refuge at last in mystery—not observing that where confessedly nothing is known, there can be nothing 373expressed. These lower, softer kinds of commutation however do not satisfy, at all, the more logical, firmly dogmatic natures, and the tendency has been, more and more distinctly of late, to settle into what are called the deeper grounds of the subject, and plant the doctrine in the soil of first principle; viz., in what is conceived to be the eternal, necessary attribute of divine justice itself.

I could hardly trust myself to state the argument, or vindication, by which this more adequate and deeper doctrine is supposed to be maintained; and therefore I am constrained to cite the language of two late writers of distinction, that they may accurately represent themselves and their view of the subject. I do it for no purpose of controversy, but only to obtain, for the great matter in question, the easiest and surest mode of settlement.

Thus it is formally argued by a teacher in great authority,⁴⁹⁴⁹Biblical Repertory, A. D. 1859, pp. 474-5. that—“A being determined by considerations outside of Himself [considerations of Absolute Justice how to be conceived. public effect for example] can not be God. It is essential to the very nature of God that he be independent and omniscient; but with these attributes a determination ab extra [as where God is conceived, in the death of his son, to be actuated by considerations of public law and authority, and results of salvation gained, or to be gained, by his sacrifice] is utterly and forever irreconcilable. * * * Were theologians to receive this first truth and couple 374it with that noble utterance with which the Shorter Catechism opens—‘Man’s chief end, etc.,’ they would never be found framing theories, which would strip God of his justice and set the universe [i. e., the benefit of it] above the throne of their Creator. * * * God is himself the highest end for which he could act.”

Now it is very true that, in one view, there is and can be nothing out of God, and that, in the same, he can act for nothing out of Himself. It is also true that his acts and purposes are not for things, or creatures taken up as ends, after their creation; but these things and creatures, present eternally to God’s thought as possibilities, in Himself, were as truly his ends, before they began to exist externally, as they could be afterward. They were, in fact, as truly other and not himself, as they came to be afterward. For them and their benefit accordingly he has eternally acted. To say otherwise, denying that he can have ends out of himself, under the supposed Calvinistic pretext of doing honor to his sovereignty, is to make him Allah and not God. He is even radically unchristianized in his God is not Allah nevertheless.. perfections. For it is the glory of God, the summit even of his glory, that, being sovereign, he knows, not justice only, but self-sacrifice, and is so sublimely given to ends out of Himself, that he can even be a suffering God in his feeling, for the recovery and salvation of his enemies. Doubtless he does all things, in’ a sense, for his own glory; which is only saying, if we speak with intelligence, that he does all things to make the luster of his greatness and moral 375perfections visible; in other words to radiate abroad his love and goodness, in a way of imparting himself; which is to all created minds their only hope of perfection and complete beatitude. We are brought round thus, in fact, upon the noble conclusion that he does every thing for ends ab extra, not for Himself. The argument, therefore, that God must have the everlasting anger of his justice satisfied, because he is acting wholly for Himself, appears to be about as repulsive, in every way, as any thing well call be. It even makes the grim οργη or vindictive attribute, to be itself the summit of God’s perfections. Insisting that he must do every thing for himself, nothing for any public ends of benefit and blessing to creatures, it seems even to say, what certainly can not be meant, that his very perfection is, to stand, first of all, for the satisfaction of his wrath, and kindle his glory at the point of his resentments!

Another attempt has also been made, in quite another quarter, to maintain what is virtually the same ground, only it is done by a more ingenious Another conception of Absolute Justice. and plausible way of argument. Consenting virtually to the principle, as every intelligent thinker must, that we can properly conceive God only by drawing on material included in our own human consciousness, the writer finds, in all “ethical natures,” whether it be the nature of God, or of man, a certain prime element that he calls “Justice,” and which is instinctively arrayed, roused to vindictive energy, against all wrong, or transgression. This 376judicial nature, called “justice,” he also conceives to be the point absolute in moral character. This must stand, and nothing else which will not stand with it. Thus he says—⁵⁰⁵⁰Bibliotheca Sacra, Oct., 1859. Art. II —The Atonement a Satisfaction for the Ethical Nature of both God and Man.

“A fundamental attribute of Deity is justice. This comes first into view and continues in sight to the very last, in all inquiries into the Divine Nature. No attribute can be conceived that is more ultimate and central than this one. This is proved by the fact that the operation of all the other divine attributes, love not excepted, is conditioned and limited by justice. For whatever else God may be, or may not be, he must be just. It is not optional with him to exercise this attribute, or not to exercise it, as it is in the exercise of that class of attributes which are antithetic to it. We can say—‘God may be merciful, or not, as he pleases,’ but we can not say, ‘God may be just or not as he pleases.’ It can not be asserted that God is inexorably obligated to show pity; but it can be categorically affirmed that God is inexorably obligated to do justly.”

His all-conditioning, first attribute of justice therefore must have “plenary satisfaction” he maintains, else there can be no deliverance. The conditionated grace of love must wait on the unconditionated, absolute impulse of justice, and drink the cup of its indignations dry. Thus it is conceived that, “In the incarnate Son, God voluntarily endures the weight of his own judicial displeasure, in order that the real criminal may be 377spared. The Divine compassion itself bears the infliction of the Divine indignation, in the place of the transgressor. The propitiation is no oblation ab extra, it is wholly ab intra, a self-oblation upon the part of Deity itself, by which to satisfy those immanent and eternal imperatives of the Divine Nature, which, without it, must find their satisfaction in the punishment of the transgressor.” “Side by side in the Godhead, there dwell the impulse to punish and the desire to pardon; but the desire to pardon is realized, in act, by carrying out the impulse to punish; not indeed upon the person of the criminal, but upon that of his substitute. And the substitute is the Punisher Himself.”

I have stated thus at large and carefully this newly elaborated scheme of satisfaction, partly because it has a certain point of merit, and partly because it is a failure where a sufficiently strong failure was wanted. The point of merit is that it has the ingenuousness to put entirely by the doubling, battledooring art commonly practiced in discussions of this subject; it does not make Christ other than God, that he may offer something to God’s justice; and then a divine person [God] that he may be able to offer what is sufficient; and then again human that the divine may not suffer; but it takes the ground and faithfully adheres to it, that the satisfaction made is wholly ab intra, or within the divine nature itself. The point of failure is equally important, because it brings the doctrine of penal suffering and judicial satisfaction, to just that issue, where its failure is likely to be final and conclusive.

First of all, the ingenuous admission, here made, that the justice of God is satisfied from within Himself, or by punishment dispensed upon Himself, A very weak justice that God exacts of himself. is even admirably fatal. What kind of power any Ruler must hold, in the impressions of his subjects who, to make sure of justice, takes all his punishments out of himself, it is not difficult to see. There plainly could not be a weaker figure in the name of government.

Besides the justice gotten, in this manner, must be as insipid to Him, as it is useless for the purposes of government. Justice wants what is just if And the justice is not just beside. it wants any thing, and here it is found feeding itself out of that which is exactly not just—what vestige of justice can there be in any punishment which a righteous God gets out of Himself? Is it so then, after all, that this inexorable, undivertible, Nemesis of God’s ethical nature, this judicial sentiment which must be satisfied first and before every thing else, will be just as well satisfied with a punishment not just, as with one that is?

There also appears to be a remarkable oversight here, in the scheme of satisfaction proposed, as regards the God suffers—not his compassions. penal suffering itself. “The Divine compassion itself bears the infliction of the Divine indignation in the place of the transgressor.” Why the divine compassion, more than the divine justice? Does the justice punish the compassion? For aught that appears there is no suffering in the compassion more than in the justice. By supposition, 379the truth is, merely, that there is a conflict between the two contrary impulses, justice and compassion, and the divine nature—not specially the compassion, not specially the justice—suffers. These words justice and compassion do not as having each distinct sensibilities make up the deity; they inhere in a Being, and that being, as being, suffers, by their conflict. Does it then satisfy justice, that the being in whom it inheres, suffers partly on account of it?

Besides, if it were conceivable that the being took so much suffering wholly on his love, or on account of his love, did it never occur to the writer that Withheld from suffering would have suffered more. if He had refused, for love’s sake, to encounter so much suffering he would certainly have suffered infinitely more? Nay, that such a refusal would even have turned the Divine bosom itself into a hell of suffering forever? Given the fact of God’s Infinite Love, he suffers demonstrably, not more, but less, in consenting to be the deliverer of men—by suffering however great.

But the scheme breaks down most fatally of all in the confusion of meaning, or the covering up of a double meaning, in the word justice. A The Justice conceived is ambiguous. sufficient discrimination here would have shown that the absolute justice pertaining to ethical natures is a fiction, without any shadow of reality. It is almost incredible, that a really intelligent writer should throw himself upon the axiom, “God must be just,” “God is inexorably obligated to do justly,” without perceiving that we assent to it for 380no other reason than that the words “just” and “justly” mean “righteous” and “righteously.” God can not of course do any thing unrighteous, or, in that sense, unjust; that is God must keep his integrity. Is that the same thing as to say that God has no option left, but to stand by retributive justice and do by all men exactly as they do to others? Calling “the impulse to punish” justice, has he no liberty left, but to follow that impulse, just as far as it must go to be exhausted? If that should possibly be true, it will require something more to establish it than simply to propound it as an axiom. Interpose, at this point, two very simple distinctions and the supposed infallible argument vanishes.

First, the distinction between righteousness and justice; righteousness, being a character grounded in the Righteousness and Justice, Wrath and Justice. absolute, unconditioned law of right existing before government; and justice, being a rectoral, politico-judicial character, maintained by the firm vindication of government; conditioned of course by the wants of government. Second, the distinction between the wrath-principle and justice; the wrath-principle being only that moral sensibility, or passion, that impels a moral nature to the infliction of evil in redress of wrong, and steels it against the restraints of false pity; and justice being, in the administration, a due infliction of such evil, according to the ill desert of the wrong. By the first distinction, righteousness is seen to be absolute, and justice to be a matter only of means to ends, and 381so of deliberative counsel. By the second, the wrath principle is seen to be no law at all, but only an impulse to be regulated by counsel; which, when it is, makes justice; when it falls short, laxity; when it runs to excess, revenge and cruelty. I have the same kind of ethical nature as God, and it is even a praise in me, nay, an obligation upon me, to do by my enemy better than he deserves—to forget my injuries and even to suffer for his good. Is it then a fault in God that he does the same? It is very true that I administer no government over my enemy, and so far there is a difference. But this difference leaves it optional with God to do by his enemy still better than he deserves, when-, ever he can do it, without injury to the public interest of government. And if that is agreed, where is the absolute, all-conditioning, unconditioned justice-element of his nature—the wrath that is to bridle and bestride everlastingly his will and counsel? Ceasing ii this manner to call righteousness justice, and justice wrath, the claim that wrath is God’s first attribute, and must be satisfied, is seen to be quite groundless. And the supposed adamantine cup, that requires to be kept exactly full of blood, to let forgiveness into the world, is happily found to be only an ambiguous term in speech and nothing more!

It will occur to almost any one, that this very huge mistake respecting the absolute nature of justice, originates in a confounding of righteousness and justice. That is absolute, unconditioned, unconditional, a law to all moral natures and even to God; a law, as we have 382seen,⁵¹⁵¹For the distinction between righteousness and justice, See Chap. I., Part II. before God undertakes to so much as organize a government for it. For this law absolute, the government Righteousness absolute, not justice. of God including his justice only maintains guard, just as guillotines do for statutes; but guillotines are not statutes themselves, neither is justice the same as the everlasting law of right whose wrongs it avenges. It was not the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the smoke, and the sound of a trumpet that were engraved in stones, but it was the law. Law is the principal and absolute matter, the variable and conditional is what counsel arranges and does to vindicate law.⁵²⁵²The Hebrew scriptures have a way of putting these two ideas righteousness and justice together that is instructive. They make use of two distinct sets of words, one that is morally significant, the other forensically; and it is remarkable how firmly these two sets of words, occurring almost constantly in a kind of twin relationship, keep themselves to their places; scarcely ever, or quite never crossing over to uses that confuse their meaning. Thus we have—“righteousness and judgment”—“righteous judgment”—“justice [i. e., righteousness] and judgment”—“just [i. e., righteous] judgment”—“judgment and justice” [i.e., righteousness]—with a great variety of similar combinations; where it will be observed, in the last three cases, that our English translation, putting justice and just in the place of righteousness and righteous, makes a considerable look of confusion; owing to the fact that the words just and justice are so often used, in English, in the judicial and vindicatory sense. It would have been very much better if the translation had excluded this ambiguity, by steadily representing the steadiness of the original, in a use only of the words righteous and righteousness, and reserving the terms just, justice, judgment and the like, for the other class of uses, the vindicatory, in the manner observed by the scripture. Nobody in that case would ever have begun to imagine that retributive justice was an original, everlasting, unconditioned, first principle in the moral nature of God. That is true of righteousness only, never of justice. 383or executive counsel, as truly as the fire that fell on Sodom, or the destruction of the golden calf. Or if we use the epithet as a word of character, the character is not original and absolute in God, but is obtained by doing justice. Which again requires to be done, only because, and just so far as, it is means to ends in a way of maintaining government; not because God’s nature contains a wrath-principle absolute, that must be exactly satisfied. And still it is, with many, a question how far, or whether in fact ever, it can be relaxed? also whether, if relaxed by forgiveness, it must not be somehow compensated? And they even go so far as to be sensitively concerned for God’s law, if he is conceived to let go any sin, without some exact equivalent obtained. To proclaim a free remission, without some such equivalent, they do not hesitate to say would quite break down his government; he might be a good adviser still, they will say, but nothing more—no real governor at all.

And yet we can easily see that any such kind of concern is theologic with us, and not practical. We do not practically feel, after all, that in After all, have no such concern for God’s justice. the universal free remission published by Christ, God’s rectoral authority is at all weakened, or requires any new buttress of support to be added. And the probable reason is that the immense 384reinforcement of eternal obligation by Christ’s doctrine of future punishment, and of the future judgment by himself, puts all thought of concern for God’s authority so far away, that it can not even occur to us. We find ourselves quivering for dread, under even mercy itself. The necessity of some compensation made to God’s justice occurs to no man, save in a way of theory.

Passing now into another field, let us consider, in a way more positive, what Christ has really done that affects, or may be seen to affect, the interests of justice. The remainder of the chapter will be occupied with matter that I could well enough put forward as a way of compensation; suffering no doubt whatever that it would be more satisfactory, closer to the problem of compensation itself, and more genuine than the others of which I have been speaking. But I shall offer it, instead, simply as proof, how closely God adheres to law and justice still in the very matter of vicarious sacrifice. And I let go, in this way, what might be a considerable relief, or commendation to many, just because I have too little respect for the compensations, to be accessory, in any way, to this kind of wrong against the simplicity of the gospel. These compensations have a too contrived look, and suggest too easily the ingenious littleness and tumid poverty of man’s invention. I would rather have the gospel in God’s way of dignity without them, than to have it in a guise so artificial and meager without the dignity.

It lies in the very conception of vicarious suffering, I am giving in this treatise, that Christ is entered practically into the condition of evil and made Christ is incarnated into the curse. subject to it. This condition, too, of evil, we shall find is, in some very important sense, a penal condition. It is what is called, in one of the epistles, “the curse;” an epithet which has reference, I suppose, indirectly, if not formally, to the expulsion from paradise set forth in the third chapter of Genesis. Not that the sentence there passed on the guilty pair, and on the world for their sake, was any positive infliction. The scriptures very commonly represent what occurs retributively under fixed laws of nature in that way; because the true moral idea of God’s dealings with evil is best conceived in that way, by minds in the earlier stages of development. But to us the effects of sin are its curse, and the laws of retribution, set in deep and firm in the economy of nature itself, are God’s appointed ministers of justice. In this manner we conceive that every thing up to the stars—the whole realm of causes—is arranged to be, in some sense, the executive organ of God’s moral retributions.

Accordingly, the moment any sin breaks out, all the causes set against it fall to being curses upon it. As the sin itself must be against the will of God, and every thing created centers in that will, a shock of discord runs through the general frame-work of life and experience. Order itself utters a groan of disorder. The crystalline whole of things is shattered, as it were by some hard blow, and the fragments begin to grind 386heavily upon each other. The soul itself, lacerated by its own wrong, winces for pain, like an eye that has extinguished sight by gazing at the sun. The passions, appetites, fears, aspirations are pitched into a general quarrel with each other, and especially with the reason and the conscience; and the will, trying to usurp control of all, when it can not sufficiently master any thing, falls off its throne, as a tyrant plucked down by revolt. The body suffers a like shock of disorder, and true health vanishes before the secret crowd of infections, twinges, and immedicable combustions, that steal into the flesh, and traverse the bones, and go burning along the nerves. Evil becomes a kind of organic power in society, in the same way; a kingdom of darkness, a conspiracy of bad opinions and powers usurped for oppression, under which truth and goodness and right and religion itself are, either badly perverted, or cruelly persecuted. The very world, made subject to vanity, groans and travails every where, waiting for some redemption that can redeem it from itself.

Now this state of corporate evil is what the scriptures call the curse; and it is directly into this that Suffers the corporate evil with us. Christ is entered by his incarnation. In this taking of the flesh, he becomes a true member of the race, subject to all the corporate liabilities of his bad relationship. The world is now to him just what it is to us; save that the retributive causations reach him only in a public way, and never as a sufferer on his own account. He is even depravated or damaged in his human constitution 387just so far as that constitution is humanly derivative. For he was the Son, not of an immaculate, but of a maculate motherhood; otherwise the humanity assumed were only a dainty, and merely ideal embodiment, such as rather mocks our sympathy than draws it. Besides, he would be tempted in all points like as we are, and give us to see how he bears himself in our lot. Therefore we believe him to have entered himself into our humanity, just as it is—into the curse itself, under which it lies. Joining himself to us, in a participation so real and deep, his birth, we half imagine, coming with a shock, and hear strange wail break out in the child’s first cry. Or if this be fancy only and not fact, we can, at least, see for ourselves that, when he comes to go into his great ministry, in the bonds of the curse, and be joined to all the corporate woes and judicial disorders of the curse, he recoils with a shudder, falls off into a sharp long contest of fasting and temptation, finally to emerge as from a fight with demons.⁵³⁵³Christ and his Salvation, pp. 94-111. In this struggle and victory his ministry begins, only the victory does not annihilate, or more than simply master his dreadful repugnances. We can see, at points all the way on, where the pressure of his labor does not occupy and respite his feeling, that his soul wrestles heavily through storms of revulsion, or incipient agony. To calm such storms he continues all night in prayer. He is “grieved,” he “groans in spirit,” he “has a baptism to be baptized with” and he is “straitened” by the dreadful pressure of 388it, till it be accomplished. He is “troubled in spirit,” he cries “now is my soul troubled,” and finally, when all his work is ended, and there is no longer any active ministry to divert or occupy his attention, he sinks, at once, into a dreadful superhuman agony and horror of darkness, moaning heavily—“My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death!” Now in all these incipient agonies, and finally in the last great agony of all, his trouble is mainly mental, as we can see for ourselves.⁵⁴⁵⁴This fact has been observed by others, who yet have not regarded his mental suffering as proceeding simply from his love vicariously burdened for the world’s evils, and have not taken his redemption as accomplished by his moral power on the world. Thus Dr. John Pye Smith has the insight to perceive, that—“The fact of natural death, the mere ceasing to live, was the smallest part of those sufferings; it was their termination and relief. The sorrow which he endured ineffably transcended all corporal agony. It was death in the soul. Our moral feelings sin has made slow and torpid; so that we can form none but very faint conceptions of the load of distress and horror which passed on that soul, whose unsullied innocence and perfection of sensibility were without an equal in all human nature. He suffered all that a perfectly holy man could suffer, but the highest intensity of his anguish lay in that which was mental.” (Testimony to the Messiah, Vol. II, p. 343.)

It is even so upon the cross, where he dies, physically speaking, before his time, because of the more dreadful moral suffering or revulsion that was on him, in his felt contact with the curse and the judicial horrors of evil.⁵⁵⁵⁵Christ and his Salvation, pp. 225-275. Partly, it is the concern he feels for his enemies, invoking the curse of his blood upon themselves and their children; and partly it is the baleful shadow that 389is upon every thing—the hour of darkness and judicial madness that is on his crucifiers, the black flag hung over the sun, and the geologic under-world shuddering horribly for their crime.

Thus it was that he came into the curse and bore it for us. Not that he endures so much of suffering as having it penally upon him—he has no such thought—and yet he is in it, as being under all the corporate liabilities of the race. He had never undertaken to bear God’s punishments for us, but had come down simply as in love, to the great river of retributive causes where we were drowning, to pluck us out; and instead of asking the river to stop for him, he bids it still flow on, descending directly into the elemental rage and tumult, to bring us away.

Let us not fail now to observe the deliberate respect he pays to God’s instituted government and law in this matter. First, that having all miraculous Observe what honor he pays to justice. power, and using that power continually for the removing of diseases, and sometimes even for the quickening of the dead, he steadily refuses to use it for the rescue of his person when arrested; or the confounding of his adversaries, when arraigned; or even to so much as hurl aside the cross and his crucifiers. “No, let sin be just as evil and wild as it will; society just as cruel to all that are in it, me included; just as visibly accursed, as the retributive order of God’s causes requires it to be.” And again, secondly, observe that, when he has all power to stop the retributive causes, and strip away the whole instituted 390order of justice, he will not do it—will not annihilate, or suspend, or in the least infringe, any single attribute of causation, arranged for the moral discipline of transgression. As he will not discontinue any law of nature by his miracles, he will not do it for the deliverance of a soul, which in fact is much less than a miracle. He is a being strictly supernatural, and his work in the deliverance of transgressors is also supernatural; but in coming to them, in their thraldom, to lift them out by his divine love and sympathy, he only masters the bad causes, but does not stop them. It could as well be imagined that a strong magnet, lifting its iron weight into the air, discontinues, or annihilates the law of gravity. Nothing in short is so conspicuous, in the vicarious suffering and death of Christ, as the solemn deference he pays to God’s instituted justice in the world, and even to the causes from which he comes to redeem.

Whoever then is pressed with the necessity, that some ground of forgiveness should be prepared by Compensations enough, were compensations wanted. Christ, in order to make forgiveness safe—some compensation made to law and justice for the loss they must suffer, in the release of their penalties—has not far to go to find the matter of a compensation that is more than sufficient. Let him remember, first, the tremendous artillery sanctions. added by Christ, in his two really new doctrines, that of eternal punishment and that of his coming in glory to judge the world; and then again let him consider Christ in his whole lifetime, 391wrestling with God’s retributions upon the world, him. self included under them, and finally drinking dry upon his cross the cup of judicial madness these retributions mix in the hearts of his enemies; and then, once more, let them note how he carefully refuses to subvert the retributive causalities of God’s judicial order in souls, even though it be to accomplish their deliverance—let him bring together these most weighty tributes of honor, added by Christ to the majesty of law, and whether he shall call them compensations or not (for it makes very little difference by what name he calls them) he will certainly not be concerned any more, lest God, in the forgiveness of sins, may have sacrificed the honors of his authority, or the majesty of his justice. All this too, without any fiction of abhorrence expressed, justice satisfied, official transfer made of guilt, official substitution suffered in the matter of punishment. There is no theologic shuffle, in which persons, and characters, and sentiments of right, and dues of wrong, are confounded, but every thing is left just as it stands, in the facts of the history; making its own impressions, mocked by no subtleties, weakened by no moonshine of scholastic science.

As I have made much, in this treatise, of the suffering element in Christ’s sacrifice, regarding mainly his moral suffering, and that as an expression of the suffering sensibility of God towards his enemies; and as I have just now magnified, in like manner, the suffering of Christ under the retributive and corporate evils of the curse, I ought perhaps to make some reference to a 392scheme of substitution, or compensation, different from the others of which I have spoken. For it is a somewhat curious fact, that we have a late treatise of our own—much commended and really more deserving than any modern treatise I have seen—which describes a mode of compensation, executed in Christ, where the suffering of God in the punishment of the wicked, is made up, or substituted, by His equal suffering in the cross of Jesus. It does not appear to be observed that the treatise of Mr. Burge has this peculiarity; but he states very distinctly the fact, that Burge’s new theory of compensation by divine suffering. God, in his punishments, evinces his respect for his law, by the amount of evil he is seen to endure in those punishments; and then proceeds—“By God’s submitting to an evil, is meant his consenting that a thing should take place, which must be, in its own nature, disagreeable to his benevolent heart, if received independently of all other things. The misery of mankind, which would have been the effect of the execution of the law, would have been such an evil. * * * If then the sufferings of Christ were really an evil in the sight of God, and he submitted to them on account of his law, it must be evident that they are sufficient to show respect for his law. These sufferings must have been an evil of very great magnitude. Hence, for God to submit to such an evil on account of his law, must be a manifestation of respect to it exceedingly great.”⁵⁶⁵⁶The Atonement, Discourses and Treatises, by Prof. Park, pp 158-60.

We seem to be coming out here upon a scheme of compensation, which, at least, involves no offense to our. natural sentiments of right; but the prospect vanishes too sow to allow us any space for congratulation. The little clause “on account of his law,” will be observed in the language cited; and the implication is that Christ must needs suffer, on account of the law, in order that God’s suffering for him and with him should go to the same account with the suffering He would undergo in punishment. And then, regarding the suffering of Christ as being somehow on account of the law, the argument goes off upon the revealing of God’s “opposition to sin,” and his “displeasure against sinners,” ending virtually, after all, in a way of compensation by abhorrence as it is commonly held. If Mr. Burge, perceiving the full import and merit of the conception he began with, could have had the firmness not to be swerved from his point by deference to existing opinions, his new base of compensation, by which one kind of moral suffering in God is substituted by another, would have allowed him to erect a complete superstructure of his own, and one that should be nowise revolting to right. But he seems to have not conceived the fine possibility it gave him.

In the general view I have thus given of the compensations, and especially in taking the position that God’s law and justice are sufficiently vindicated in Christ, saying nothing of compensations at all, I anticipate two objections—

1st Obj. That the christian world is unanimous in the belief that Christ has offered a compensation to the Christian world unanimous for compensation. justice of God, and that such compensation is necessary, as a ground for the forgiveness of sins. There is some truth in this, and I have no pleasure in a raising a conflict with any so generally accepted faith or opinion. But I have (1.) made up as large an account of compensations as any one can desire, if a compensation must be provided; and (2.) I have it to say, that whatever agreement there may be in respect to the need of a compensation, there is no agreement as to the mode; and (3.) that, for the first thousand years of the church, there was nothing said of any compensation at all, except that the suffering death of Christ was a compensation paid to the devil; and (4.) that Anselm, at whom this notion of a compensation to God begins, only makes up an argument in which God’s violated honor is compensated by the obedience unto death of his incarnate Son, conceiving the fact of no compensation at all to God’s justice or the want of any—much as, in the previous chapter, I have shown what honor God has put upon the law-precept, by Christ’s obedience, and here upon the penalty, by his incarnate submission to the curse or the natural retributions of God. How much is left of the objection after a specification like this, I am not anxious to inquire.

2d Obj. That the view here advanced will not satisfy the strong substitutional, or imputational phrases applied to Christ in the scripture. Exactly contrary to 395this, I am clear in the conviction, that it has the particular merit of giving to all such forms of scripture expression, their most easy and genuinely Substitutional phrases of scripture not met. natural meaning, and that, without doing any offense to the standards of our moral nature. There is a kind of legerdemain, or word-shuffle practice, in such phrases; by which Christ is shown to be set in the very condition, or it will even be said in the very guilt of sinners, having their sins really put upon him, to be answered for by him in suffering before God’s justice, and to satisfy that justice. If it were necessary to reason with attempts that are themselves even shocking violations of reason, it should be enough to say, that Christ is either really in the lot of ill desert, or else he is not. If he is there, then he ought to suffer; and if he is not, then it is the greatest wrong and irreverence to pretend that he suffers justly. I have dared to say that he is not there, and suffers nothing as justly due to himself. He only comes into the corporate evil of sin, as being incarnated into humanity, and, working there to recover men away, both from sin and punishment, he, for so long a time, encounters and suffers the curse they are justly under. This he does, not to satisfy God’s justice, but in a way of coming at their consciences and hearts; whereupon it results that they, being released or recovered, by so great expense of suffering and sacrifice, give him their testimony of thanks, in the most natural way possible, by telling how he “was made a curse for them,” “bore their sins in his own body,” “gave himself for them,” 396“was made sin for them,” “gave himself to be their ransom,” “died for them,” “suffered the just for the unjust.”

The case is one we can not parallel, but suppose—no matter if the like was never heard of—that some state, An illustration of the substitutive language. the Roman for example, has contrived a prison for the punishment of public malefactors, on the plan of an ordeal by Providence. The prison is placed in the region of some deadly miasma, that we will say of the campagna; the design being to let every convict go free, after some given numbers of years are passed; on the ground that, being still alive, he must have learned to govern himself for so long a time, and is also marked for life and liberty by the acceptance of Providence. The fell poison of the atmosphere decimates, of course, the number of the prisoners, almost every week. Finally it comes to the knowledge of a certain good monk of the city, who has learned to follow his Master, that a notable prisoner who, a long time ago, was his bitter private enemy,. begins to show the working of the poison, and is giving way to the incipient burnings of the fever. Whereupon the godly servant says “this man was my enemy, and for Christ’s sake I must go to him, trying, if I can, to save him.” Becoming thus the prisoner’s faithful nurse and attendant, he is recovered and goes free, and the benefactor takes the infection and dies. And now the rescued man throws out his soul on words, trying vainly to express the inexpressible tenderness of his obligation. He writes, and 397talks, and sings, nothing but gratitude, all his life long; telling how the Christly man saved him, by what poor figures he can raise. “O he bore my punishment”—“became the criminal for me”—“gave his life for mine”—“died that I might live”—“stood in my lot of guilt”—“suffered all my suffering.” It will not be strange, if he should even go beyond scripture and testify in the fervors of his homage to so great kindness—“he took my debt of justice”—“satisfied the claims of justice for me;” for he will mean, by that, nothing more than he has meant by all he has been saying before. Then, after a time, when he and his benefactor are gone, some one, we will imagine, undertakes to write their story; and the dull, blind-hearted literalizer takes up all these fervors of expression, in the letters and reported words of the rescued felon, showing most conclusively from them, that the good monk actually got the other’s crime imputed to him, took the guilt of it, suffered the punishment, died in his place, and satisfied the justice of the law that he might be released! Why the malefactor himself would even have shuddered, at the thought of a construction so revolting, hereafter to be put upon his words! The honors won for Christian theology, by this kind of interpretation put upon the free words of scripture, make a very sad figure, and are better to be lost than preserved. I do not, to speak frankly, know a passage of scripture, that can with any fairness be turned to signify a legal or judicial substitution of Christ, in the place of transgressors—none that, taken with only a proper Christian intelligence, 398can be understood as affirming, either the fact, or the necessity, of a compensation made to God’s justice, for the release of sin.

If now we take the material of this and the two previous chapters, apart from any thought or proposed These law factors necessary, in the moral-power construction of the gospel. scheme of compensation for the release of punishment, we can not fail to see the immense importance and absolute integral necessity of it, in a gospel that proposes to quicken and spiritually restore the world. Not even the transcendent moral power over mankind, which Christ has obtained by his incarnate life and sacrifice, can have any sufficient sway, save as it is complemented, authenticated, and sharpened into cogency, by the sturdy law-work of these three chapters.

It is one of the most remarkable facts in the history of christian doctrine, that what the critical historians call the “moral view” of the atonement, in distinction from the expiatory, has been so persistently attempted, and so uniformly unsuccessful. The discouragements of failure appear to signify nothing; still the attempt is renewed, age after age, as if pushed on by some sublime fatality that can not be resisted. And what shall we see in this sublime fatality, but the felt pressure of truth, thrusting on attempts to issue the truth in some right form? What also shall we see in so great persistency under failure, but a pledge of final success? And we are the more confident of this, in the revision of these three chapters, that we are able so 399clearly to see, why the attempts at a moral construction of the sacrifice, such as have heretofore been made, should have failed. They have keen partial, they have not included matter enough to make any complete gospel, or to maintain any permanent hold, as a power, in men’s convictions. They begin to wane as they begin to live, and shortly die for want of any complete apparatus of life. One proposes Christ as an example. Another imagines that his work is exhausted in correcting the superstition, or false opinion, that God will not forgive sin; and so allowing God’s paternity to be accepted. Another shows him to be the teacher of a divine morality that must needs restore the world. Another beholds, in his life and death, the manifested love of God. Others follow in varieties that combine some, or all, of the proposed modes of benefit, and fill out, as they conceive, the more complete account of his moral efficacy. The inherent weakness of all such versions of the gospel is, that they look to see it operate by mere benignities—something is either to be shown or done, that is good enough to win the world.

The one fatal defect that vitiates all such conceptions and puts them under a doom of failure is that they make up a gospel which has no law side of authority, penal enforcement, rectoral justice; nothing to take hold of an evil mind at the point of its indifference or averseness to good, nothing to impress conviction, or shake the confidence, or stop the boldness of transgression. Doubtless it is something great, a wonderful and chief 400element, that Christ unbosoms the Suffering Love of God, and obtains a name and power, in that manner, so transcendent; and yet not even he himself appears to put this captivating figure first in order, in the working plan, or economy of his gospel. On the contrary, we may distinctly see, when he comes to the end of his ministry, that he expects the dispensation of the Spirit now to begin, as he retires, in a cogent, piercing, fearfully appalling work, that is far as possible from any thing captivating or benignant. And yet even this will be, in a sense, by him and by his cross. “And when he is come he shall reprove the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment to come.” How of sin? “because they believe not on me.” How of righteousness? “because I go to the Father and ye see me no more.” How of judgment? “because the prince of this world is judged.” In these thunders he will be revealed, and by these mighty shocks of inward convulsion, he will open a passage for his love and beauty to enter. For what honor is there on the precept of God’s law, when Jesus personates it in his life! and how dreadfully, visibly, base is the sin, that can attack that life and do a deed of murder on it! Well might the poor maddened multitude, overwhelmed by unutterable convictions of wrong in what they have done, go home smiting on their breasts! And the righteousness of God—what opinion shall they have, now, either of it, or of themselves, when they conceive him ascending to the Father? He came out from the righteousness of God, verily he lived it in the world, and now he has 401gone up clad in its honors to reign. And the justice of God—what is now so visible, as that the cross itself is God’s mightiest deed of judgment? for here goes down, as by a thunderstroke, the prince of this world—all the organically dominating powers of evil; its fashions, its pride, its pomps of condition, its tremendous codes of false opinion, all its lies, all its usurpations. These overgrown tyrannies upon souls are hurled, like Dagon, to the ground; and Pilate and the priests, and the senators, and the mob, and the soldiers, are all seen choking in dumb silence, before the cross and the judgment-day quaking and blackness of the scene. Poor sinning mortals! how weak do they look! how like to culprits judged!

In all which we have, according to the conception of Christ himself, what exactly corresponds to the matter of these three rugged chapters of government. Expecting, as he does, to draw all men, by the captivating love and grace of his sacrifice, he has no such thought as that the moral power of his life will do any thing by itself. There must be law, conviction, judgment, fear, taking hold of natures dead to love, and by this necessary first effect, preparing a way for love. No effective and firm hold of the world as world, does he even hope to get, save as he breaks the shell of the world’s audacity and blunted feeling, by these piercing rigors of conviction—doing visibly and suffering all that he does and suffers, in a way to honor the precept, enforce the penalty, and sanctify the justice of law; the precept as right, the penalty as righteous, the justice as the 402fit vindication of the righteousness of God. No moral-view account of his gospel, separated from this, can be any thing but a feeble abortion. In this firm conjunction, his wonderful life and the name he has obtained, which is above every name, become the power of God unto salvation—thus and not otherwise.