CHAPTER III.

PRACTICAL USES AND WAYS OF PREACHING.

AFTER we have gone over the whole ground of the gospel as a work of vicarious sacrifice, settled the doctrine, found the meaning of the Scripture symbols, there still remain some very important practical questions respecting the modes of preaching and use. Neither can these questions be dispatched, by what may seem to be the ready and simple conclusion, that we are to preach and apply to our own lives just what we have found to be true, neither more nor less. For to preach what is true concerning a matter, and to preach the matter itself Truth concerning Christ not Christ. may be very different things. So if we speak of use, or application to our own spiritual state, we may only fool ourselves in the endeavor to get our benefit out of what is true concerning the gospel, when all true benefit lies in a right appropriation of the gospel itself. As concerning Christ, we have made up our account of his work, in the conclusion that he is in the world to be the moral power of God upon it; but it does not follow that we shall preach him, or receive him, in the most effectual way, by contriving always how to be in the power, and muster the power upon us. His truth may be most 525powerful, when we think least of the power, and have our mind wholly turned away, in love and trust, from ourselves. If I have a much honored and powerful friend, by whose great character I would like to mode, my own, I shall not do it probably by contriving always, artificially and consciously, how to get his efficacy upon me; but I shall be much with him, and putting faith in him, I shall breathe the atmosphere he makes, even as I do the air without contriving how to live by it; I shall admire his sentiments and his bearing in great crises of trial; I shall find a pleasure in meeting his wishes, and doing what I may, to advance the cause that engages him. Thinking nothing thus of getting a power upon me from his person, I shall be only the more completely pervaded and molded by his power. A glance in this direction is sufficient to show, that the preaching and personal uses of the gospel are a subject widely distinct from the truth concerning it.

The gospel will of course be preached and applied to use in modes that have some agreement with what it is conceived to be. Thus if Christ be accepted Various kinds of preaching. only as a great moral teacher and reformer, the preaching over of his preaching, as recorded in the four gospels, will be the main thing, and almost nothing will be made of his personal life and death, and the reconciling purpose of his mission. Preaching will be teaching as the Master taught, even as the pupils of the Academy, the Porch, or the Peripatetic order, followed the school of their master. The after developments of his mission and the significance 526of it, as completed by the cross, and opened by the Holy Spirit—just that which the apostles received and pub. lished, when they preached him as the Saviour of sinners—will be virtually ignored. Precisely what made the day of pentecost will be omitted.

If the gospel is conceived to be merely an array of legal motives addressed to interest, and so contrived as to cast a preponderating balance always on the side of right choices, then there will be cogent appeals to the conscience, and the fears, and the: love of happiness, and so, to the will-power of the; subjects addressed. And then, for such as choose rightly, Christ will be shown to have prepared a ground of forgiveness; and beyond that as the principal account of his mission, will be conceived to have no particular agency in the transformations to be wrought. This kind of preaching will take on a strenuous air, and will sometimes stir great commotions where only motions would be better. The piety thus resulting will be legal; a kind of will-work, too little freshened by the graceful affections, too little enriched by great sentiments, lifted by no inspirations, save when slipping, by chance, the legal detentions, it seizes the forbidden fruit of liberty.

Another characteristic mode of preaching is produced by preaching a formula, supposed. to be the very equivalent and substantial import of the gospel. And we have abundance of complaints, -from such as mean to be faithful in this way, that Christ is now so little preached. They mean that Christ is not preached as an expiation, or a satisfaction to God’s justice, or an 527exposition of God’s abhorrence to sin. The substance of their complaint is really that a formula is not preached instead of Christ; that, too, a formula so painfully untrue as to make itself felt more often as a violation of natural feeling, than as a saving power upon it. If only this be preaching Christ, it will be a long time before he is preached in a way to satisfy this kind of complaint.

The very idea of preaching Christ by formula, even if the true formula were developed, is a great mistake; for whatever mind, goes into limitation or incrustation under formula becomes sterile, and the gospel on which it perpetually hammers will be meager, and weak, and dry. All the ten thousand flaming truths that are crowding in, as troops of glory, on the thoughts of a soul in liberty, asking as it were to be uttered faster than the Sundays will let them, are suppressed, or shut back, by that inevitable little sentence of wisdom, which has concluded every thing. I will not deny that some general account or scheme of the gospel plan may be convenient, for the mind to fall back upon and gather itself into, for the minting and: due authentication of its issues. But a formula to be preached, and maintained as a gospel, is a very different matter—all the worse, if it has only been received pedagogically, and been set as the hand-organ tune which the school is engaged to play. Any formula is a necessary abortion, which is not the formulization of Christ discovered by the heart, and verified by a deep working Christian experience.

Let us see if we can arrive at some better and more 528adequate conception of preaching. Christ is here, according to the doctrine of this treatise, to be the moral The true kind described. power of God on the world, so the power of God unto salvation. But if any one should set himself to preaching only this, turning it round and round, citing texts for it, and arguing down objections, he would only postpone the power he undertakes to assert. Christ will be the power, only as he is himself in that which makes him the power; viz., all that he was, did, and expressed, in his life and death and resurrection—Saviour of sinners and Judge of the world. We have seen him, for example, fulfilling the love principle in vicarious suffering for us; revealing, in his obedience, God’s everlasting obedience to law; adding vigor to law by his tremendous enforcements; doing honor to God’s retributive justice, by subjecting himself to all the corporate evils it brings on the human state; and by all these methods, declaring so impressively the righteousness of God, as to prepare the glorious possibility and fact of a free justification—these are all great truths for preaching, greater each of them singly in its power, than the general truth which includes them all; and yet when these again are subdivided, and run out into all the thousand facts and subjects included, they will ring even the more impressively in each one, because it is farther off from what is general and closer to the concrete matter of Christ’s personal life. The subjects are endless, and the power inexhaustible.

I think we shall best conceive the subject matter of preaching and in that sense the mode, if we specify three 529distinct elements which must be included, and are necessary to the genuine power.

1. There must be a descent to human nature in its lower plane of self-love and interested motive, and a beginning made with the conscience, the God’s law and justice to be preached. fears, and the boding expectations of guiltiness. To convince, intimidate, waken out of stupor, shake defiant wrong out of its confidences, must be deliberately undertaken and, if possible, effectively done. There must be no delicacy here; as if God’s love and the vicarious ministry of Jesus were too softly good, to do any so rugged and severe thing as to punish. Christ’s own doctrine of future punishment, Christ as the judge of the world, all that belongs to God’s law, all that will be done by God’s justice, the very dies irae of the wrath to come, must be faithfully declared, and that in a manner that indicates conviction. Of course there must be no violence, under pretext of suffering no delicacy, but a manner of tenderness that indicates due sensibility in a matter so appalling. The true conception is, that as God’s justice is a co-factor with his mercy, it is to be set forth and magnified and made real in the same way, and for the same purpose. And no better model can be taken for this than Christ himself. Nor is any thing more certain, than that whoever gives in to the feeling that Christ is outgrown in this matter, has really no gospel to preach—his vocation is gone. For if Christ did not understand himself here, what reason is there to believe that he understood himself at all? In this dilemma one may think he has a 530gospel, and a specially superlative kind of gospel, but it will be nerveless and without sound; like the headless drums that marching children sometimes carry, beating on the rim. God is a just God, and if he is not shown to be, but only to be a beautiful God, or a gentle and loving God, sin will be abundantly reconciled to him staying where it is. There is no salvation here, and no power of salvation is wanted. There may be a dressing of the soul in what is called beauty of character, but the character will be only a beautiful affectation. But we pass to the saving side of the gospel, that in which the personal power of Christ’s sacrifice is specially designed to operate. And here we shall find—

2. That a very great and principal office of preaching will consist in a due exhibition of the Christian facts. The facts of Christ’s life to be magnified. The power is to be personal, and will therefore lie in the facts of the personal life. These facts therefore are preëminently the good news that composes the gospel; requiring heralds, or preachers [precones,] to go abroad and publish it. Apart from these facts, the great subjects we have spoken of are nothing. They spring out of the facts and have no basis of reality beside. Hence also it is that in the Apostles’ creed, or first recorded confession of Christ, nothing is included but the simple outline facts of his life; no other and better formula being yet conceived or attempted. Here accordingly is the original and truly grand office of preaching; viz., in the setting forth and fit representation of these gospel facts.

They begin with the grand primal fact of the incarnation; for it is only in that, and by that mystery, that the person arrives whose history is to be entered into the world. Viewed in this light, the person arriving is not merely a man, but, as we must believe, a veritable God-man. Taken as being simply a man, the facts of his life would certainly be remarkable and valuable, he would only be a much greater and more incredible mystery, considering the morally perfect, and therefore superhuman character he is in, than he is when conceived as an abnormal, extra-mundane person, let into the world from above it, to fulfill a specially divine mission. All the after facts change color and consequence, accordingly, as they are viewed in one mode or the other. Considered as the God-man, there is not a single fact, or scene, in the history which, fitly conceived, does not yield some lesson of power; the infancy; the thirty years of silent preparation; the recoil of the poor human nature, called the temptation, when the work begins; every healing, every miracle, every friendship, every commendation, every denunciation, the lot of poverty, the hour of oppressed feeling, the weariness and sleep, the miraculous hem of his garment, the transfiguration, the prayers, the amazing assumptions of a common glory and right with the Father, the agony, the trial, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the appearings and tender teachings afterwards, and last of all the ascension, followed by the descent of the Spirit to represent and be himself, according to his promise, a Christ every where present, every where accessible—no 532longer limited and localized in space—in all these and in all he said and taught concerning God, himself, and us, the preacher is to find staple matter for his messages. There is almost nothing, even as to his mere manners and modes, which, if he is truly alive—and no Christian man has a right to be dead—will not open some gate or crevice into chambers of glory, for the conscience or the heart.

Here has been one of the great faults or deficiencies in the preaching of Christ. Too little, by a thousand fold, A great fault of preaching has been here. has been made of the facts of his life. By some they are almost never dwelt upon, with the exception, perhaps, of two or three that could not be utterly passed over; the rest are as if they were not. Commonly the feeling is not brought close enough to them to find the life that is in them—what can they signify of importance, after the main doctrine of all has been decocted? How much easier to preach the decoction and let the dried herbs of the story go. It might be so, if they were really dry; but since they are all alive, fresh and fragrant as a bank of roses, how much better to go and breathe among them and catch the quickening odors. How little indeed does any preacher know of the true gospel, who only finds a dull, stale matter, in the wonderful, morally sublime record of such a character! No good news will ever go forth out of him. He thinks he has exhausted the gospel and gotten the whole matter of it in his head, just because he has gotten nothing, and knows not that there is any thing to get, besides 533what his formula contains. He mourns a little, it may be, over the want of power in his preaching, when in fact there ought to be no power, because there is no fact in the grand life-history of Jesus that is alive to him. He fails just where any really high ministry must begin; viz., in the ability to show forth Christ alive, in the facts that represent his living personality; thus to raise conviction, thus to keep interest in a glow, thus to conquer the heart and testify a Saviour who mediates peace.

I think it would be hardly possible for a preacher of Christ to be too much in the facts of his life. Only they must be so handled as to raise great subjects, and kindle the heat of a true fire, as they always may. The mere doling of these facts, or the setting them off in a garnish of scene-painting or mock sentiment, or frothy laudation, does not fulfill the idea of such preaching. Something worthy of God’s love, something deifically great must be found in them, and the feeling must be raised, that he is personally nigh, rich in his gifts, strong in his majesty, terrible in his beauty, heavyhearted and tender in the suffering concern of his love. We come next—

3. To another and more difficult matter, as regards the power of the gospel in its uses, and the due impression of it, as a way of salvation; viz., No sufficient gospel without the altar forms. the right conception and fit presentation of it, under the altar forms provided for it. For, besides the outward figure of the facts, occurring under conditions of space and time, and 534significant to human feeling in that manner, God has contrived a thought-form, to assist us in that kind of use which may conduct us into the desired state of practical reconciliation with himself. In the facts, outwardly regarded, there is no sacrifice, or oblation, or atonement, or propitiation, but simply a living and dying thus and thus. The facts are impressive, the person is clad in a wonderful dignity and beauty, the agony is eloquent of love, and the cross a very shocking murder triumphantly met, and if then the question rises, how we are to use such a history so as to be reconciled by it, we hardly know in what way to begin. How shall we come unto God by help of this martyrdom? How shall we turn it, or turn ourselves under it, so as to be justified and set in peace with God? Plainly there is a want here, and this want is met by giving a thought-form to the facts which is not in the facts themselves. They are put directly into the molds of the altar, and we are called to accept the crucified God-man as our sacrifice, an offering or oblation for us, our propitiation; so to be sprinkled from our evil conscience, washed, purged, purified, cleansed from our sin. Instead of leaving the matter of the facts just as they occurred, there is a reverting to familiar forms of thought, made familiar partly for this purpose, and we are told, in brief, to use the facts just as we would the sin offerings of the altar, and make an altar grace of them—only a grace complete and perfect, an offering once for all. According to the Epistle to the Hebrews, the ancient ritual was devised by God, apart from its 535liturgical uses, to be the vehicle in words of the heavenly things in Christ, molds of thought for the world’s grand altar service in Christ the universal offering, regulative conceptions for the fit receiving and effective use of the gospel.

And so much is there in this that, without these forms of the altar, we should be utterly at a loss in making any use of the Christian facts, that would set us in a condition of practical reconciliation with God. Christ is good, beautiful, wonderful, his disinterested love is a picture by itself, his forgiving patience melts into my feeling, his passion rends open my heart, but what is he for, and how shall he be made unto me the salvation I want? One word—he is my sacrifice—opens all to me and beholding him, with all my sin upon him, I count him my offering, I come unto God by him and enter into the holiest by his blood.

But the principal reason for setting forth the matter of Christ’s life and death as an oblation remains to be stated; viz., the necessity of somehow Wanted to produce an attitude of objectivity. preventing an over-conscious state in the receiver. It was going to be a great fault in the use, that the disciple, looking for a power on his character, would keep himself too entirely in the attitude of consciousness, or voluntary self-application. He would be hanging round each fact and scene, to get some eloquent moving effect from it. And he would not only study how to get impressions, but, almost ere he is aware of it, to make them. Just here accordingly it was that the Scripture symbols, and especially 536those of the altar service, were to come to oui aid, putting us into a use of the gospel so entirely objective, as to scarcely suffer a recoil on our consciousness at all. The sacrificial offering was in form, an offering wholly to God, even as the smoke rolls up from the altar and comes not back. The result was that the worshiper was made clean; that is, according to the political, or statutory sense; and if, perchance, he was made clean in a deeper sense, it would be implicitly, just because his mind was going up wholly to God, with the smoke of his offering. So, when I conceive that Christ is my offering before God, my own choice Lamb and God’s, brought to the slaying, and that for my sin, my thought moves wholly outward and upward, bathing itself in the goodness and grace of the sacrifice. Doubtless there will be a power in it, all the greater power that I am not looking after power, and that nothing puts me thinking of effects upon myself.

In this manner coming unto Christ, or to God through Christ, in the symbols of sacrifice, we make an escape, as it were, from ourselves and that state of consciousness which is the bane of religion; an escape, I must frankly admit, which is none the less necessary, when we conceive that Christ has come into the world, not to expiate sin, but to be a power upon it; furthermore, an escape which God has provided, to make him more completely a power. For it is in these symbols that God contrives to get us out of ourselves into the free state of faith, and love, and to become the new inspiration of life in our hearts. And accordingly we 537should find, in the ready and free use of these symbols, our best means of grace, if only we could have them clear of misconstructions that often fatally corrupt their meaning. Oppressed with guilt, we should turn ourselves joyfully to Christ as the propitiation for our sins, Christ who hath borne the curse for us, Christ who knew no sin made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. We should cry in our prayers; O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, take away our sins; or thinking of that sacred blood, by whose drops that fell as touches of life on the world’s grand altar, Calvary, we should cry—wash us, O Christ, in the blood of thy cross and make us clean; or wanting, in despair of ourselves, some Helper and Friend to bear the sins we can not bear ourselves, we should take up tenderly the words of the poet, if not in his meaning, yet in the meaning which they ought to have—

“My soul looks back to see The burdens thou didst bear, When hanging on the accursed tree, And hopes her guilt was there.”

We want, in short, to use these altar terms, just as freely as they are used by those who accept the formula of expiation, or judicial satisfaction for sin; in just their manner too, when they are using them most practically. Indeed, it is one of the enviable advantages of their scheme that they are able to use them freely; for, when they are so used, they will not always keep themselves close in the dogmatic misconstructions 538put upon them, but will often pour into the heart, in their true Scripture meaning, as chariots into some pos tern gate that is not closed. A more subjective gospel, one that looks to effects on character and the renewing of the life in God, has even a better right to their use; and they are almost indispensable, to save it from an otherwise nearly fatal subjectivity.

Nor is there any thing so peculiar in this need of an objective form for the gospel. We need what is like it Objective terms a first want of language. every where, and human language is full of it. A very great part of the terms and expressions of language, and those that are liveliest and freshest, are such as put into things and facts meanings which are really not there, but in ourselves. We say that a thing is painful because we suffer pain from it; putting the pain into the thing, which is really in ourselves. We say, in the very palpable and common matters of color, that things are red, blue, white, and the like, when, as we all know, the colors are in us and not in the things. Subjectively speaking, we should have to say, awkwardly and pedantically, that we have sensations of redness, blueness, whiteness, before the things. We say that a thing has a sweet taste, when the sweet taste is not in the thing at all, but wholly in ourselves. The language of Christ, which is about as nearly perfect as it can be, abounds in these objective representations of subjective facts and ideas. Glance along the sermon on the mount, looking go farther, and we get examples like these, “If thy right eye offend thee”—“if thine eye be evil;” where 539he has no thought of any thing blamable in the eye, o! any thing without offending the eye, but only of the lustful, or grudging soul, that looks through it. “Lead us not into temptation;” where he means, not that God might lead us into it, but that we need to be kept from leading ourselves into it. “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven;” where he does not imagine that we have access to heaven, so that we can put in treasures there, but that we are to get heavenly treasures garnered in ourselves. Again—“straight is the gate, broad is the way;” where he seems to say that God’s gate of life is made narrow, and his way of destruction broad. He could not raise any fit impression, by the real subjective fact, that our perverseness makes the gate of life narrow and difficult to enter, and the way of destruction broad and easy; so he puts the case objectively, willing, even at the expense of an almost seeming reflection upon God, to set us in a distinct feeling of the fearful alternative we are required to meet.

To carry these illustrations of the genius of language, and especially of Scripture language a little farther, and show, on how large a scale, the forms Hence the Devil, or bad king. of truth are affected by the instinct of objective representation, I will refer to the devil, or ὀ διαβολος, of the Old and New Testament. Here we have a kind of bad God, over against the good, who leads the powers of darkness and manages the interest of evil. But there is no more reason to suppose that God has created any such being, or that any such really exists, than there is to suppose that there is a real 540being called the prince of this world, or another called antichrist, or two others called Gog and Magog. The devil is that objective person, whose reality is the sum of all subjective seductions, or temptations to evil; viz., those of bad spirits, and those of the corrupted soul itself. These bad spirits, sometimes called Legion, together with our own bad thoughts, are all gathered up into a great king of art and mischief and called the devil. Whether it is done by some instinct of language, or some special guidance of inspiration, in the use of language, or both, we do not know; the latter is more probable. But however it came to pass, we can see that it serves a most important use in the economy of revelation. In the process of recovery to God, men must be convinced of their sins, and made thoroughly conscious of their guiltiness, and this requires a turning of their minds upon themselves in reflection and a state of piercingly subjective attention to their own ill desert. And yet they must be taken away, somehow, from a too close, or totally subjective attention, even to their sins. For if they are to be taken away from their ill desert and guiltiness, they must be drawn out into a movement of soul in exactly the opposite direction; viz., in the direction of faith which is outward. And this exactly is what the grand objective conception of the devil prepares and facilitates. First, their sin is all gathered up with its roots and causes into the Bad King conceived to be reigning without; and then it is permitted the penitent, or the disciple struggling with his enemy, to conceive that Christ, in whom he is called to 541believe, is out in force, to subdue and crush the monster. And so he is helped away from the torment of a merely reflective state, even when contending with the sins of his own bosom.

Only two days previous to the writing of this paragraph I was conversing with a very intelligent and, withal, a truly liberal Christian friend, who said, as arguing for the existence of the devil, that he liked to think of such a being, in distinction from thinking always of his sins, about which he knew very little, and then to hang his faith on Christ as warring with him, and able to pluck him down; for this takes in every thing and makes a clean issue, when we do it, in the simplest manner possible. To which the very obvious reply was, that for this very purpose God has given us the objective devil of Scripture to be hated, and conspired against, and by faith cast down, when the real, multitudinous, inconceivable matter to be thus hated, conspired against, and by faith cast down, is working subjectively in ourselves. And, what is more, there is no other conception of the devil of Scripture that makes him so profoundly real as this; partly because there is no other that has any look of credibility.

We find then, as we look at language, whether out of the Scriptures or in, that objective representations are always best for us, most sought after, and prepared on a very large scale, because they take us away from mere self-management, and carry us out to rest our hope and faith in God. If we represented every thing subjectively which is subjective, we could do it only by using 542the most awkward and tedious circumlocutions. In one view, these outward projections of what is within are not true, and yet they are the more vigorously true for that reason. Shut up to saying every thing subjectively, our language would be only a torment.

Any strictly subjective style of religion is vicious. It is moral self-culture, in fact, and not religion. We The outgoing state is thus secured. think of ourselves abundantly in the selfishness of our sins. What we need, above all, is to be taken off the self-center and centered in God. Ceasing to go by contrivance, we must learn to go by inspiration; that is, by the free impulse of God in our faith. Hence the profound importance of the altar symbols, divinely prepared and fashioned, to be the form of the Christian grace. They compose for us even a kind of objective religion; that is, a religion operated for us and before us. In one view they are not true, just as the ten thousand objective expressions of language referred to are not, and yet there is nothing so sublimely, healthfully true, in the practical and free uses of faith, because we are so simple in them, and so completely carried out of ourselves. Of course we shall be conscious beings still; we must be conscious always and in every thing we do; but how much does it signify that we can have an altar and an offering, once for all, where we can go with our confession, and pay our tender worship, without thinking, for the time, of any thing but what is before us and is done for us. Here it is that we drop out self most easily, and come away to God, in 543a liberty most perfectly unembarrassed by the habit of our guilty self-devotion. In the sacrifice we cling to and call our own, we are respited, and the ceasing from our will, makes us plastic to the grace that molds us. The new element we are in is peace; we are atoned, reconciled.

But we encounter, at this point, a very great difficulty, in the fact that all these Scripture symbols have been so long and dreadfully misapplied, A great difficulty met. by the dogmatic schemes of expiation, penal suffering, and judicial satisfaction. Thus, if we attempt to use them, we are disturbed by the feeling, that neither we, nor they, will be understood, in any sense that is true. How shall we venture to speak of Christ as a sacrifice for sin, when even the ritual sacrifice, on which the figure is based, has been made to signify, not a confessional offering, or offering of pious devotion, in which the worshiper is turned to God, but the offering of a substituted victim, to even the penal account with God, or reconcile God to him? So of all the other symbols; the lamb is the victim, in the sense that he suffers; the slaying of the victim is death for death, and the dying of the victim is pain for pain; when truly nothing was made, either of the death, or the pain, but only of the offering of some choicest animal, as a reverently careful act of homage and repentance for sin. The blood sprinkled here and there is no more the life, that sacred element which pacifies every thing it touches, but it is the blood of slaughter, signifying that God is reconciled only when sin draws blood. 544Even the bearing of sin by the scape-goat—a beautifully contrived figure, to signify the deportation of sin—what is it but the certain fact of theology, that, if sins are to be removed, they must yet be borne by somebody? In the same way atonement is not the covering of sin, or the reconciliation of the sinner, but it is that paying for sin which evens the account. And so of all the lustral figures—making clean, washing, purifying, purging, sprinkling by the hyssop branch—they only mean that expiation is complete, and a clean, or even account made by it. So, too, of the extra-ritual figures. Redemption and ransom are not figures of release from captivity, but penal satisfactions paid to even the account of justice. The stripes that heal, too, are become the stripes that satisfy God’s wrath.

What then shall we do with these forms of the altar, when they have come to be thus sadly disfigured and turned from their true meaning? Shall we use them freely and rightly, and let such impressions be taken as certainly will be? Shall we use them with salvos and parentheses of explanation? That would be awkward and troublesome and besides would despoil them of all right effect. Shall we then give them up entirely and let them go? Many, alas, are doing it, contriving how to find a sufficient gospel in the forms of the facts themselves, described in the terms of common speech. And the result is, that they preach a philosophy of Christ instead of the Christian oblation, a Christ who is to work on souls under the natural laws of effect, and not a Christ to be our sacrifice before God. We can not 545afford to lose these sacred forms of the altar. They fill an office which nothing else can fill, and serve a use which can not be served without them. It may perhaps be granted that, considering the advance of culture and reflection now made, we should use them less, and the forms of common language more; still we have not gotten by the want of them and we never shall. The most cultivated, most intellectual disciple wants them now and will get his dearest approaches to God in their use. We can do without them, it may be, for a little while; but after a time we seem to be in a gospel that has no atmosphere, and our breathing is a gasping state. Our very repentances are hampered by too great subjectivity, becoming as it were a pulling at our own shoulders. Our subjective applications of Christ get confused and grow inefficacious. Our very prayers and thanksgivings get introverted and muddled. Trying to fight ourselves on in our wars, courage dies and impulse flags. And so we begin to sigh for some altar, whither we may go and just see the fire burning, and the smoke going up, on its own account, and circle it about with our believing hymns; some element of day, into which we may come, and simply see, without superintending the light.

No, these much abused symbols are indispensable and must be recovered. It may be a task of some difficulty, yet of much less difficulty than How to get back the lost symbols. many suppose. It only requires a little resolute courage here, as always, to retake a battery that is lost. Let the preacher go before, in one or two 546discourses, showing what the sacrifices were not, and what they were; then how Christ, without expiation, becomes an offering for us, our lamb, our blood of remission, fulfilling the highest reality of sacrifice, and meeting all our highest Christian uses, in such molds of sacrifice; and then let him throw himself on the using of all these altar figures freely, allowing just such impressions to be taken as there sometimes probably will be; still going on without any sensitive concern. The result will be that, in a little while, the abused terms will right themselves and come into their places, rejoicing as it were in their own redemption, as the souls they fructify rejoice in the grace they minister by their use. And this act of reclamation is due to the Scriptures not less than to our ourselves. Not even the grand Scripture doctrine of justification by faith can be named in many places, without raising associations that are painful—such as follow in the train of penal suffering, expiatory death, literal substitution, judicial satisfaction, legally imputed righteousness. And this being so, there is no loyal way left but to retake the whole field, and restore all these lost symbols to their rightful meanings and places.

I could not excuse myself, in the closing of this last chapter, if I did not call attention directly to the very Our doctrine ends where the first age began. instructive and somewhat humbling fact, that we are ending here, just where Christianity began. After passing round the circuit of more than eighteen centuries, occupied 547alas! how largely, in litigations of theory and formula, we come back, at last, to say, dropping out all the accumulated rubbish of our wisdom, preach Christ just as the Apostolic Fathers, and the Saints of the first three centuries did; viz., in the facts of his personal life and death; and these facts in the forms of the altar; and withal in his judgment sanctions, and his second coming to judge the world. If we look at the effects wrought, these first three centuries of Christian preaching have never been matched in any other three, and yet they had no formula at all of atonement, and had not even begun, as far as we can discover, to have any speculative inquiries on the subject. All our most qualified historians agree in this, and we can see for ourselves, from the epistles of Clement and other Apostolic Fathers so called, that no such inquiries had yet arrived. Is it then to be the end of all our litigations, theories, and attempted scientific constructions, that, after our heats of controversy have cooled, and our fires of extirpation have quite burned away, we come back to the very same kind of preaching alphabet, in which the first fathers had their simple beginnings? Be it so, and yet the labor we have spent is by no means lost. We shall come back into that first preaching, with an immense advantage gained over these fathers. What they did in their simplicity, we shall do in a way of well-instructed reason. Their simplicity, in fact, supposed the certainty of all these long detours of labor and contest afterwards to come; but we, in our return, come back with our experiments all made, and detours all ended, 548not simply to preach Christ in just their manner, but to do it because we have finally proved the wisdom of it, and the foolishness of every thing else; advantages that are worth to us all they have cost.

And what if we shall seem to have proved something else that is more positive still; viz., that the formulizing God’s true formula in place of all others. industry, in which we have so long been occupied, was anticipated by God from the first, and that he Himself, to save us from a task so far above our powers, provided us in fact a formula of his own. Perhaps I do not mean by this exactly what we commonly mean by the word, and yet perhaps I do. A formula is a little form, a condensed representation, by figure, of some spiritual truth; for every spiritual truth comes into figure and form of necessity, when it comes into language, or a statement in words. We commonly understand by a formula what is really never true of it, or is true only to the apprehensions of ignorance; viz., a propositional statement that conveys the spiritual truth or doctrine of a subject by words of exact notation. In this latter impossible sense of formula, there is none, of the Christian gospel, and what is more there never will be or can be any. But in the former and true sense, or only possible sense, the altar, with its offerings and rites of blood, is the very form and formula that God has provided for the gospel; provided, I may say, by long centuries of drill, in a liturgy of rites contrived, in fact, to serve this very purpose. After we have tried our own hand long enough, in the absurd endeavor to get up a 549formula, better than God’s, in the common terms of abstraction, shall we not come back humbled and shamed, to rest in the discovery that the Scripture figures of sacrifice and blood make up a complete investiture for the gospel, in all its highest meanings and profoundest mediatorial relationships? Here we have, in small, all that Christianity is, or can do for us, in the way of our reconciliation to God. Preaching, and praying, and giving praise in these words of the altar, we have the gospel in its fullest and best use, with the advantage that every thing done, in that way of use, is a confession we are always reciting. In these terms of sacrifice we are kept fresh in the gospel, and the gospel is kept fresh and vital in us. It can never die and never be corrupted, as long as our faith keeps up its confession under these figures, unless the figures themselves are corrupted by artificial and false constructions put upon them—which is more than can be said of almost any other creed, on any other subject. No church, or synod, or council, need be at all concerned for the gospel, lest it should die for the want of a creed to keep it safe, as long as Christ is accepted and clung to in God’s own chosen forms —the soul’s great sacrifice, the Lamb that bears and takes away its sin, the blood that sprinkles its foul conscience and makes it clean, the life that, being in the blood, quickens and hallows every thing. Let this be the preaching word of the preachers and the repenting and praising word of guilty souls, and the gospel is safe, even for eternal ages; because it is a gospel in power. Let any one contrive to make it safe, by any 550other guard of orthodoxy, when it is not in power, and he will not be long in making the discovery that it is gone already. Hither, last of all, then, we return, and here we raise, in deep sorrow and shame, our confession.

O, thou God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, into what strange places, and how far away, hath our foolish We return to God. conceit been leading us. We thought we must needs make out for thy dear Son—dear also to us because he hath come to bring us life—some wisely framed doctrine, bearing the stamp of our own wise thought and science—not so familiar and so merely practical as thy choice words of sacrifice. But we have wearied ourselves in the greatness of our way. We have raised long controversies, and held learned councils, and contrived exact articles; and though we have seemed to settle many things wisely, yet nothing is either settled or wise; but whatever we devise turns dry, looks empty, disappoints the craving of our wants, creating after all only such consent as consists in a common discord. Commanded by thee to build our altar of “whole stones” and “lift up no tool of iron upon them,” we have thought to improve its look, and make it stronger, by squaring them carefully and hewing them into shapes more scientifically exact; and now that we have done it, we. perceive that we have only cut them into our own stale forms, and made them “stones of emptiness.” Mortified in our conceit we return, O God, to thee, and to thy free word in Christ. We are ashamed that we could go so far to find so little, 551and the more that, when we return, every thing seems to: be found already. Thy cross, taken as our altar, O thou Christ of God, and thou thyself the offering once for all, for our sins—what other and more sure confession do we need? We renounce the foolishness and poverty of our inventions; only be thou our sacrifice, and let us be offered up with thee in thy offering. We could not dare to put our sins upon thee, but since thou hast taken them on thyself to bear them, let us also come and take hold of thy sorrows and pains, to suffer with thee. Having boldness to enter thus into the holiest, by thy blood and priesthood, need we more to keep our unity in the truth, and is there more of truth for us to have, than to go in and out together with thee, and behold, with faces bowed, the wings of thy cherubim overspreading the mercy-seat of thy peace? Truly there is no formulary that can tell so much of thy gospel, as to call thee Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world! For if we come to confess our sins upon thy head, we have our fearing, guilt-stricken heart made strong in the confidence, that they are truly taken away. Being thus made consciously clean, is not thy great renewing power upon us, and what more is there to be found?

Coming back then to thy own formulary, O God, and having it for our sufficient confession, let our Christ himself be the mold of our doctrine, the medium of our prayers, the soul of our liberty, the informing grace and music of our hymns—wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Be thy saints gathered speedily. 552O Lord, into these; gathered away thus from their distractions into thy clear unity; away from their own contrived poverties of meaning, into thy riches and the glorious liberties of thy truth. And so let the better ages of thy promise come; even as they meet us in the vision of thy prophet—a fair river of healing, deepening, spreading wide in its flow, and making every thing to live whithersoever the river cometh; because it issues, O Lord, from under Thine Altar.