DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT. 433 ment, out of which evil comes and appears as an enemy, so that the good will is not fulfilled, Blancombe has said enough. (2) "I have said the goodness of God. For secondly, I must not allow you to think that our heavenly Father was either vindictive, or mercenary, or even changeable. He does not change; for it is written, that His counsel stands fast, and He does all His pleasure*. Whatever is being done for the salvation of mankind now, has been predestined from before the creation; and by the term predestination we express this fixity of the Divine counsel. Thus Christ, as the Lamb of God, is said to have been slain before the foundation of the world†. With the Eternal, then, according to our doctrine, is no variableness. Neither, again, is there mercenariness. For though the life of Christ is the most precious of all ransoms, yet it is paid not to the Father, whose will was always to deliver us, but to the great enemy, whether death, or the devil, or the law, considered as an accuser. Surely you know that it is to an enemy ransom is paid, and not to a father. Thus the apostles with one voice teach in all their writings, that we are bought out of the hand of death, or sin, and out of this present evil world, but never out of the hands of our heavenly Father. So the primitive doctors§, who came next after the apostles, taught that the price of Christ's sufferings was paid to the great enemy; only they knew not how He had a right to exact it. More modern doctors have explained the price paid as a satisfaction to the law; and there is no harm in this view, if we understand it of the law in its accusing aspect, when it becomes an enemy; for then it is the strength of sin; and we do read that Christ has blotted out the handwriting which was against us. But we must * Isaiah xlvi. 10. Ephesians i. 11. + Revelations xiii. 8. 1 Peter i. 10. Colossians i. 13: Acts xxvi. 18: Galat. i. 4: 2 Tim. i. 9, 10: Titus ii. 11-14. § So Irenæus, Origen, the two Gregories, and even St Augustine. The theory of a price paid to the Father, or to change His will, is as contrary to Ecclesiastical Antiquity as it is to our purest conscience, and to Scripture when caught from the point of view of the sacred writers. M. P. 28 434 DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT. greatly beware of understanding this of that innermost law, which is the will of the Father, and which, when it comes forth, gives light to the simple. For in that innermost law, which is love, there is no darkness at all. Neither does pain come of it; for no evil, as evil, is of God." "But why," here interposed the Saugata, "did not the Father save the world, since He loved it, without such suffering by His Son ?" "Why," replied Mountain, "do you hurt your child, when you wish only to correct him? Or why alarm, when you desire to warn? No earthly father rejoices in his child's crying, and yet he suffers it; nor surgeon in the sharp pain of the knife, and yet he uses it. So God is not angered as if out of infirmity; but if men break the order of His creation, they disturb forces which crush them. As they sow, He lets them reap. He could not put forth law in fixity, unless it had penalty possible. All that Blancombe said of evil, as coming of God only in possibility, but of lower agents in fulfilment, should be here remembered by you. He also explained sufficiently for humility the suffering of Christ. The old written law could not be broken as a civil institution, unless He who broke it suffered. Nor could it be abolished in its hold over men's consciences, unless He who suffered from it had also triumph. But if even that written law pointed to an eternal right above us, and its sacrifices to a dread of conscience within us, these deeper things are for mankind what the writing was for the Hebrews. These things then require of all men a suffering, which we must partake by sympathy, or otherwise, so as to be purged, and an assurance that our sacrifice, or that of which we partake in spirit, can be accepted. Again, it has been shewn, how Christ's dying and rising again brings about our death to sin, and our moral resurrection. But this visible effect (as in what I said before) points to a deeper something, or a writing in heaven, which answers to what is written in earth. Christ then died, even as the victims of the Mosaic law died; and as men offering those both expressed contrition, and were forgiven, DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT. 435 so we, associating ourselves with Christ's death in sympathy and sacrament, make as it were a spiritual sacrifice, and receive the forgiveness of our heavenly Father, which comes frankly of His infinite love. "I need not prove farther that God is not vindictive. However imperfectly we may understand that mystery of evil, which Christ triumphed over on the cross, we find there the cause of His pain, rather than in the will of the Father. The limit set to everything human, the possibilities which accompany good, the threatening nature of all law, and the necessity of law not being broken with impunity, give us something like a clue. They teach us to find the necessity for Christ's death, as a death, in some necessity external to the innermost will of God, rather than within it; though yet without Him, by whom all things are, neither the necessity, nor the law introducing it, could be even in thought. They suggest also how that suffering, which to the eternal love was no motive*, may yet have been an indispensably foreseen condition; and hence to our finite thoughts, not grasping an omnipresent unity, it may seem presented as a cause. Moreover, when we see how all great martyrs suffer, how out of their death goes forth power, and how death itself by the greater mystery of Christ's bringing immortality within its range, had its bonds for ever loosed, we can feel better than understand, that love here wrought with wisdom in delivering us from evil. Nor are our Scriptures doubtful on this point; for they ever teach that 'God loved the world, and gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish.' Only I must own that our doctrine of Christ's suffering for our sins, and taking away the sins of the world by His death, is by some modern teachers put in a different light from that of the apostles. For the moderns sometimes make belief in it a kind of legal requirement, and use it so as to discourage man, and to narrow the mercies of God. Whereas with the apostles of Christ it was ever a doctrine of * See above, page 334. 436 DOCTRINE OF ELECTION. freedom. It was a message of good news that all legal sacrifices were put away, and that God freely forgives sins, and calls back all His wanderers through the spirit of the beloved Son to the Father. Such freedom then gave power to men's souls; and the loss of it now in the language of some blind leaders of the blind is the reason why our truth has less power to heal. But the very apostles of Christ are our higher authority; and as their doctrine is most wholesome, so from their writings I would have you take it. (3) "As God, by delivering us through His Son from that evil which was in the world, shews His love to man, neither does He narrow it by rejecting any willing to be saved. You have rightly guessed that our doctrine of election has something to do with Jewish feelings. Only, instead of being the same as their narrowness, it is built upon St Paul's express teaching to the contrary. He saw the Jews priding themselves upon being a chosen people. Already John the Baptist had warned them, that if they did not Abraham's works, God could raise up other children to Abraham. So St Paul tells them the chosen position of light which they had enjoyed had been the gift of God. Since they turned to the darkness of the letter instead of taking the light of the spirit in Christ, this better light would be for the nations at large. Whoever embraced this better gift would be a part henceforth of the chosen people. Thus mankind steps into the place of Israel. You see, the apostle's doctrine is not a narrowing, but a widening. It is a protest against national or sacerdotal exclusiveness. There may be something of human metaphor in ascribing such choice to God; but do we not feel that we could have no gift without an adequate Giver? Whatever light, then, we enjoy, or whatever calling comes to us through teaching, we ascribe it to a forethought of God, as any human act to a man's thought. If some have larger gifts than others, they are in a way more chosen. Thus St Paul, having power to turn many hearts to God, was a chosen vessel. So all the apostles of Christ were chosen, though one of them turned NATURAL DIFFICULTIES OF FREEWILL. 437 out an enemy. But if even bodily gifts are of God, much more those of the soul. The more, then, any man has right faith, and truth of heart, and goodness, the more he will ascribe such deliverance to God. But this ascription is in looking back with thankfulness, when we have received, not in presuming beforehand that we shall. We see the side of human performance, and our faith infers the inner side of Divine grace. Perhaps our language on such points may be innocently tinged by those difficulties which are felt throughout the world in all attempts to reconcile Fate and Freewill,' or Divine purpose and human agency. For as our freedom is both limited by vaster forces, and prompted by natural motives, we seem at once agents, and yet instruments. We are conscious of choice; yet we choose not without reason. We will; but our will had antecedents. Our will goes forth, but yet in act it falls short of its object. Again, it is biassed by inclinations hardly its own. Circumstances again give us power, or fetter us. We say for ourselves, we are free; yet the bystander foresees what we will do. Perhaps every individual man is in his own will properly free, and manifests his character by spontaneous choice; yet the conduct of a mass of men in given circumstances of mind and body is not doubtful; and we do not doubt that a higher and spiritual Governor wields the whole at His will. Such difficulties, however, whether they come of two truths which seem to contradict each other, or rather, as I should say, of limitation to our freedom, are at least not peculiar to Christianity. They were felt in Greece and India before the Gospel was preached in the world. Their connexion with our faith is quite accidental. Only, as we do magnify soul above body, and motives above circumstance, and will above deed, or character above results, so we magnify the secret teaching which comes of the grace of God. Whoever has this so as to use it, is so far chosen as to have cause of thanksgiving. But such a gift is no proof that the like was not offered to others; for we teach favour, but not favoritism. Take the doctrine of election as a way of ascribing all we |