fectual way of moral influence. He beholds a full, perfect sacrifice for sin which becomes his own upon this one simple condition the passive acquiescence of faith in Christ.

Undoubtedly there is a certain appearance of meagreness and baldness about this definition of the Christian sacrifice, as there must inevitably be about any statement which attempts to reduce under a brief logical formula the most sacred and momentous event of history. But all this appearance vanishes when we come to conjoin our conception with the other great truths of Christian doctrine, and to see how they mutually enrich and illuminate each other. To do this fully would require a treatise upon systematic theology. Here we must content ourselves with some brief intimations in regard to a few of the leading thoughts of Christianity.

1. And, first of all, we notice that element of vicariousness which the deep instinct of Christendom has always found in the sacrificial, redeeming work of Christ. But while there has been an almost universal belief in the vicarious nature of the atonement, the details of this belief have been extremely vague and unsettled. The theory which has been most generally accepted, that of Anselm, has never, we think, been entirely satisfactory to the most thoughtful minds of the Church, and has been only provisionally adopted for lack of anything better. Luckily we are not called upon to repeat the familiar arguments by which the irrationality and self-contradictiveness of this theory have been so often shown. Suffice it here, that Anselm's theory so generally adopted since the Middle Ages, puts the element of vicariousness in a place where it does not rightly belong, and cannot possibly subsist. Christ is not the vicarious bearer of our penalties; that conception every principle of justice and reason contradicts. He is not my penal substitute, taking upon himself the punishments which the irrevocable sentence of nature has placed upon me, and me alone. He is our vicarious sacrifice. He has performed that great act of spiritual, sacrificial surrender unto God which becomes my own upon the simple condition of faith in him. That conception, we believe, enfolds the real vicariousness, to

which the heart of Christendom has been clinging through so many centuries; Christ upon the cross, offering himself a full, perfect sacrifice for sin in the stead of us all.

2. We note, again, the light that our conception throws upon another fundamental principle of the Christian religion -Justification by Faith. How pale and impotent seem the conclusions to which the so-called Moral Theory of the Atonement is driven in attempting to deal with this primitive, elementary thought of Christianity. Justification is nothing more than a divine influence working upon us through Christ, to make us righteous; and the faith by which we are justified merely our consent that this influence should work upon us freely. The grand, apostolic declaration that we are justified by faith. becomes a bald truism asserting merely that we are justified, provided we consent, do not refuse to be justified. Surely there must be a deeper, richer mine of meaning in this conception of justifying faith which kindled so lofty an enthusiasm in the Apostle's heart, emancipated the genius of St. Augustine, lit the fires of the Reformation in the soul of Luther in a word, has formed the chief, inspiring force in all the great movements of Christianity. That deeper, richer meaning, we believe, is brought to the open light by our conception of Christian sacrifice.

Upon the term "justification" we put no new rendering. To be justified is not to be made actually righteous, as rationalistic criticism is so prone to assert; it is not a transformation of moral character, the infusion of a new quality within the soul. It is difficult to see how such a meaning could ever have been put upon a term used so often and so explicitly in the Scriptures. How visibly, for instance, is St. Paul, in Romans iii. 25, standing by the familiar meaning of justification as an act of pardoning mercy. How plainly is he there dwelling upon the seeming antithesis between God as just and as the justifier of those who believe, between God as immutable righteousness and as One who acquits, pardous and restores to His favor the guilty. But without entering further into an 2 See Dr. Bushnell's Vicarious Sacrifice, p. 404.

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exegesis which our limits will not permit, we simply stand by the meaning which the church has always put upon justification as, not a transformation of the moral nature, but a new relation of pardon and peace which God establishes with the guilty soul. And the ground of this justification, if the whole argument of these pages be not at fault, is the soul's sacrificial yielding and surrender of itself unto God.

But how is this state of sacrificial renunciation and selfsurrender to be attained? That is the difficult question which confronted the ancient religions, and from which, in the end, they shrank in doubt, perplexity, and even dismay. All the altar scenes of antiquity had for their inner, most primitive purpose, the design of leading the soul, by the aid of symbols, into the way of renunciation and spiritual sacrifice. But these ceremonial activities being found for the most part of little avail, multitudes of the most religious souls were driven to seek this path of spiritual renunciation through ascetic austerities, fastings, vigils, and frightful torturings of the body. But in the end came only a sense of failure and spiritual impotence, both the ceremonial and ascetic strivings being found to foster a more intense pride of self-will and consciousness of merit, instead of the yielding, self-surrendering spirit they were designed to engender.

Just here seems the proper place to more strictly define this consciousness of spiritual impotence which lay like a fatal spell upon the ancient religions, and which forms one of the central intuitions of Christian doctrine. Spiritual impotence is not that utter moral inability to do right, and irresistible inclination to the wrong, which the Augustinian theory proclaims. There is no such inability as that attested by the experiences of the soul; and if there was, we should cease to be moral agents, with no further concern about our salvation than have the beasts or the birds. Our spiritual impotence is special, a powerlessness to do a particular thing, to work out our own deliverance, or rather to attain by our own exertions that spiritual state upon which our deliverance depends. As the muscles are hardened and strengthened by exercise, so

by every exertion the will is strengthened in its active power, hardened in its proud self-consciousness, rendered less pliant and yielding, less submissive to any influences that would turn it from its natural course into a state of passive self-renunciation. Thus the Jewish ceremonial gave birth to the hard, unyielding temper of Pharisaism, instead of the true sacrificial spirit. Thus the austerities of the ascetic, demanding an immense and constant exertion of the will, fostered a proud self-consciousness the very opposite of the state that was being sought after at such a frightful cost of toil and suffering. It was as if one should strive to gain sleep by strenuous exertions of the will, only to find that these very exertions served to increase his wakefulness. Such then is our conception of spiritual impotence. It is that special inability imposed upon the will by the necessities of a sinful nature, whereby all its strivings serve only to turn it more and more from that yielding, self-surrendering, sacrificial state upon which its pardon depends.

From these depths of spiritual impotence the cross comes as a flash of deliverance. A sinless and divine nature achieves for us all that perfect, sacrificial surrender which the guilty will can never gain for itself. But that spiritual surrender is the one thing wherein it is possible for a vicarious relation to subsist. Upon the simple condition of faith, passive acquiescence in Christ's leadership and work, that surrender becomes our own; and all its results, peace, pardon, justification, flow in upon us. We are, and can be, justified by faith alone.

3. We notice, briefly, the light which our conception throws upon the Christian doctrine of the pardoning grace of God. We are often told by the rationalistic criticism of the day that the old forebodings of the guilty soul, its consciousness of the loss of the divine favor, its sense of inability to save itself from ruin are mere superstitions; that Christ was a wise teacher who came to abolish these superstitions, and to reveal unto us a God demanding no sacrifice for sin, but freely pardoning those who repented. And this repentance seems to be vaguely conceived of as sorrow for sin combined with a desire for re

formation - a kind of repentance running so closely, hand in hand with guilt, that it is repeatedly experienced by every criminal when caught in the meshes of his own wrong. Against all this we oppose our conception of pardon as necessarily preceded by a true sacrifice for sin; and that sacrifice of so lofty and spiritual a nature that it can only be made by the sinless Son of God, from him to be appropriated to ourselves through the power of faith. That is indeed free grace; a divine clemency which offers pardon upon the only conditions consistent with eternal righteousness, and then makes most am de provision for the bringing of these conditions within the grasp of the guiltiest soul.

In this theory of pardoning grace there is, indeed, no thought of Christ as our penal substitute, bearing the penalties of our transgressions. That conception, so revolting to reason, we believe to be but a mere accident of Christian doctrine, foisted upon it because there seemed to be no other way of satisfying one of the deepest instincts of religion that profound sense of sin and guilt which demanded some form of expiation before pardon became possible. But the expiation does not come through penal sufferings. These are put upon us by the inflexible law of nature for our advantage; and not to satisfy the offended majesty of God. The real atonement for our offences is made through the spiritual sacrifice. the yielding up and surrender of will, heart and life unto God. That proper expiatory element, as our readers already know, enters into the very ground-work of the theory advocated in these pages. And nothing further will be demanded save by those who cling to the mere external accidents and verbal forms of their creed, while thinking little about the eternal truths which lie close to the heart of the very creed which they profess to prize so highly.

Such, then, is our theory of the redemptive work of Christ. It is, we know, at variance with the opinions that are commonly current in our midst; but at the same time we believe it to be built upon the foundations, and consistent with the spirit of true Universalism. And let us remember that our