class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="p. 2" id="pgepubid00010"/>out of place.  For the justification of their attacks has very often come from the Christian side.  In former times, far more commonly than now, the sacrifice of Christ has been represented as a substitutory offering, necessary to appease the wrath of an offended God.  It used to be said, and in some quarters it is said to-day, that the sins of the human race had so provoked the Divine anger that it could be appeased by nothing short of the destruction of mankind.  In these dire straits of mankind, the Sinless Son of God presented Himself as the object on which the full vials of the Father’s wrath should be outpoured.  God having been thus placated, and His wrath satisfied, such as believe in this transaction, and rest themselves in confidence upon it, are enabled in such wise to reap its benefits that they escape the penalty due to their transgression, and are restored to the Divine favour.

Now this is the crudest representation of a certain popular theology of the Atonement.  With some of its features softened down, it is by no means without its adherents and exponents at the present day.  But when its drift is clearly understood, it is seen to be a doctrine which no educated man of our time can accept.  We may consider four fatal objections to it.

(a) It is true that there is such a thing as “the wrath of God.”  It is not only a fact, but one of the most tremendous facts in the universe.  It is a fact

as high as the Divine purity, as deep as the malignity and foulness of sin, as broad as all human experience.  It is impossible to construct a theistic theory of the world which shall leave it out.  The nature of the fact we shall investigate at a later point.  But we can say this at once.  It cannot be such a fact as is represented by the theory under review.  For that represents the wrath of God as a mere thirst for vengeance, a burning desire to inflict punishment, a rage that can only be satisfied by pain, and blood, and death.  In other words, we are driven to a conception of God which is profoundly immoral, and revoltingly pagan.  If we are rightly interested in missions to the heathen, are there to be no attempts to convert our fellow-Christians whose conception of God scarcely rises above the heathen one of a cruel and sanguinary deity?  Not such, at least, is the New Testament doctrine of Him Who is God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

(b) There is no moral quality which we esteem higher than justice.  Fairness, equity, straight dealing are attributes for which all men entertain a hearty and unfeigned respect.  There is no flame of indignation which burns fiercer within us than when we conceive ourselves, or others, to be the victims of injustice.  But what are we to say of a view of the Atonement which represents God Himself as being guilty of the most flagrant act of injustice that the mind of man has ever conceived, the

infliction of condign punishment upon a perfectly innocent Person, and that for the offences committed by others?  It is a further wrong, and that a wrong done to the offenders themselves, that they are, in consideration of the sufferings of the righteous One, relieved of the merited and healthful punishment of ill-doing.

(c) A third defect of this theory of the Atonement is, that it is profoundly unethical.  The need of man is represented as being, above all, escape from penalty.  Whereas, at least, the conscience of the sinner himself is bearing at all times witness to the truth that his real necessity is escape from his sin, from the weakness and the defilement of his moral nature, which are of the very essence of moral transgression.  We are now dealing with the matter from the moral standpoint; but we have to support us the authority of the earliest proclamation of the work of the Christ: “He shall save His people from their sins,” not from any pains or penalties attached to their sins.  Relief from punishment is not the Gospel of the New Testament, it is not a gospel at all.

(d) Finally, the idea of a transaction between the Father and the Son is clean contrary to the fundamental Christian doctrine of the Unity of God.  Once locate justice in the Father, and love in the Son, and view the Atonement as the result of a bargain, or transaction between the Two, and once more we are left with a doctrine not Christian, but

heathen and polytheistic.  There is unhappily little doubt, that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity suffers, just as that of the Atonement, even more from its defenders than from its assailants.  Properly understood, that doctrine is the vindication of the complete fulness of the personal life of the One God.  Too often it is so held, and so preached and represented, as in this case, that monotheism is tacitly abandoned in favour of ditheism or tritheism.  It needs to be plainly said, that the transaction theory is inconsistent with the trinitarian doctrine.  The Three Persons are so called in our Western theology owing to defects inherent in human thought and speech.  To set one over against the other as two parties to a contract, is to found a theory upon those very defects.  The Miltonic representation of the Father and the Son is Arian; the popular view is, more often than not, a belief either in two gods, or in a logical contradiction.

To sum up, the view of the Atonement with which we have been occupying ourselves, is opposed to the fundamental moral instincts, and to the Christian consciousness, both as it finds expression in the New Testament, and as it reveals itself in the best minds of to-day.  And this type of theory, although without some of its coarser features, is by no means extinct.  There is all the more need then, in spite of all that has been so well done in this direction, to exhibit the Atonement as the supreme vindication

of those instincts which are the witness of the Divine in man.  There is laid on all who would preach or teach Christianity to-day to show that Calvinism, and all that is touched with the taint of Calvinism, is not the doctrine of the Atonement which is taught in the Bible or held by the Church.  But, as nothing can be built on negations, there is an even greater and more imperative need to exhibit the truth of the Atonement in its beauty and majesty and transcendent moral power.

2.  The second of our two reasons for the choice of the Cross of Christ as our subject, is the failure on the part of those who believe in it, trust in it, and even build their lives upon it, to realise the true vastness of its meaning.  We are too apt to regard the Cross as one of the doctrines of our religion, or as supplying a motive to penitence, or to Christian conduct.  Our view, when we are most in earnest, is one-sided, limited, parochial.  We must rise, if we would really understand the Cross, to the height of this conception: that it contains in itself the answer to the problem of human existence, and of our individual lives.  The secret of the universe, of our part of it at least, that tiny corner which is occupied by the human race, was revealed in that supreme disclosure of the Divine Mind which was made on Calvary.  It was a disclosure necessarily given under the forms of time and space, else it could not have been given to us at all.  But it transcends

all forms and limitations, and belongs to the spiritual and timeless order, which is also the Real.  But it is a disclosure which requires the thought and study, not of one generation only, but of all.  It can never be exhausted.  There is no view of it