Chapter VII: The Atonement (1)

ARTHUR LYTTELTON.

I. Theological doctrine, describing, as it professes to do, the dealings of an all-wise Person with the human race, must be a consistent whole, each part of which reflects the oneness of the will on which it is based. What we call particular doctrines are in reality only various applications to various human conditions of one great uniform method of Divine government, which is the expression in human affairs of one Divine will. The theological statement of any part of this method ought to bear on its face the marks of the whole from which it is temporarily separated; for though it may be necessary to make now this, now that doctrine prominent, to isolate it and lay stress on it, this should be done in such a way that in each special truth the whole should, in a manner, be contained. We must be able to trace out in each the lines of the Divine action which is only fully displayed in the whole. Neglect of this not only makes our faith as a whole weak and incoherent, but deprives the doctrines themselves of the illumination and strength which are afforded by the discovery in them of mutual likeness and harmony. They become first unintelligible and then inconceivable, and the revelation of the character of God, which should be perceived in every part of His dealings with men, becomes confused and dim to us. This has been especially the case with the Atonement. In the course of religious controversy this doctrine has become separated from the rest, at one time neglected, at another over emphasized, till in its isolation it has been so stated as to be almost incredible. Men could not indeed be brought to disbelieve in forgiveness, however attained, and the conviction of remission of sins through and in the Blood of Christ has survived all the theories which have been framed to account for it; but nevertheless, the unreality of these theories has been a disaster to the Christian faith. Some of them have strained our belief in the moral attributes of God, others have given men easy thoughts of sin and its consequences. This has been so because they have treated the Atonement apart from the whole body of facts which make up the Christian conception of God and His dealings with men. In this essay the attempt will be made to present the doctrine in its relation to the other great Christian truths: to the doctrines, that is, of God, of the Incarnation, of sin.

(1) On the human side the fact with which we have to deal is the fact of sin. Of this conception the Bible, the most complete record of the religious history of man, is full from the first page to the last. Throughout the whole course of Jewish development, the idea that man has offended the justice of God was one of the abiding elements in the religious consciousness of the race. But it was by no means confined to the Jews. They have been truly called the conservators of the idea of sin; but it has never been permanently absent, in some form or other, from the human mind, although we learn most about it, and can see it in its clearest, most intense form, in the Hebrew religion. Now this conception of sin in its effect on the human soul is of a twofold character. Sin is felt to be alienation from God, Who is the source of life, and strength, and peace, and in consequence of that alienation the whole nature is weakened and corrupted. In this aspect sin is a state in which the will is separated from the Divine will, the life is cut off from the life of God which He designed us to share. When men come to realize what is meant by union with God, and to feel the awful consequences of separation, there arises at once the longing for a return, a reconciliation; but this longing has by itself no power to effect so great a change. To pass from alienation to union is to pass from darkness to light, from evil to good, and can only be accomplished by that very power, the power of a life united to God, which has been forfeited by sin. Only in union with God can man accomplish anything that is good; and, therefore, so long as he is alienated from God, he can only long for, he cannot obtain, his reunion with the Divine life. Sin therefore, thus considered, is not only wickedness; it is also misery and hopelessness. Sinners are 'without God in the world,' and for that reason they 'have no hope.'

This is the aspect of sin as a state of the sinful soul, and as affecting the present relation between man and God. It has destroyed the union, has broken down even the sacrificial bridge, for it has made all acceptable offerings impossible. Man's will is weakened, therefore he has not strength to offer himself completely and unreservedly to God; his nature is corrupted and stained, therefore his offering, could he make it, could not be accepted. Sin is a hopeless state of weakness and uncleanness. But there is another, in one sense an earlier, more fundamental aspect of sin. The sins of the past have produced not merely weakness and corruption, but also guilt. The sinner feels himself guilty before God. If we examine the idea of guilt, as realized by the conscience, it will be seen to contain the belief in an external power, or law, or person against whom the offence has been committed, and also an internal feeling, the acknowledgment of ill-desert, a sense of being under sentence, and that justly. Whether the punishment which is felt to be the due reward of the offence has been borne or not, the conception of punishment, when the offence has been committed, cannot be avoided, and it brings with it a conviction of its justice. These two elements, the external and the internal element, seem to be necessary to the full conception of guilt. The common fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a sinner would not feel himself guilty. But it is precisely because the consciousness of sin does not and cannot stop here that, over and above any injury to self, any weakness or even corruption produced by sin, we speak of its guilt. 'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight.' This belief in an external power, whose condemnation has been incurred by sin, may take various forms; for the power may be represented as impersonal or as personal, as law or as God. For our present purposes, however, the distinction is immaterial: the essential point is that it is something external to ourselves, not merely the echo of the sinner's own self-inflicted pain and injury. We cannot, however, limit it to this. For it is not merely an external power, it is also a just power that is presented to the sense of guilt. Before bare power, unrighteous or non-moral, an offender may be compelled to submit, but he will not feel guilt. The state of mind expressed by Mill's well-known defiance is his who has offended a superior power which he cannot believe to be just, and it is very far removed from the feeling of guiltiness[217]. The sense of guilt implies the righteousness as well as the power of that against which we have offended; it is a moral conviction. Guiltiness, then, regarded in one aspect is the sense of sin, in another it is the recognition of the law of righteousness, or, if we may now assume the religious point of view, it is the conviction of the wrath of God against sin.

It is plain, if we will only scrutinise closely and candidly the conception of sin and guilt, that no merely 'subjective' explanation will account for the facts revealed by our consciousness. Even if we had no scriptural evidence to guide us, the evidence, that is, to take it at the lowest, of a series of specially qualified witnesses to religious phenomena, our own hearts would tell us of the wrath of God against sin. It is irresistibly felt that there is a Power hostile to sin, and that this Power has decreed a righteous punishment for the offences which are the external signs and results of the sinful state. Whatever the punishment may be, a question we need not now discuss, the sinner's conscience warns him of it. He may apparently, or for a time, escape it; but it is none the less felt to be the fitting expression of Divine wrath, the righteous manifestation of the hostility of God's nature to sin and all its consequences. Guilt, then, like sin, has its twofold character. It is the belief in an external hostility to sin expressing itself in punishment, and also the conviction that such punishment is righteous and just. Thus, when once God is recognised as the offended Person, the acknowledgment of the righteousness of His judgment follows. 'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight; that Thou mightest be justified when Thou speakest, and be clear when Thou judgest.'

(2) Corresponding to the sense of sin in its twofold aspect we find, not only in the Mosaic system or in the scriptural history, but almost universally established, the system of sacrifice. It is not necessary to maintain that sacrifice, in its essential idea, was intended to express the consciousness of sin. Rather, it seems to be, essentially, the expression of the very opposite of sin, of that relation of man to God which sin destroyed[218]. It is sometimes said that sacrifice is the recognition of God's sovereignty, the tribute paid by His subjects. This is, of course, a necessary element in the conception of sacrifice, for God is our King; but it does not satisfy the whole consciousness which man has of his original relation to God. That is a relation, not of subjection only, but of union at least as close as that of sons to a Father, a union whereby we derive life from His life, and render back absolute unquestioning love to Him. Sacrifice is, in its highest, original meaning, the outward expression of this love. As human love naturally takes outward form in gifts, and the closer, the more fervent it is, makes those gifts more and more personal, till at last it wholly gives itself; so sacrifice should be the recognition of our union with God, an expression of our love for Him, giving Him all that we have and all that we are. Submission, reverence, love are the original feelings which sacrifice was intended to represent; and it may be called, therefore, the expression of man's relations to God in their purest form, unmarred and unbroken by sin. But this is only the original, ideal meaning, for with the intrusion of sin another element appears in sacrifice; and men attempt, by their offerings, to expiate their offences, to cover their sins, to wipe out their guilt, to propitiate Divine wrath. But though this new element is introduced, the original intention is not altogether lost. The union has been destroyed by sin, but even in the sin-offerings under the Law there was expressed the endeavour to regain it, to enter once more into living relations with God: while the normal sacrifices of the congregation went beyond this, and represented the exercise of a right based on union with God, the presentation of the people before Him. Thus we must recognise in the Mosaic sacrifices--the most complete and typical form of the sacrificial idea--the twofold aspect which corresponds to the twofold effect of sin on the human race. There is the offering, sometimes the bloodless offering, by which was typified simply man's dependence on God, his submission to Him, his life derived from Him and therefore rendered back to Him. From this point of view the sacrifice culminated, not in the slaying and offering of the victim, but in the sprinkling of the blood, the 'principle of life,' upon the altar. The priestly mediators brought the blood, which 'maketh atonement by reason of the life,' before God, and sprinkled it upon the altar, in order that the lost union with God in the covenant might be restored, and life once more derived from God as it had been offered to Him. The whole system was indeed only partial, temporary, external. The Mosaic sacrifices 'sanctified unto the cleanness of the flesh,' they did not 'cleanse the conscience from dead works to serve the living God.' So the restoration which the special sin-offerings accomplished was merely external and temporary, the reunion of the offender with the congregation of Israel from which his fault had separated him. But as this excommunication symbolised the loss, brought about by sin, of life with God, so the reunion with the congregation typified the reunion of the sinner with God. As a system, then, the Mosaic sacrifices both corresponded to a deep desire of the human heart, the desire to recover the lost relation to the Divine life, and also by their imperfection pointed forward to a time when, by means of a more perfect offering, that restoration should be complete, accomplished once for all, and eternal. This is one aspect of the sacrificial system. But before this typical restoration of life, there came the mysterious act which corresponded to the sense of guilt. Leaving aside the lesser offerings of the shew-bread and the incense, it may be said generally that in every sacrifice the slaying of a victim was a necessary element. And there is deep significance in the manner in which the slaying was performed. The hands of the offerer laid upon the victim's head denoted, according to the unvarying use of the Old Testament, the representative character of the animal offered, and thus the victim was, so to speak, laden with the guilt of him who sought for pardon and reconciliation. The victim was then slain by the offerer himself, and the death thus became an acknowledgment of the justice of God's punishments for sin: it was as if the offerer declared, 'This representative of my guilt I here, by my own act, doom to death, in satisfaction of the righteous law of vengeance against sin, for "the soul that sinneth it shall die."' It was not, therefore, till the sense of personal guilt had been expressed by the act which constituted the victim a representative of the offerer, and by the slaying which typified the need of expiation by suffering for sin, that the sacrifice was fit to be presented before God by the mediation of the priest, and the blood, 'the life which had willingly passed through death[219],' could be sprinkled as a token of restored life in God. A careful study of the Mosaic sacrifices will shew the twofold character impressed upon them. Both aspects are necessary, they may even be described as two sides of the same fact. Before God can be approached by a sinner he must expiate his sin by suffering, must perfectly satisfy the demands of the law, must atone for the past which has loaded him with guilt: and then, as part of the same series of acts, the life so sacrificed, so purified by the expiatory death, is accepted by God, and being restored from Him, becomes the symbol and the means of union with Him. Forgiveness for the past, cleansing in the present, hope for the future, are thus united in one great symbolic ceremony.

The Mosaic system was only external, 'sanctifying unto the cleanness of the flesh'; partial, for it provided no expiation for the graver moral transgressions; temporary, for the sacrifices had to be repeated 'day by day'; provisional, for 'if there was perfection through the Levitical priesthood ... what further need was there that another priest should arise after the order of Melchizedek?' In spite, however, of these obvious defects and limitations in the Mosaic system, there was a constant tendency among the Jews to rest content with it, to rely upon the efficacy of these external sacrifices and ceremonies for their whole religion, to believe that 'the blood of bulls and goats' could 'put away sin,' and that no inner spiritual repentance or renovation was required. And the highest minds of the nation, represented by the prophets, were keenly alive to this danger: their rebukes and remonstrances shew how strongly they felt the imperfection of the sacrificial system, how it failed to satisfy the really religious cravings of spiritual minds. Yet there it was, divinely ordained, clearly necessary as the expression of the national religious life, profoundly significant. It could not be dispensed with, yet it could not satisfy: in its incompleteness, as well as in its symbolism, it pointed forward, and foreshadowed a perfect expiation.

(3) This examination of the sacrificial system of the Old Testament is necessary in a discussion of the doctrine of the Atonement, for several reasons. The institutions of the Law were, in the first place, ordained by God, and therefore intended to reveal in some degree His purposes, His mind towards man. We thus find in them traces of the fuller revelation which came afterwards, and the two dispensations throw light on each other. Then again, it was from the Law that the Jews derived their religious language: their conceptions of sacrifice, of atonement, of the effects of sin, were moulded by the influence of the Mosaic ceremonies. For this reason the apostolic doctrine of the Atonement must be looked at in connection with the ideas inspired by the Law, although, of course, the life and work of our Lord so enlarged the religious conceptions of the Apostles as to constitute a fresh revelation. But it was a revelation on the lines, so to speak, of the old; it took up and continued the ideas implanted by the Mosaic religion, and displayed the fulfilment of the earlier promises and forecasts. It is, therefore, from the Old Testament that we have to learn the vocabulary of the apostolic writings. As the Messianic hopes and phraseology throw light upon the apostolic conception of the Kingdom of Christ, so the sacrificial ceremonies and language of the Law throw light upon the apostolic conception of the Sacrifice, the Atonement of Christ. But this is not all. The Mosaic institutions, in their general outlines, were no arbitrary and artificial symbols, but corresponded to religious feelings, needs, aspirations that may truly be called natural and universal. This conception of sin in its twofold aspect of alienation and of guilt, and this idea of sacrifice as effecting man's restoration to union with God, and also as expiating his guilt by suffering, correspond to what the human conscience, when deeply and sincerely investigated, declares to be its inmost secret. Every man who has once realized sin, can also realize the feelings of the Jew who longed to make an expiation for the guilt of the past, to suffer some loss, some penalty that would cover his sin, and who therefore brought his offering before God, made the unconscious victim his representative, the bearer of his guilt, and by slaying it strove to make atonement. We feel the same need, the same longing. This load of guilt has to be laid down somehow: this past sinfulness must meet with a punishment which will make expiation for it: before this lost union with God can be restored we must be assured of pardon, must know that the wrath of God no longer abides on us, but has been turned away, and finds no longer in us the sin which is the one obstacle to the free course of Divine love. And then we know further that bitter truth which came to the loftiest minds among the Jews, that no sacrifice of ours can have atoning value, for God demands the offering of ourselves, and we are so weakened by sin that we cannot give ourselves up to Him, so polluted by sin that we cannot be well-pleasing in His eyes. In order to atone, sacrifice must be no outward ceremony, the offering of this or that possession, the fulfilment of this or that externally-imposed ordinance, but the entire surrender of self to God, and to His law, a surrender dictated from within by the free impulse of the will. Therefore, just as the spiritually-minded Jew felt the continual discrepancy between the external ceremonies which he was bound to fulfil, and the complete submission to the will of God which they could not effect, and without which they were wholly inadequate, so every awakened conscience must feel the fruitlessness of any outward expression of devotion and obedience so long as there is no complete sacrifice of self.

These, then, seem to be the conditions which must be satisfied before an atonement can meet the needs of the human heart and conscience, whether these are inferred from an examination of the Hebrew religious institutions or are gathered from our own knowledge of ourselves and of others. There is, first of all, the consciousness of guilt, of an offended God, of a law transgressed, of punishment impending, to expiate which some sacrifice is necessary, but no sacrifice adequate to which can be offered by us as we are. Propitiation is the first demand of the law, and we cannot, of ourselves, propitiate Him whose anger we have righteously incurred. Secondly, we long for an abiding union with Him, and for the full bestowal of the Divine life which results from that union alone. Propitiation is not enough by itself, though propitiation is the necessary first step in the process of reconciliation. Aliens, by our own sinful acts, and by the sin of our forefathers, from the life of God, we yet long to return and to live once more in Him. But this is equally impossible for us to accomplish of ourselves. By sin we have exiled ourselves, but we cannot return by mere force of will. Both as propitiation, therefore, and as reunion, the Atonement must come from without and cannot be accomplished by those who themselves have need of it. But there is a third condition, apparently irreconcileable with the other two. This same consciousness of guilt which demands an expiation demands that it shall be personal, the satisfaction of the sense of personal responsibility, and of the unconquerable conviction of our own freedom. The propitiatory sacrifice which is to effect our reunion must, for we are powerless to offer it, come from without: but at the same time we cannot but feel that it must come into contact with the will, it must be the inward sacrifice, the freewill offering of the whole nature that has sinned.

II. If the redemptive work of Christ satisfies these conditions it is evident that it is not a simple, but a very complex fact. The fault of many of the theories of the Atonement has been that, though none of them failed to be partially true, they were limited to one or other of the various aspects which that mysterious fact presents. It is certain, again, that of this complex fact no adequate explanation can be given. At every stage in the process which is generally summed up in the one word Atonement we are in presence of forces which issue from infinity and pass out of our sight even while we are contemplating their effects. And even if the Atonement could be altogether reduced, so to speak, to terms of human experience, it will be shewn that man's forgiveness, the nearest analogy of which we have any knowledge, is an experience of which no logical explanation can be given, which seems to share, indeed, something of the mystery of its Divine antitype. But though it is almost blasphemous to pretend to fathom the depth of the Atonement, to lay out the whole truth so as to satisfy the formulae of human reason, it is necessary so to understand it as to discern its response to the imperative demands of the sense of sin and the desire for forgiveness. Whatever the ultimate mysteries of the death of Christ may be, it is certain that it has had power to convince men of forgiveness and to give them a new life. It must therefore in some way satisfy the conditions which, as we have seen, are laid down by human consciousness and experience. It is under the threefold aspect required by those conditions that the doctrine of the Atonement will be here presented.

1. The death of Christ is, in the first place, to be regarded as propitiatory. On the one hand there is man's desire, natural and almost instinctive, to make expiation for his guilt: on the other there is the tremendous fact of the wrath of God against sin. The death of Christ is the expiation for those past sins which have laid the burden of guilt upon the human soul, and it is also the propitiation of the wrath of God. As we have seen, over against the sense of sin and of liability to the Divine wrath there has always existed the idea of sacrifice by which that wrath might be averted. Man could not offer an acceptable sacrifice: it has been offered for him by Christ. That is the simplest, and it would seem the most scriptural way of stating the central truth, which is also the deepest mystery, of the Atonement, and it seems to sum up and include the various other metaphors and descriptions of the redemptive work of Christ. But its mere statement at once suggests questions, the consideration of which will lead to a fuller understanding of the doctrine. Thus we have to ask. What is it which is propitiated by Christ's death? In other words, What is meant by the wrath of God against sin?

(_a_) It should be remembered that though there is great danger in anthropomorphism, and though most of the superstition which has ever been the shadow cast by religion on the world has arisen from an exaggerated conception of the likeness of God to ourselves, yet there is, after all, no other way of knowing God than by representing Him under conceptions formed by our own consciousness and experience, and this method is pre-eminently incumbent upon us who believe that man is made 'in the image of God.' We are certain, for instance, that love, pity, justice, are affections which, however imperfectly they may be found in us, do make for goodness, and if we may not ascribe these same affections, infinitely raised and purified, to God, we have no means of conceiving His character, of knowing 'with whom we have to deal.'

Our knowledge, even of ourselves, is after all fragmentary[220], and thus truths of whose certainty we are convinced may seem irreconcileably opposed to each other. Our conception of love, for example, is a fragment, and we cannot trace it up to the meeting-point at which it is reconciled with justice, so that in our moral judgments we are continually oscillating, as it were, between the two. But this fact should not hinder us from ascribing to God in their fullest degree both love and justice, confident that in Him they are harmonized because we are confident from the verdict of our own consciences that both are good, and because even in such imperfect reflections of His image as, for instance, parental love, we see at least a partial harmony of them. When then a doubt arises as to the literal explanation of the phrase 'the wrath of God,' the difficulty must not be met by the simple assertion that we cannot reconcile the idea of wrath with that of the love of God: we must ask whether wrath, as it exists in us, is a good and righteous affection, or whether it is always and entirely evil. To this question there can be but one answer. We are conscious of a righteous anger, of an affection of displeasure that a good man ought to feel against sin and evil, and this is amply justified by the scriptural references to righteous anger, and by the accounts of our Lord's displays of indignation against evil. But though we are thus compelled to find room, so to speak, for anger in our conception of God's character, it is not therefore necessary to ascribe to Him that disturbance of the spiritual nature, or that change in the direction of the will, which are almost invariable accompaniments of human anger. These are the defects of the human affection, from which arises the sinful tendency in our anger, and which cannot be thought of in connection with the all-holy and all-wise God. On the other hand, it is not possible to limit the conception of the 'wrath of God' to the acts whereby sin is or will be punished, which was the explanation of some of the Fathers, or to think of it as in the future only, to come into existence only on the day of judgment, as has been attempted by some modern theologians. The scriptural expressions, including as we must the passages which speak of our Lord's anger, cannot be so weakened. 'The wrath of God' seems to denote no changeful impulse or passing feeling, but the fixed and necessary hostility of the Divine Nature to sin; and the idea must further include the manifestation of that hostility, whenever sin comes before God, in external acts of vengeance, punishment and destruction. God's anger is not only the displeasure of an offended Person: it is possible that this is altogether a wrong conception of it: it must be further the expression of justice, which not only hates but punishes. The relation of the Divine Nature to sin is thus twofold: it is the personal hostility, if we may call it so, of holiness to sin, and it is also the righteousness which punishes sin because it is lawless. The two ideas are intimately connected, and not unfrequently, when we should have expected to find in the Bible the wrath of God spoken of, the language of judgment and righteousness is substituted for it. Sin is necessarily hateful to the holiness of God, but also, because sin is lawlessness, it is judged, condemned, and punished by Him in accordance with the immutable law of righteousness, which is the law of His own Nature. Therefore, to turn from God's wrath against sin to the mode in which that wrath may be averted, it results that the sacrifice offered for sin must be both a propitiation and a satisfaction. Anger, so we think, is but a feeling, and may be ousted by another feeling; love can strive against wrath and overcome it; the Divine hatred of sin need raise no obstacle to the free forgiveness of the sinner. So we might think; but a true ethical insight shews us that this affection of anger, of hatred, is in reality the expression of justice, and derives from the law of righteousness, which is not above God, nor is it dependent on His Will, for it is Himself. 'He cannot deny Himself'; He cannot put away His wrath, until the demands of Law have been satisfied, until the sacrifice has been offered to expiate, to cover, to atone for the sins of the world. The reconciliation to be effected is not merely the reconciliation of man to God by the change wrought in man's rebellious nature, but it is also the propitiation of God Himself, whose wrath unappeased and whose justice unsatisfied are the barriers thrown across the sinner's path to restoration.

(_b_) But how, we ask further, was this propitiation made by the Sacrifice on the Cross? Or, to put the question rather differently, what was it that gave to the death of Christ its propitiatory value? In attempting to suggest an answer to this question it is necessary to bear in mind the distinction between the actual event, or series of events, which constituted the Propitiatory Sacrifice, and that inner element which was thereby manifested, and which gave to the actual event its worth. S. Bernard expressed the distinction in the well-known words 'Not His death, but His willing acceptance of death, was pleasing to God,' and there can be no doubt that throughout the New Testament special stress is laid upon the perfect obedience manifested in the life and death of Christ, upon the accomplishment of His Father's will which He ever kept in view, and upon the contrast thus marked between the Mosaic sacrifices and the one atoning offering. 'Sacrifices and offerings and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein ... then hath He said, Lo, I am come to do Thy will.'

That the perfect obedience displayed in the passion and death of our Lord was the element which gave to the sacrifice its propitiatory value will be more readily understood when it is remembered that the essence of man's sin was from the first disobedience, the rebellion of the human will against the commands of God. The perfect sacrifice was offered by One Who, being man with all man's liability to temptation, that is with all the instruments of sin at His disposal[221], and exposed to every suggestion to set up His will against that of the Father, yet throughout His life continued unswervingly bent on doing 'not His own will, but the will of the Father Who sent Him,' and Who thus displayed the original perfection of human nature, the unbroken union with the life of God. On the cross the final struggle, the supreme temptation took place. The obedience shewn throughout His life was there manifested in death. 'He became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.' At any moment of the passion a single acquiescence in evil, a single submission to the law of unrighteousness, a single swerving of His will from its choice of absolute obedience, would, we may believe, have ended all the shame and torture. And therefore there was needed at every moment a real effort of His human will to keep itself in union with the will of God[222]; it was not a mere submission at the outset once for all, but a continuous series of voluntary acts of resignation and obedience. Here then is the spirit of sacrifice which God demands, and which could not be found in the sacrifices of the Mosaic law, or in any offering of sinful man. The essence of the Atonement was the mind of Christ therein displayed, the obedience gradually learnt and therein perfected, the will of Christ therein proved to be one with the Father's will.

But we may discern a further element of propitiation in the death of our Lord. The law of righteousness, the justice of God, demands not only obedience in the present, but retribution for the past. 'The sins done aforetime' had been 'passed over in the forbearance of God' for His own purposes, which are not revealed to us: this 'passing over' had obscured the true nature of sin and of the Divine justice. Men had come to have easy thoughts of sin and its consequences; the heathen felt but vaguely the burden of guilt, the Jew trusted in the mere external works of the law. In the death of Christ a manifestation was made of the righteousness of God, of His wrath, the absolute hostility of His nature to sin. 'God set Him forth to be a propitiation, through faith, by His blood, to shew His righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.' But this manifestation of Divine justice might have been made by mere punishment: it became a propitiation, in that He, the self-chosen victim, by His acceptance of it, recognised the righteousness of the law which was vindicated on the cross. Men had refused to acknowledge God's justice in the consequences of sin; nothing but the willing acceptance of suffering, as the due portion of the human nature in which the sin was wrought, could have so declared the justice of God's law as to be a propitiation of Divine wrath. The cross was, on the one hand, the proclamation of God's ordinance against sin, on the other it was the response of man at length acknowledging the righteousness of the condemnation[223].

But on looking more closely into the matter, it is obvious that these explanations are not by themselves enough to account for the scriptural facts which we call the Atonement. We cannot ignore that, whether we consider the Old Testament anticipations, or the New Testament narrative of our Lord's work, His death, apart from the obedience manifested in it, occupies a unique place, and that stress is laid on it which would be unaccountable were it _only_ the extreme trial of His obedience. The frequent declaration that it was necessary, that 'it behoved Christ to die,' seems to point to something exceptional in it, something more than the mere close of His spotless life. So again the mysterious dread and horror with which He looked forward to it testify to something in it which goes far beyond any human experience of death[224]. And what we gather from the New Testament must be combined with the Old Testament premonitions of Christ's death, as typified by the Mosaic sacrifices. There can be no question that death was, speaking generally, an integral part of the idea of sacrifice for sin, and that the distinguishing ceremonial of the slaying of the victim points to a special significance in death as connected with expiation and propitiation. Therefore, although we may still recognise that it was the spirit of obedience and voluntary submission which gave atoning value to the death of Christ, we cannot ignore the necessity of death as the appointed form which the obedience took. Had He not obeyed, He would not have atoned; but had He not died, the obedience would have lacked just that element which made it an atonement for sin. The obedience was intended to issue in death. S. Bernard's saying, though true as he meant it, is, if taken quite literally, too sharp an antithesis. There is nothing well-pleasing to God in death alone, it is true; but there is, so He has revealed it, something well-pleasing to His righteousness, something propitiatory in death, if as a further condition the perfect obedience of the victim is thereby displayed.

We are driven to the same conclusion by the second explanation of our Lord's sacrifice given above. It is not enough to say that He died in order to manifest God's righteous judgment against sin, for the question remains, Why is death the requisite manifestation of judgment? If He endured it because it is the only fitting punishment, why is it in such a signal manner the penalty of sin? We can point indeed to the Divine principle, 'The soul that sinneth, it shall die,' as we can point to God's declared will that expiation shall be made by means of death, but in neither case, whether death be looked upon as the punishment or as the expiation of sin, is there any explanation of its unique position. It may well be that here we are confronted by the final mystery, and that the propitiatory virtue of Christ's death, typified by the slaying of animal victims under the law, foreshadowed by the almost universal belief in the expiation of blood, acknowledged with wondering gratitude by the human heart, depends upon the unsearchable will and hidden purposes of God, except in so far as we can see in it the manifestation at once of Christ's perfect obedience and of the righteousness of Divine judgment. If an attempt is made to penetrate further into the mystery of Redemption, it can be but a speculation, but it will be saved from overboldness if it follows the general lines of God's action as revealed in His Word.

Some light may be thrown upon the mystery of Christ's death by considering the scriptural view of death in general as the penalty of sin. It is not the mere physical act of dying, for that, as S. Athanasius says, is natural to man[225], and can be traced in the animal world in the ages before man existed. Besides, our Lord is said to have delivered us from death, and this clearly cannot mean physical death, since to this all men are still subject, but rather spiritual death; and the death which is spoken of as the penalty of sin must therefore also be spiritual. In this sense death can be no other than the final removal from us of God's presence, the completion of the alienation from the Divine life which sin began. But, considering the close connection, throughout the Bible, of physical and spiritual death, may it not be that the former is more than the symbol and type of the latter, that it is actually its consummation? If, again, death be truly represented by the Christian consciousness as the close of man's probation, does not this also point to its being the moment when the light of God's presence, the strength of His life, is finally withdrawn from the impenitent sinner, and the spiritual death, which is the one essential punishment of sin, falls upon him? The sentence of death, then, under which the whole world lay apart from the Atonement[226], was the declaration that every man who by inheritance and by his own act shared in Adam's sin, should at the moment of physical death experience also the full measure of spiritual death. The common lot of death thus involved the consciousness of separation from the life of God, and when we so regard it, we can understand something of the horror which its anticipation brought upon the soul of the Son of God[227]. He must pass through this last and most awful human experience; not only because it was human, but because by the victorious endurance of it alone could the propitiation be accomplished. The thought throws light upon the prominence given to the death of Christ, upon His dread of it, upon His mysterious cry of dereliction upon the cross. It shows us how, though the experience was common to man, yet in Him it was in a twofold manner unique. The withdrawal of God's presence, awful as it is to the sin-hardened nature of man, must have been immeasurably more bitter to Him Who was One with the Father, whose 'meat was to do the will of His Father.' Just as we may believe the tortures of the cross to have been specially grievous to the perfect body which was unstained by sin, though other men have endured them, so, though all have to pass through death with its accompanying terror of the loss of God's presence, none can realize what that experience was to Him, because He was the Son of God. The death of Christ was therefore unique because of the nature of Him Who underwent it. But it was also unique in its results. No other death had been a propitiation for sin, for in no other death had this overwhelming consciousness of dereliction been endured victoriously, with no failure of perfect obedience, no shrinking of the will from the ordained task. In this final experience the offering was complete, the essence of the propitiation was secured, for the actual result of all human sin was herein made the very revelation of holiness itself, the means whereby the union with the will of God, so far from being finally broken, was finally perfected. The propitiatory value, therefore, of the sacrifice of Christ lay in His absolute obedience, in His willing acceptance of suffering which was thereby acknowledged as the due reward of sin, and in the death which was the essential form of both, for death is the culminating point of the alienation from God, which is both sin and its punishment. He alone endured it victoriously and without sin; He alone, therefore, transformed it from the sign and occasion of God's wrath into a well-pleasing offering; He took the punishment and made it a propitiation. 'The chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.'

(_c_) So far we have considered the sacrifice of Christ in its aspect Godwards: we have tried to find an answer to the question, How did the death of Christ propitiate the wrath of God? There remains the further question, How was it a sacrifice for us? It was, we can see, a perfect offering acceptable to God: but how has it availed 'for us men'? The mind shrinks from a purely external Atonement, and part of the imperfection of the Mosaic sacrifices consisted in the merely artificial relation between the offender and the victim. In the perfect sacrifice this relation must be real; and we are thus led to the truth, so often overlooked, but impressed on every page of the New Testament, that He who died for our sins was our true representative in that He was truly man. Without for the present going into the more mystical doctrine of Christ as the second Adam, the spiritual head of our race, what is here emphasized is the reality and perfection of His human nature, which gave Him the right to offer a representative sacrifice[228]. 'For verily not of angels doth He take hold, but He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.' Being thus 'taken from among men,' He was 'appointed for--or, on behalf of--men' and the justification of His Priesthood is the complete reality of His humanity, which, if we may so speak, overlay and hid His Divinity, so that 'though He was a Son,' unchangeably 'in the form of God,' 'yet learnt He obedience by the things which He suffered,' and thus became for us a perfect Priest. The sinless perfection of Christ, far from removing Him out of the sphere of our sinful lives, made Him perfectly representative; for He not only possessed in their greatest perfection all the powers and capacities which are the instruments of sin, but in the strength of His sinlessness and of His love He could feel for all men and accept them as His brethren, though they were sinners. Our High Priest 'hath been in all points like as we are, yet without sin.' The holiest man has some part of his nature stunted and repressed by sin, and is so far incomplete, unrepresentative: but He, unweakened and unmarred in any point by sin, can without holding anything back represent human nature in its perfection and entirety.

The representative character of Christ is manifested in a different aspect, according as He is regarded as the victim or as the priest offering the sacrifice. As the victim He must be the sin-bearer, for the transfer of guilt--which under the Mosaic system was merely symbolised by the act of laying hands on the victim's head--must for a true propitiatory sacrifice be more than external and artificial. That is to say, there must be a real meaning in S. Paul's tremendous words, 'Him Who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf,' in the passages in which He is described as bearing our sins[229], in the great prophecy which told that 'the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.' How can we find an explanation of the paradox so boldly stated by S. Paul, that He who knew no sin was yet made sin? We may not surely take all these plain phrases to mean that He bore the _punishment_ of our sins: it would have been easy to say that had it been meant. No, the relation typified by the Mosaic offerings must be real, and yet the expression 'He made Him to be sin' cannot without blasphemy be understood to mean that God the Father actually made His Son to sin. The solution of the difficulty can only be found in the truth of the Incarnation. In order that the sacrifice might be representative, He took upon Him the whole of our human nature, and became flesh, conditioned though that fleshly nature was throughout by sin[230]. It was not only in His death that we contemplate Him as the sin-bearer, but throughout His life He was, as it were, conditioned by the sinfulness of those with whom His human nature brought Him into close and manifold relations. The Crucifixion does not come as the unexpectedly shameful end of a glorious and untroubled life, though it was undoubtedly in a special sense the manifestation of the 'curse' under which He laid Himself. We cannot say that at a given moment in His life, as when the sinner's hands were laid upon the victim's head and his guilt was transferred, He began to bear our iniquity, for the very nature which He took, freed though it was in Him from hereditary guilt, was in itself, by its necessary human relations, sin-bearing. Nor did His personal sinlessness make this impossible or unreal; rather it intensified it. As S. Matthew tells us, even in relation to bodily sickness and infirmity, that He bore what He took away--'Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases'--so it was with our redemption from sin. In taking it away, He had to bear its weight, intensified by reason of that very self-sacrificing love which made Him realize with more than human keenness the sinfulness of the human nature into which He had come. There is thus nothing artificial or external in His sin-bearing, for His human nature was so real and so perfect that He was involved, so to speak, in all the consequences of the sin which is so tremendous a factor in human life, even to the enduring of the very sufferings and death which in us are the penal results and final outcome of sin, but in Him were the means of His free self-sacrifice.

Once more He was our representative as the Priest who offered the sacrifice. The requisite conditions of such an office are stated, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to be complete human sympathy, and yet such separateness from sin, and from all limitations of incompleteness, as can only be Divine. 'It behoved Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest;' 'but He, because He abideth for ever, hath His priesthood unchangeable ... for such a high priest became us, holy, harmless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and made higher than the heavens;' 'for the law appointeth men high priests, having infirmity; but the word of the oath, which was after the law, appointeth a Son, perfected for evermore[231].' In these and similar passages the doctrine of the Priesthood of Christ is developed, and it is obvious that quite as much stress is laid on His unlikeness, as on His likeness to us[232]. He is our representative as Priest, because He is both man and more than man, and can therefore perform for us what we could not and cannot perform for ourselves, in offering the perfect propitiatory sacrifice. Here is the true vicariousness of the Atonement, which consisted, not, as we shall see later, in the substitution of His punishment for ours, but in His offering the sacrifice which man had neither purity nor power to offer. From out of the very heart and centre of the human nature which was so enslaved and corrupted by sin that no human offering was acceptable to God there is raised the sinless sacrifice of perfect humanity by the God-Man, our great High Priest: human in the completeness of His sympathy, Divine in the unique power of His Priesthood. So is the condition of the law of righteousness fulfilled, and the sacrifice of obedience unto death is offered by His submission to all that constitutes in sinners the consummation and the punishment of their sin, which He transformed into the occasion and the manifestation of His perfect holiness. And it is a representative sacrifice, for unique though it is, it consists of no unheard-of experience, of no merely symbolical ceremony, unrelated and unmeaning to us; but of just those universal incidents of suffering which, though He must have felt them with a bitterness unknown to us, are intensely human--poverty, misunderstanding, failure, treachery, rejection, bodily anguish, spiritual desolation, death. 'Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.... The chastisement of our peace was upon Him,' and therefore 'by His stripes we are healed.'