Chapter IX: Part 9

It is deeply instructive to observe the pulsation of religious thought in men. Revealed religion is ever passing into natural, and natural returning to re-interpret the revealed. We can almost see the steps by which sacred history was converted into dogma; while dogma, assumed in turn as the starting-point, is ever producing new readings of the history. This world may be regarded as a _human theatre_, where the Wills of men perform the parts; or as the stage of _Divine agency_, using the visible actors as the executants of an invisible thought. Its vicissitudes, presented in the former aspect, yield only history; in the latter, give rise to doctrine. Noticed by Tacitus, the life of Christ is a provincial incident of Tiberius's reign, and his death a judicial act of Pontius Pilate's government. In the three first Gospels and the book of Acts, the crucifixion is still the act of wicked or misguided men, inflicted on an expostulating victim; not, however, without being _foreseen_ as the appointed precursor of a resurrection. The event is thus in the main simply historical; but with a divine comment which gives it an incipient theological significance. It appears under another aspect in the Gospel of John; there, Christ not only foresaw, but _determined_ his own death: his life "no man taketh it from him," but he "lays it down of himself"; he is not merely the submissive medium, but the spontaneous co-agent of a Divine intent. Finally, in St. Paul,--to whom the person and ministry of Christ were unfamiliar, who, as a disciple of his heavenly life, looked back upon them from a higher point,--the historical aspect almost wholly disappears in the ideal; and the cross becomes the Gospel, the wisdom of God and the power of God, the self-sacrifice of the Son the reconciling way to the Father, the very focus and symbol of all the mystery and mercy comprised in humanity. The movement of thought through these successive stages is obvious. An event is at first accepted as it arises. But in proportion as its concrete impression retires, the need becomes more urgent to find its function: instinctive search is made for all those elements, accessories, and effects of it, which promise to bring out its meaning and idea, until at last its doctrine absorbs itself, and enters the human mind as a permanent factor of positive religion. It is thus that the great antitheses, of Law and Gospel, of the Natural and the Spiritual man, of dead Works and living Faith, of self-seeking enmity and self-surrendering reconciliation with God, have settled upon the consciousness of Christendom, and grown into the very substance of its experience. They have become part of its natural religion. But in this character they may, conversely, be taken as the initiative of a new version of the history whence they sprung. They could not be born into unmixed and formed existence at once; but, like all new affections, must feel their way out of an early indeterminate state, into clear self-apprehension and settled purity. The testimony of the Christian conscience needs time to become articulate and collected. The shadow of human guilt may lie so dark upon the mind, the dawn of the divine holiness may so dazzle the inward vision, that blindness in part may linger for a while; and the eye, in very opening to Christ's healing touch, may fail to see. Once accustomed to the new light of life, men are no longer occupied with it alone, but find in it a medium for truer discernment of objects around. The special sentiments awakened by the Gospel test themselves afresh, like any other theory, by being fully lived out, and tried as experiments upon the soul. The type of character,--the edition of human nature,--in which they take embodiment, becomes a distinct object of critical appreciation; and while all its deep expressive traits speak for the inner truth whence they are moulded, every mixture of disharmony or defect calls for some revision of idea. In the thirsty spiritual state to which men were reduced on the eve of the Reformation, they drank up with intense eagerness the most turbid supplies of evangelical doctrine. With purer health and finer perception they become aware that not all was water of life; and that coarse notions of the nature of justice, the conditions of mercy, and the measurement of sin, were intermixed and must become mere sediment. Cleared of these, the theory is taken back to the facts of revelation, and so washed through them, that they may also emerge as from a sprinkling of regeneration. Through such re-baptism does our author, furnished with a purified conception of "atonement," pass the history of Christ.

In looking for the whereabouts of the atonement, we are guided, as in search for the pole-star, by two pointers whose indications we are to follow. Its function was double,--to cancel a guilty past, to make a holy future: and it must be of such a nature as to disappoint neither of these conditions. In determining its form, the great anxiety of theologians hitherto has been to fit it for its _retrospective_ action, and disembarrass the problem of salvation of the burden of accumulated sin. It is Mr. Campbell's distinction that he lays the superior stress on its _prospective_ action, and requires that it shall positively heal the sickness of our nature, and evolve thence a real and living righteousness. God's moral perfectness could be satisfied with nothing less. If, indeed, He looked on our guilt merely as an obstacle to our "salvation," and desired to remove it as a hinderance out of the way,--if He rather sought a pretext for making us happy than a provision for drawing us to goodness,--then the work of Christ might be so devised as simply to tear out the defiled page of the past, and register an infinite credit not our own, without inherent care for ulterior personal holiness. But were it so, the divine _love_ would amount only to an unrighteous desire for our happiness, and the divine _righteousness_ to an unloving repulsion from our sin. Such spurious analysis corresponds with no reality; and in the truth of things there can be no heavenly affection that is not holy, nor any holiness that is not affectionate.

"While in reference to the not uncommon way of regarding this subject which represents righteousness and holiness as opposed to the sinner's salvation, and mercy and love as on his side, I freely concede that all the Divine attributes were, in one view, against the sinner, in that they called for the due expression of God's wrath against sin in the history of redemption: I believe, on the other hand, that the justice, the righteousness, the holiness of God, have an aspect according to which they, as well as his mercy, appear as intercessors for man, and crave his salvation. Justice may be contemplated as according to sin its due; and there is in righteousness, as we are conscious to it, what testifies that sin should be miserable. But _justice_, looking at the sinner not simply as the fit subject of punishment, but as existing in a moral condition of unrighteousness, and so its own opposite, must desire that the sinner should cease to be in that condition; should cease to be unrighteous, should become righteous: righteousness in God craving for righteousness in man, with a craving which the realization of righteousness in man alone can satisfy. So also of holiness. In one view it repels the sinner, and would banish him to outer darkness, because of its repugnance to sin. In another, it is pained by the continued existence of sin and unholiness, and must desire that the sinner should cease to be sinful. So that the sinner, conceived of as awakening to the consciousness of his own evil state, and saying to himself, 'By sin I have destroyed myself. Is there yet hope for me in God?'--should hear an encouraging answer, not only from the love and mercy of God, but also from his very righteousness and holiness. We must not forget, in considering the response that is in conscience to the charge of sin and guilt, that, though the fears which accompany that response are partly the effect of a dawning of light, they also in part arise from remaining darkness. He who is able to interpret the voice of God within him truly, and with full spiritual intelligence will be found saying, not only, 'There is to me cause for fear in the righteousness and holiness of God,' but also, 'There is room for hope for me in the Divine righteousness and holiness.' And when gathering consolation from the meditation of the name of the Lord, that consolation will be not only, 'Surely the Divine mercy desires to see me happy rather than miserable,' but also, 'Surely the Divine righteousness desires to see me righteous,--the Divine holiness desires to see me holy,--my continuing unrighteous and unholy is as grieving to God's righteousness and holiness as my misery through sin is to his pity and love.' 'Good and righteous is the Lord, therefore will he teach sinners the way which they should choose.' 'A just God and a Saviour'; not as the harmony of a seeming opposition, but 'a Saviour, _because_ a just God.'"--p. 29.

From this justly-conceived passage the characteristics of Mr. Campbell's theory may already be divined. He sets his faith on a concrete, living, indivisible God, whom you can never understand by laying out His abstract attributes one by one, with their separate requirements, and then putting them together again to compute the resultant. He insists on the absolute dominance of a moral and spiritual idea throughout the revealed economy: of this nature is the evil to be met,--sin and estrangement; of this nature is the good to be reached,--righteousness and reconciliation; and only of this nature can be the mediation which effects the change; related upward to the Father and downward to men, in a way accordant with the laws of conscience, and intelligible by its self-light. He craves, therefore, a natural juncture, a real causal nexus, between the several parts of the process, to the exclusion of all forensic fictions and arbitrary scene-shifting and sovereign _tours-de-force_. In short, he will have no tricks passed off, no _quasi_-transformations upon the conscience; he feels the moral world to be above the range of mere miracle; any change in it irreducible to its solemn laws would _ipso facto_ fall out of it and become a mere dynamical surprise. Of _physical_ miracle our author avails himself to the full amount; the incarnation of the Son of God being, with him, as with others, the central fact and essential medium of Christian redemption. But the august power thus _super_naturally set up--the Person at once divine and human--works out his great problem _naturally_, without requiring the suspension of one rule of right, or holding any magical dealings with the character of God or man. His problem, therefore, is to show how the life and death of Christ--considered as God in humanity--were fitted, and alone fitted, to blot out the sins of the world before God, and to introduce among men a new state of real righteousness and eternal life.

The common Evangelical scheme of redemption so far affects to be deduced from certain general principles, and to render the way of redemption _conceivable_, that it is stigmatized as _rationalistic_ by Catholics and Anglicans. It is so, however, only in the sense of hanging well together, and serving the purpose of a _theological Mnemonic_ to those who want a religion ready more than deep. In the higher sense, of occupying any natural ground of reason, it does not earn its reproach. The propositions which it lays down, as to the inability of a holy nature to forgive unless circuitously and with compensation, and as to the commutability of either penal liabilities or moral attributes, are without any support from our primary sentiments of right and wrong, and could be carried out by no sane man in the conduct of life. The doctrine is taught in two principal forms;--the earlier and more exact scheme of "_Satisfaction_," elaborated by Anselm of Canterbury, and perfected by Owen and Edwards; and the modern theory of "_Public Justice_," maintained in the writings of Dr. Pye Smith and Dr. Payne, and prevailing wherever the first decadence from the old Calvinism is going on. The first of these prepares its ground by laying down these principles as fundamental;--that the connection between sin and suffering is inviolably secured on the veracity of God; that "when we have done all, we are unprofitable servants," and have only rendered our strict due; that, far from "doing all," we have done and can do nothing, except accumulate guilt, which, measure it as you will,--by the majesty of the authority defied, or the multitude of the offenders and their sins,--is practically of infinite amount. Here, then, is a case of utter despair: infinite debt; nothing to pay; remission impossible; punishment eternal; death unattainable. But we are brought into the labyrinth on one side, to emerge from it on the other. While _men_ can only multiply demerit, there are natures conceivable to which merit is possible. A Divine Person, laying aside a blessedness inherently his, and assuming sorrow not his own, and doing this out of a pure love, fulfils the conditions; and when the Son takes on him our humanity, the act, carried out unto the end, has a merit in it which in amount is a full set-off against the guilt of men. Still, this only leaves us with two opposite funds--of infinite good desert and infinite ill desert--which sit apart and unrelated. In due course, the one ought to have a boundless reward, the other a boundless punishment. But to render his affluence available for our debt, the Son consummates his self-sacrifice, substitutes himself for us as the object of retribution, and dies once for all,--one infinite death for many finite hereafters of woe. The Father's justice is satisfied; the allotment of suffering to sin has been accurately observed; His desire to pardon is released from its restraint. Having dealt with the person of the Son as if it were mankind, He may deal with mankind as if they were the Son, and look upon them as clothed with a perfect obedience.

The wholly artificial structure of this scheme, which is its greatest condemnation, has been its chief security. It is by approaching within conducting-distance of reality, that a doctrine elicits resistance and meets the stroke of natural objection; and if it only keeps far enough aloft in the metaphysic atmosphere, it may float along unarrested from zone to zone of time. Men know not what to make of propositions so much out of their sphere, so evasive of any real encounter with their consciousness, and are apt to let them pass for their very strangeness' sake. But surely we are bound to demand for them some "response of conscience," and, with Mr. Campbell, to demur to such of them as will not bear this test. Limiting ourselves to the _mediatorial_ part of the theory, we will assume the problem of moral evil to be correctly stated, and only ask whether, from the supposed case of despair, the offered solution affords any real exit of relief. Nor do we assume this for argument's sake alone. We can perfectly understand any remorseful sense, however deep, of human unworthiness; any appreciative reverence, however intense, of Christ's self-sacrifice. Set the one under the shadow of the Father's infinite disapproval, the other in the light of His infinite complacency; so far we go; there let them lie. But what next? Here, on the left hand, is Sin with its need of punishment; there, on the right, a perfect Holiness with its merits. While they are thus spread beneath the Father's eye, they break up their inviolable alliances; each moral cause crosses over and takes the opposite effect. If such change took place, the _seat_ of the fact must be sought partly in the consciousness of Christ, partly in the Father's view of things. In reference to the first, must we say that the Crucified _felt himself_ under Divine wrath and punishment, and esteemed that wrath to be _just_,--the fitting expression of his own inward _remorse_? If so, can we affirm that his consciousness was veracious? or did he not feel, in regard to _others'_ sins, sentiments and experiences that are false except in relation to _one's own_? And, ascending to the other point of view, shall we affirm that the Father _saw sin_ in the Son and was angry with him; so that, in the hour of sublimest obedience, the words ceased to be true, "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased"? And on the other hand, what is meant when it is said that beneath the Divine eye men in their guilt are seen "clothed with" a perfect righteousness? Is such an aspect of them _true_? or is it akin to an ocular deception? We seem to be reduced to this dilemma;--the change of apparent moral place implied in "imputation" is either a faithful representation, or a _quasi_-representation, of the reality of things. If the latter, then the Divine consciousness is illusory, and the world is administered on a fiction; if the former, then the moral law, in assuring us of the personal and inalienable nature of sin, gives a false report, and there is nothing to prevent a circulating medium of merit from passing current through the universe. Mr. Campbell's deference for the great advocates of this marvellous doctrine does not obstruct his perception of its difficulties.

"I freely confess," he says, "that to my own mind it is a relief, not only intellectually, but also morally and spiritually, to see that there is no foundation for the conceptions that when Christ suffered for us, the just for the unjust, he suffered either 'as by imputation unjust,' or 'as if he were unjust.' I admit that _intellectually_ it is a relief not to be called to conceive to myself a double consciousness, both in the Father and in the Son, such as seems implied in the Father's seeing the Son at one and the same time, though it were but for a moment, as the well-beloved Son, to whom infinite favor should go forth, and also as worthy, in respect of the imputation of our sins to him, of being the object of infinite wrath, he being the object of such wrath accordingly; and in the Son's knowing himself the well-beloved of the Father, and yet having the consciousness of being personally, through imputation of our sin, the object of the Father's wrath. I feel it intellectually a relief neither to be called to conceive this, nor to assume it as an unconceived mystery. Still more do I feel it _morally_ and _spiritually_ a relief, not to be required to recognize legal fictions as having a place in this high region, in which the awful realities of sin and holiness, spiritual death and spiritual life, are the objects of a transaction between the Father and the Son in the Eternal Spirit."--p. 310.

The second form of mediatorial doctrine, to which we have referred as the modern type of Calvinism, has arisen from the endeavor to evade some of these perplexities. The riddle that haunts its teachers is still the same,--how it can become possible to show mercy to sinners; but the difficulty in the way is differently conceived, and therefore met by a different expedient. It is not an obstacle in God, arising from his personal sentiment of equity, which must be satisfied; but springs out of the necessity of consistent rectitude, and adherence to law in his administrative government. The Father himself, it is intimated, would be quite willing to forgive, were there nothing to consult except his own disposition. But it would never do to play fast and loose with the criminal law of the universe, and, notwithstanding the most solemn enactments, let off delinquents on mere repentance, as if nothing were the matter beyond a personal affront. Something more is due to _Public Justice_. If the due course of retribution is to be turned aside, it must be in such a way and at such a cost as to proclaim aloud the awfulness of the guilt remitted. This, we are told, is accomplished by the sufferings and death of the Son of God, which were substituted for our threatened punishment, not as its quantitative equal paid to the Father, but as a moral equivalent in the eyes of men. Their validity is thus conceived to depend by no means on their particular measure, but on the meritorious obedience of love which was their sustaining and animating soul, and which, being on the scale of a Divine nature, gave infinite value to the smallest sorrow. Within the casket of his grief was held such a priceless righteousness, that, on beholding it, the Father might regard it as an adequate plea for acts of mercy to sinners. He does not indeed impute to them the actual moral perfectness of Christ, so as to see them invested with it, any more than he imputed to Christ their guilt, and frowned on Calvary. It is the _effects_ only of that holiness which he imputes; he offers to men the benefits of it, without reckoning it as really theirs, and giving them the _legal standing_ which its possession would bestow.

No doubt this scheme gets rid of the penal mensuration and moral conveyancing of the older Calvinism. It shifts also the bar to free mercy away from the inner personality of God, and sets it in his outer government. But when we again attempt to seize the _mediatorial expedient_, what is it? It is said to be a display of the enormity of that guilt which needs to be redeemed at such a cost. But is that need _real_? Have we not been told that it has no place in God? Does he then hang out a profession that is not true to the kernel of things, but only a show-off for impression's sake? If Eternal Justice in its inner essence does _not_ require the expiation provided, why in its outer manifestation pretend that it _does_? As nothing can become right for "the sake of good example" that is not right in itself, so is "Public Justice," unsustained by the sincere heart of reality, a mere dramatic imposture. Mr. Campbell has supplied us with a forcible statement of this truth:--

"Surely rectoral or public justice, if it is to have any moral basis,--any basis other than expediency,--must rest upon, and refer to, distributive or absolute justice. In other words, unless there be a rightness in connecting sin with misery, and righteousness with blessedness, looking at individual cases simply in themselves, I cannot see that there is a rightness in connecting them as a rule of moral government. 'An English judge once said to a criminal before him: You are condemned to be transported, not because you have stolen these goods, but that goods may not be stolen.' (_Jenkyns_, 175, 176.) This is quoted in illustration of the position, that 'the death of Christ is an honorable ground for remitting punishment,' because 'his sufferings answer the same ends as the punishment of the sinner.' I do not recognize any harmony between this sentiment of the English judge and the voice of an awakened conscience on the subject of sin. It is just because he has sinned and deserves punishment, and not because he says to himself that God is a moral governor, and must punish him to deter others, that the wrath of God against sin seems so terrible,--and as just as terrible."--p. 79.

Even were the expression backed up by reality, we cannot but ask about the fitness of the medium for the thought to be conveyed. God's horror at guilt is publicly proclaimed by the most awful crime in human history! To explain the difficulty of letting off the offender, he exhibits the anguish of the innocent! The spectacle would seem in danger of suggesting the wrong lesson to the terrified observer,--of raising to intensity the doubt whether, in a world that gives its silver to a Judas, its judgment-seat to a Pilate, and the cross to the Son of God, any Providence can care for rectitude at all. Even when the death of Christ is contemplated exclusively as a _self_-sacrifice, without remembering the guilt which compassed it, we are at a loss to understand how it could be "an honorable ground for remitting punishment." What difference did it make in the previous reasons of the Divine government, so that penalties right before should be less right afterwards? If Catiline were undergoing his just retribution at the date of the Last Supper, what plea was there for releasing him at or before the date of the resurrection? That obedience rendered and suffering endured by one soul should dispense with the liabilities of another, is a supposition at variance with the personal and inalienable nature of all sin; and to say that God "imputes the _effects_" of Christ's holiness to those who are not partakers in the cause, is to accuse the Divine government of total disregard to character and evasion of moral reality. The old Calvinism represents the Father as having an illusory _perception_ of men, _as if_ they were clad in a divine righteousness. The new Calvinism represents him as having indeed a true perception of their unrighteousness, but, notwithstanding this, falsifying the truth _in action_, and proceeding as if the facts were quite other than they are. Inasmuch as unveracious vision is intellectual, while unveracious practice is moral, the younger doctrine appears to us a positive degradation of the elder, not only in logical completeness, but in religious worth. Both of them make the redeeming economy proceed upon a _fiction_; but there is all the difference between unconscious and conscious fiction; between an inner "satisfaction" brought about by an optical displacement of merit, and an outward "exhibition" set up for the sake of impression. The theory of Owen, stern as it is, bears the stamp of resolute meaning consistently carried through into the inmost recess of the Divine nature. The newer doctrine is the production of a platform age, which obtrudes considerations of _effect_ even into its thoughts of God and his government, and can scarce refrain from turning the universe itself into pathos and _ad captandum_ display.

With good reason, therefore, does our author feel that this whole subject is in need of reconsideration. His own doctrine diverges from its predecessors at a very early point, and is seen at its source in the following proposition of Edwards, as cited by Mr. Campbell:--

"In contending that sin must be punished with an infinite punishment, President Edwards says, 'that God could not be just to himself without this vindication, unless there could be such a thing as a repentance, humiliation, and sorrow for this (viz. sin) proportionable to the greatness of the Majesty despised,'--for that there must needs be 'either an equivalent punishment, or an equivalent sorrow and repentance'; 'so,' he proceeds, 'sin must be punished with an infinite punishment'; thus assuming that the alternative of 'an equivalent sorrow and repentance' was out of the question. But, upon the assumption of that identification of himself with those whom he came to save, on the part of the Saviour, which is the foundation of Edwards's whole system, it may at the least be said, that the Mediator had the two alternatives open to his choice,--either to endure for sinners an equivalent punishment, or to experience in reference to their sin, and present to God on their behalf, an adequate sorrow and repentance. Either of these courses should be regarded by Edwards as equally securing the vindication of the majesty and justice of God in pardoning sin."--p. 136.

The side of the alternative which Edwards abandoned, our author takes up and follows out. The work of Christ, as a ground of remission, consisted in the offering on behalf of humanity of an adequate repentance. Adequate it could not have been but for his Divine nature; which attaches to his holy sorrow an infinite moral value, to balance the infinite heinousness of the sin deplored. The only reason why human penitence does not in itself avail to restore, lies in its imperfect purity and depth. Through the cloud of evil, and with the eye of self, we are disqualified for true discernment of sin as it is: both the limits of a finite nature, and the delusions of a tempted and fallen one, hinder us from appreciating the measure of our guilt and misery. Even when our better mind reasserts itself, our very compunction carries in it many a speck of ill, and our repentance needs to be repented of. But were it not for this, there would be "more atoning worth in one tear of the true and perfect sorrow which the memory of the past would awaken," "than in endless ages of penal woe." It is not the inefficacy, but the impossibility, of due penitence that constitutes our fatal disability; to be relieved from which we need to be taken out of ourselves, to be identified with a perfect spirit; our humanity must cease to be human, and become one with the Divine nature. This is precisely the condition which realized itself in Christ. As God in humanity, he had perfect sympathy with the holiness of one sphere, and the infirmities of the other; he saw the whole amount of the world's moral estrangement, not only with infinite pity for its misery, but with infinite horror at its guilt. He could both make a plenary confession for us, and respond unreservedly to the Father's righteous judgment; could bear our burden on his heart before heaven, and utter the _Miserere_ of holy sorrow, which our most plaintive cry can never approach. This is the true nature of his sufferings. He "made his soul an offering for sin," yielded it up to be filled with a sense of our real aspect beneath the Omniscient eye, and an Amen to its condemning look. Hence his sorrows had nothing _penal_ in them, any more than the tears of a devout parent over a prodigal child are penal. They are incident to that attitude of soul which a perfect nature cannot but have in the presence of a brother's sin. They are altogether moral and spiritual; and their efficacy as an expiation is that of true repentance; expressing at once our entire confession, acceptance of the Father's just displeasure, and sympathy with his compassionate grieving at our alienation.

At the same time, this mere retrospective confession would not of itself avail, were there no better hope for the future of mankind. But our Mediator's own experience in humanity, his consciousness of intimate peace and communion with the Father, opened to him the other side of our nature, assured him of its secret capacity for good, and filled him with hope in the very moment of contrition. As his sympathy could have fellowship with our temptations, so could ours have fellowship with his righteousness; and the light of Divine love that rested actually on himself was thereby a possibility for the universal human soul, and was already hovering round with longing to descend. It was on the strength of this assurance that his intercession on our behalf was presented; it would never have pleaded for indemnity in relation to the past, but as the prelude to a real righteousness, a true partnership in his life of filial harmony with God. The validity of his transaction on our behalf consisted in its perfect seizure of the whole reality, its entire "response to the mind of the Father in relation to men"; sorrow for their estrangement, conviction of their possible return, and desire to draw them into the spirit of genuine Sonship.

It was needful, then,--so we conceive our author's meaning,--that the sentiments of God towards the world's sin and misery should quit their absolute position, and should come and take their station in humanity; and from that field should turn their gaze and expression upward to meet the Father's downward and accordant look. As this "Amen of the Son to the mind of the Father" constitutes the essence of the atonement on the Divine side, so does it consist on the human side in "the Amen of each individual soul to the Amen of the Son." The reproduction in us of the filial spirit of Christ,--his confession, his pleading, his trust,--is our fellowship with him and reconciliation with God.

"This is saving faith,--true righteousness,--being the living action, and true and right movement of the spirit of the individual man in the light of eternal life. And the certainty that God has accepted that perfect and divine Amen as uttered by Christ in humanity is necessarily accompanied by the peaceful assurance that, in uttering, in whatever feebleness, a true Amen to that high Amen, the individual who is yielding himself to the spirit of Christ to have it uttered in him is accepted of God. This Amen in man is the due response to that word, 'Be ye reconciled to God'; for the gracious and Gospel character of which word, as the tenderest pleading that can be addressed to the most sin-burdened spirit, I have contended above. This Amen is sonship; for the Gospel call, 'Be ye reconciled to God,' when heard in the light of the knowledge that 'God made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him,' is understood to be the call to each one of us on the part of the Father of our spirits, 'My son, give me thine heart,' addressed to us on the ground of that work by which the Son had declared the Father's name, that the love wherewith the Father hath loved him may be in us, and he in us. In the light itself of that Amen to the mind of the Father in relation to man which shines to us in the atonement, we see the _righteousness of God in accepting the atonement_, and in that same light the Amen of the individual human spirit to that divine Amen of the Son of God is seen to be what the Divine righteousness will necessarily acknowledge as the _end of the atonement accomplished_."--p. 225.

In this view, it is not the rescue from punishment, not any favorable change in our legal standing, not any imputed righteousness, that Christ's mediation obtains, but a real transformation of soul and character through the divine infection and infusion of his own filial spirit. Only in so far as his mind thus spreads to us are we united to him, or in any way partakers of his gift of life. Personal alienation can have no reversal but in personal return; nor can anything "extraneous to the nature of the Divine will itself, to which we are to be reconciled, have part in reconciling us to that will." The fear of hell is not repentance; the assurance of heaven is not salvation; nor under any modification can the desire of safety, or the consciousness of its attainment, constitute the least approach to holiness. The good alone can touch the springs of goodness; and the divine and trustful life of Christ must speak to us on its own account, and win us by its own power, or not at all. Not that it acts on us merely in the way of _example_. We do not so stand apart from him in our independent individuality, that by an external imitation we can copy him, and become, as it were, each another Christ, repeating in ourselves his offering of propitiation. He is the Vine, of which we are the branches. The sap is from him, drawn through the eternal root of righteousness, and does but flow as a derived life into us. The Son of God is not a mere historical personage, to be contemplated at a distance in the past, but ever with us in the power of an endless life; still succoring us when we are tempted, and ministering to conscience a present help and peace. It is not, therefore, by _following_ him, but by _abiding in_ him, that we have our fellowship in his harmony with God.

The essence, then, of the scheme of redemption, in the view of our author, seems to be this: that the Divine nature entered humanity to open the Fatherliness of God by living the life of perfect Sonship; and that, having awakened that life in us by this its visible realization, he sustains it by the inner presence of his Spirit. It is one of the obvious consequences of this doctrine, that no exclusive or exceptional value is to be ascribed to the _death_ of Christ. It is simply the final and crowning expression of the same filial mind which is the continuous essence of his whole existence upon earth. Nor does the theory attach importance to any _sufferings_ of Christ, as such; but only as media and measures of moral expression. Had men sinned _as spirits_, his reconciling work would not have involved death at all: but since in our constitution mortality is "the wages of sin," his response to the Divine mind in regard to sin would have been incomplete, had he not honored this law and tasted its realization. Not to lose sight of the main features of the doctrine in pursuit of details, we must pass without notice many curious and subtle thoughts of our author on this part of his subject. Indeed, everywhere the reader who has patience with the entangled style will find deep hints and delicate turns of reflection. But we must withdraw to a little distance from his system, and endeavor to look at it as a whole; fixing attention especially on the central point of all,--the _mediatorial provision_, which replaces the penal "satisfaction" of the elder Calvinism, and the "exhibition of rectoral justice" of the modern divines.

Instead of an infinite punishment endured or represented, the theory offers us an infinite _repentance_ performed. Repentance for what?--for human sin. Repentance by whom?--by Him "who knew no sin." Is this a thing that can be? Is vicarious contrition at all more conceivable than vicarious retribution? It is surely one and the same difficulty that meets them both. On what ground is the transfer of either moral qualities or their effects regarded by our author as impossible?--because at variance with our consciousness of the personal and inalienable nature of sin. But not less is this truth contradicted when we say that the guilt may be incurred by one person, and the availing repentance take place in another. Nor can any imagination of Christ's state of mind identify it with penitence. Mr. Campbell himself describes it (p. 135) as having "all the elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin of man--a perfect sorrow--a perfect contrition,--all the elements of such a repentance, and that in absolute perfection--all--_excepting the personal consciousness of sin_." This exception, however, contains just the essential element of the whole. Penitence without any personal consciousness of sin is a contradiction in terms; and the requisition of the Divine law is, that _the sinner_ shall turn from the evil of his heart, not that the righteous shall make confession for him. The entire moral value of contrition belongs to it as the sign of inner change of character from prior evil to succeeding good; and it admits of no transplantation from the identical personality which has been the seat of the evil and is the candidate for the good.

Further, it seems a paradox to say, with our author, that true repentance is impossible to man, who alone needs it; and can be realized only by the Son of God, in whom there is no room for it. It would indeed be a hopeless realm to live in, which should annex to all sins both an imperative demand and an absolute disqualification for adequate contrition, and first open the fountain of availing tears in holy natures that have none to shed. It is, in truth, of the very essence of repentance to have its seat in mixed and imperfect moral beings: and our author lays upon it quite an arbitrary requisition, when he insists that, to pass as adequate, it must contain a perfect appreciation of the sin deplored,--a view of it coincident with that of God. Under such an aspect as this it could never have appeared to us, though we had remained guiltless of it, and recoiled from it: and we can hardly be required to reach, in the rebound of recovery, a point beyond the station which would have prevented the fall. Many errors in theology arise from applying absolute conceptions to relative conditions, and forgetting that religion, as realized in us, is a life, a movement, a progress, and not an ultimate limit of perfection. Repentance is a transitional state, to which it is absurd to apply an infinite criterion: it is a change from the worse to the better mind, and cannot need the resources or belong to the experience of the best. To pronounce it impossible to the wandering and fallen, and make it the exclusive function of the All-holy, implies the strangest metamorphosis of its meaning.

But how, it may be asked, could a paradox so violent find favor with an author everywhere intent on the exclusion of fiction from Christian theology? To refer a moral act to the _wrong personality_, to toss about a solemn change like penitence between guilty and innocent, as if its particular seat were a matter of indifference, is so serious an error, that it could never enter a mind like Mr. Campbell's, unless under some plausible disguise. Can we find the shape under which it has recommended itself to his approval?

The sentiment ascribed to the Son of God in regard to sin,--wanting as it does the essential penitential element of personal compunction,--is simple sorrow for others' guilt, founded on perfect apprehension of its nature. But this attitude of soul in him awakens the conscience of his disciples, and is reproduced in them by fellowship. Spread into their consciousness, it is no longer clear of the immediate presence of sin, but, falling in with it, assumes the missing element, and becomes repentance. When the Christian sense of evil, which ever partakes of true contrition, is thus contemplated as a transmigration of the Mediator's own spirit into the soul, the two are so identified in thought, that what is true only of the human effect is referred to the Divine cause; and the moral sorrow of Christ is regarded as _potentially_ equivalent to repentance, because that is _actually_ the form of the corresponding phenomenon in us. If this, however, _explains_ our author's position, it hardly _justifies_ it. Intercession for others in their guilt may _move them_ to remorse for their own, but is a fact of quite different nature. As attributes and expressions of character, the two phenomena are not to be confounded; and as affecting our relation to God, there is the obvious and admitted distinction, that intercession avails not for those who remain impenitent, and would not be needed for the spontaneously penitent. The sorrowful expostulations of the Son of God have only so far a reconciling effect as they become the medium, in the hearts of men, of an awakened contrition, aspiration, and faith. We cannot conceive them to have _immediately_ altered--as repentance _does_--the personal relation between God and the transgressors of His will; else the change would be a change in the Divine sentiment whilst its objects still remained unchanged. The effect _waits_ for its development in souls melted and renewed. And thus the atoning sorrow of Christ becomes simply a provision for a healing penitence in men.

The ascription of "repentance" to Christ is curious in another point of view. It arises from a blending together of _his_ consciousness and _his disciples'_; from slurring the lines of personality between them; from regarding their spiritual state as an organic extension of his, and his as the vital root of theirs. In his endeavor to recommend it to us, our author instinctively runs into abstract expressions in speaking of mankind; fusing down concrete men into "_humanity_"; referring to the Mediator as "God in _humanity_"; and so, dealing with our nature as if it were a single existence, carrying or turning up all its individuals as partial phenomena of one essence. On the other hand, in our endeavor to correct his doctrine, we have had to lay stress on the inalienable and separate character of all particular persons, taken one by one; to insist on the solitude of each responsible agent, and the impassable barriers which forbid the transference of moral attributes from mind to mind. Which of these two modes of conception is the truer? For according as we incline to the one or the other,--according as we treat _humanity_ as the organic unit of which individual samples of mankind are numerical accidents, or take each man as an integer, of which the race is a multiple,--shall we lean towards mediatorial or towards direct religion. We are firmly convinced that _no_ doctrine of _mediation_--in the strict sense implying transactions with God on behalf of men, _as well as_ in the opposite direction--can be harmonized with the modern _individualism_; and that it is precisely in the attempt to unite these incompatibles, that the forensic fictions to which Mr. Campbell objects, and the moral fiction in his own theory to which we object, have had their origin. They are mere artificial devices to compensate the loss of that realistic mode of conception in which alone a true atoning doctrine can rest in peace. So long as you contemplate the Redeemer as a detached person, not less insulated in his integrity of being than angel from archangel or from man, the difficulty will remain insuperable of making his moral acts avail for _other human individuals_, unless by a fictitious transference, against which conscience protests. Punishment by substitute, righteousness by deputy, vicarious repentance, are notions at variance with the fundamental postulates of the Moral Sense: and in the attempt to defend them we are liable to lose the solemn, living, face-to-face reality of the strife within us, and to weave around us a web of legal and formal relations, as little like any heart-felt veracity as a chancery decree to a law of nature. In proportion as the soul is pierced with a sharper contrition, and attains a deeper and clearer insight into her own unfaithful disorder, will the inherent impossibility of any foreign exchange of righteousness become apparent, and the desire to be shielded from punishment will pass away: nor is the conscience truly awakened which does not rather rush into the arms of its just anguish than start back and fly away. And the more you hold up to view the holiness of Christ, the darker will the personal past appear to grow; for self-reproach will say: "Yes, I see him as the holy Son of God; the guiltier am I that the vision did not keep me from my sin." Talk to such a one of Christ's transactions on our behalf, as "_federal head_" of a redeemed people; and his misery will take no notice of the cold pretence, unless to think, "Whatever engagements he made for me, I have broken them all." In short, while Christ is regarded simply as an historical individual, with the chasm of an incommunicable personality between him and us, no ingenuity can construct, except from the ruins of moral law, any other bridge of mediation than the suasion of natural reverence, by which his image passes into the heart of faith.

It is otherwise when we break through the restraints of the modern individualism, and strive to enter into that literal identification of Christ with Christians which is so frequent with St. Paul. If, instead of saying that Christ _had_ our human nature, we could put our thought into this form,--"He _was_ (and _is_) our human nature,"--if we could suppose our type of being not merely represented in him as a sample, but concentrated in him as a whole,--we should read its essentials and destination in his biography: his predicates would be its predicates: and in his sorrows and sanctity it might undergo purification. Humanity thus made into a person would then be the corresponding fact to Deity embodied in a person: both would be _Incarnations_,--essential Manhood and essential Godhead,--co-present in the same manifested life. In the ordinary conception of the doctrine of two natures, Christ is represented, we believe, as _a_ man; in the mode of thought to which we now refer, he appears as _Man_. The difficulties which arise in the attempt to carry out this form of thinking are evident enough, even to those who know nothing of the Parmenides of Plato. Indeed, they are rendered so obtrusive by our modern habits of mind, that even a momentary seizure, for mere purposes of interpretation, of that older intellectual posture, scarcely remains possible to us. The apprehension of it, however, is indispensable to one who would appreciate the mediatorial theology of Christendom,--a theology which never could have sprung up if our present conceptualist and nominalist notions had always prevailed, and which, ever since their ascendency in Europe, has been driven to deplorable shifts of self-justification. The parallel between the first and second Adam, the fall and the restoration, the death incurred and the life recovered, acquire new meaning for those who thus think,--that as the incidents of Adam's existence become _generic_ by _descent_, so the incidents of Christ's existence are generic by _diffusion_; that if in the one we see humanity at head-quarters in _time_, in the other we see it at head-quarters in _comprehension_; so that, like an atmosphere which, purified at nucleus, has the taint drawn off from its margin, our nature is freed from its sickliness in him. It becomes intelligible to us in what sense we are to take refuge in him as our including term, to find in him an epitome of our true existence, to die (even to have died) with him, to suffer with him, to be risen with him, to dwell above in him. On the assumption of such a union, his life ceases to be an individual biography; what is manifested in him personally, becomes true of us universally; and it is as if we were all--like special examples in a general rule, or undeveloped truths in a parent principle--virtually present in his dealings with evil and with God. It is evident, that in this view his mediation has no chasm to cross, no foreign region to enter, but is an inseparable predicate of his own personal acts. The facility of conception afforded by this method is betrayed by Mr. Campbell's resort to an analogous hypothesis as a mere illustrative help to the mind. Witness the following striking passage:--

"That we may fully realize what manner of equivalent to the dishonor done to the law and name of God by sin an adequate repentance and sorrow for sin must be, and how far more truly than any penal infliction such repentance and confession must satisfy Divine justice, let us suppose that all the sin of humanity has been committed by one human spirit, on whom is accumulated this immeasurable amount of guilt; and let us suppose this spirit, loaded with all this guilt, to pass out of sin into holiness, and to become filled with the light of God, becoming perfectly righteous with God's own righteousness,--such a change, were such a change possible, would imply in the spirit so changed a perfect condemnation of the past of its own existence, and an absolute and perfect repentance, a confession of its sin commensurate with its evil. If the sense of personal identity remained, it must be so. Now, let us contemplate this repentance with reference to the guilt of such a spirit, and the question of pardon for its past sin and admission now to the light of God's favor. Shall this repentance be accepted as an atonement, and, the past sin being thus confessed, shall the Divine favor flow out on that present perfect righteousness which thus condemns the past, or shall that repentance be declared inadequate? Shall the present perfect righteousness be rejected on account of the past sin, so absolutely and perfectly repented of? and shall Divine justice still demand adequate punishment for the past sin, and refuse to the present righteousness adequate acknowledgment,--the favor which, in respect of its own nature, belongs to it? It appears to me impossible to give any but one answer to these questions. We feel that such a repentance as we are supposing would, in such a case, be the true and proper satisfaction to offended justice. Now, with the difference of personal identity, the case I have supposed is the actual case of Christ, the holy one of God, bearing the sins of all men on his spirit,--in Luther's words, 'the one sinner,'--and meeting the cry of these sins for judgment, and the wrath due to them, absorbing and exhausting that Divine wrath in that adequate confession and perfect response on the part of man which was possible only to the infinite and eternal righteousness in humanity."--p. 143.