from which the life of the whole body is derived. For the redemp tion of sinful humanity, wrought fully once for all by Himself, must be applied separately to individual members of the race. Only so can actual redemption and propitiation before God be accomplished for them, through the removal of sin and of the debt and punishment which are its consequences. Pardon cannot be bestowedunless there is a guarantee for the actual casting out of sin. When the sinner is thus reconciled with God, a gradual process of renewal follows, in which the moral and religious elements are constantly tending to become identified. For cases of death-bed conversion, and even for those who die unconverted, there still remains till the end of the present world and the general judgment an intermediate state of trial, probably by fire (for which Mark ix. 49 is quoted). But a time comes sooner or later, when the being is wholly turned to evil (dümonisirt) and no further change is possible. Conversion after death is harder than before, and the higher position once forfeited can never be regained. (Ib., pp. 190-2, 484, 488.)

Similar specimens of modern Lutheran teaching might easily be multiplied; these are taken as a sample, from some of the principal contemporary divines of that body.

CHAPTER VII.

THE MORAL FITNESS OF THE ATONEMENT.

AND now that we are come to the end of our inquiry, does it not almost seem as if we were still at the beginning? Are we not tempted to exclaim, with the philosopher of old, that the end of all knowledge is the consciousness of our ignorance? Doubtless what Coleridge said of philosophy is even more true of theology, that it begins in wonder and ends in wonder. Indeed, this is but to repeat the language of the ritual, that He, who has wonderfully created our nature, has yet more wonderfully redeemed it.

"Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind.” '

After all has been said, much must ever remain unsaid. Our deepest feelings are precisely those we are least able to express; and, even in the act of adoration, silence is our highest praise. Still, without attempting to dogmatize on points beyond the sphere of revelation, we may gather up some results, both negative and positive, from what has been recorded of the past.

Not to dwell on minor undercurrents of opinion or belief, we have seen the successive waves of two great

1 Göthe, Faust.

theories of satisfaction pass over the surface of theology, and again retire, but not without leaving indelible traces behind them. First came the Origenist notion of a ransom paid to the Evil Spirit, which found its latest utterance in Peter Lombard, but was then already merging into the broader and more spiritual conception of a victory over sin, and therefore over him who is its author. After this followed the Anselmic conception of the necessity of an infinite satisfaction for an infinite debt, discussed in all its bearings throughout the scholastic period, and almost universally rejected, but finding new advocates at the Reformation, and becoming in their hands the basis of a system which has served first to distort, and then to alienate, the moral and religious convictions of a large section of Christendom. The scholastic controversy brought out with peculiar clearness that, while we have no right to assume that an adequate satisfaction was necessary, a satisfaction not only sufficient but superabundant has certainly been made, owing to the infinite worth, by virtue of the hypostatic union, of those human acts and sufferings which the Redeemer offered for the sins of His brethren as the Head and Representative of our race.

We cannot, again, say, except by a figure of speech, that our sins were imputed to Him, or that He who was sinless endured the wrath of God; still less, in the blasphemous language of several Lutheran divines, that He suffered the torments of the damned. Yet it is certain that His mental sufferings, which greatly ex

ceeded the bodily pains of the Passion, had an expiatory virtue, and that they were chiefly, though not exclusively, supernatural. As was said in a previous chapter, He was offering to the Eternal Father the one perfect act of contrition for the sins of His brethren, whose nature He had assumed; He was making a general confession of the iniquities of all mankind, which He had taken upon Him, as though they were indeed His own. Nor is this true only of those incidents of the Passion which are crowded into the last twenty hours of His earthly ministry. Every act of that spotless life had a sacrificial power. It was at once a confession of the sins that had separated man from his Maker, and an intercession for the transgressors. And thus even those sufferings which might seem at first sight purely natural, as the awful solitude of which the Prophet spoke, or the 'contradiction' foretold by Simeon and noticed in the Epistle to the Hebrews, have their supernatural side also. The Agony in the Garden and dereliction on the Cross represent, in the language of prophecy, an ocean of sorrow,' on whose shore we may stand, and gaze down upon the waveless surface; but the depths below no created intelligence can fathom. Thus much, however, we may certainly discern; and it is needful to repeat it, because it has not unfrequently been denied -that the bitterness of His spiritual trial lay not merely in the treachery or coldness of His intimates, the foresight of His Passion, and the sorrow for His murderers' sin. The chalice that could not pass from

Him, the agony Gabriel was powerless to console, meant more-far more-than that. The accumulated wickedness of all generations of mankind, in its fulness and its detail, not weighed in the scales of human judgment, but seen in the light of His Countenance before whom the heavens are unclean-the just wrath of the Allholy, not, indeed, against Him who was sinless, but against the sin which for us men, and as our Representative, He had in that supreme agony of meritorious contrition vouchsafed to make His own'— the sense of unutterable loneliness, as though (if one may venture to say so) the hypostatic union was being dissolved and He was to become one in will, as in nature, with the apostate creature who had forsaken God-these were the rebukes that broke His Heart, and wrung from His parched lips the loud and exceeding bitter cry that startled the gazers on Calvary. It was the hour of the power of darkness. The light of the Beatific Vision was shrouded, for so He willed; and in a sense most real, though passing human comprehension, Jesus received into His sinless consciousness the burden of our guilt, and learnt by experience, as He alone could learn, whose gaze alone could "measure the infinite descent," what it is to be shut out from the Eternal Love. When He brought in vision before one of His saints a venial sin in all its naked deformity, she swooned beneath the intolerable anguish. What must the contemplation of all sins,

1 ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν ἁμαρτίαν ἐποίησεν. 2 Cor. v. 20.