have intended his teaching to be Antinomian, but he lived to witness in the excesses of the Anabaptists a wild outbreak of the Antinomianism which is its inevitable result. From that day to this, wherever his doctrinal system has been thoroughly accepted and realised, whether in his own country or in ours, it has acted as a deadly narcotic to the action of conscience. Hallam observes that "it is certain that we find no testimonies to any reform of manners in the countries that embraced it." If Lutheranism is powerless for good or for evil in Germany now, that is simply because, among the great majority of its nominal adherents, "the doubtsome faith of the Church of Rome," which it was intended to supersede, has long since been replaced by a faith which can hardly be called doubtsome, for it does not offer to the revelation of God Incarnate even the homage of a doubt whether it

known passage, from his Letter to Melancthon, is characteristic: "Sufficit quod agnovimus per divitias gloriæ Dei Agnum, qui tollit peccata mundi; ab hoc non avellet nos peccatum, etiamsi millies millies uno die fornicemur aut occidamus. Putas tam parvum esse pretium et redemptionem pro peccatis nostris factam in tanto et tali Agno? Ora fortiter; es enim fortissimus peccator." It would be easy to multiply similar extracts from his writings. I have no pleasure in throwing stones at a great memory, still less would I attempt to gauge theological systems by the aberrations of individual teachers. But when Luther is again put forward as a great preacher of truth and righteousness, it is well people should understand clearly what his real teaching was.

may perchance be true. There is, indeed, as we shall see later on, a reaction in an orthodox direction among Lutheran divines of the present day, but the most prominent among them, though they may still adhere to the traditional terminology of their formularies, have wandered far from the ideas it was originally intended to convey.

In another Note occurs the following passage, which is probably, from the turn of expression and the allusion to St. Bernard's words which stand on the title page, intended to include a reference to my book, though it is not expressly named. I therefore transscribe it as it stands.

"St. Bernard speaks of the merits of Christ's death being the mind in which He died; and recent Roman Catholic writers dwell on the merits of Christ's satisfaction and sacrifice for sin, speaking of the relation of the excellence that was in Him to us and our demerits in a way that, though free from the charge of legal fiction, has in it the essence of that imputation of righteousness with which they reproach the divines of the Reformation. I have not thus conceived of merit counter-balancing demerit, any more than of penal suffering substituted for punishment. That the self

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sacrifice present in it has been the atoning virtue of Christ's sacrifice is a form of this conception of merit which commends itself to some, though perhaps rather as a part of the man-ward aspect of the atoncment, than as its power to prevail with God. Love is the life in which the atonement was made, and self-sacrifice, which is of the essence of love (though self-sacrifice is not an adequate definition of love), is the form in which love is seen in the atonement. But the atonement is such, not because of the self-sacrificing love manifested in it, but as that love taking a form determined by our need as God's offspring, alienated from Him by sin." 1

The latter portion of this extract does not call for much comment here. It is obvious that self-sacrifice is not identical with love, though it is, under the conditions of this life, one of its most essential expressions, and, as the author admits, is the form which it took in the atonement. Neither, of course, would it suffice to constitute an atonement in itself, and apart from the method of exercising it. It was not the self-sacrifice but the moral element of the Sacrifice of Christ, to which I ascribed its atoning virtue; the self-sacrifice

1 Nature of the Atonement, p. 399.

2 A few words have indeed been inserted (at p. 6), to bring out this idea

I spoke of chiefly in its relation to man. But Mr. Campbell speaks of Catholic writers dwelling on the excellence of Christ as related to our demerits in a way that has in it the essence of the imputation of righteousness with which they reproach the Reformers. I am not sure that I clearly understand the charge. It is certainly Catholic doctrine, that all human merit is accepted for Christ's sake only, and derives its whole efficacy from His Cross and Passion. But this differs toto cœlo from the Lutheran view of a transfer or imputation of righteousness, and of merit counterbalancing demerit. It is just the difference between saying that His merit and obedience is taken as a substitute for ours, and saying that He has merited for His brethren, as the Second Adam and Head of the family of the regenerate, forgiveness of the past and grace henceforth to serve God, not as slaves, but sons. It is a real though imperfect righteousness which "the just Judge" rewards, yet in bestowing that crown of righteousness, He is, in St. Augustine's words, crowning His own gifts. We can neither be justified without the righteousness of Christ, whereby all grace is won for us, nor is it by that righteousness, in the words

more clearly, but they do not add to it, and I wrote them before seeing Mr. Campbell's comment.

of the Tridentine Council, that we are "formally just." A substituted righteousness is even more alien from the Catholic idea of the Atonement than a substituted punishment. that idea from failing to realise the infusion of sanctifying grace through sacramental union with our Lord, as an integral part of it. At all events his objections to it seem ultimately to run up into the difficulty, which he elsewhere expressly recognises and dwells upon, in conceiving of any atonement being required at all, rather than a mere announcement of the Divine mercy.1

The author, I think, misapprehends

It will be seen that I have confined myself to noticing in detail those passages of Mr. Campbell's book which bear directly on my own, and seemed, therefore, to call for a reply. Criticism on living writers does not (as was observed in my original preface) fall properly within the scope of a treatise on the history of doctrine. But it is impossible not to sympathise with the spirit of Mr. Campbell's book and with much of its positive teaching, especially as to what he calls the "expiatory confession of our sins by Christ," which seems to be its leading idea. My criticisms, were I to undertake the task of criticising,

Nature of Atonement, pp. 20, sqq.