from which the life of the whole body is derived. For the redemption 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 bestowed, unless 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, (dämonisirt,) 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; but these are taken as a sample, from some of the principal contemporary divines of that body.

CHAPTER VII.

MORAL FITNESS OF THE ATONEMENT IN RELATION TO MAN.

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

*Göthe's Faust.

belief, we have seen the successive waves of two great 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 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 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 the mental greatly exceeded the bodily sufferings of the Passion, and that they were chiefly, though not exclusively, supernatural. Even those which at first blush might seem purely natural, as the awful solitude

of which the Prophet spoke, or the 'contradiction' fore told 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. That, in some sense to us incomprehensible, Jesus received into His human consciousness the countless sins of all generations of mankind, and vouchsafed to learn by experience what it is to be shut out from the Eternal Love, is attested by the fourth word on the Cross, and the sweat of Blood. Dolor Meus in conspectu Meo semper. We can but adore in silence the inscrutable secret of those 'unknown agonies,' the interior martyrdom sealed at last in death.

The controversies of the Reformation threw a fresh light on the subjective and moral aspects of the doctrine, and exhibited with peculiar distinctness the error of supposing, that the Atonement wrought by Christ was to be understood as superseding our own satisfactions or obedience, instead of sanctifying and transforming them. This was in fact the question that lay at the root of the long disputes on justification, and the nature of justifying faith.

Another idea elicited in the course of discussion is, that in all probability the Son of God, 'the Firstborn of every creature,' would have assumed our nature, and sanctified it by personal indwelling, though we had needed no redemption. We could not have argued d priori that He would come at all, or that, when we had fallen, He would come to die. We could not have

told that the Incarnation of Jesus was to be the means of our union with the Godhead, or that our atonement, if atonement was needed, would be wrought by His death. Nor can we tell why it has been so now. The reasons lie deep in the counsels of eternal wisdom. But looking back on what has actually occurred, with the light which revelation throws upon it, we may discern something, if not of the original causes of the Atonement, at least of its adaptation to our nature, and the lessons it is designed to teach. There is a fitness in the belief, that He, who is 'the Brightness of the everlasting Light, the unspotted Mirror of God's majesty, and Image of His goodness,' would have come to make 'His delights with the children of men,' even if they had persevered in their primal innocence. Still more does it seem natural to us, that, when we had sinned, He should consecrate afresh our fallen humanity in the baptism of blood; and this for many

reasons.

1. Pain, as has been already said, is the deepest and truest thing in our nature since the Fall. We feel instinctively that it is so, even before we can tell why. Pain is what binds us most closely to one another and to God. It appeals most directly to our sympathies, as the very structure of language indicates. To go no further than our own, we have English words, such as condolence, to express sympathy with grief; we have no one word to express sympathy with joy. So, again, it is a common remark that, if a funeral and wedding procession were to meet, something of the shadow of death would be cast over the bridal train, but no reflection of bridal happiness would pass into the mourners' hearts. Scripture itself has been not in

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