is not this like saying, that the end justified the means, that deception was the chosen instrument of the God of truth? To this a modern writer, viewing the whole question from the independent standpoint of impartial unbelief, adds a further observation, that the Incarnation being thus introduced for an illusory purpose is in danger of being itself regarded as a phenomenal illusion, and the Docetic heresy brought back by a sidewind into the Church.* That, however, seems an over-refinement of criticism. Those who insist most strongly on this object of the human nature of the Redeemer, insist also on the necessity of His actual death, which required a real, not merely a phenomenal, body; not to repeat here an observation made before, in a different connection, that the Fathers recognize many other objects of the Incarnation which certainly involve its reality. It is more to the purpose to remark, what indeed did not escape the notice of many advocates of the theory, that there is something shocking to natural reverence in the blood of the Holy One becoming the prize of Satan. More than that, the whole theory carried with it the original sin of its Gnostic parentage. The essentially dualistic notion of two independent powers, set over against one another, of a kingdom of light and a kingdom of darkness, with jurisdictions mutually limited by conflicting claims, lies inevitably at the root of any system which treats evil as other than a temporary and accidental interruption of the divine order, or ascribes to the Evil Spirit rights of whatever kind, and though acquired by the voluntary and disgraceful submission

* Baur Von der Versöhnung, pp. 82, 83.

of his captives, as against the supremacy of Him who is infinite in holiness as in power and love. An unjust victory could confer no claims, nor wrong because it was successful become the ground of an immoral right.

This radical flaw of the whole system had not been unfelt from the first, while its inadequacy as an explanation of the great mystery of redemption had prevented it from ever being held alone. We have seen that Origen combined with it the idea of a sacrifice offered to God, though without attempting to harmonize the two, which indeed was scarcely possible. Nor was this idea ever lost sight of by succeeding writers. It is suggested, in antagonism to the dominant theory, as early as the fourth century, by Gregory Nazianzen. To the question, To whom was Christ's blood paid as a ransom? he replies; "If to the Evil One, shame upon the insult, that the robber should not only receive a ransom from God, but receive God Himself, a payment so much exceeding in value his own tyranny, on account of which it was just that we also should be spared. But if it was paid to the Father, first how? For it was not by Him we were held captive. And next, for what reason should the blood of His only-begotten Son please the Father, who would not receive Isaac when being offered up by his father, but changed the victim and gave a ram instead of the human sacrifice? Or is it clear that the Father receives it, without having asked or needed it, but on account of the dispensation (oikovoμíav) and its being fit that men should be sanctified by that which is mortal in God, that He might deliver us Himself, having conquered the tyrant by violence, and bring us back to Himself through the mediation of His Son, who disposed this too to the

honour of the Father, to whom He seems to concede all things?"* This was to assert, that a sacrifice was presented to the Father, but to reject particular theories about it as doubtful or superfluous. And, accordingly, the writer says elsewhere, that it is a point on which we are free to speculate, for though not without advantage to hit the mark, it is not dangerous to miss it. Four centuries later, John of Damascus, who repeats almost the very words of Gregory as to the price being paid to the tyrant, though in an earlier chapter of the same book he had acknowledged a certain claim of justice on Satan's side, decides, against Gregory, that the 'ransom' was paid to the Father because we had sinned against Him. It is remarkable that Gregory, while discarding the idea of a payment to Satan, yet retains one of the strangest features of that theory, saying, that he who had deceived us with the hope of Godhead was himself deceived by the veil of flesh.

This idea of a sacrifice offered to the Father (or rather to the whole Trinity)§ is stated or implied by the great body of patristic writers, though not made the basis of any particular scheme of satisfaction, and usually held in connection with that of a ransom paid to Satan. St. Athanasius speaks of Christ offering a sacrifice for all; St. Augustine traces out the essential obligation of sacrifice, even antecedently to the conviction of sin, as the outward expression of the supreme homage (Marpɛía) due to God; Eusebius refers to the sacrifice of Abel, which he says was accepted in

De Fid. Orth. iii. 27. Cf. supr. p. 42.

Fulgent. Contr. Arian. ii. 4. Cf. Ans. Cur Deus Homo, ii. 18.

preference to Cain's because it was an animal sacrifice; St. Cyril of Alexandria says, "This was the goat sent alive into the wilderness, the goat that was offered to the Lord as a victim for the propitiation of sins, and made a true propitiation for the peoples who believe on Him;" St. Leo speaks of an offering to God, though he dwells chiefly on the necessity of a ransom from the power of the Evil One; St. Gregory the Great says, that the Son of God offered a sacrifice for us, and insists that a victim for man must himself be man, but to cleanse them from sin must be sinless.* The only attempt, if such it can be called, to mediate between these theories is in the view dwelt upon in Athanasius' treatise on the Incarnation, of a sinless victim being needed to undergo the sentence of death, incurred by man, as an obligation or kind of debt, at the Fall, and from which God could not otherwise release Him without being untrue to His own word. The writer sometimes speaks of an equivalent (karáλλŋλov), sometimes of a debt owed (ὀφειλόμενον τῷ θανάτῳ) or a full satisfaction to death; and he thus illustrates the two natures of our Lord, who must be man to die, and more than man not to be under the obligation of dying. The Word is said to take to Himself a body, which partaking of the common nature of all may be fit to die in the place of all, but through the indwelling Word may remain incorruptible. The same view is expressed by St. Ambrose, when he says our Lord underwent death, that

* Eus. De Dem. Ev. i. 10. Aug. De Civ. Dei, x. 19. Contr. Faust. xx. et passim. Cyril In Lev. x. Greg. Mag. Mor. xvii. 46.

† Ath. De Inc. 9. τὸ δυνάμενον ἀποθανεῖν ἑαυτῷ λαμβάνει οῶμα, ἵνα τοῦτο τοῦ ἐπὶ πάντων λόγου μεταλαβὸν ἀντὶ πάντων ἱκανὸν γένηται τῷ θανάτῳ, καὶ δία τὸν ἐνοικήσαντα λόγον ἄφθαρτον διαμείνῃ,

the sentence might be fulfilled and the decree satisfied.*

At the root of all these theories, whether of a ransom paid to Satan, or a sacrifice to God, or a fulfilment of the sentence pronounced on Adam's sin, lay two ideas, which became afterwards the two factors of the scholastic theory of satisfaction, and which were brought into prominence by the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, in the East on the Godhead and Incarnation of the Eternal Son, in the West on the extent of man's natural faculties and the doctrines of grace. These are, on the one hand, the infinite value of the human acts and sufferings of the Redeemer, through the hypostatic union; on the other, the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and the need of Divine grace to supplement the weakness of a corrupted will. The latter point assumed a new importance and distinctness in Augustine's controversy with the Pelagians. Athanasius, in his first and second Orations against the Arians, is led constantly to argue, that only One who is Himself God could mediate between God and man, could restore to us the holiness we had lost, make us partakers of the Divine nature, sons of God, and heirs of eternal life. A mere man, he urges, might have preached forgiveness, he could not have really removed the barrier between man and God. St. Cyril, in his tenth anathema, is still more explicit; he says again; "One would not have been equivalent to all, had He been mere man; but if He is understood to be God incarnate and suffering in His own flesh, the

Ambr. De Fug. Sæc. ut implereter sententia et satisfieret judicato. Here we have the word 'satisfy,' but in reference to the sentence pronounced on Adam, not to the justice of God.