dence of inward struggles, and leave us no room to doubt that he would more willingly have borne, had it been his lot, that oppression which he unwillingly consented to inflict. To die for mankind, like Prometheus, who so strangely combines the characters of a rebel and a redeemer, the Miltonic ideal of Paradise Lost and Regained; or for one's country, like the popular heroes of Roman and Athenian legend; or for the sacred duties of kinship, like Antigone; or for one's friend, like Nisus for the young Euryalus in the Æneid, was the highest ideal of Pagan virtue.* And it foreshadowed, however imperfectly, a higher truth. It was, far more than the usage of animal sacrifice, so often quoted, the genuine though unconscious witness of the natural conscience, that "without shedding of blood there is no remission." For sacrifice, apart from direct revelation, was little more at best than the rude expression of a want dimly felt. It told, indeed, of sin, but it might mean, like the ring of Polycrates, that too much happiness is not safe for man; or it might be the mere unreasoning fear of a superior power, or the perplexed sense of obligation to a law imperfectly fulfilled; or it might be degraded to the horrible conception of human sacrifice, as an offering acceptable to the Deity. It scarcely touches the moral element in the death of Christ. Oblatus est quia Ipse voluit; "He was obedient even unto death." And, accordingly, the Fathers regard even the Jewish ritual of bloody sacrifice chiefly as a temporary concession to human infirmity, ordained

*Origen (Contra Celsum) uses this analogy. Whether the usage of animal sacrifice was originally derived from revelation or from natural instinct, is a further question, not touched upon here.

through Moses, to withdraw the people from the service of devils; depreciated by the Prophets, to remind them of its intrinsic worthlessness. The mystic offering of Melchisedeck is, in patristic theology, the great type of the sacrifice of Christ.

It will not of course be imagined for a moment, that I suggest these illustrations as more than illustrations, or as in any sense adequate parallels of that which they nevertheless serve to adumbrate. So much at least they may prove in reply to objections, that there is no prima facie incongruity in the doctrine of redemption, from its having to be wrought out by the Redeemer's death. Christianity has not contradicted but endorsed the presentiments of natural religion, when it teaches by the acts, even more than by the words, of its Founder, that self-sacrifice for the good of others is the measure of our perfection, our highest law of life. "Pain," it has been truly said, "is the deepest thing we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more holy and more real than any other."

By those cords' of the first Adam the second bound us to Himself. Even those who believe Him not have owned their power;* how much more those who love Him! Would such a life as that of Eugénie de Guérin, to take no extreme case, be conceivable without the Passion?

It is further evident that if our redemption was to be not simply conceded, but purchased by toil and sacrifice, it could not be won by the redeemed them

* Thus Renan (Vie de Jésus, p. 77): "His religion will for ever grow young again. His sufferings will soften the best hearts; all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there has not been born a greater than Jesus." Similar expressions abound in the book.

selves. Prophets and just men under the Old Law did and suffered much, to bear testimony to the truth; but their obedience, like their testimony, was imperfect. They were lifted up from the earth, but they did not draw all men to themselves. He alone could offer to the Creator a perfect oblation of the human will, to whom holiness belonged of inherent right. If men were to be delivered from their vain conversation,' from that thraldom of sense by which the corruptible body pressed down the incorruptible spirit, not merely by external teaching or threats of future judgment, but by the living witness of a nature identical with their own, yet with every motion of flesh or spirit brought into subjection to a higher law, then He alone could deliver them who was perfect man, yet 'did no sin.' And if the very method of deliverance was to be a measure of the ultimate consequence and tendencies, because a measure of the true character of sin, of the real and living energy of that evil principle from which men required to be set free, then He could only deliver them through submitting to their injustice, through bearing in His own body that death which was itself the culminating act and typical expression of their sin.* It is no answer to this to say, that we might have been delivered without any sacrifice at all. I have already admitted that, so far as we know, it is so; what I am urging now is that, if there was to be a sacrifice, we can conceive but one, because

* Thus the account of the atonement given by an estimable Protestant writer of our own day (the late Rev. F. W. Robertson) that Christ' bore our sins,' because the collective wickedness of mankind spent itself upon Him in the Passion, is true as far as it goes, but not the whole truth. A somewhat similar explanation of the doctrine is given by the Rev. J. Llewellyn Davies, in the Preface to his Sermons on the Work of Christ.

one alone is perfect. And it is in this sense, as we shall see, that those Fathers are to be understood who speak of the sacrifice of Christ being necessary. They always imply, what most of them expressly state, as do also the great majority of scholastic writers, that God might have delivered us by some other means; but they affirm that no other sacrifice could be adequate.* St. Anselm was the first to lay down a law of absolute necessity, and he does so on the professed ground, usually held to be untenable, that it was the most fitting means of effecting our reconciliation, and therefore God was bound to adopt it.

And here it may be well to repeat more distinctly, what was implied just now, that the satisfaction or atonement of Christ, with which we are at present concerned, is part, and part only, of the great work wrought out through the 'sacrament,' or as the Greek Fathers are wont to call it, 'economy' of the Incarnation. "The Word was made Flesh." That is the mystery which is the life and light of the Church, the centre of her worship and kernel of her creed; the mystery which angels desire to look into, and which sinners are permitted to adore in the abiding miracle of the Eucharist. Theologians usually make a threefold division of the causes or motives of the Incarnation. As one motive they assign the glory of God,

* Petav. De Incarn. ii, 13. In the words of a modern theologian, whose loss we are still deploring, "It was no necessity which drove God to the redemption of the world by the Precious Blood. He might have redeemed it in unnumbered other ways. There is no limit to His power, no exhaustion to His wisdom The shedding of His Blood was part of the freedom of His love. It was, in some mysterious reality, the way of redemption most worthy of His blessed majesty, and also the way most likely to provoke the love of men."— Faber's Precious Blood (Richardson, 1860), pp. 27, 28.

† Ib. ii. 5.

B

in the manifestation of His attributes of power, sanctity, wisdom and goodness, which broke forth in the Person of Jesus, through their veil of flesh. A second motive is the benefit of man, and that in three ways: by redemption and sanctification, by teaching, and by example; and a third is the triumph over Satan. It is clear at first blush that all these motives, except the last, would have held good, under certain modifications, if men had never sinned. And accordingly one great school of theologians in the Church, whose theory receives a fresh sanction from the recent definition of the Immaculate Conception, and is also the most natural inference from the spirit if not the letter of patristic teaching, hold that if there had been no Fall, the Second Person in the Trinity would yet have taken our nature upon Him, and become our Brother. He would have come, of course, other than He actually came. He would not have come in a corruptible body; He would not have come to die. But He would have been, as now, our Teacher, our Pattern, our Mediator, the Second Adam, and Source of Grace; we should still have seen mirrored in His perfect Humanity the mind of God.* And thus, while the Incarnation formed part of the Divine purpose from the beginning, and the predestined Manhood of the Eternal Son was the archetype and model on which ours was formed, the Passion, so to say, was an afterthought, added because of transgressions; it was not the original motive of the decree, but affected the manner of its fulfilment. Whether or not, however, this theory be accepted-and it certainly seems most in accordance with the

On the Mediation of Christ, as necessarily involved in the very fact of the Incarnation, see Wilberforce's Doctrine of the Incarnation, ch. vii.