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 acceptedand 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,

tradition of the Church, and with what revelation would suggest to us of the love of God-it remains equally certain, that the Incarnation had objects not necessarily connected with the Fall, and even as regards our present fallen state had further ends besides that of satisfaction. Some of these are elaborately worked out by writers strongly opposed to the view referred to, such as Thomassin, who devotes the greater part of his first book on the Incarnation to setting forth the exhibition in the Person of the God-Man of the eternal law and the Divine attributes. The mediatorial office of Christ includes, besides and even before the notion of intercession and sacrifice, that of reconciliation, or 'making peace,' on which Scripture so constantly dwells, uniting man with God, giving peace from the internal conflict of passion in the human soul, and joining together those who are no more strangers and foreigners, Jew or Gentile, Greek or barbarian, but united in His one family, of whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named. *

It may be as well to add here, though for theological readers the remark would be superfluous, that the notion of 'imputation,' in the sense of a transfer, by a kind of juridical fiction, of our sins to Christ, and His Righteousness to His members, was first started in the sixteenth century, and must be kept quite distinct from the doctrine of atonement, on which it has been engrafted. It differs widely from the teaching of the Church on righteousness not imputed but imparted, which is expressed by the Council of Trent in language borrowed from St. Augustine, to the effect

Petav. De Inc. xii. 6, 7.

that in crowning our merits God crowns His own gifts. The Passion of Christ was not to be the substitute for our personal obedience, but the source of it. To justify is to make, not simply to account men just.

Once more, there is no hint in any Father, except St. Augustine and Fulgentius, of the notion that Christ died for some, or for the elect only, not for the whole race of mankind. There are no doubt traces of such a view to be found in St. Augustine's later writings, during the Pelagian controversy; and he was the first to explain St. Paul's words (Rom. ix. 21) of the 'mass of perdition' (púpapa) from which only the predestined would be taken out. This idea of Christ dying for a chosen few re-appears, to support an argument which is however complete without it, in one passage of Abelard; it found distinct expression later, among the Reformed in the heresy of Calvin, among Catholics in the heresy of Jansenism. That God is no respecter of persons, but wills all men to be saved, and that Christ died for all, is, on the other hand, the constant teaching of the Church.

This leads to a further remark, which must be borne in mind throughout the ensuing examination of the writings of Fathers, Schoolmen, and later Catholic theologians. While the unanimous consent of the Fathers,' so far as it embodies the faith of the universal Church, is affirmed by the Council of Trent (Sess. vi.) to be an authoritative rule for the interpretation of Scripture, the individual opinions of any or even all of them can never constitute more than a strong prima

Conc. Trid. Sess. vi. cap. 16; cf. Can. 11, 12, where the imputation of Christ's merits is denied to be the cause of our justification.

facie presumption in favour of the view adopted. And as regards later writers also, we may expect to find much variety in their way of handling points not defined by authority, and shall gain light from their very differences. To use the words of the great leader of the Catholic revival in Germany, "For a time even a conception of a dogma, or an opinion may be tolerably general, without however becoming an integral portion of a dogma, or a dogma itself. There are here eternally changing individual forms of an universal principle, which may serve this or that person, or a particular period for mastering that universal principle by way of reflection and speculation, forms which may possess more or less of truth, but whereon the Church pronounces no judgment; for the data for such a decision are wanting in tradition, and she abandons them altogether to the award of theological criticism." This is said with special reference to "Augustine's and Anselm's exposition of original sin, and the theory of the latter respecting the vicarious atonement of Christ."* The Church of God was to be 'clothed in raiment of many colours' (circumamicta varietatibus), and unity in diversity is among her predicted glories. The different and even mistaken or imperfect aspects under which the same truth may present itself to different minds do but serve to bring out the more clearly, in the long run, its vital unity and coherence.† It must be remembered, too, as one reason why this particular

* Möhler's Symbolism, Eng. Tr. vol. i. p. 11.

"Dass aber in dieser nur durch Irrthümer hindurch der Weg zur Wahrheit führe, ist ein Gesetz, welches in der Zukunft eben so gelten wird, wie es in der Vergangenheit sich bewährt hat."-Die Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der katholischen Theologie, von J. von Döllinger. Regensburg, 1863.