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angry Father's face;' it is no such unworthy and anthropomorphic conception as this that we mean, when we speak of a satisfaction to His justice, or a sacrifice to appease His wrath. It is the perfect holiness of God, which is one with Himself, that is outraged by sin, and then becomes what is frequently called in Scripture His indignation or anger, and expresses itself in the chastisement of the sinner. It is that holi

ness which is satisfied by the spotless sacrifice of His Son; not,' as St. Bernard says, 'His death, but His will in voluntarily dying.' We need not doubt that He might, had He so willed, have pardoned us on our repentance, without any sacrifice at all; but He preferred a method of reconciliation which established alike His holiness and His love. We had fallen away, not by any arbitrary external accident, but by a moral perversion of our will; and He therefore chose to redeem us through a moral act, through the perfect oblation of a will obedient to His own. It was a consequence of the Fall, and it is so still, that obedience could only be exercised through suffering; that the right to benefit mankind could only be purchased through enduring their persecution*: and Jesus submitted for our sakes to that law which was the fruit of our sin, and which, while He has not repealed it, for all who love Him He has turned from a curse into a blessing. As others suffer for our sins, so also do they benefit by our suffering for righteousness' sake. It would be superfluous to illustrate this in detail from the familiar history of the Jewish, or the Christian Church. We know full well how the shadow of His cross

* 1 Tim. iii. 12.

has more or less deeply fallen on all who prefigured Him under the Old Law, on all who have been preeminent as His followers under the New; making them, after their measure and degree, partakers of His sufferings. That was no unmeaning record inscribed on the luminous cross which converted the first Christian emperor to the obedience of faith: In hoc signo vinces. It sums up in four short words the work of the Redeemer, and the mission of His earthly Church. On that I need not dwell.

It is more to the purpose to observe, that, even without the limits of His visible kingdom, the same principle had been perceived and exemplified. The well-known passage in Plato's Republic, which sounds almost like an echo of inspired prophecy in its thrilling description of the perfectly righteous man, whom, because of his righteousness, his fellows will scourge and crucify, is in fact but a summary of the whole experience of mankind. Of the two most religious heathen of whom history tells us, it is remarkable that one was a persecutor and the other a martyr. Socrates died, because he would not purchase safety at the price of his convictions of truth; and his words before his judges, "I must obey God rather than you," are the key-note of his character and his life. Marcus Aurelius, who, if he had been a Christian, would surely have been a Saint, was born into a corrupted atmosphere, and brought himself to believe it a duty to the Empire to persecute the Church. But, if his position exempted him from suffering at the hands of others, his Meditations contain abundant evi

*Plat. Rep. ii. 65, 66; cf. Isaiah liii.

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 Suret est quia Ipse voluit; "He was obedient even unto

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death." And, accordingly, the Fathers regard even the Jewish ritual of bloody sacrifice chiefly as a temporary concession to human infirmity, ordained

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* 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.

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