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 σῶμα, 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. Sec. 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.

whole creation is little as compared to Him;" as little, says St. Chrysostom, as a tiny drop to the boundless ocean. His namesake of Jerusalem says similarly, that the iniquity of sinners was not so great as the righteousness of Him who died for them, who was not mere man or angel, but Incarnate God.* Thus the whole doctrine of Redemption was seen to hinge on a right belief about the Person and nature of the Redeemer, and therefore also about the Holy Trinity. Only One, who was God and man, could bring man again into communion with God. But it is rather His assumption of our nature in all its fulness than His death alone, that the Fathers dwelt upon. He is the representative Man, the Second Adam, the Head of the Body, who recapitulates in Himself, as they are fond of expressing it, the whole human race, and imparts to them, through the union of their nature with His, a new principle of life, in whose death all die, in whose resurrection all are made alive. This is Athanasius' great argument against the Arians; so, too, St. Augustine says, "That nature was to be assumed which had to be delivered." Hilary of Poitiers had said before him; "He took on Himself the nature of all flesh, by which, being made the True Vine, He contains in Himself the race of all the progeny of flesh," that is, He is to the new creation what Adam was to the old. And St. Leo says, after him, that the Son of God is one and the same Christ in all His saints, that on the cross is celebrated the oblation of human nature.†

Ath. Contr. Arian. i. 19, 37, 49; ii. 14, 20, 68, 69, 70, 77.

Cyril Alex. De Recta Fide. Ib. Contr. Nestor. iii. 2. Chrys. Hom. x. in Ep. ad Rom. Cyril Hier. Cat. xiii. 33.

† Aug. De Vera Rel. 30. Hil. De Trin. ii. 24. Leo Serm. lxvi. 4. De

Enough has been said to show, from what point of view the Fathers were wont to regard the Redeemer's office and work, and that their whole teaching hinged on a right understanding of His consubstantiality with the Father by virtue of His Eternal Generation, and with us by His Conception in Mary's womb. In bringing out the need of a reconciliation between God and man, divided by sin, and the infinite dignity of the Person of Christ, they laid a basis for future speculation on the atonement; but their own theories, whether of a ransom paid to Satan, or a sacrifice offered to God upon the Cross, were kept subordinate to their reiterated and many-sided exhibition of the assumption of our nature by the Incarnate Word, the Corner Stone who makes both one, the Man whom holy Job sought and found not, who could arbitrate between him and his Maker, because He laid His hand on both.* The Incarnation itself they regard as a kind of perpetual sacrifice,' in which the whole human family is offered up to God, and this begins from the first moment of the Conception. "By the mystery of His humanity," says Gregory the Great, "He offers an everlasting sacrifice." He is Priest and Temple, Altar and Victim, all in One.

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But they never imagined, let it be distinctly repeated, that the Incarnation or the Cross effected a

Pass. iv. It is a strange perversion of this idea when Strauss says, « True philosophy substitutes for Jesus the abstract term Humanity. Humanity dies, rises again, and ascends up on high. The individual Jesus is of little moment, saving in so far as He may have served to bring out the idea." We may reply, in the words of Rousseau, L'inventeur en serait plus etonnant que le héros. (Emile, 54. 4.)

*Job ix. 33.

† Greg. Mor. i. 19. See Thomass. De Inc. x. 8, 9, and the passages there quoted.

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change in the mind of God toward us. The sacrifice of Calvary, however explained, they looked upon as part of an eternal purpose, not a device to avert His anger, but the utterance of His unfailing love. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, though offered once for all in blood on the Cross, offered continually till time shall be no more, in the heavenly Jerusalem, and on the altars of the earthly Church. I quoted a writer of the first century, who lays down this principle. Let me add here the testimony of the greatest doctor of his own or any age of Christian history. The passage is too remarkable to be curtailed; "What means this, 'reconciled by the death of His Son? Is it, that when the Father was angry with us He looked on the death of His Son for us and was appeased? Had the Son, then, been so completely appeased already, that He even vouchsafed to die for us, but was the Father still so incensed that He would not be appeased unless the Son died for us? And what is it, which the same teacher of the Gentiles says elsewhere; 'What then shall we say to these things? If God be for us, who is against us? He, who spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, how has He not with Him given us all things? Would the Father, unless He had been already appeased, deliver up His Son for us, not sparing Him? Do not these statements seem to contradict each other? In the former the Son dies for us, and the Father is reconciled to us by His death; but in the latter the Father, as though He first loved us, Himself does not spare His Son for our sakes, Himself delivers Him up to death for us. But I see that the Father loved us before also, not only before the Son died for us, but