before He created the world, as the Apostle himself testifies, saying, 'As He has chosen us in Him before the creation of the world.' Nor was the Son delivered up, for us as it were, unwillingly when the Father spared Him not, since it is said of Him also, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.' The Father therefore, and the Son, and the Spirit of Both, work all things at the same time, equally and harmoniously; yet we are justified in the blood of Christ, and reconciled to God through the death of His Son." This shows how little a change in the Divine mind, or a division of will in the Persons of the Trinity was thought of. "One," says St. Leo, "is the kindness of their mercy as the sentence of their justice, nor is there any division in action where there is no diversity in will." And Cyril of Alexandria almost repeats the very words, already quoted, from the Epistle to Diognatus: "God was and is good by nature, ever full of mercy and pity, and did not become this in time, but was shown to be such towards us."* It was we who changed; His mercies had not failed. With Him, who knows no shadow of vicissitude, the grace of redemption was involved in the prevision of sin.

And now we are in a position to answer the question which may perhaps have occurred to the reader, as to why we find so little of definite theory on the Atonement among the Fathers, while one view very prevalent then has since completely passed away, and a great writer even says it is a matter on which we need not have any theory at all. Was their faith in Christ uncertain, or were they ashamed of the foolish

* Aug. De Trin. xiii. 11. Leo Serm. iii. De Pent. Cyr. Alex. adv. Nestor. iii. 2.

ness of the Cross? The answer is not far to seek. To them, as to the Church in all ages, it was not the Atonement but the Incarnation which was the centre of Christian faith as of Christian life; the Incarnatus was the key-note of their creed. The difference between their way of looking at the matter and that which came in with the Reformation may be shortly described as follows. By the Reformers, the incarnation and earthly life of Christ is regarded only, or chiefly, as the necessary introduction to His atoning death; while the Fathers see in His death, not an isolated act, or even an isolated sacrifice, but the natural consummation of that one great act of selfdevotion, whose unbroken energy stretched from the Conception to the Cross. The blood that flowed on Calvary was indeed the price of redemption, but it could not be thought of apart from the Redeemer's life; it was not so much the blood as the will of Him who shed it, that was the real oblation ;* His work of mediation was summed up but not exhausted in the act of dying; He was anointed for His priesthood in Mary's womb; He is still a Priest in Heaven. In all the stages of that life, as in the closing sacrifice, the believer was to be associated, I might almost say identified, with his Lord; on the Cross was celebrated the oblation of our common humanity,' as the faithful unite the oblation of themselves with the abiding sacrifice of the altar. Their whole life was to be, like His, an act of life-long crucifixion, but also a risen life, for all rise with Him. Over all that touched His Person the Church kept jealous watch, for in Him she lived

* Thus St. Bernard said afterwards, in reply to Abelaird, "Non mors sed voluntas sponte morientis plaucit."

and moved and had her being, and on Him through successive ages was fixed her deepening gaze. He had assumed man's nature, with all its sinless infirmities, and by the very act of assuming had restored it, and bridged over the chasm which divided the creature from his Creator. In that nature He died for us. Fathers and doctors might well be suffered to use their own judgment in explaining the efficacy of His death, or to abstain from explanations, so long as the truth of His Person and natures, on which all its efficacy rested, was held fast. And in this the Church did but carry out the intimations of Scripture, which does not dwell exclusively on the death of Christ, but exhibits in the four Gospels the facts and words of His earthly ministry. When, for instance, we read; "For this end hath the Son of God appeared, that He may destroy the works of the Devil," it is rather His life than His death that is referred to. By His victory over the Tempter, by His miracles of mercy, by His perfect obedience, by His pure teaching, by the vocation of His Apostles, by the institution of His Church, no less than by the crowning act of self-devotion on Calvary, He broke the power of the Evil One. When, again, He says of Himself, "I am come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly," He speaks not so much of the forgiveness of sin as of the engrafting in our nature of a new principle of life through union with His own, who took root, according to the Prophet's saying, as a tender plant in the dry and thirsty soil of our corrupted humanity. It was when all this was coming to be forgotten, when the Incarnation itself was thrust into the background, the sacraments which are its application slighted, and the

Sacrifice of the Altar which perpetuates it reduced to a symbolic form, that theories about the Atonement were made into articles of a standing or falling Church, and became, for those who had lost the true key for interpreting it, a source of manifold misconceptions. When the life of Jesus was treated as a biographical record, men began to wrangle about the meaning of His death.

I make no apology for closing this summary of patristic teaching with words which express its spirit far better than any I could hope to use myself; "The Son of God then took our nature upon Him, that in Him it might do and suffer what in itself was impossible to it. What it could not effect of itself, it could effect in Him. He carried it about Him through a life of penance. He carried it forward to agony and death. In Him our sinful nature died and rose again. When it died in Him on the Cross, that death was its new creation. In Him it satisfied its old and heavy debt; for the presence of His divinity gave it transcendent merit. His presence had kept it pure from sin from the first. His Hand had carefully selected the choicest specimen of our nature from the Virgin's substance; and, separating from it all defilement, His personal indwelling hallowed it and gave it power. And thus, when it had been offered upon the Cross, and made perfect by suffering, it became the first-fruits of a new man; it became a divine leaven of holiness for the new birth and spiritual life of as many as should receive it."*

From the death of Gregory the Great, 'the last of the Fathers,' at the beginning of the seventh century,

*Newman's Paroch. Serm. vol. vi. p. 86.

till Anselm came forward, at the close of the eleventh, as the pioneer of scholasticism, the theology of Western Christendom slept, it has been said, her winter sleepa sleep disturbed rather than broken by the strange apparition in the ninth century of John Scotus Erigena, one of the most original thinkers of his own or any age, as of one born out of due time. He belongs, however, more to the preceding than the subsequent period, and must therefore be noticed here. Christian theology, as has been observed before, took its rise at Alexandria, the home of Neo-Platonism, in the third century; its later scholastic form was based on the study of the other great master of ancient philosophy, Aristotle. Erigena, who drew his inspirations chiefly from Maximus, the last but one of the Greek theologians, and the works composed during the fifth century under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, is the latest and most systematic exponent of a Platonic theosophy of the Gospel. With the part he took in the controversies of his own day on predestination and the Eucharist we need not meddle here. Nor can I profess to do more than give a brief sketch of his teaching on sin and redemption, as gathered from his five books on the Division of Nature.* It would be beyond my present scope to enter into any lengthened discussion of it, or to trace its connection in detail with other parts of his system, which in regarding the Divine nature as incomprehensible alike to itself and to every created intellect, as not something but nothing because exceeding everything, not itself being, but the source of being to others,† is not easy to reconcile with God's

*De Divisione Naturarum, lib. v. Diu Desiderati. Oxon. 1681. + Ib. ii. p. 78.