ON THE ATONEMENT.
THE Atonement may be regarded as the central doctrine of Christianity, the very raison d'être of the Christian faith. Take this away, and there would remain indeed a faith and a morality, but both would have lost their distinctive features: it would be a faith without its centre, and a morality without its foundation. Christianity would be unrecognisable without its angry God, its dying Saviour, its covenant signed with "the blood of the Lamb:" the blotting out of the Atonement would deprive millions of all hope towards God, and would cast them from satisfaction into anxiety from comfort into despair. The warmest feelings of Christendom cluster round the Crucifix, and he, the crucified one, is adored with passionate devotion, not as martyr for truth, not as witness for God, not as faithful to death, but as the substitute for his worshippers, as he who bears in their stead the wrath of God, and the punishment due to sin. The Christian is taught to see in the bleeding Christ the victim slain in his own place; he himself should be hanging on that cross, agonised and dying; those nail-pierced hands ought to be his; the anguish on that face should be furrowed on his own; the weight of suffering resting on that bowed head should be crushing himself inta the dust. In the simplest meaning of the words, Christ is the sinner's substitute, and on him the sin of the world is laid: as Luther expressed it, he "is the greatest and only sinner;" literally "made sin" for mankind, and expiating the guilt which, in very deed, was transferred from man to-him.
I wish at the outset, for the sake of justice and candour, to acknowledge frankly the good which has been drawn forth by the preaching of the Cross. This good has been, however, the indirect rather than the direct result of a belief in the Atonement. The doctrine, in itself, has nothing elevating about it, but the teaching closely connected with the doctrine has its ennobling and purifying side. All the enthusiasm aroused in the human breast by the thought of one who sacrificed himself to save his brethren, all the consequent longing to emulate that love by sacrificing all for Jesus and for those for whom he died, all the moral gain caused by the contemplation of a sublime self-devotion, all these are the fruits of the nobler side of the Atonement. That the sinless should stoop to the sinful, that holiness should embrace the guilty in order to raise them to its own level, has struck a chord in men's bosoms which has responded to the touch by a harmonious melody of gratitude to the divine and sinless sufferer, and loving labour for suffering and sinful man. The Cross has been at once the apotheosis and the source of self-sacrificing love. "Love ye one another as I have loved you: not in word but in deed, with a deep self-sacrificing love:" such is the lesson which, according to one of the most orthodox Anglican divines, "Christ preaches to us from His Cross." In believing in the Atonement, man's heart has, as usual, been better than his head; he has passed over the dark side of the idea, and has seized on the divine truth that the strong should gladly devote themselves to shield the weak, that labour, even unto death, is the right of humanity from every son of man. It is often said that no doctrine long retains its hold on men's hearts which is not founded on some great truth; this divine idea of self-sacrifice has been the truth contained in the doctrine of the Atonement, which has made it so dear to many loving and noble souls, and which has hidden its "multitude of sins"—sins against love and against justice, against God and against man. Love and self-sacrifice have floated the great error over the storms of centuries, and these cords still bind to it many hearts of which love and self-sacrifice are the glory and the crown.
This said, in candi d'homage to the good which has drawn its inspiration from Jesus crucified, we turn to the examination of the doctrine itself: if we find that it is as dishonouring to God as it is injurious to man, a crime against justice, a blasphemy against love, we must forget all the sentiments which cluster round it, and reject it utterly. It is well to speak respectfully of that which is dear to any religious soul, and to avoid jarring harshly on the strings of religious feeling, even though the soul be misled and the feeling be misdirected; but a time comes when false charity is cruelty, and tenderness to error is treason to truth. For long, men who know its emptiness pass by in silence the shrine consecrated by human hopes and fears, by love and worship, and the "times of this ignorance God (in the bold figure of Paul) also winks at;" but when "the fulness of the time is come," God sends forth some true son of his to dash the idol to the ground, and to trample it into dust. We need not be afraid that the good wrought by the lessons derived from the Atonement in time past will disappear with the doctrine itself; the mark of the Cross is too deeply ploughed into humanity ever to be erased, and those who no longer call themselves by the name of Christ are not the most backward scholars in the school of love and sacrifice.
The history of this doctrine has been a curious one. In the New Testament the Atonement is, as its name implies, a simply making at one God and man: how this is done is but vaguely hinted at, and in order to deduce the modern doctrine from the Bible, we must import into the books of the New Testament all the ideas derived from theological disputations. Words used in all simplicity by the ancient writers must have attached to them the definite polemical meaning they hold in the quarrels of theologians, before they can be strained into supporting a substitutionary atonement. The idea, however, of "ransom" is connected with the work of Jesus, and the question arose, "to whom is this ransom paid?" They who lived in those first centuries of Christianity were still too much within the illumination of the tender halo thrown by Jesus round the Father's name, to dream for a moment that their redeemer had ransomed them from the beloved hands of God. No, the ransom was paid to the devil, whose thrall they believed mankind to be, and Jesus, by sacrificing himself, had purchased them from the devil and made them sons of God. It is not worth while to enter on the quaint details of this scheme, how the devil thought he had conquered and could hold Jesus captive, and was tricked by finding that his imagined gain could not be retained by him, and so on. Those who wish to become acquainted with this ingenious device can study it in the pages of the Christian fathers: it has at least one advantage over the modern plan, namely, that we are not so shocked at hearing of pain and suffering as acceptable to the supposed incarnate evil, as at hearing of them being offered as a sacrifice to the supreme good. As the teaching of Jesus lost its power, and became more and more polluted by the cruel thoughts of savage and bigoted men, the doctrine of the atonement gradually changed its character. Men thought the Almighty to be such a one as themselves, and being fierce and unforgiving and revengeful, they projected their own shadows on to the clouds which surrounded the Deity, and then, like the shepherd who meets his own form reflected and magnified on the mountain mist, they recoiled before the image they themselves had made. The loving Father who sent his son to rescue his perishing children by sacrificing himself, fades away from the hearts of the Christian world, and there looms darkly in his place an awful form, the inexorable judge who exacts a debt man is too poor to pay, and who, in default of payment, casts the debtor into a hopeless prison, hopeless unless another pays to the uttermost farthing the fine demanded by the law. So, in this strange transformation-scene God actually takes the place of the devil, and the ransom once paid to redeem men from Satan becomes the ransom paid to redeem men from God. It reminds one of the quarrels over the text which bids us "fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in hell," when we remain in doubt whom he is we are to fear, since half the Christian commentators assure us that it refers to our Father in heaven, while the other half asseverate that the devil is the individual we are to dread. The seal was set on the "redemption scheme" by Anselm in his great work, "Cur Deus Homo" and the doctrine which had been slowly growing into the theology of Christendom was thenceforward stamped with the signet of the Church. Roman Catholics and Protestants, at the time of the Reformation, alike believed in the vicarious and substitutionary character of the atonement wrought by Christ. There is no dispute between them on this point. I prefer to allow the Christian divines to speak for themselves as to the character of the atonement: no one can accuse me of exaggerating their views, if their views are given in their own words. Luther teaches that "Christ did truly and effectually feel for all mankind, the wrath of God, malediction and death." Flavel says that "to wrath, to the wrath of an infinite God without mixture, to the very torments of hell, was Christ delivered, and that by the hand of his own father."
