THE Atonement may be regarded as the central doctrine of Christianity,
the very _raison d'etre_ 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." The Anglican homily
preaches that "sin did pluck God out of heaven to make him feel the
horrors and pains of death," and that man, being a firebrand of hell and
a bondsman of the devil, "was ransomed by the death of his own only and
well-beloved son;" the "heat of his wrath," "his burning wrath,"
could only be "pacified" by Jesus, "so pleasant was this sacrifice and
oblation of his son's death." Edwards, being logical, saw that there was
a gross injustice in sin being twice punished, and in the pains of
hell, the penalty of sin, being twice inflicted, first on Christ, the
substitute of mankind, and then on the lost, a portion of mankind. So
he, in common with most Calvinists, finds himself compelled to restrict
the atonement to the elect, and declared that Christ bore the sins, not
of the world, but of the chosen out of the world; he suffers "not for
the world, but for them whom Thou hast given me." But Edwards adheres
firmly to the belief in substitution, and rejects the universal
atonement for the very reason that "to believe Christ died for all is
the surest way of proving that he died for none in the sense Christians
have hitherto believed." He declares that "Christ suffered the wrath of
God for men's sins;" that "God imposed his wrath due unto, and Christ
underwent the pains of hell for," sin. Owen regards Christ's sufferings
as "a full valuable compensation to the justice of God for all the sins"
of the elect, and says that he underwent "that same punishment which....
they themselves were bound to undergo."
The doctrine of the Christian Church--in the widest sense of that
much-fought-over term--was then as follows, and I will state it in
language which is studiously moderate, _as compared with the orthodox
teaching_ of the great Christian divines. If any one doubts this
assertion, let him study their writings for himself. I really dare
not transfer some of their expressions to my own pages. God the Father
having cursed mankind and condemned them to eternal damnation, because
of Adam's disobedience in eating an apple--or some other fruit, for the
species is only preserved by tradition, and is not definitely settled
by the inspired writings--and having further cursed each man for his own
individual transgressions, man lay under the fierce wrath of God, unable
to escape, and unable to pacify it, for he could not even atone for his
own private sins, much less for his share of the guilt incurred by his
forefather in Paradise. Man's debt was hopelessly large, and he had
"nothing to pay;" so all that remained to him was to suffer an eternity
of torture, which sad fate he had merited by the crime of being born
into an accursed world. The second person of the Trinity moved to pity
by the helpless and miserable state of mankind, interposed between the
first person of the Trinity and the wretched sinners; he received into
his own breast the fire-tipped arrows of divine wrath, and by suffering
inconceivable tortures, equal in amount to an eternity of the torments
of hell, he wrung from God's hands the pardon of mankind, or of a
portion thereof. God, pacified by witnessing this awful agony of one who
had from all eternity been "lying in his bosom" co-equal sharer of his
Majesty and glory, and the object of his tenderest love, relents
from his fierce wrath, and consents to accept the pain of Jesus as
a substitute for the pain of mankind. In plain terms, then, God is
represented as a Being so awfully cruel, so implacably revengeful,
that pain _as_ pain, and death _as_ death, are what he demands as a
propitiatory sacrifice, and with nothing less than extremest agony can
his fierce claims on mankind be bought off. The due weight of suffering
he must have, but it is a matter of indifference whether it is undergone
by Jesus or by mankind. Did not the old Fathers do well in making the
awful ransom a matter between Jesus and the devil?
When this point is pressed on Christians, and one urges the dishonour
done to God by painting him in colours from which heart and soul recoil
in shuddering horror, by ascribing to him a revengefulness and pitiless
cruelty in comparison with which the worst efforts of human malignity
appear but childish mischief, they are quick to retort that we are
caricaturing Christian doctrine; they will allow, when overwhelmed with
evidence, that "strong language" has been used in past centuries, but
will say that such views are not now held, and that they do not ascribe
such harsh dealing to God the Father. Theists are therefore compelled to
prove each step of their accusation, and to quote from Christian writers
the words which embody the views they assail. Were I simply to state
that Christians in these days ascribe to Almighty God a fierce wrath
against the whole human race, that this wrath can only be soothed by
suffering and death, that he vents this wrath on an innocent head, and
that he is well pleased by the sight of the agony of his beloved Son,
a shout of indignation would rise from a thousand lips, and I should be
accused of exaggeration, of false witness, of blasphemy. So once more I
write down the doctrine from Christian dictation, and, be it remembered,
the sentences I quote are from published works, and are therefore, the
outcome of serious deliberation; they are not overdrawn pictures taken
from the fervid eloquence of excited oratory, when the speaker may
perhaps be carried further than he would, in cold blood, consent to.
Stroud makes Christ drink "the cup of the wrath of God." Jenkyn says,
"he suffered as one disowned and reprobated and forsaken of God." Dwight
considers that he endured God's "hatred and contempt." Bishop Jeune
tells us that "after man had done his worst, worse remained for Christ
to bear. He had fallen into his father's hands." Archbishop Thomson
preaches that "the clouds of God's wrath gathered thick over the whole
human race: they discharged themselves on Jesus only;" he "becomes a
curse for us, and a vessel of wrath." Liddon echoes the same sentiment:
"the apostles teach that mankind are slaves, and that Christ on the
Cross is paying their ransom. Christ crucified is voluntarily devoted
and accursed:" he even speaks of "the precise amount of ignominy and
pain needed for the redemption," and says that the "divine victim" paid
more than was absolutely necessary.
These quotations seem sufficient to prove that the Christians of the
present day are worthy followers of the elder believers. The theologians
first quoted are indeed coarser in their expressions, and are less
afraid of speaking out exactly what they believe, but there is no
real difference of creed between the awful doctrine of Flavel and the
polished dogma of Canon Liddon. The older and the modern Christians
alike believe in the bitter wrath of God against "the whole human race."
Both alike regard the Atonement as so much pain tendered by Jesus to the
Almighty Father in payment of a debt of pain owed to God by humanity.
They alike represent God as only to be pacified by the sight of
suffering. Man has insulted and injured God, and God must be revenged by
inflicting suffering on the sinner in return. The "hatred and contempt"
God launched at Jesus were due to the fact that Jesus was the sinner's
substitute, and are therefore the feelings which animate the Divine
heart towards the sinner himself. God hates and despises the world. He
would have "consumed it in a moment" in the fire of his burning wrath,
had not Jesus, "his chosen, stood before him in the gap to turn away his
wrathful indignation."
Now, how far is all this consistent with justice? Is the wrath of God
against humanity justified by the circumstances of the case, so that we
may be obliged to own that some sacrifice was due from sinful man to his
Creator, to propitiate a justly incensed and holy God? I trow not. On
this first count, the Atonement is a fearful injustice. For God has
allowed men to be brought into the world with sinful inclinations, and
to be surrounded with many temptations and much evil. He has made
man imperfect, and the child is born into the world with an imperfect
nature. It is radically unjust, then, that God should curse the work
of His hands for being what He made them, and condemn them to endless
misery for failing to do the impossible. Allowing that Christians are
right in believing that Adam was sinless when he came from his Maker's
hands, these remarks apply to every other living soul since born into
the world; the Genesis myth will not extricate Christians from the
difficulty. Christians are quite right and are justified by facts when
they say that man is born into the world frail, imperfect, prone to sin
and error; but who, we ask them, made men so? Does not their own Bible
tell them that the "potter hath power over the clay," and, further, that
"we are the clay and thou art the potter?" To curse men for being men,
_i.e._, imperfect moral beings, is the height of cruelty and injustice;
to condemn the morally weak to hell for sin, _i.e._, for failing in
moral strength, is about as fair as sentencing a sick man to death
because he cannot stand upright. Christians try and avoid the force of
this by saying that men should rely on God's grace to uphold them, but
they fail to see that this _very want of reliance_ is part of man's
natural weakness. The sick man might be blamed for falling because he
did not lean on a stronger arm, but suppose he was too weak to grasp
it? Further, few Christians believe that it is impossible in practice,
however possible in theory, to lead a perfect life; and as to "offend in
one point is to be guilty of all," one failure is sufficient to send the
generally righteous man to hell. Besides, they forget that infants are
included under the curse, although _necessarily_ incapable of grasping
the idea either of sin or of God; all babies born into the world and
dying before becoming capable of acting for themselves would, we are
taught, have been inevitably consigned to hell, had it not been for the
Atonement of Jesus. Some Christians actually believe that unbaptized
babies are not admitted into heaven, and in a Roman Catholic book
descriptive of hell, a poor little baby writhes and screams in a red-hot
oven.
This side of the Atonement, this unjust demand on men for a
righteousness they could not render, necessitating a sacrifice to
propitiate God for non-compliance with his exaction, has had its due
effect on men's minds, and has alienated their hearts from God. No
wonder that men turned away from a God who, like a passionate but
unskilful workman, dashes to pieces the instrument he has made because
it fails in its purpose, and, instead of blaming his own want of skill,
vents his anger on the helpless thing that is only what he made it.
Most naturally, also, have men shrunk from the God who "avengeth and
is furious" to the tender, pitiful, human Jesus, who loved sinners
so deeply as to choose to suffer for their sakes. They could owe no
gratitude to an Almighty Being who created them and cursed them, and
only consented to allow them to be happy on condition that another paid
for them the misery he demanded as his due; but what gratitude could
be enough for him who rescued them from the fearful hands of the living
God, at the cost of almost intolerable suffering to himself? Let us
remember that Christ is said to suffer the very torments of hell, and
that his worst sufferings were when "fallen into his father's hands,"
out of which he has rescued us, and then can we wonder that the
crucified is adored with a very ecstasy of gratitude? Imagine what it is
to be saved from the hands of him who inflicted an agony admitted to be
unlimited, and who took advantage of an infinite capacity in order to
inflict an infinite pain. It is well for the men before whose eyes this
awful spectre has flitted that the fair humanity of Jesus gives them a
refuge to fly to, else what but despair and madness could have been the
doom of those who, without Jesus, would have seen enthroned above the
wailing universe naught but an infinite cruelty and an Almighty foe.
We see, then, that the necessity for an atonement makes the Eternal
Father both unjust in his demands on men and cruel in his punishment of
inevitable failure; but there is another injustice which is of the
very essence of the Atonement itself. This consists in the vicarious
character of the sacrifice: a new element of injustice is introduced
when we consider that the person sacrificed is not even the guilty
party. If a man offends against law, justice requires that he should be
punished: the punishment becomes unjust if it is excessive, as in the
case we have been considering above; but it is equally unjust to allow
him to go free without punishment. Christians are right in affirming
that moral government would be at an end were men allowed to sin with
impunity, and did an easy forgiveness succeed to each offence. They
appeal to our instinctive sense of justice to-approve the sentiment that
punishment should follow sin: we acquiesce, and hope that we have now
reached a firm standing-ground from which to proceed further in our
investigation. But, no; they promptly outrage that same sense of justice
which they have called as a witness on their side, by asking us to
believe that its ends are attained provided that somebody or other is
punished. When we reply that _this_ is not justice, we are promptly
bidden not to be presumptuous and argue from our human ideas of justice
as to the course that ought to be pursued by the absolute justice of
God. "Then why appeal to it at all?" we urge; "why talk of justice in
the matter if we are totally unable to judge as to the rights and wrongs
of the case?" At this point we are commonly overwhelmed with Paul's
notable argument--"Nay, but, O man, who art thou that repliest against
God?" But if Christians value the simplicity and straightforwardness
of their own minds, they should not use words which convey a certain
accepted meaning in this shuffling, double sense. When we speak of
"justice," we speak of a certain well-understood quality, and we do not
speak of a mysterious divine attribute, which has not only nothing in
common with human justice, but which is in direct opposition to that
which we understand by that name. Suppose a man condemned to death for
murder: the judge is about to sentence him, when a bystander--as it
chances, the judge's own son--interposes: "My Lord, the prisoner is
guilty and deserves to be hanged; but if you will let him go, I will
die in his place." The offer is accepted, the prisoner is set free, the
judge's son is hanged in his stead. What is all this? Self-sacrifice
(however misdirected), love, enthusiasm--what you will; but certainly
not _justice_--nay, the grossest injustice, a second murder, an
ineffaceable stain on the ermine of the outraged law. I imagine that,
in this supposed case, no Christian will be found to assert that justice
was done; yet call the judge God, the prisoner mankind, the substitute
Jesus, and the trial scene is exactly reproduced. Then, in the name of
candour and common sense, why call that just in God which we see would
be so unjust and immoral in man? This vicarious nature of the Atonement
also degrades the divine name, by making him utterly careless in
the matter of punishment: all he is anxious for, according to this
detestable theory, is that he should strike a blow _somewhere_. Like
a child in a passion, he only feels the desire to hurt somebody, and
strikes out vaguely and at random. There is no discrimination used;
the thunderbolt is launched into a crowd: it falls on the head of the
"sinless son," and crushes the innocent, while the sinner goes
free. What matter? It has fallen somewhere, and the "burning fire of
his-wrath" is cooled. This is what men call the vindication of the
justice of the Moral Governor of the universe: this is "the act of
God's awful holiness," which marks his hatred of sin, and his immovable
determination to punish it. But when we reflect that this justice
is consistent with letting off the guilty and punishing the innocent
person, we feel dread misgivings steal into our minds. The justice of
our Moral Governor has nothing in common with our justice--indeed, it
violates all our notions of right and wrong. What if, as Mr. Vance
Smith suggests, this strange justice be consistent also with a double
punishment of sin; and what if the Moral Governor should bethink himself
that, having confused morality by an unjust--humanly speaking, of
course--punishment, it would be well to set things straight again by
punishing the guilty after all? We can never dare to feel safe in the
hands of this unjust--humanly speaking--Moral Governor, or predicate
from our instinctive notions of right and wrong what his requirements
may be. One is lost in astonishment that men should believe such things
of God, and not have manhood enough to rise up rebellious against such
injustice--should, instead, crouch at his feet, and while trying to hide
themselves from his wrath should force their trembling lips to murmur
some incoherent acknowledgment of his mercy. Ah! they do not believe it;
they assert it in words, but, thank God, it makes no impression on their
hearts; and they would die a thousand deaths rather than imitate, in
their dealings with their fellow-men, the fearful cruelty which the
Church has taught them to call the justice of the Judge of all the
earth.
The Atonement is not only doubly unjust, but it is perfectly futile. We
are told that Christ took away the sins of the world; we have a right to
ask, "how?" So far as we can judge, we bear our sins in our own bodies
still, and the Atonement helps us not at all. Has he borne the physical
consequences of sin, such as the loss of health caused by intemperance
of all kinds? Not at all, this penalty remains, and, from the nature
of things, cannot be transferred. Has he borne the social consequences,
shame, loss of credit, and so on? They remain still to hinder us as
we strive to rise after our fall. Has he at least borne the pangs of
remorse for us, the stings of conscience? By no means; the tears of
sorrow are no less bitter, the prickings of repentance no less keen.
Perhaps he has struck at the root of evil, and has put away sin itself
out of a redeemed world? Alas! the wailing that goes up to heaven from a
world oppressed with sin weeps out a sorrowfully emphatic, "no, this
he has _not_ done." What has he then borne for us? Nothing, save the
phantom wrath of a phantom tyrant; all that is real exists the same as
before. We turn away, then, from the offered atonement with a feeling
that would be impatience at such trifling, were it not all too
sorrowful, and leave the Christians to impose on their imagined
sacrifice, the imagined burden of the guilt of the accursed race.
Further, the Atonement is, from the nature of things, entirely
impossible: we have seen how Christ fails to bear our sins in any
intelligible sense, but can he, in any way, bear the "punishment" of
sin? The idea that the punishment of sin can be transferred from one
person to another is radically false, and arises from a wrong conception
of the punishment consequent on sin, and from the ecclesiastical guilt,
so to speak, thought to be incurred thereby. _The only true punishment
of sin is the injury caused by it to our moral nature_: all the indirect
punishments, we have seen, Christ has not taken away, and the true
punishment can fall only on ourselves. For sin is nothing more than the
transgression of law. All law, when broken, entails _of necessity_ an
appropriate penalty, and recoils, as it were, on the transgressor. A
natural law, when broken, avenges itself by consequent suffering, and so
does a spiritual law: the injury wrought by the latter is not less
real, although less obvious. Physical sin brings physical suffering;
spiritual, moral, mental sin brings each its own appropriate punishment.
"Sin" has become such a cant term that we lose sight, in using it, of
its real simple meaning, a breaking of law. Imagine any sane man coming
and saying, "My dear friend; if you like to put your hand into the fire
I will bear the punishment of being burnt, and you shall not suffer." It
is quite as absurd to imagine that if I sin Jesus can bear my consequent
suffering. If a man lies habitually, for instance, he grows thoroughly
untrue: let him repent ever so vigorously, he must bear the consequences
of his past deeds, and fight his way back slowly to truthfulness of
word and thought: no atonement, nothing in heaven or earth save his own
labour, will restore to him the forfeited jewel of instinctive candour.
Thus the "punishment" of untruthfulness is the loss of the power of
being true, just as the punishment of putting the hand into the fire is
the loss of the power of grasping. But in addition to this simple and
most just and natural "retribution," theologians have invented certain
arbitrary penalties as a punishment of sin, the wrath of God and hell
fire. These imaginary penalties are discharged by an equally imaginary
atonement, the natural punishment remaining as before; so after all we
only reject the two sets of inventions which balance each other, and
find ourselves just in the same position as they are, having gained
infinitely in simplicity and naturalness. The punishment of sin is not
an arbitrary penalty, but an inevitable sequence: Jesus may bear, if his
worshippers will have it so, the theological fiction of the "guilt of
sin," an idea derived from the ceremonial uncleanness of the Levitical
law, but let him leave alone the solemn realities connected with the
sacred and immutable laws of God.
Doubly unjust, useless, and impossible, it might be deemed a work of
supererogation to argue yet further against the Atonement; but its hold
on men's minds is too firm to allow us to lay down a single weapon which
can be turned against it. So, in addition to these defects, I remark
that, viewed as a propitiatory sacrifice to Almighty God, it is
thoroughly inadequate. If God, being righteous, as we believe Him to be,
regarded man with anger because of man's sinfulness, what is obviously
the required propitiation? Surely the removal of the cause of anger,
_i.e._, of sin itself, and the seeking by man of righteousness. The old
Hebrew prophet saw this plainly, and his idea of atonement is the
true one: "wherewith shall I come before the Lord," he is asked, with
burnt-offerings or--choicer still--parental anguish over a first-born's
corpse? "What doth the Lord require of thee," is the reproving answer,
"but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
But what is the propitiatory element in the Christian Atonement?
let Canon Liddon answer: "the ignominy and pain _needed_ for the
redemption." Ignominy, agony, blood, death, these are what Christians
offer up as an acceptable sacrifice to the Spirit of Love. But what have
all these in common with the demands of the Eternal Righteousness, and
how can pain atone for sin? they have no relation to each other; there
is no appropriateness in the offered exchange. These terrible offerings
are in keeping with the barbarous ideas of uncivilized nations, and we
understand the feelings which prompt the savage to immolate tortured
victims on the altars of his gloomy gods; they are appropriate
sacrifices to the foes of mankind, who are to be bought off from
injuring us by our offering them an equivalent pain to that they desire
to inflict, but they are offensive when given to Him who is the
Friend and Lover of Humanity. An Atonement which offers suffering as
a propitiation can have nothing in common with God's will for man, and
must be utterly beside the mark, perfectly inadequate. If we must have
Atonement, let it at least consist of something which will suit the
Righteousness and Love of God, and be in keeping with his perfection;
let it not borrow the language of ancient savagery, and breathe of blood
and dying victims, and tortured human frames, racked with pain.
Lastly, I impeach the Atonement as injurious in several ways to human
morality. It has been extolled as "meeting the needs of the awakened
sinner" by soothing his fears of punishment with the gift of a
substitute who has already suffered his sentence for him; but nothing
can be more pernicious than to console a sinner with the promise that
he shall escape the punishment he has justly deserved. The Atonement
may meet the first superficial feelings of a man startled into the
consciousness of his sinfulness, it may soothe the first vague fears and
act as an opiate to the awakened conscience; but it does not fulfil the
cravings of a heart deeply yearning after righteousness; it offers a
legal justification to a soul which is longing for purity, it offers
freedom from punishment to a soul longing for freedom from sin. The true
penitent does not seek to be shielded from the consequences of his past
errors: he accepts them meekly, bravely, humbly, learning through pain
the lesson of future purity. An atonement which steps in between us and
this fatherly discipline ordained by God, would be a curse and not a
blessing; it would rob us of our education and deprive us of a priceless
instruction. The force of temptation is fearfully added to by the idea
that repentance lays the righteous penalty of transgression on another
head; this doctrine gives a direct encouragement to sin, as even
Paul perceived when he said, "shall we continue in sin that grace may
abound?" Some one has remarked, I think, that though Paul ejaculates,
"God forbid," his fears were well founded and have been widely realised.
To the Atonement we owe the morbid sentiment which believes in the holy
death of a ruffianly murderer, because, goaded by ungovernable terror,
he has snatched at the offered safety and been "washed in the blood of
the lamb." To it we owe the unwholesome glorying in the pious sentiments
of such an one, who ought to go out of this life sadly and silently,
without a sickening parade of feelings of love towards the God whose
laws, as long as he could, he has broken and despised. But the Christian
teachers will extol the "saving grace" which has made the felon die with
words of joyful assurance, meet only for the lips of one who crowns
a saintly life with a peaceful death. The Atonement has weakened that
stern condemnation of sin which is the safeguard of purity; it has
softened down moral differences, and placed the penitent above the
saint; it has dulled the feeling of responsibility in the soul; it has
taken away the help, such as it is, of fear of punishment for sin; it
has confused man's sense of justice, outraged his feeling of right,
blunted his conscience, and misdirected his repentance. It has chilled
his love to God by representing the universal father as a cruel tyrant
and a remorseless and unjust judge. It has been the fruitful parent of
all asceticism, for, since God was pacified by suffering once, he would,
of course, be pleased with suffering at all times, and so men have
logically ruined their bodies to save their souls, and crushed their
feelings and lacerated their hearts to propitiate the awful form
frowning behind the cross of Christ. To the Atonement we owe it that God
is served by fear instead of by love, that monasticism holds its head
above the sweet sanctities of love and home, that religion is crowned
with thorns and not with roses, that the _miserere_ and not the _gloria_
is the strain from earth to heaven. The Atonement teaches men to crouch
at the feet of God, instead of raising loving, joyful faces to meet his
radiant smile; it shuts out his sunshine from us, and veils us in the
night of an impenetrable dread. What is the sentiment with which Canon
Liddon closes a sermon on the death of Christ? I quote it to show the
slavish feeling engendered by this doctrine in a very noble human soul:
"In ourselves, indeed, there is nothing that should stay His (God's)
arm or invite his mercy. But may he have respect to the acts and the
sufferings of his sinless son? Only while contemplating the inestimable
merits of the Redeemer can we dare to hope that our heavenly Father will
overlook the countless provocations which he receives at the hands of
the redeemed." Is this a wholesome sentiment, either as regards our
feelings towards God or our efforts towards holiness? Is it well to look
to the purity of another as a makewight for our personal shortcomings?
All these injuries to morality done by the atonement are completed
by the crowning one, that it offers to the sinner a veil of "imputed
righteousness." Not only does it take from him his saving punishment,
but it nullifies his strivings after holiness by offering him a
righteousness which is not his own. It introduces into the solemn
region of duty to God the legal fiction of a gift of holiness, which is
imputed, not won. We are taught to believe that we can blind the eyes
of God and satisfy him with a pretended purity. But that every one whose
purity we seek to claim as ours, that fair blossom of humanity, Jesus
of Nazareth, whose mission we so misconstrue, launched his anathema at
whited sepulchres, pure without and foul within. What would he have said
of the whitewash of unimputed righteousness? Stern and sharp would have
been his rebuke, methinks, to a device so untrue, and well-deserved
would have been his thundered "woe" on a hypocrisy that would fain
deceive God as well as man.
These considerations have carried so great a weight with the most
enlightened and progressive minds among Christians themselves, that
there has grown up a party in the Church whose repudiation of an
atonement of agony and death is as complete as even we could wish.
They denounce with the utmost fervour the hideous notion of a "bloody
sacrifice," and are urgent in their representations of the dishonour
done to God by ascribing to him "pleasure in the death of him that
dieth," or satisfaction in the sight of pain. They point out that there
is no virtue in blood to wash away sin, not even "in the blood of a
God." Maurice eloquently pleads against the idea that the suffering
of the "well-beloved Son" was in itself an acceptable sacrifice to the
Almighty Father, and he sees the atoning element in the "holiness and
graciousness of the Son." Writers of this school perceive that a moral
and not a physical sacrifice can be the only acceptable offering to the
Father of spirits, but the great objection lies against their theory
also, that the Atonement is still vicarious. Christ still suffers _for_
man, in order to make men acceptable to God. It is, perhaps, scarcely
fair to say this of the school as a whole, since the opinions of Broad
Church divines differ widely from each other, ranging from the orthodox
to the Socinian standing-point. Yet, roughly speaking, we may say that
while they have given up the error of thinking that the death of
Christ reconciles God to-us, they yet believe that his death, in
some mysterious manner, reconciles us to God. It is a matter of deep
thankfulness that they give up the old cruel idea of propitiating God,
and so prepare the way for a higher creed. Their more humane teaching
reaches hearts which are as yet sealed against us, and they are the
John Baptist of the Theistic Christ. We must still urge on them that an
atonement at all is superfluous, that all the parade of reconciliation
by means of a mediator is perfectly unnecessary as between God and his
child, man; that the notion put forward that Christ realised the ideal
of humanity and propitiated God by showing what a man _could_ be, is
objectionable in that it represents God as needing to be taught what
were the capacities of his creatures, and is further untrue, because the
powers of God in man are not really the equivalent of the capabilities
of a simple man. Broad Churchmen are still hampered by the difficulties
surrounding a divine Christ, and are puzzled to find for him a place in
their theology which is at once suitable for his dignity, and consistent
with a reasonable belief. They feel obliged to acknowledge that some
unusual benefit to the race must result from the incarnation and death
of a God, and are swayed alternately by their reason, which places
the crucifixion of Jesus in the roll of martyrs' deaths, and by their
prejudices, which assign to it a position unique and unrivalled in the
history of the race. There are, however, many signs that the deity of
Jesus is, as an article of faith, tottering from its pedestal in the
Broad Church school. The hold on it by such men as the Rev. J. S. Brooke
is very slight, and his interpretation of the incarnation is regarded
by orthodox divines with unmingled horror. Their _moral_ atonement, in
turn, is as the dawn before the sunrise, and we may hope that it will
soon develop into the real truth: namely, that the dealings of Jesus
with the Father were a purely private matter between his own soul and
God, and that his value to mankind consists in his being one of the
teachers of the race, one "with a genius for religion," one of the
schoolmasters appointed to lead humanity to God.
The theory of M'Leod Campbell stands alone, and is highly interesting
and ingenious--it is the more valuable and hopeful as coming from
Scotland, the home of the dreariest belief as to the relations existing
between man and God. He rejects the penal character of the Atonement,
and makes it consist, so to speak, in leading God and man to understand
one another. He considers that Christ witnessed to men on behalf of God,
and vindicated the father's heart by showing what he could be to the son
who trusted in him. He witnessed to God on behalf of men--and this
is the weakest point in the book, verging, as it does, on
substitution--showing in humanity a perfect sympathy with God's feelings
towards sin, and offering to God for man a perfect repentance for human
transgression. I purposely say "verging," because Campbell does not
_intend_ substitution; he represents this sorrow of Jesus as what he
must inevitably feel at seeing his brother-men unconscious of their sin
and danger, so no fiction is supposed as between God and Christ. But he
considers that God, having seen the perfection of repentance in Jesus,
accepts the repentance of man, imperfect as it is, because it is _in
kind_ the same as that of Jesus, and is the germ of that feeling of
which his is the perfect flower; in this sense, and only in this sense,
is the repentance of man accepted "for Christ's sake." He considers that
men must share in the mind of Christ as towards God and towards sin, in
order to be benefited by the work of Christ, and that each man must thus
actually take part in the work of atonement. The sufferings of Jesus he
regards as necessary in order to test the reality of the life of sonship
towards God, and brotherhood towards men, which he came to earth to
exemplify. I trust I have done no injustice in this short summary to a
very able and thoughtful book, which presents, perhaps, the only view of
the Atonement compatible with the love and the justice of God; and this
only, of course, if the idea of _any_ atonement can fairly be said to
be consistent with justice. The merits of this view are practically that
this work of Jesus is not an "atonement" in the theological sense at
all. The defects of Campbell's book are inseparable from his creed,
as he argues from a belief in the deity of Jesus, from an unconscious
limitation of God's knowledge (as though God did not understand man
till he was revealed to him by Jesus) and from a wrong conception of the
punishment due to sin. I said, at starting, that the Atonement was the
_raison d'etre_ of Christianity, and, in conclusion, I would challenge
all thoughtful men and women to say whether good cause has or has not
been shown for rejecting this pillar "of the faith." The Atonement has
but to be studied in order to be rejected. The difficulty is to persuade
people to _think_ about their creed, Yet the question of this doctrine
must be faced and answered. "I have too much faith in the common sense
and justice of Englishmen when once awakened to face any question
fairly, to doubt what that answer will be."