natural impression is, that it requires no interpretation, but speaks
for itself; that it has no mystery, except that which belongs to the
triumphs of deep guilt, and the sanctities of disinterested love. To
raise our eye to that serene countenance, to listen to that submissive
voice, to note the subjects of its utterance, would give us no idea of
any mystic horror concealed behind the human features of the scene; of
any invisible contortions, as from the lash of demons, in the soul of
that holy victim; of any sympathetic connection of that cross with the
bottomless pit on the one hand, and the highest Heaven on the other; of
any moral revolution throughout our portion of the universe, of which
this public execution is but the outward signal. The historians drop no
hint that its sufferings, its affections, its relations, were more than
human,—raised indeed to distinction by miraculous accompaniments; but
intrinsically, however signally, human. They mention, as if bearing some
appreciable proportion to the whole series of incidents, particulars so
slight, as to vanish before any other than the obvious historical view
of the transaction; the thirst, the sponge, the rent clothes, the
mingled drink. They ascribe no sentiment to the crucified, except such
as might be expressed by one of like nature with ourselves, in the
consciousness of a finished work of duty, and a fidelity never broken
under the strain of heaviest trial. The narrative is clearly the
production of minds filled, not with theological anticipations, but with
historical recollections.
With this view of Christ’s death, which is such as might be entertained
by any of the primitive Churches, having one of the gospels only,
without any of the epistles, we are content. I conceive of it, then, as
manifesting the last degree of moral perfection in the Holy One of God;
and believe that in thus being an expression of character, it has its
primary and everlasting value. I conceive of it as the needful
preliminary to his resurrection and ascension, by which the severest
difficulties in the theory of Providence, life, and duty, are alleviated
or solved. I conceive of it as immediately procuring the universality
and spirituality of the Gospel; by dissolving those corporeal ties which
give nationality to Jesus, and making him, in his heavenly and immortal
form, the Messiah of humanity; blessing, sanctifying, regenerating, not
a people from the centre of Jerusalem, but a world from his station in
the Heavens. And these views, under unimportant modifications, I submit,
are the only ones of which Scripture contains a trace.
All this, however, we are assured, is the mere outside aspect of the
crucifixion; and wholly insignificant compared with the invisible
character and relations of the scene; which, localized only on earth,
has its chief effect in Hell; and though presenting itself among the
occurrences of time, is a repeal of the decretals of Eternity. The being
who hangs upon that cross is not man alone; but also the everlasting
God, who created and upholds all things, even the sun that now darkens
its face upon him, and the murderers who are waiting for his expiring
cry. The anguish he endures is not chiefly that which falls so
poignantly on the eye and ear of the spectator; the injured human
affections, the dreadful momentary doubt; the pulses of physical
torture, doubling on him with full and broken wave, till driven back by
the overwhelming power of love disinterested and divine. But he is
judicially abandoned by the Infinite Father; who expends on him the
immeasurable wrath due to an apostate race, gathers up into an hour the
lightnings of Eternity, and lets them loose upon that bended head. It is
the moment of retributive justice; the expiation of all human guilt;
that open brow hides beneath it the despair of millions of men; and to
the intensity of agony there, no human wail could give expression.
Meanwhile, the future brightens on the Elect; the tempests that hung
over their horizon are spent. The vengeance of the lawgiver having had
its way, the sunshine of a Father’s grace breaks forth, and lights up,
with hope and beauty, the earth, which had been a desert of despair and
sin. According to this theory, Christ, in his death, was a proper
expiatory sacrifice; he turned aside, by enduring it for them, the
infinite punishment of sin from all past or future believers in this
efficacy of the cross; and transferred to them the natural rewards of
his own righteousness. An acceptance of this doctrine is declared to be
the prime condition of the divine forgiveness; for no one who does not
_see_ the pardon, can _have_ it. And this pardon again, this clear score
for the past, is a necessary preliminary to all sanctification; to all
practical opening of a disinterested heart towards our Creator and man.
Pardon, and the perception of it, are the needful preludes to that
conforming love to God and men, which is the true Christian salvation.
The evidence in support of this theory is derived partly from natural
appearances, partly from scriptural announcements. Involving, as it
does, statements respecting the actual condition of human nature, and
the world in which we live, some appeal to experience, and to the
rational interpretation of life and Providence, is inevitable; and hence
certain propositions, affecting to be of a philosophical character, are
laid down as fundamental by the advocates of this system. Yet it is
admitted, that direct revelation only could have acquainted us, either
with our lost condition, or our vicarious recovery; and that all we can
expect to accomplish with nature, is to harmonize what we observe there,
with what we read in the written records of God’s will; so that the main
stress of the argument rests on the interpretation of Scripture. The
principles deduced from the nature of things, and laid down as a basis
for this doctrine, may be thus represented:
That man needs a Redeemer; having obviously fallen, by some disaster,
into a state of misery and guilt, from which the worst penal
consequences must be apprehended; and were it not for the probability of
such lapse from the condition in which it was fashioned, it would be
impossible to reconcile the phenomena of the world with the justice and
benevolence of its Creator.
That Deity only can redeem; since, to preserve veracity, the penalty of
sin must be inflicted; and the diversion only, not the annihilation, of
it, is possible. To let it fall on angels, would fail of the desired
end; because human sin, having been directed against an infinite Being,
has incurred an infinitude of punishment; which, on no created beings,
could be exhausted in any period short of eternity. Only a nature
strictly infinite can compress within itself, in the compass of an hour,
the woes distributed over the immortality of mankind. Hence, were God
personally One, like man, no redemption could be effected; for there
would be no Deity to suffer, except the very One who must punish. But
the triplicity of the Godhead relieves all difficulty; for, while one
Infinite inflicts, another Infinite endures; and resources are furnished
for the atonement.
Amid a great variety of forms in which the theory of atonement exists, I
have selected the foregoing; which, if I understand aright, is that
which is vindicated in the present controversy. I am not aware that I
have added anything to the language in which it is stated by its
powerful advocate, unless it be a few phrases, leaving its essential
meaning the same, but needful to render it compact and clear.
The scriptural evidence is found principally in certain of the
apostolical epistles; and this circumstance will render it necessary to
conduct a separate search into the historical writings of the New
Testament, that we may ascertain how they express the corresponding set
of ideas. Taking up successively these two branches of the subject, the
natural and the biblical, I propose to show, first, that this doctrine
is inconsistent with itself; secondly, that it is inconsistent with the
Christian idea of Salvation.
I. It is inconsistent with itself.
(1.) In its manner of treating the principles of natural religion.
Our faith in the infinite benevolence of God is represented as destitute
of adequate support from the testimony of nature.[295] It requires, we
are assured, the suppression of a mass of appearances, that would scare
it away in an instant, were it to venture into their presence; and is a
dream of sickly and effeminate minds, whose belief is the inward growth
of amiable sentimentality, rather than a genuine production from God’s
own facts. The appeal to the order and magnificence of creation, to the
structures and relations of the inorganic, the vegetable, the animal,
the spiritual forms, that fill the ascending ranks of this visible and
conscious universe;—to the arrangements which make it a blessing to be
born, far more than a suffering to die,—which enable us to extract the
relish of life from its toils, the affections of our nature from its
sufferings, the triumphs of goodness from its temptations;—to the
seeming plan of general progress, which elicits truth by the
self-destruction of error, and by the extinction of generations gives
perpetual rejuveniscence to the world; this appeal, which is another
name for the scheme of natural religion, is dismissed with scorn; and
sin and sorrow and death are flung in defiance across our path;—barriers
which we must remove, ere we can reach the presence of a benignant God.
Come with us, it is said, and listen to the wail of the sick infant;
look into the dingy haunts where poverty moans its life away; bend down
your ear to the accursed hum that strays from the busy hives of guilt;
spy into the hold of the slave-ship; from the factory follow the wasted
child to the gin-shop first, and then to the cellar called its home; or
look even at your own tempted and sin-bound souls, and your own
perishing race, snatched off into the dark by handfuls through the
activity of a destroying God; and tell us, did our benevolent Creator
make a creature and a world like this? A Calvinist who puts this
question is playing with fire. But I answer the question explicitly: all
these things we have met steadily and face to face; in full view of
them, we have taken up our faith in the goodness of God; and in full
view of them we will hold fast that faith. Nor is it just or true to
affirm, that our system hides these evils, or that our practice refuses
to grapple with them. And if you confess, that these ills of life would
be too much for your natural piety; if you declare, that these rugged
foundations and tempestuous elements of Providence would starve and
crush your confidence in God, while ours strikes its roots in the rock,
and throws out its branches to brave the storm, are you entitled to
taunt us with a faith of puny growth? Meanwhile, we willingly assent to
the principle which this appeal to evil is designed to establish; that,
with much apparent order, there is some apparent disorder in the
phenomena of the world; that from the latter, by itself, we should be
unable to infer any goodness and benevolence in God; and that were not
the former clearly the predominant result of natural laws, the character
of the Great Cause of all things would be involved in agonizing gloom.
The mass of physical and moral evil we do not profess fully to explain;
we think that in no system whatever is there any approach to an
explanation; and we are accustomed to touch on that dread subject with
the humility of filial trust, not with the confidence of dogmatic
elucidation.
Surely the fall of our first parents, I shall be reminded, gives the
requisite solution. The disaster which then befell the human race, has
changed the primeval constitution of things; introduced mortality, and
all the infirmities of which it is the result; introduced sin, and all
the seeds of vile affections which it compels us to inherit; introduced
also the penalties of sin, visible in part on this scene of life, and
developing themselves in another in anguish everlasting. Fresh from the
hand of his Creator, man was innocent, happy and holy; and he it is, not
God, who has deformed the world with guilt and grief.
Now, _as a statement of fact_, all this may or may not be true. Of this
I say nothing. But who does not see that, _as an explanation_, it is
inconsistent with itself, partial in its application, and leaves matters
incomparably worse than it found them? It is inconsistent with itself;
for Adam, perfectly pure and holy as he is reputed to have been, gave
the only proof that could exist of his being neither, by succumbing to
the first temptation that came in his way; and though finding no
enjoyment but in the contemplation of God, gave himself up to the first
advances of the devil. Never surely was a reputation for sanctity so
cheaply won. The canonizations of the Romish Calendar have been
curiously bestowed, on beings sufficiently remote from just ideas of
excellence; but, usually, there is _something_ to be affirmed of them,
legendary or otherwise, which, _if true_, might justify a momentary
admiration. But our first parent was not laid even under this necessity,
to obtain a glory greater than canonization; he had simply to do
nothing, except to fall, in order to be esteemed the most perfectly holy
of created minds. Most partial, too, is this theory in its application;
for disease and hardship, and death unmerited as the infant’s, afflict
the lower animal creation. Is this, too, the result of the fall? If so,
it is an _unredeemed_ effect; if not, it presses on the benevolence of
the Maker; and by the physical analogies which connect man with the
inferior creatures, force on us the impression, that his corporeal
sufferings have an original source not dissimilar from theirs. And
again, this explanation only serves to make matters worse than before.
For how puerile is it to suppose, that men will rest satisfied with
tracing back their ills to Adam, and refrain from asking, who was Adam’s
cause! And then comes upon us at once the ancient dilemma about evil;
was it mistake, or was it malignity, that created so poor a creature as
our progenitor, and staked on so precarious a will the blessedness of a
race and the well-being of a world? So far, this theory, falsely and
injuriously ascribed to Christianity, would leave us where we were: but
it carries us into deeper and gratuitous difficulties, of which natural
religion knows nothing, by appending eternal consequences to Adam’s
transgression; a large portion of which, after the most sanguine
extension of the efficacy of the atonement, must remain unredeemed. So
that if, under the eye of naturalism, the world, with its generations
dropping into the grave, must appear (as we heard it recently
described)[296] like the populous precincts of some castle, whose
governor called his servants, after a brief indulgence of liberty and
peace, into a dark and inscrutable dungeon, never to return or be seen
again: the only new feature which this theory introduces into the
prospect is this; that the interior of that cavernous prison-house is
disclosed; and while a few of the departed are seen to have emerged into
a fairer light, and to be traversing greener fields, and sharing a more
blessed liberty than they knew before, the vast multitude are discerned
in the gripe of everlasting chains, and the twist of unimaginable
torture. And all this infliction is a penal consequence of a first
ancestor’s transgression! Singular spectacle to be offered in
vindication of the character of God!
We are warned, however, not to start back from this representation, or
to indulge in any rash expression at the view which it gives of the
justice of the Most High; for that, beyond all doubt, parallel instances
occur in the operations of nature; and that if the system deduced from
Scripture accords with that which is in action in the creation, there
arises a strong presumption that both are from the same Author. The
arrangement which is the prime subject of objection in the foregoing
theory, _viz._, the vicarious transmission of consequences from acts of
vice and virtue, is said to be familiar to our observation as a _fact_;
and ought, therefore, to present no difficulties in the way of the
admission of a _doctrine_. Is it not obvious, for example, that the
guilt of a parent may entail disease and premature death on his child,
or even remoter descendants? And if it be consistent with the divine
perfections, that the innocent should suffer for others’ sins at the
distance of one generation, why not at the distance of a thousand? The
guiltless victim is not more completely severed from identity with Adam,
than he is from identity with his own father. My reply is brief: I admit
both the fact and the analogy; but the fact is of the exceptional kind,
from which, by itself, I could not infer the justice or the benevolence
of the Creator; and which, were it of large and prevalent amount, I
could not even reconcile with these perfections. If then you take it out
of the list of exceptions and difficulties, and erect it into a cardinal
rule, if you interpret by it the whole invisible portion of God’s
government, you turn the scale at once against the character of the
Supreme, and plant creation under a tyrant’s sway. And this is the fatal
principle pervading all analogical arguments in defence of Trinitarian
Christianity. No resemblances to the system can be found in the
universe, except in those anomalies and seeming deformities which
perplex the student of Providence, and which would undermine his faith,
were they not lost in the vast spectacle of beauty and of good. These
disorders are selected and spread out to view, as specimens of the
divine government of nature; the mysteries and horrors which offend us
in the popular theology are extended by their side; the comparison is
made, point by point, till the similitude is undeniably made out; and
when the argument is closed, it amounts to this: do you doubt whether
God could break mens’ limbs? You mistake his strength of character; only
see how he puts out their eyes! What kind of impression this reasoning
may have, seems to me doubtful even to agony. Both Trinitarian theology
and nature, it is triumphantly urged, must proceed from the same Author;
aye, but what sort of Author is that? You have led me in your quest
after analogies, through the great infirmary of God’s creation! and so
haunted am I by the sights and sounds of the lazar-house, that scarce
can I believe in anything but pestilence; so sick of soul have I become,
that the mountain breeze has lost its scent of health; and you say, it
is all the same in the other world, and wherever the same rule extends:
then I know my fate, that in this Universe Justice has no throne. And
thus, my friends, it comes to pass, that these reasoners often gain
indeed their victory; but it is known only to the Searcher of Hearts,
whether it is a victory against natural religion, or in favour of
revealed. For this reason, I consider the “Analogy” of Bishop Butler
(one of the profoundest of thinkers, and on purely moral subjects one of
the justest too,) as containing, with a design directly contrary, the
most terrible persuasives to Atheism that have ever been produced. The
essential error consists in selecting the difficulties,—which are the
rare, exceptional phenomena of nature,—as the basis of analogy and
argument. In the comprehensive and generous study of Providence, the
mind may, indeed, already have overcome the difficulties, and with the
lights recently gained from the harmony, design, and order of creation,
have made those shadows pass imperceptibly away; but when forced again
into their very centre, compelled to adopt them as a fixed station and
point of mental vision, they deepen round the heart again, and, instead
of illustrating anything, become solid darkness themselves.
I cannot quit this topic without observing, however, that there appears
to be nothing in nature and life, at all analogous to the vicarious
principle attributed to God in the Trinitarian scheme of redemption.
There is nowhere to be found any proper transfer or exchange, either of
the qualities, or of the consequences, of vice and virtue. The good and
evil acts of men do indeed affect others _as well_ as themselves; the
innocent suffer _with_ the guilty, as in the case before adduced, of a
child suffering in health by the excesses of a parent. But there is here
no endurance _for_ another, similar to Christ’s alleged endurance in the
place of men; the infliction on the child is not deducted from the
parent; it does nothing to lighten his load, or make it less than it
would have been, had he been without descendants; nor does any one
suppose his guilt alleviated by the existence of this innocent
fellow-sufferer. There is a nearer approach to analogy in those cases of
crime where the perpetrator seems to escape, and to leave the
consequences of his act to descend on others; as when the successful
cheat eludes pursuit, and from the stolen gains of neighbours constructs
a life of luxury for himself; or when a spendthrift government,
forgetful of its high trust, turning the professions of patriotism into
a lie, is permitted to run a prosperous career for one generation, and
is personally gone before the popular retribution falls, in the next, on
innocent successors. Here no doubt the harmless suffer _by_ the guilty,
in a certain sense _in the place of_ the guilty; but not in the sense
which the analogy requires. For there is still no substitution; the
distress of the unoffending party is not struck out of the offender’s
punishment; does not lessen, but rather aggravates his guilt; and
instead of fitting him for pardon, tempts the natural sentiments of
justice to follow him with severer condemnation. Nor does the scheme
receive any better illustration from the fact, that whoever attempts the
cure of misery must himself suffer; must have the shadows of ill cast
upon his spirit from every sadness he alleviates; and interpose himself
to stay the plague which, in a world diseased, threatens to pass to the
living from the dead. The parallel fails, because there is still no
transference: the appropriate sufferings of sin are not given to the
philanthropist; and the noble pains of goodness in him, the glorious
strife of his self-sacrifice, are no part of the penal consequences of
others’ guilt; they do not cancel one iota of those consequences, or
make the crimes which have demanded them, in any way, more ready for
forgiveness. Indeed, it is not in the good man’s _sufferings_,
considered as such, that any efficacy resides; but in his _efforts_,
which may be made with great sacrifice or without it, as the case may
be. Nor, at best, is there any proper annihilation of consequences at
all, accruing from his toils; the past acts of wrong which call up his
resisting energies, are irrevocable, the guilt incurred, the penalty
indestructible; the series of effects, foreign to the mind of the
perpetrator, may be abbreviated; prevention may be applied to new ills
which threaten to arise; but, by all this, the personal fitness of the
delinquent for forgiveness is wholly unaffected; the volition of sin has
gone forth; and on it, flies, as surely as sound on a vibration of the
air, the verdict of judgment.
Those who are affected by slight and failing analogies like these, would
do well to consider one, sufficiently obvious, which seems to throw
doubt upon their scheme. The atonement is thought to be, in respect to
all believers, a reversal of the fall: the effects of the fall are
partly visible and temporal, partly invisible and eternal; linked,
however, together as inseparable portions of the same penal system. Now
it is evident, that the supposed redemption on the cross has left
precisely where they were, all the _visible_ effects of the first
transgression: sorrow and toil are the lot of all, as they have been
from of old; the baptized infant utters a cry as sad as the unbaptized;
and between the holiness of the true believer and the worth of the
devout heretic, there is not discernible such a difference as there must
have been between Adam pure and perfect, and Adam lapsed and lost. And
is it presumptuous to reason from the seen to the unseen, from the part
which we experience to that which we can only conceive? If the known
effects are unredeemed, the suspicion is not unnatural, that so are the
unknown.