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Our difierence is, that we trace it far back, and refiise to stop short of its deepest root ; and having learnt the greatness of man's sickness, we more thankfully proclaim the goodness of God who has sent the great Physician of souls into the world. Here is no cruel doctrine, but one of healing ; and in so far as any one receives the gift, we rejoice, and -would gladly extend it farther. Only our piety forbids us to find the origin of sin, as sin, properly in the mind of God, or anywhere but in an evil spirit in ourselves. But as to the great entangle- * I Corinthians xi. 7 ; 3 Corinthians iv. 4 ; Romans viii. 99 ; Genesia i. a6, 97. DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT. 433 ment, out of which evil comes and appears as an enemy, so that the good will is not fulfilled, Blancombe has said enough. (2) " I have said the goodness of God. For secondly, I must not allow you to think that our heavenly Father was either vindictive, or mercenary, or even changeable. He does not change ; for it is written, that His counsel stands fast, and He does all His pleasure*. Whatever is being done for the salvation of mankind now, has been predestined from before the creation ; and by the term predestination we express this fixity of the Divine counsel. Thus Christ, as the Lamb of God, is said to have been slain before the foundation of the world^. With the Eternal, then, according to our doctrine, is no variableness. Neither, again, is there mercenariness. For though the life of Christ is the most precious of all ransoms, yet it is paid not to the Father, whose will was always to deliver us, but to the great enemy, whether death, or the devil, or the law, considered as an accuser. Surely you know that it is to an enemy ransom is paid, and not to a father. Thus the apostles with one voice teach in all their writings, that we are bought out of the hand of death I, or sin, and out of this present evil world, but never out of the hands of our heavenly Father. So the primitive doctors §, who came next after the apostles, taught that the price of Christ's sufferings was paid to the great enemy ; only they knew not how He had a right to exact it. More modem doctors have explained the price paid as a satisfaction to the law ; and there is no harm in this view, if wc understand it of the law in its accusing aspect, when it becomes an enemy ; for then it is the strength of sin ; and we do read that Christ has hhtted out the handioriting which was against tis. But we must * Isaiah xlvL lo. Epheeians i. ii. + Revelations xiiL 8. i Peter i. lo. t GoloBsiansi. 13 : Actsxxvi 18 : Galat. i. 4 : 1 Tim. L 9, 10: Titus ii. 11 — 14. § So Irenffius, OrigeD, the two Gregories, and even St Augustine. The theory of a price paid to the Father, or to change His will, is as contrary to Ecclesiastical Antiquity as it is to our purest conscience, and to Scripture when caught from the point of view of the sacred wriien. M. P. 28 434 DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT. greatly beware of understanding this of that innermost law, which is the will of the Father, and which, when it comes forth, gives light to the simple. For in that innermost law, which is love, there is no darkness at all. Neither does pain come of it ; for no evil, as evil, is of God." "But why," here interposed the Saugata, "did not the Father save the world, since He loved it, without such suffering by His Son?" "Why," replied Mountain, "do you hurt your child, when you wish only to correct him? Or why alarm, when you desire to warn? No earthly father rejoices in his child's crying, and yet he suffers it ; nor surgeon in the sharp pain of the knife, and yet he uses it. So God is not angered as if out of infirmity; but if men break the order of His creation, they disturb forces which crush them. As they sow, He lets them reap. He could not put forth law in fixity, unless it had penalty possible. All that Blancombe said of evil, as coming of God only in possibility, but of lower agents in fulfil- ment, should be here remembered by you. He also explained suflSciently for humility the suffering of Christ. The old written law could not be broken as a civil institution, unless He who broke it suffered. Nor could it be abolished in its hold over men's consciences, unless He who suffered from it had also triumph. But if even that written law pointed to an eternal right above us, and its sacrifices to a dread of conscience within us, these deeper things are for mankind what the writing was for the Hebrews. These things then require of all men a suffer- ing, which we must partake by sympathy, or otherwise, so as to be purged, and an assurance that our sacrifice, or that of which we partake in spirit, can be accepted. Again, it has been shewn, how Christ's dying and rising again brings about our death to sin, and our moral resurrection. But this visible effect (as in what I said before) points to a deeper something, or a writing in heaven, which answers to what is written in earth. Christ then died, even as the victims of the Mosaic law died ; and as men offering those both expressed contrition, and were forgiven, DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT. 436 80 we, associating ourselves with Christ's death in sympathy and sacrament, make as it were a spiritual sacrifice, and receive the forgiveness of our heavenly Father, which comes frankly of His infinite love. " I need not prove farther that God is not vindictive. How- ever imperfectly we may understand that mystery of evil, which Christ triumphed over on the cross, we find there the cause of His pain, rather than in the will of the Father. The limit set to everything human, the possibilities which accompany good, the threatening nature of all law, and the necessity of law not being broken with impunity, give us something like a clue. They teach us to find the necessity for Christ's death, as a death, in some necessity external to the innermost will of God, rather than within it; though yet without Him, by whom all things are, neither the necessity, nor the law introducing it, could be even in thought. They suggest also how that sufiering, which to the eternal love was no motive*, may yet have been an indispensably foreseen condition; and hence to our finite thoughts, not grasping an omnipresent unity, it may seem pre- sented as a cause. Moreover, when we see how all great martyrs suffer, how out of their death goes forth power, and how death itself by the greater mystery of Christ's bringing immor- tality within its range, had its bonds for ever loosed, we can feel better than understand, that love here wrought with wisdom in delivering us from evil. Nor are our Scriptures doubtful on this point ; for they ever teach that * God loved the world, and gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish.' Only I must own that our doctrine of Christ's suffering for our sins, and taking away the sins of the world by His death, is by some modem teachers put in a different light from that of the apostles. For the modems some- times make belief in it a kind of legal requirement, and use it so as to discourage man, and to narrow the mercies of God. Whereas with the apostles of Christ it was ever a doctrine of * See above, n&ge 334. 28—2 4% v/TTxi'SL '.F zLirm.y. J <&■...>:. . r, A ..- >- T^T* . ..- .--'-- ii i • ^ .•.-■■_ -■ — '. — * > ^. ? . dii hVizA :>. the r*A.*vn wi^v ', ir tnt'i. :-£.t 'tS- i.- w-r to iieaL Bt th<i v*:r7 aj^'/-:: '.-I C'lr!.?: are r~r :-:j'-.e:r auth>r!rj: and : th*:ir A'^rxvi-jz w mrrrt wL-'..Ie->me- =•:• fr: m thrrir wrlrln^? I woul Lave voa take it. '%, " Aa OyL bv delivrrin^ tl^ thr:iT:2:h His S-^n fr>in thi evil which waa in the worl'L shews His l>ve to man. neither doi He narrow it Ly rejectin;: any wiilin? t> be savecL Yon hai ri^fhtlj ;rne3iv:d that our doctrine of election has somethin? do with Jewish feel in zs- Onlv. instead of beine the same \ their narrowness, it is built upon St Paul's express teachinpr the contrary. He saw the Jews pridin;? themselves up>n beii % chojy;n people. Already John the Baptist had warned tliei that if they did not Abraham's works. Grjd could raise up otli children to Abraham.