God's grace he has no disposition to do it; and cannot, because man, held fast in that net of sin in which all humanity is entangled, has neither the understanding of his guilt nor the power of reparation and amendment necessary for an adequate atonement. Those awful words which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the king in "Hamlet" express as truly the sinner's impotency to render atonement as inability to repent, for atonement and repentance, though very different, are yet in many cases very like:

"What then? what rests?

Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged!”

Sin in its relation to God is an awful thing, and the adequate atonement for it is beyond human power to render. Could the sinner see his guilt, still he could not atone for it. It is for this reason that in mercy on mankind God himself has interposed, first in the Old Testament system, furnishing a symbolical and typical atonement; then in Christ's work, giving us in Him a perfect atonement which we in faith can make our own. The marvel of God's method is, that here is a true atonement which the wronged party furnishes to the wrong-doer in such a way that it may still be the sinner's own act, and that he may do by this divine grace what he could not by himself even take the first steps towards doing.

V. The way is prepared for alluding to another point that deserves serious attention. In the older theories of the atonement, and to no small degree in the modern discussions of the subject, man is regarded as standing in a relation to the divine law or to the divine attribute of justice rather than in direct and personal relation to God himself. And similarly, in the further working out of the doctrine, Christ is represented as making atonement for us by appeasing a law or attribute. It is a part of that deistical tendency to which theology so easily falls a prey, and which forgets the continual presence and activity of God alike in the physical and moral universe. Anything but the living personal God himself. Once forget that God himself is energizing in his justice, and we listen almost with indifference to views which turn it into the grossest injustice. Once forget that the law is but the holy will of God, coming fresh in momently command from his throne, and we attribute to it what we should never dare to attrib

ute to God himself. And in like manner we separate the persons of the Trinity in our teachings of the atonement until we bring the Father and the Son into opposition with each other, and lose sight of the truth that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.

It will be impossible to reach any adequate understanding of this great doctrine while this error clings to it. For the relation between God and man is a direct and personal one, and never more so than in this matter of sin. The true guilt of sin lies not in the fact that a law has been broken or an attribute dishonored, but that a loving and righteous Father has been treated with despite. It is the sense of a personal displeasure on the part of Him who is our life and joy and only good that gives to conviction of sin its deep, tingling shame. It is to the wronged Father we owe our amends, not merely to a precept or a principle. The law might set the sinner free, canceling every claim of punishment against him and shutting the doors of hell forever, and still there would be no completed reconciliation and no assured hope of a perfect salvation. Sin is a personal matter. "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight." "Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." God's love to the sinner and burning displeasure with his sin are both intensely personal. There is an awful meaning, which no effeminate theology can ever smooth over, and no scholastic theology can ever rob of its directness of personal divine feeling, in the Scriptural assertion that "God is angry with the wicked every day." And in the work of Christ it is a personal Mediator coming between personal parties, bearing on his heart the sins and the woes of men, and pleading with his Father for their forgiveness, who speaks for men and furnishes the atonement they cannot give.

ment.

There is indeed a place for the legal in the doctrine of the atoneBut it is the subordinate, not the principal place. The legal rests on the personal, not the reverse. Until this relation is recognized, the legal analogies which have been the bane of theology, so far as our doctrine is concerned, will dominate in the theories of the atonement.

VI. There is need, also, that we reach a better understanding respecting the vicariousness of the Saviour's work. This principle finds abundant illustration in the Scriptures and in the facts of human life. It is recognized, though in the form of a merely legal substitution, in the older Protestant theology. But so deep

seated, both in philosophy and theology, is the influence of that individualism which was the bane of the eighteenth century, and its mischievous legacy to the nineteenth, that in this doctrine, as well as in that of sin, it seems wellnigh impossible to reach any true understanding of the organic relations of humanity in their theological bearings. Nor is it really a help that modern science, or rather the popular scientific philosophy, lays so much stress upon the corporate oneness of mankind, since it accompanies its teachings on this subject with a doctrine of determinism which makes this oneness entirely a matter of physical necessity. For vicariousness is not a "natural law in the spiritual world," but rather one of the most characteristic of spiritual laws, of which there are only feeble analogies and anticipations in the lower sphere. The fact that Christ became man in the assumption of our physical nature gives us but the starting-point for his work. To look at his work as a recuperative influence penetrating in natural ways through the social tissue does not bring us up to the spiritual or even truly ethical understanding of his salvation. There is need of striking a higher key.

It is the merit of Dorner that he has so fully and satisfactorily set forth the deep-lying nature of vicariousness as a law of humanity. Those splendid sections in the doctrine of sin and of the atonement, in which he has elucidated the subject, are among the most helpful in the "Glaubenslehre," that great work which has the not unprecedented fortune of being condemned most loudly by those who understand it least. Men form parts of a great ethical and spiritual organism, in which each is united to the rest, responsible for the rest, in some sense representative of the rest. The parent must think and choose and act for the child during the time of nonage. The husband and wife are a unity in which the physical relation is but the type and symbol of the higher ethical relation. The officers of government represent the people of the commonwealth. The patriot takes his country's dangers or its woes upon his heart. Men of influence speak the thought of the multitude. The good throw the mantle of their protection or their influence about the bad. In joy and sorrow, in private and public life, we do not live unto ourselves. It is hard to see what would become of literature as one of the fine arts, did not this principle furnish it with the subjects for its delineations. It is the key to that highest department of poetry, the tragic drama, opening to us the deepest meaning of a Sophocles and a Shakespeare. There is in the tragedy always some great calamity or guilt, which, in virtue

of this law, draws into its whirlpool a whole group of human beings, innocent and guilty alike. The thrilling interest of the drama lies in the interworking of the individual and the general, the way in which the gentle Ophelia is caught within the sweep of the king's guilt and her father's plots and Hamlet's deep-laid plans, and made to bear the awful sorrows of sins she has never even heard of; or the heroism and constancy of an Antigone struggling against the consequences of the crime of an ŒEdipus.

This principle of vicariousness must be understood, if we are to understand the atonement. But for its existence Christ could not have performed his saving work. By its means He has been able to accomplish a result which may perhaps have been possible only in humanity. What in the ordinary experience of life and in the tragic drama appears to be only half a matter of free-will, while for the rest men are hurried on by Providence or Fate to ends they know not of, appears in Christ a matter of voluntary and loving purpose. That He might save men, He made himself the man of men. He wrought out by temptation and suffering, by obedience and self-sacrifice, a perfect sonship in humanity in which the divine purpose for man was fulfilled, God's image realized, the Father well pleased. Winning by his perfect life, as well as by his divine nature, the right to be the second Adam, the central man of the race, He made himself the throbbing heart of its life and felt every pulse-beat. Especially, He put himself into contact with human sin. No being ever understood sin as Christ did. Let me reverently say, even the Father has never understood it as the incarnate Son. His great heart brooded over it, and in his experience he felt it in all its power. He realized as no man ever did what an awful thing it is to sin against the Father in heaven. He saw as would have been impossible even for the most gifted of sinful men the evil it has brought upon the race, and the extent to which all men and all human relations are implicated in it. He saw its relation to God's law and the moral order of his world, the consequences in human suffering and death of the working of God's punitive justice. In his contact with human sufferings, and in the sufferings which were peculiar to his own vocation, and most of all in his death, He even came in a sense, real yet not involving any personal guilt, to feel the power of that wrath of God which is directed against all sin, and from the effects of which in a world like this, where all partake of one organic life, even the guiltless cannot wholly escape. So far as was possible for a sinless being, or rather in a way and to a degree possible only for

him, the sinless Christ, our Saviour brought himself into the sinner's place. His atonement could avail for mankind because he was the Son of Man, the Head of humanity, whom God sent into the world to be the Atoner of human sin, and who by his own holy effort had won the right to act for all men. In this representative capacity, the Head acting for the members, He rendered to God the atonement that was due.

And so the atonement was itself vicarious. What man himself ought to have done, yet could not do, the Saviour did. By God's own appointment He stood before God as our substitute. The sinner who accepts Him to-day may claim, in virtue of the faith which unites him to the Saviour, that he was crucified with Christ. If one died for all, then all died. His atonement was humanity's atonement, and every believer may present it to God as his own perfect sacrifice.

Yet let us be clear in our own minds here. There are two kinds of substitution possible. The one is that of the earlier theology, substitution in punishment; the Holy One takes our "law place,' our guilt and liability to punishment are imputed to him, the punishment that is due to us or its equivalent in suffering falls upon Him, and the sinner goes free. The other kind is substitution in atonement; the Saviour does something which it is impossible for the sinner to render, makes the amends which God's holiness requires, that so the love of God, which from the first has yearned after the sinner, may become a reconciled love and bring the sinner into that holy life of sonship which of itself is the negation of all punishment. Substitution in punishment and substitution in atonement are not the same thing. And yet they are so closely related that it is needful, in order that we may see our way clearly to choose between them, for us to examine more closely the fact which furnishes their common groundwork.

VII. We are brought, then, to consider more carefully the death of Christ as an element in the atonement. That it furnishes in a preeminent sense the subject-matter of the doctrine we have seen already. The most superficial reading of the New Testament is sufficient to show how it stands out in sharply outlined prominence as the great atoning fact. It seems strange that in so many of our modern theories the death of Christ falls to such an extent into the background, becoming a mere incident in his redemptive career, or made a matter of altar forms and sacrificial phraseology. The doctrine of the atonement that is based upon the simple teaching of the Bible cannot possibly ignore what is most