ren.

reconciling the world unto himself. The Holy One took human flesh upon Him and went through all the weary way of earthly toil and suffering, that He might be in all things like his brethren and become their true and acknowledged representative and substitute before God, their merciful and faithful high-priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. Not merely by divine appointment and community of nature, but by that perfected sonship to God and fellowship to his brethren which were wrought out in his holy life, He is the Son of man, the Central Man, in whom the redeemed and holy race has begun, and in whom the whole race of God's lost children find their sinless head and spokesman. Human sin is concentrated upon Him; God makes Him to be sin who knows no sin. He endures the pangs of death. But what generations have suffered in sin, paying the penalty of their evil-doing, He suffers holily for his brethWhat others have suffered with hearts bearing still in them. the stains and perversity of sin, He suffers with love to God and love to man. His will is at one with God, his spirit is the spirit of perfect sonship, of filial submission to the Father's will and patient endurance of its discipline. Here is Man holy in death instead of man sinful in death, the One who stands for all. And more than that, here is the Son of man, whose heart has become the heart of humanity, whose mouth speaks the true word of man, making acknowledgment of the justice of that divine displeasure that visits sin with punishment, interceding for mercy and holding up in his own perfect sonship and hard-won spiritual power over men the pledge of a new and holy race. This is what God sees coming to Him out of sinful humanity, out of the suffering of death. What atonement could there be like this? All the conditions of the case are satisfied. God furnishes the atonement. Man renders it. God accepts it for all who join themselves to Christ in faith. The Saviour is exalted to God's right hand. The Holy Spirit is given to Him. He makes it his work to bring men to accept his mercy. They who believe are forgiven, and, united with Christ, are finally made perfect, saved unto the

uttermost.

A single sentence tells the simple story. The atonement of Christ is his vicarious bearing of death in holy submission to God and acknowledgment of his just wrath against human sin. Christ does for us what we ought to do, but cannot do. He makes the amends we cannot make, the satisfaction that is beyond our power. We make it ours by accepting Christ. Through Him

we are reconciled to God. There is no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus, for He has made full atonement for them.

There is still enough of mystery left in the atonement. Into the secret of the Saviour's consciousness we cannot enter. In what words or by what thoughts deeper than words He made good to the Father our wrong against Him, we cannot tell. There is truth hidden under the maxim of the old theologians that sin is an infinite evil. Certainly it is an evil beyond our present power to comprehend, and only the Son of man, who sounded its fearful depths to the bottom, could make that satisfaction to the Father we have wronged which is his due.

Along the line of such investigations as these seems to me to lie the successful solution of the problem of the atonement, so far as that problem is an open one to the theologian. I do not claim to have done the great subject more than the scantest justice in this hasty sketch. There are undoubtedly other points of view from which it might be regarded. There are other elements of the doctrine which need a more searching investigation and analysis. The object of this discussion has been only, as the title intimates, to furnish some of the data of the doctrine of the atonement. To others belongs the task of supplementing their defects and bringing the whole into the unity of a consistent theory.1

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, BANGOR, ME.

Lewis French Stearns.

1 It may be right to say that, so far as this article may be regarded as presenting a theory of the atonement, my obligations should be expressed to the discussions of the atonement in Sartorius's Doctrine of Holy Love, Martensen's Christian Dogmatics, Nitzsch's System der Christlichen Lehre, Van Oosterzee's Christian Dogmatics, Dorner's Glaubenslehre, and especially to the articles of Gess and Weizsäcker in the Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie, vols. ii.-iv.

EDITORIAL.

THE ENLARGEMENT OF THE FUNCTION OF THE LOCAL CHURCH.

It is not proposed to introduce through this subject a study in ecclesiasticism. We have no present contention for or against the polity of any church, provided its working principle is ample and elastic, equal to the capacity of the church and to its opportunity. The chief motive of the subject lies in the personal conviction of the writer, partly the result of experience in the pastorate, partly the result of a somewhat extended observation, that many of our larger communities, viewed as fields for religious work, are underworked for want of a sufficient equipment on the part of the local church; and this notwithstanding the fact that in some of these communities the ministry is overworked, and the communities themselves are overstocked with churches. One very quickly learns under careful observation that the multiplicity of sects, or even of churches, does not secure thoroughness in the working of a given field. Sects, it has been said, are like circles: the more circles you describe upon a surface, the more spaces you have between. The comparison is ingenious, and as comparisons go, it is truthful. A great many individuals do fall between religious organizations. The unorganized, the unattached population of a city is no inconsiderable factor in its religious life; and the amount of this kind of life is not appreciably lessened by the multiplication of churches. A church in distinction from a mission is usually established because a sufficient number of positively religious people demand its establishment. They demand it sometimes from differing conviction in respect to truth, sometimes from considerations of mere convenience, as through the claims of a neighborhood. A new church seldom makes any large inroad upon what are known as non-attendants.

Assume a New England community of fifty thousand souls, and make the proper reduction for those of the Roman Catholic faith. Within the available Protestant population there will be four or five, hardly more, strong churches among the different denominations, and a much larger, number of weaker churches, some of them just above, others just below the line of self-support. Beyond these, or between these, lies the unorganized, unattached mass to which reference has been made, to the number of from two thousand to five thousand. This mass is made up of entirely unrelated life. The individuals who compose it have nothing in ǝommon except the negative fact that they are non-church-attendants. They have not been drawn within that centripetal movement which forms churches. The two or three ruling motives which might be supposed to impel them toward the church are neutralized and dissipated by those smaller motives which are often decisive in securing negative results. Yet these people are in no respect inaccessible by Christianity; they are

not hostile to the church. Probably few of them would be found in the audiences which attend upon Mr. Ingersoll, or if found there, would be found as readily in the audiences which attend upon Mr. Moody. Occasions serve to bring them out. An evening service, of a popular nature, will often show a congregation quite as large as that of the morning, but distinct from it, and distinct from that which habitually worships in any church. Now such a congregation virtually represents a parish; it is in numbers and in opportunity the equivalent of a parish. That is a small city which cannot show such a parish of souls. And we are to remember who and what the people are who make up this outlying parish. They are for the most part such as would cause a foreign missionary to thank God and take courage; such as would gladden the heart of a minister on the frontier. But they do not constitute the material out of which alone a church can be organized. The attempts which have been made to gather these people by themselves into halls for popular services, with a view to their organization into churches, have usually proved failures.

Who now can minister to this parish or to these parishes lying adjacent to the churches? What agency is capable of working this field? Evidently this is not the field of the mission chapel. Neither is it the field of the weaker church. The causes, whatever they may be, which operate to make a church weak will certainly prevent its growth in this direction. The churches which most need these people are the churches which cannot reach them. Only the stronger churches can accomplish any considerable ministry in behalf of the unattached masses. These alone have resources, the enthusiasm of numbers, the advantage of assured strength. But, so far as we know, there is not a Congregational church in such a community as has been described fully equipped for a successful ministry in one of these outlying parishes of from five hundred to one thousand souls. There are churches which have missions, and which provide for them, often through actual pastoral work. We have found no corresponding provision made for the people lying alongside our churches and yet without. We grant the increased difficulties of the problem, chiefly of classifying and locating those who are to be reached. But these difficulties are in part obviated by the ease with which the unattached masses can be drawn into our churches, and so identified in person and by families. During the past months a most noticeable movement has been going on in some of the churches of New England in the form of a popular Sabbath evening service. The result has been, when the right effort has been put forth and when the conditions have been favorable, that the churches have been filled, in some cases thronged, with non-church-goers. Why, then, it may be asked, is not their case met? Why are not these churches really fulfilling the ministry which is called for? We answer, a crowd is not a congregation, and a congregation is not of necessity a church. A Sabbath evening audience made up of absolutely unrelated life is in point of numbers a parish, but it lacks all the conditions which are favorable to the development of the individual religious life. For the

accomplishment of anything permanent, there must be the most painstaking and continuous pastoral work. Preaching of itself can secure few results. The parable of the sower applies with exact suggestion at this point. The sowing was of no avail where the conditions of soil were unfavorable, but of the conditions mentioned in the parable there was not one which could not be changed. That which lay, under one sowing, in the beaten path, the wayside soil, might before the next sowing be ploughed up and guarded from the foot of man; then it would be good ground. The thin, shallow soil, hardly covering the ledgy rock, might be deepened, filled up, till it could give strength of root, then it would be good ground. And the soil possessed of thorns might be dispossessed of them, then it would be good ground. Not one condition is mentioned in the parable which might not be changed. And the hope of future harvests lay in the changing of the soil quite as much as in the casting of the seed. In the communities of which we are now speaking the conditions of life must be changed if the truth is to become operative; according to the analogy of the parable, they can be changed, and the work which effects this change is pastoral work. Families must be visited, and revisited. Individuals must be studied in the influences which most directly affect them, in their work, their associations, their reading, their amusements. It must first be known, and in a more satisfactory way than through a canvass, why people do not attend church, and then counteracting influences must be brought to bear upon them.

But for this work of detail the pastorate of a large church is manifestly insufficient. The work of the pastor in his own field is always sadly in arrears. No pastor is ever satisfied with what he is able to accomplish within his prescribed limits in the cure of souls. The church, acting through committees, is an inadequate and, from the nature of the case, an unreliable force. In some churches work through organization has already been carried to the extreme. The machinery acts under increasing friction.

What then can be done? The question is becoming more imperative, while the churches are discussing it. Our large village communities are fast changing into city communities, not in number simply, but in idea. All the disintegrating influences which are peculiar to the city, especially those which affect the family and the Sabbath, are beginning to operate in the average town. It is becoming easier every year for a man in any community to occupy his Sabbath in some other way than through church attendance. Formerly the church of the village commanded its life. This was the distinction of the New England village church. The distinction of the church of the city is that it is one of many claimants for the life which surges about it.

The answer which we propose to the question is suggested in the form of our subject, and explains the terms in which we have stated it. There are two systems under which the Christian church is capable of extension, through which it may increase its activities and multiply its