atonement. It does not seem to have occurred to these writers any more than to the Arminians that their theory really excludes the proper idea of literal substitution. If Christ died for every man, and yet every man is not to be saved, then all the literal ideas of satisfaction, substitution, price, and redemption must go. The dogmas supposed to be "revealed realities" disappear. The truth at the bottom of these theories, and common to them all, takes a simpler form, and the anti-dogmatist enters on the inquiry what that simpler form is.

We have chosen Mr. Martineau's volume for the same reasons that we chose Mr. Martin's. Mr. Martineau is the representative of the descendants of the old English Presbyterians in their most advanced stage of departure from dogma. Mr. Liddon could doubtless prove that Mr. Martineau has dogmas as well as the dogmatists; that is, certain things which he believes. But our present business is to see how in his hands dogmas which others think all-important pass on to dissolution. The foundation of the "federal theology" is the fall of man in Adam, which implies the identification of all men with Adam, and their being involved in his sin. Mr. Martineau confesses that he cannot explain the mystery of the existence of evil, but he denies that in Christianity all physical and moral evil is ascribed to the sin of Adam. He sees suffering in the world which he cannot explain; but to be told that that suffering is to be eternal is only to be carried into "deeper and gratuitous difficulties." Supposing the fall of Adam to be the cause of the existence of evil, we see no evidence that it has been affected by the death on the cross. The "visible" effects are visible still, and if the visible consequences of Adam's sin are unredeemed, there is a just suspicion that the invisible are also unredeemed. The announcement to Adam simply 'was that if he sinned he should die. To have extracted from this that he and his posterity were to suffer endless life in hell, must have required the ingenuity of a theologian. The theory of substitution is that the blow of Divine justice must fall somewhere. This either supposes that the Divine Being is a person, and that He refuses to forgive until satisfaction be made to Him, or it supposes God is impersonal, and that justice, existing eternally and necessarily, demands retribution. In the first case the Divine Being is vindictive; in the other case the universe does not exist by will but by inevitable law. With every effort which the Calvinist makes on his scheme to defend the Divine Being from vindictiveness he falls into the idea of the Divine impersonality. What amount of truth there may be in this aspect of Deity we cannot at present inquire; but Calvinism, consistently with itself, falls back on the analogy of nature, where it finds a terrible Deity, not always just, but apparently

Mr. Martineau protests

never suffering sin to go unpunished. against going for analogy to that which in nature is dark and incomprehensible. That one man suffers by the sin of another is evident, and in this we cannot explain Divine justice; but no man suffers for another. The great and manifest truth in the world of nature and of revelation is that every man must bear the punishment of his own sins, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." No guilt is forgiven until it is eradicated from the soul. The atonement then, as explained by Mr. Martineau, is simply that God forgives men who forsake their sins; and this forgiveness is not a "legal fiction" like the popular doctrine of justification, but proceeds according to the degree of inner regeneration.

But the question, which view has Scripture on its side, has yet to be determined. In the first three Gospels it may be admitted that there is no trace of anything like substitution for sin. The words of Isaiah, quoted in St. Matthew, that "He bare our diseases," are applied to Jesus healing the sick. Forgiveness is always represented as following repentance and amendment. The parables, which set forth the Divine forgiveness, as for instance that of the prodigal son, say nothing of substitution. In John's Gospel Jesus says, "I lay down my life for the sheep." The sense in which a good or true shepherd dies in defence of his sheep may fairly embrace all that is meant by this passage. It is chiefly in the Epistles that we find the sacrificial language on which the popular dogmas of satisfaction and propitiation are erected. And the sole question is, if this language be literal, or only an adaptation of Jewish phraseology by way of illustration of the simple fact of the Divine forgiveness. Mr. Martineau, admitting that three or four sacrificial passages are to be found in the Gospels and the Acts, and holding this distinction to be nearly true, yet lays down one which he regards as absolutely true. It is that the language supposed to teach the atoning efficacy of the cross does not occur in the New Testament until the beginning of the Gentile controversy. By His death Christ ceased to be merely the Jewish Messiah, and opened the kingdom of heaven to the Gentiles. He was lifted up that He might draw all men unto Him. He laid down His life that He might bring together the "other sheep not of this fold." With considerable ingenuity this principle is applied to the sacrificial language of St. Paul's Epistles. The Epistle to the Hebrews is excepted. In it we have all the Jewish phraseology, and indeed the whole Jewish economy spiritualized or applied by way of adaptation or illustration to Christ. This was done to satisfy the Hebrews for the loss of their temple-worship and ritual. In this Epistle Christ is spoken of as offering up sacrifice, once for all; for His own sins, and also for the sins of the people. The Epistle with

Mr. Martineau is simply a Jewish mode of exhibiting or illustrating the Divine forgiveness.

To the same conclusion, concerning the sacrificial language of the New Testament, Mr. Jowett has come in his study of St. Paul's Epistles. "Passing allusions," he says, "figures of speech, rhetorical oppositions, have been made the foundation of doctrinal statements, which are like a part of the human mind itself, and seem as if they could never be uprooted without uprooting the very sentiment of religion." The "federal theology" which Mr. Martin lauds as "a noble catalogue of revealed truth," Mr. Jowett cannot find anywhere in the Scriptures. Concerning its first principle, Mr. Jowett says, "How slender is the foundation in the New Testament for the doctrine of Adam's sin being imputed to his posterity-two passages from St. Paul at most, and these of uncertain interpretation. The little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, has covered the heavens.” The words indeed of the two passages are plain—" As in Adam all die," and "By one man sin entered into the world." But did they mean to St. Paul what they are understood to mean now? Was Adam's sin the cause of death to all his posterity in any different way than as Abraham was a father of circumcision to the uncircumcised? This is a parallel case of St. Paul's mode of speaking. Where he says all died in Adam, is it the same that is meant as in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, where he says, "If one died for all, then all died ?" The Apostle's words need not mean more than that Adam's sin was the cause of the sins of his posterity. The "federal theology,' like many other theologies, has to go about for explanations. The second clause of the first passage is, "So in Christ shall all be made alive." But Mr. Martin comes in to say that the "all" in the second clause only means all that are in the covenant, not all that died in Adam. If the words are to be taken in the simple sense which they have to us, they mean clearly that as all men fell in Adam, so all shall be ultimately restored through Christ. And, indeed, this accords with the whole argument of the chapter. Every man in his own order; Christ the first fruits, afterwards they that are Christ's, then cometh the end." The last enemy is to be destroyed, all things subdued, and the consummation is a complete restoration to the bosom of the Father when "God shall be all things in all things." Mr. Jowett finds in St. Paul's Epistles that Christ's dying for us is the same as His living for us. The nearest and best conception he takes to be that furnished by Christ Himself, who spoke of a good man dying for his friends; or this death for us may mean that He identified Himself with our troubles and sorrows. It may edify Mr. Martin and some other advocates of the "Catholic faith" to know that there was no doctrine of atonement in any primitive

creed, and that according to the great Fathers of the ancient Church, the price was paid, not to God, but to the great enemy.

It is with considerable satisfaction that we can number among anti-dogmatists a bishop of the Episcopal Church of Scotland. That Church, perhaps, never had any very luminous virtues, and of late years its poverty has made it the prey of an extreme party in the Church of England. At the present hour, it is letting slip a golden opportunity for introducing into Scotland something of the culture and liberality of sentiment which now, happily, have made considerable progress in the Church of England. It might do much to lessen the sectarianism and the dogmatism which are among the chief evils of religious parties in Scotland. But we fear it is only introducing an intensified sectarianism, which is different merely in species, not in genus, from the narrowest sects. Their operations are diversified; but it is one and the self-same spirit which is at work. The Bishop of Argyll is evidently an exception. We do not venture to speak of the benefits which Mr. Hugh Martin, and those whom he represents, might derive from the paternal counsels and godly admonitions of this Right Reverend Father in God.

The object which the writers of the Present-day Papers seem to have before them, is to try how much of the dogmatic incrustations that have gathered around Christianity may be removed without injury to the essence of Christianity. They are not unconscious of the difficulty, and even the danger, of the work which they have undertaken. Their spirit is cautious and reverent; conscious, on the one hand, that some of the popular dogmas are the chief causes of unbelief, and conscious also that by many they will be regarded as promoting that unbelief. Speaking of the departure of some in the present time from the faith of Christianity, one of the writers says—

"We do not look on it as hopeless, or with unmitigated fear, for we are under the impression that the present is no final, but merely a transition stage, where the things which have served their purpose and become effete are being superseded by those things which are real and cannot pass away. It signifieth, we believe, but the removing of the things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.'

The preface gives a definition of Revelation different from the ordinary one, and simpler. It takes the word as it stands, meaning a giving of light, an unveiling." It is not an additional mystery to the mysteries of nature, but something whereby we are to understand what is dark and mysterious in nature. It is something which speaks to the reason and the conscience; whatever then in the Scriptures is dark can be no part of Revelation. None of the writers have treated of the doctrine of the Trinity, which must always

be the main test, whether or not there are any mysteries in Christianity which claim to be believed as mysteries. Anything in the Scriptures which seems contrary to our sense of right, on this principle can be no part of Revelation.

66

The first Paper is a reprint from William Law's "Spirit of Love." The subject is the Atonement. William Law, we suppose, is reprinted because of what he said, and not for the mere authority of his name. When he wrote this tract he had become a follower of Jacob Böhme. He does not deny "a justice of God which requires satisfaction done to it before man could be reconciled," but he denies that this favours the opinion of wrath or resentment in God. The wrath to be atoned is nothing else but sin or disorder in the creature. When sin is extinguished in the creature, all the wrath that is between God and the creature is fully atoned. If the wrath is to be taken away from God, then the atonement would be for His benefit, and not for the benefit of man. St. Paul says we are by nature children of wrath ;" and David says, "Thine arrows stick fast in me. Thy hand presseth me sore." These, and such passages, are understood to mean simply the dominion of sin and its necessary consequences. The work of atonement is the work of regeneration; it is "Christ given unto us." Sin brings its necessary punishment, not because God wills it, but because He cannot change His own nature; He cannot give blessedness to any but the righteous. The atonement of Christ is God putting an end to sin, and death, and hell. There is nothing in it supernatural. It is "only nature set right, or made to be that which it ought to be." The question here, as before, concerns the sense in which the Scriptures are to be understood, and how far reason and conscience are to be guides in interpreting them. The difficulty of dogma is only the difficulty of Scripture interpretation intensified. The Bishop of Argyll has often said that the statement in the second of the Thirty-nine Articles-Christ died " to reconcile his Father to us -can only be received in a conventional sense. "A bargain has no relation to love; but Christ's wounds are the outgoings of God's love, the pledge of its reality, the gauge of its depth, not equivalents for sin." the fruits of sin, it is said, there never is remission. But Christ went among the wheels of a disordered creation to bring it into unison. He delivered from sin rather than from the penalty; indeed, from the penalty only by eradicating sin. Salvation, regeneration, and justification proceed with equal steps. We are saved, regenerated, and justified just in the degree that sin is removed and the life of Christ has become real within us. The author of the last Paper in the series, "Eternal Life Manifested," says, "The life was incarnated in Jesus Christ, and then from Him and through Him,

Of