INCONSISTENCY OF THE SCHEME OF VICARIOUS REDEMPTION. (continued 2)

I have described one aspect, which the death of the Messiah presented to the Jews; and, in this, we have found another primary conception, explanatory of the Scriptural language respecting the cross. Of the two relations in which this event appeared (the Gentile and the Israelitish), I believe the former to be by far the most familiar to the New Testament authors, and to furnish the true interpretation of almost all their phraseology on the subject. But, as my readers may have noticed, many passages receive illustration by reference to either notion; and some may have a meaning compounded of both. I must not pause to make any minute adjustment of these claims, on the part of the two interpreting ideas: it is enough that, either separately or in union, they have now been taken round the whole circle of apostolic language respecting the cross, and detected in every difficult passage the presence of sense and truth, and the absence of all hint of vicarious atonement.

It was on the unbelieving portion of the Jewish people that the death of their Messiah conferred the national blessings and opportunities to which I have adverted. But to the converts who had been received by him during his mortal life, and who would have been heirs of his glory, had he assumed it at once, it was less easy to point out any personal benefits from the cross. That the Christ had retired from this world was but a disappointing postponement of their hopes; that he had perished as a felon was shocking to their pride, and turned their ancient boast into a present scorn; that he had become spiritual and immortal made him no longer theirs "as concerning the flesh," and, by admitting Gentiles with themselves, set aside their favorite law. So offensive to them was this unexpected slight on the institutions of Moses, immemorially reverenced as the ordinances of God, that it became important to give some turn to the death of Jesus, by which that event might be harmonized with the national system, and be shown to effect the abrogation of the law, on principles strictly legal. This was the object of the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews; who thus gives us a third idea of the relations of the cross,—bearing, indeed, an essential resemblance to St. Paul's Gentile view, but illustrated in a manner altogether different. No trace is to be observed here of Paul's noble glorying in the cross: so studiously is every allusion to the crucifixion avoided, till all the argumentative part of the Epistle has been completed, that a reader finds the conclusion already in sight, without having gained any notion of the mode of the Lord's death, whether even it was natural or violent,—a literal human sacrifice, or a voluntary self-immolation. Its ignominy and its agonies are wholly unmentioned; and his mortal infirmities and sufferings are explained, not as the spontaneous adoptions of previous compassion in him, but as God's fitting discipline for rendering him "a merciful and faithful high-priest." They are referred to in the tone of apology, not of pride; as needing rather to be reconciled with his office, than to be boldly expounded as its grand essential. The object of the author clearly is, to find a place for the death of Jesus among the Messianic functions; and he persuades the Hebrew Christians that it is (not a satisfaction for moral guilt, but) a commutation for the Mosaic Law. In order to understand his argument, we must advert for a moment to the prejudices which it was designed to conciliate and correct.

It is not easy for us to realize the feelings with which the Israelite, in the yet palmy days of the Levitical worship, would hear of an abrogation of the Law;—the anger and contempt with which the mere bigot would repudiate the suggestion;—the terror with which the new convert would make trial of his freedom;—the blank and infidel feeling with which he would look round, and find himself drifted away from his anchorage of ceremony;—the sinking heart with which he would hear the reproaches of his countrymen against his apostasy. Every authoritative ritual draws towards itself an attachment too strong for reason and the sense of right; and transfers the feeling of obligation from realities to symbols. Among the Hebrews this effect was the more marked and the more pernicious, because their ceremonies were in many instances only remotely connected with any important truth or excellent end; they were separated by several removes from any spiritual utility. Rites were enacted to sustain other rites; institution lay beneath institution, through so many successive steps, that the crowning principle at the summit easily passed out of sight. To keep alive the grand truth of the Divine Unity, there was a gorgeous temple worship; to perform this worship there was a priesthood; to support the priesthood there were (among other sources of income) dues paid in the form of sacrifice; to provide against the non-payment of dues there were penalties; to prevent an injurious pressure of these penalties, there were exemptions, as in cases of sickness; and to put a check on trivial claims of exemption, it must be purchased by submission to a fee, under name of an atonement. Wherever such a system is received as divine, and based on the same authority with the great law of duty, it will always, by its definiteness and precision, attract attention from graver moral obligations. Its materiality renders it calculable: its account with the conscience can be exactly ascertained: as it has little obvious utility to men, it appears the more directly paid to God: it is regarded as the special means of pleasing him, of placating his anger, and purchasing his promises. Hence it may often happen, that the more the offences against the spirit of duty, the more are rites multiplied in propitiation; and the harvest of ceremonies and that of crimes ripen together.

At a state not far from this had the Jews arrived when Christianity was preached. Their moral sentiments were so far perverted, that they valued nothing in themselves, in comparison with their legal exactitude, and hated all beyond themselves for their want of this. They were eagerly expecting the Deliverer's kingdom, nursing up their ambition for his triumphs; curling the lip, as the lash of oppression fell upon them, in suppressed anticipation of vengeance; satiating a temper, at once fierce and servile, with dreams of Messiah's coming judgment, when the blood of the patriarchs should be the title of the world's nobles, and the everlasting reign should begin in Jerusalem. Why was the hour delayed? they impatiently asked themselves. Was it that they had offended Jehovah, and secretly sinned against some requirement of his law? And then they set themselves to a renewed precision, a more slavish punctiliousness than before. Ascribing their continued depression to their imperfect legal obedience, they strained their ceremonialism tighter than ever; and hoped to be soon justified from their past sins, and ready for the mighty prince and the latter days.

What, then, must have been the feeling of the Hebrew, when told that all his punctualities had been thrown away,—that, at the advent, faith in Jesus, not obedience to the law, was to be the title to admission,—and that the redeemed at that day would be, not the scrupulous Pharisee, whose dead works would be of no avail, but all who, with the heart, have worthily confessed the name of the Lord Jesus? What doctrine could be more unwelcome to the haughty Israelite? it dashed his pride of ancestry to the ground. It brought to the same level with himself the polluted Gentile,—whose presence would alone render all unclean in the Messiah's kingdom. It proved his past ritual anxieties to have been all wasted. It cast aside for the future the venerated law; left it in neglect to die; and made all the apparatus of Providence for its maintenance end in absolutely nothing. Was then the Messiah to supersede, and not to vindicate, the law? How different this from the picture which prophets had drawn of his golden age, when Jerusalem was to be the pride of the earth, and her temple the praise of nations, sought by the feet of countless pilgrims, and decked with the splendor of their gifts! How could a true Hebrew be justified in a life without law? How think himself safe in a profession, which was without temple, without priest, without altar, without victim?

Not unnaturally, then, did the Hebrews regard with reluctance two of the leading features of Christianity; the death of the Messiah, and the freedom from the law. The Epistle addressed to them was designed to soothe their uneasiness, and to show that, if the Mosaic institutions were superseded, it was in conformity with principles and analogies contained within themselves. With great address, the writer links the two difficulties together, and makes the one explain the other. He finds a ready means of effecting this, in the sacrificial ideas familiar to every Hebrew; for by representing the death of Jesus as a commutation for legal observances, he is only ascribing to it an operation acknowledged to have place in the death of every lamb slain as a sin-offering at the altar. These offerings were a distinct recognition, on the part of the Levitical code, of a principle of equivalents for its ordinances; a proof that, under certain conditions, they might yield: nothing more, therefore, was necessary, than to show that the death of Christ established those conditions. And such a method of argument was attended by this advantage, that, while the practical end would be obtained of terminating all ceremonial observance, the law was yet treated as in theory perpetual; not as ignominiously abrogated, but as legitimately commuted. Just as the Israelite, in paying his offering at the altar to compensate for ritual omissions, recognized thereby the claims of the law, while he obtained impunity for its neglect; so, if Providence could be shown to have provided a legal substitute for the system, its authority was acknowledged at the moment that its abolition was secured.

Let us advert, then, to the functions of the Mosaic sin-offerings, to which the writer has recourse to illustrate his main position. They were of the nature of a mulct or acknowledgment rendered for unconscious or inevitable disregard of ceremonial liabilities, and contraction of ceremonial uncleanness. Such uncleanness might be incurred from various causes; and, while unremoved by the appointed methods of purification, disqualified from attendance at the sanctuary, and "cut off" "the guilty" "from among the congregation." To touch a dead body, to enter a tent where a corpse lay, rendered a person "unclean for seven days"; to come in contact with a forbidden animal, a bone, a grave, to be next to any one struck with sudden death, to be afflicted with certain kinds of bodily disease and infirmity, unwittingly to lay a finger on a person unclean, occasioned defilement, and necessitated a purification or an atonement. Independently of these offences, enforced upon the Israelite by the accidents of life, it was not easy for even the most cautious worshipper to keep pace with the complicated series of petty debts which the law of ordinances was always running up against him. If his offering had an invisible blemish; if he omitted a tithe, because "he wist it not"; or inadvertently fell into arrear, by a single day, with respect to a known liability; if absent from disease, he was compelled to let his ritual account accumulate; "though it be hidden from him," he must "be guilty, and bear his iniquity," and bring his victim. On the birth of a child, the mother, after the lapse of a prescribed period, made her pilgrimage to the temple, presented her sin-offering, and "the priest made atonement for her." The poor leper, long banished from the face of men, and unclean by the nature of his disease, became a debtor to the sanctuary, and on return from his tedious quarantine brought his lamb of atonement, and departed thence, clear from neglected obligations to his law. It was impossible, however, to provide by specific enactment for every case of ritual transgression and impurity, arising from inadvertence or necessity. Scarcely could it be expected that the courts of worship themselves would escape defilement, from imperfections in the offerings, or unconscious disqualification in people or in priest. To clear off the whole invisible residue of such sins, an annual "day of atonement" was appointed; the people thronged the avenues and approaches of the tabernacle; in their presence a kid was slain for their own transgressions, and for the high-priest the more dignified expiation of a heifer; charged with the blood of each successively, he sprinkled not only the exterior altar open to the sky, but, passing through the first and holy chamber into the Holy of Holies (never entered else), he touched, with finger dipped in blood, the sacred lid (the Mercy-seat) and foreground of the Ark. At that moment, while he yet lingers behind the veil, the purification is complete; on no worshipper of Israel does any legal unholiness rest; and were it possible for the high-priest to remain in that interior retreat of Jehovah, still protracting the expiatory act, so long would this national purity continue, and the debt of ordinances be effaced as it arose. But he must return; the sanctifying rite must end; the people be dismissed; the priests resume the daily ministrations; the law open its stern account afresh; and in the mixture of national exactitude and neglects, defilements multiply again till the recurring anniversary lifts off the burden once more. Every year, then, the necessity comes round of "making atonement for the holy sanctuary," "for the tabernacle," "for the altar," "for the priests, and for all the people of the congregation." Yet, though requiring periodical renewal, the rite, so far as it went, had an efficacy which no Hebrew could deny; for ceremonial sins, unconscious or inevitable (to which all atonement was limited[19]), it was accepted as an indemnity; and put it beyond doubt that Mosaic obedience was commutable.

Such was the system of ideas, by availing himself of which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews would persuade his correspondents to forsake their legal observances. "You can look without uneasiness," he suggests, "on your ritual omissions, when the blood of some victim has been presented instead, and the penetralia of your sanctuary have been sprinkled with the offering: well, on no other terms would I soothe your anxiety; precisely such equivalent sacrifice does Christianity exhibit, only of so peculiar a nature, that, for all ceremonial neglects, intentional no less than inadvertent, you may rely upon indemnity." The Jews entertained a belief respecting their temple, which enabled the writer to give a singular force and precision to his analogy. They conceived that the tabernacle of their worship was but the copy of a divine structure, devised by God himself, made by no created hand, and preserved eternally in heaven: this was "the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man"; which no mortal had beheld, except Moses in the mount, that he might "make all things according to that pattern"; within whose Holy of Holies dwelt no emblem or emanation of God's presence, but his own immediate Spirit; and the celestial furniture of which required, in proportion to its dignity, the purification of a nobler sacrifice, and the ministrations of a diviner priest, than befitted the "worldly sanctuary" below. And who then can mistake the meaning of Christ's departure from this world, or doubt what office he conducts above? He is called by his ascension to the pontificate of heaven; consecrated, "not after the law of any carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless life"; he drew aside the veil of his mortality, and passed into the inmost court of God: and as he must needs "have somewhat to offer," he takes the only blood he had ever shed,—which was his own,—and, like the High-Priest before the Mercy-seat, sanctifies therewith the people that stand without, "redeeming the transgressions" which "the first covenant" of rites entailed. And he has not returned; still is he hid within that holiest place; and still the multitude he serves turn thither a silent and expectant gaze; he prolongs the purification still; and while he appears not, no other rites can be resumed, nor any legal defilement be contracted. Thus, meanwhile, ordinances cease their obligation, and the sin against them has lost its power. How different this from the offerings of Jerusalem, whose temple was but the "symbol and shadow" of that sanctuary above. In the Hebrew "sacrifices there was a remembrance again made of sins every year"; "the high-priest annually entered the holy place"; being but a mortal, he could not go in with his own blood and remain, but must take that of other creatures and return; and hence it became "not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins," for instantly they began to accumulate again. But to the very nature of Christ's offering a perpetuity of efficacy belongs; bearing no other than "his own blood," he was immortal when his ministration began, and "ever liveth to make his intercession"; he could "not offer himself often, for then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world,"—and "it is appointed unto men only once to die"; so that "once for all he entered into the holy place, and obtained a redemption that is perpetual"; "once in the end of the world hath he appeared, and by sacrificing himself hath absolutely put away sin"; "this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down on the right hand of God," "for by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." The ceremonial, then, with its periodical transgressions and atonements, is suspended; the services of the outer tabernacle cease, for the holiest of all is made manifest; one who is "priest for ever" dwells therein;—one "consecrated for evermore," "holy, harmless, undefiled, in his celestial dwelling quite separate from sinners; who needeth not daily, as those high-priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's; for this he did once for all when he offered up himself."[20]

Nor is it in its perpetuity alone that the efficacy of the Christian sacrifice transcends the atonements of the law; it removes a higher order of ritual transgressions. It cannot be supposed, indeed, that Messiah's life is no nobler offering than that of a creature from the herd or flock, and will confer no more immunity. Accordingly, it goes beyond those "sins of ignorance," those ceremonial inadvertences, for which alone there was remission in Israel; and reaches to voluntary neglects of the sacerdotal ordinances; insuring indemnity for legal omissions, when incurred not simply by the accidents of the flesh, but even by intention of the conscience. This is no greater boon than the dignity of the sacrifice requires; and does but give to his people below that living relation of soul to God which he himself sustains above. "If the blood of bulls and of goats ... sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purify (even) your conscience from dead works (ritual observances) to serve the living God!" Let then the ordinances go, and the Lord "put his laws into the mind, and write them in the heart"; and let all have "boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by this new and living way which he hath consecrated for us"; "provoking each other to love and to good works."

See, then, in brief, the objection of the Hebrews to the Gospel; and the reply of their instructor. They said: "What a blank is this; you have no temple, no priest, no ritual! How is it that, in his ancient covenant, God is so strict about ceremonial service, and permits no neglect, however incidental, without atonement; yet in this new economy throws the whole system away, letting us run up an everlasting debt to a law confessedly unrepealed, without redemption of it or atonement for it?"

"Not without redemption and atonement," replies their evangelical teacher; "temple, sacrifice, priest, remain to us also, only glorified into proportions worthy of a heavenly dispensation; our temple, in the skies; our sacrifice, Messiah's mortal person; our priest, his ever-living spirit. How poor the efficacy of your former offerings! year after year, your ritual debt began again: for the blood dried and vanished from the tabernacle which it purified; the priest returned from the inner shrine; and when there, he stood, with the interceding blood, before the emblem, not the reality, of God. But Christ, not at the end of a year, but at the end of the great world-era of the Lord, has come to offer up himself,—no lamb so unblemished as he; his voluntary and immortal spirit, than which was nothing ever more divinely consecrate, becomes officiating priest, and strikes his own person with immolating blow; it falls and bleeds on earth, as on the outer altar, standing on the threshold of the sanctuary of heaven: thither he ascends with the memorials of his death, vanishes into the Holy of Holies of the skies, presents himself before the very living God, and sanctifies the temple there and worshippers here; saying to us, 'Drop now for ever the legal burdens that weigh you down; doubt not that you are free, as my glorified spirit here, from the defilements you are wont to dread; I stay behind this veil of visible things, to clear you of all such taint, and put away such sin eternally. Trust, then, in me, and take up the freedom of your souls: burst the dead works, that cling round your conscience like cerements of the grave; and rise to me, by the living power of duty, and a loving allegiance to God.'"

So far, then, as the death of Christ is treated in Scripture dogmatically, rather than historically, its effects are viewed in contrast with the different order of things which must have been expected, had he, as Messiah, not died. And thus regarded, it presented itself to the minds of the Apostles in three relations:—

First, to the Gentiles, whom it drew in to be subjects of the Messiah, by breaking down the barriers of his Hebrew personality, and rendering him spiritual as well as immortal.

Secondly, to the unbelieving Jews; whom his retirement from this world delivered from the judgment due to them, on the principles of their own law, both for their general violation of the conditions of their covenant, and for their positive rejection of him. His absence reopened their opportunities; and to tender them this act of long-suffering, he took on himself the death which had been incurred by them.

Thirdly, to the believing Jews; the terms of whose discipleship the Messiah's death had changed, destroying all the benefits of their lineage, and substituting an act of the mind, the simpler claim of faith. It was therefore a commutation for the Ritual Law, and gave them impunity and atonement for all its violations.

With the last two of these relations, beyond their remarkable historical interest, we have no personal concern. The first remains, and ever will remain, worthy of the glorious joy with which Paul regarded and expounded it. God has committed the rule of this world to no exclusive prince, and no sacerdotal power, and no earthly majesty; but to one whose spirit, too divine to be limited to place and time, broke through clouds of sorrow into the clearest heaven; and thither has since been drawing our human love, though for ages now he has been unseen and immortal. An impartial God, a holy and spiritual law, an infinite hope for all men, are given to us by that generous cross.

It is evident that all three of the relations which I have described belonged to the death of Jesus, in his capacity of Messiah; and could have had no existence if he had not borne this character, but had been simply a private martyr to his convictions. The foregoing exposition gives a direct answer to the inquiry, pressed without the slightest pertinence upon the Unitarian, why the phraseology of the cross is never found applied to Paul or Peter, or any other noble confessor, who died in attestation of the truth; why "no record is given that we are justified by the blood of Stephen; or that he bare our sins in his own body, and made reconciliation for us."[22] I know not why such a question should be submitted to us; we have assuredly no concern with it; having never dreamt that the Apostles could have written as they did respecting the death on Calvary, if they had thought of it only as a scene of martyrdom. We have passed under review the whole language of the New Testament on this subject; and in the interpretation of it have not even once had recourse to this, which is said to be our only view of the cross. We have seen the Apostles justly announcing their Lord's death as a proper propitiation; because it placed whole classes of men, without any meritorious change in their character, in saving relations: declaring it a strict substitute for others' punishment; on the ground that there were those who must have perished, if he had not; and that he died and retired, that they might remain and live: describing it as a sacrifice which put away sin; because it did that for ever, which the Levitical atonements achieved for a day: but we have not found them ever appealing to it either as a satisfaction to the justice of God, or an example of martyrdom to men. The Trinitarians have one idea of this event themselves; and their fancy provides their opponents with one idea of it; of the former not a trace exists, on any page of Scripture; and of the latter the Unitarian need not avail himself at all, in explaining the language whereof it is said to be his solitary key.

Nowhere, then, in Scripture do we meet with anything corresponding with the prevailing notions of vicarious redemption; everywhere, and most emphatically in the personal instructions of our Lord, do we find a doctrine of forgiveness, and an idea of salvation, utterly inconsistent with it. He spake often of the unqualified clemency of God to his returning children; never once of the satisfaction demanded by his justice. He spake of the joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth; but was silent on the sacrificial faith, without which penitence is said to be unavailing. Nor did he, like his modern disciples, teach that there are two separate salvations, which must follow each other in a fixed order: first, redemption from the penalty, secondly, from the spirit, of sin; pardon for the past, before sanctification in the present; a removal of the "hinderance in God," previous to its annihilation in ourselves. If indeed there were in Christianity two deliverances, discriminated and successive, it would be more in accordance with its spirit to invert this order;—to recall from alienation first, and announce forgiveness afterwards; to restore from guilt, before cancelling the penalty; and permit the healing to anticipate the pardoning love. At least, there would seem, in such arrangement, to be a greater jealousy for the holiness of the divine law, a severer reservation of God's complacency for those who have broken from the service of sin, than in the system which proclaims impunity to the rebel will, ere yet its estrangement is renounced. If the outward remission precedes the inward sanctification, then does God admit to favor the yet unsanctified; guilt keeps us in no exile from him: and though the Holy Spirit is to follow afterwards, it becomes the peculiar office of the cross to lift us as we are, with every stain upon the soul and every vile habit unretraced, from the brink of perdition to the assurance of glory: the divine lot is given to us, before the divine love is awakened in us; and the heirs of heaven have yet to become the children of holiness. With what consistency can the advocates of such an economy accuse its opponents of dealing lightly with sin, of deluding men into a false trust, and administering seductive flatteries to human nature?[23] What! shall we, who plant in every soul of sin a hell, whence no foreign force, no external God, can pluck us, any more than they can tear us from our identity,—we, who hide the fires of torment in no viewless gulf, but make them ubiquitous as guilt,—we, who suffer no outward agent from Eden, or the Abyss, or Calvary, to encroach upon the solitude of man's responsibility, and confuse the simplicity of conscience,—we, who teach that God will not, and even cannot, spare the froward, till they be froward no more, but must permit the burning lash to fall, till they cry aloud for mercy, and throw themselves freely into his embrace;—shall we be rebuked for a lax administration of peace, by those who think that a moment may turn the alien into the elect? It is no flattery of our nature, to reverence deeply its moral capacities: we only discern in them the more solemn trust, and see in their abuse the fouler shame. And it is not of what men are, but of what they might be, that we encourage noble and cheerful thoughts. Doubtless, we think exaggeration possible (which our opponents apparently do not) even in the portraiture of their actual character: and perhaps we are not the less likely to awaken true convictions of sin, that we strive to speak of it with the voice of discriminative justice, instead of the monotonous thunders of vengeance; and to draw its image in the natural tints provided by the conscience, rather than in the preternatural flame-color mingled in the crucibles of hell.

In making penal redemption and moral redemption separate and successive, the vicarious scheme, we submit, is inconsistent with the Christian idea of salvation. Not that we take the second, and reject the first, as our Trinitarian friends imagine; nor that we invert their order. We accept them both; putting them, however, not in succession, but in super-position, so that they coalesce. The power and the punishment of sin perish together; and together begin the holiness and the bliss of heaven. Whatever extracts the poison cools the sting: nor can the divine vigor of spiritual health enter, without its freedom and its joy. That there can be any separate dealings with our past guilt and with our present character, is not a truth of God, but a fiction of the schools. The sanctification of the one is the redemption of the other. The mind given up to passion, or chained to self, or anyhow alienated from the love and life divine, dwells, whatever be its faith, in the dark and terrible abyss; while he, and he only, that, in the freedom and tranquillity of great affections, communes with God and toils for men, understands the meaning, and wins the promises, of heaven. Am I asked: "What, then, is to persuade the sinful heart thus to draw near to God;—what, but a proclamation of absolute pardon, can break down the secret distrust, which keeps our nature back, wrapped in the reserve of conscious guilt?" I reply; however much these fears and hesitations might cling round us, and restrain us from the mystic Deity of Nature, they can have no place in our intercourse with the Father whom Jesus represents. It needs only that Christ be truly his image, to know "that the hinderance is not with him, but entirely in ourselves";[24] to see that there is no anger in his look; to feel that he invites us to unreserved confession, and accepts our self-abandonment to him,—that he lifts the repentant, prostrate at his feet, and speaks the words of severe, but truest hope. Am I told, "that only the gratitude excited by personal rescue from tremendous danger, by an unconditional and entire deliverance, is capable of winning our reluctant nature, of opening the soul to the access of the Divine Spirit, and bringing it to the service of the Everlasting Will"? I rejoice to acknowledge, that some such disinterested power must be awakened, some mighty forces of the heart be called out, ere the regeneration can take place that renders us children of the Highest; ere we can break, with true new birth, from the shell of self, and try and train our wings in the atmosphere of God. The permanent work of duty must be wrought by the affections; not by the constraint, however solemn, of hope and fear; no self-perfectionating process, elaborated by an anxious will, has warmth enough to ripen the soul's diviner fruits; the walks of outward morality, and the slopes of deliberate meditation, it may keep smooth and trim; but cannot make the true life-blossoms set, as in a garden of the Lord, and the foliage wave as with the voice of God among the trees. I gladly admit that, to a believer in the vicarious sacrifice, the sense of pardon, the love of the Great Deliverer, may well fulfil this blessed office, of carrying him out of himself in genuine allegiance to a being most benign and holy. And perceiving that, if this doctrine were removed, there is not, in the system of which it forms a part, and which else would be all terror, anything that could perform the same generous part, I can understand why it seems to its advocates an essential power in the renovation of the character. But great as it may be, within the limits of its own narrow scheme, ideas possessed of higher moral efficacy are not wanting, when we pass into a region of nobler and more Christian thought. Shall we say that the view of the Infinite Ruler, given in the spoken wisdom or the living spirit of Christ, has no sanctifying power? Yet where is there any trace in it of the satisfactionist's redemption? When we sit at Messiah's feet, that transforming gratitude for an extinguished penalty, on which the prevailing theology insists, as its central emotion, becomes replaced by a similar and profounder sentiment towards the Eternal Father. If to rescue men from a dreadful fate in the future be a just title to our reverence, never to have designed that fate claims an affection yet more devoted; if there be a divine mercy in annihilating an awful curse, in shedding only blessing there is surely a diviner still. Shall the love restored to us after long delay, and in consideration of an equivalent, work mightily on the heart,—and shall that which asked no purchase, which has been veiled by no cloud, which has enfolded us always in its tranquillity, nor can ever quit the soul opened to receive it, fail to penetrate the conscience, and dissolve the frosts of our self-love by some holier flame? Never shall it be found true, that God must threaten us with vengeance, ere we can feel the shelter of his grace!

In truth, the Christian idea of salvation cannot be better illustrated, than by the doubt which has been entertained respecting the proper translation of my text. Some, referring it to spiritual redemption, adhere to the common version; others, seeing that the Apostle Peter is explaining "by what power or by what name" he had cured the lame man at the temple gate, refer the words to this miracle of deliverance, and render them thus: "Neither is there healing in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we can be healed." It matters little which it is; for whether we speak of body or of mind, Jesus "saves" us by "making us whole"; by putting forth upon us a divine and healing power, by which past suffering and present decrepitude disappear together; which supplies the defective elements of our nature, cools the burning of inward fever, or calls into being new senses and perceptions, opening a diviner universe to our experience. The deformed and crooked will, bowed by Satan, lo! these many years, and nowise able to lift up itself, he loosens and makes straight in uprightness. The moral paralytic, collapsed and prostrate amid the stir of life, and incapably gazing on the moving waters in which others find their health, has often started up at the summons of that voice, though perchance "he wist not who it was"; and, going his way, has found it to be "the sabbath," and owned the "work" of one who is in the spirit of "the Father." From the eye long dark and blind to duty and to God, he has caused the film to pass away; and shown the solemn look of life beneath a heaven so tranquil and sublime. Even the dead of soul, close wrapped in bandages of selfishness,—that greediest of graves,—have been quickened by his piercing call, and have come forth, to learn, "when risen," that only in the meekness that can obey is there the power to command, only in the love that serves is there the life of heart-felt liberty. To call, then, on the name and trust in the spirit of Christ, is to invoke the restoring power of God; to give symmetry and speed to our lame affections, and the vigor of an athlete to our limping wills. There is not any Christian salvation that is not thus identical with Christian perfection: "nor any other name under heaven given among men, whereby we may be (thus) made whole." Let all that would "be perfect be thus minded"; seek "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ"; and they shall find in him a "power to become the sons of God."