action. That there should be presumption in the attempt of sinful creatures like ourselves to look on the very face of God, I could understand. I could understand the humility and dread with which devout men might warn us that so long as the imperfections of this mortal condition are still upon us, it must be presumptuous to invoke the illumination of the Holy Ghost to reveal to us the very thought and life of God as expressed in the redemptive work of Christ; but such warnings cannot be listened to, for it was of this immediate revelation that our Lord was speaking when He said, "This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." And since we are encouraged to hope and to pray for this transcendent knowledge, it is difficult to perceive how we can be guilty of presumption in attempting to give to what has been revealed to us accurate intellectual expression. And this is what I mean by a theory of the Atonement.

I propose, therefore, in this series of Lectures to show that there is a direct relation between the Death of Christ and the remission of sins, and to investigate the principles and grounds of that relation. I have first to establish a Fact, and then to attempt the construction of a Theory.

The proof that in the New Testament our Lord's Death is represented as the objective ground on which God absolves us from sin and delivers us from eternal

destruction has been exhibited with great elaboration and with a large amount of exegetical learning in many treatises on the Atonement. All the passages have been classified and carefully analysed which affirm that our Lord died for sinners, that He died for our sins, that He bore our sins, that He was made sin for us, that He was made a curse for us, that we have remission of sins and deliverance from wrath through Him, that He gave His life as a ransom for us, that His death was a Sacrifice, that He is the Propitiation for the sins of the world. The collection of passages seems to be very complete, and I do not know that the classification can be improved. Nor is there much to be added to the criticism and illustration of the separate texts on which the argument is built, for since the days of Socinus these texts have been investigated and reinvestigated in the interests of hostile schools of theology.

It is not my intention, therefore, to present the argument precisely in this form. The proof as it stands appears to me to be conclusive, and within the narrow limits of this series of Lectures it may not be possible for me to add anything to its cogency. But I propose to adopt a somewhat different method, which, if it were properly handled, might, I think, greatly strengthen the argument.

It must be obvious to every reader of the New Testament that a mere catalogue of texts in which any great truth is definitely taught can never give a

I Note B.

just impression of the place which that truth held in the thought and faith of the Apostles. This observation has a special application to texts selected from the apostolic epistles. For these epistles were for the most part occasional writings. They were suggested by accidental circumstances. The space which is given to the illustration of particular doctrines or duties was determined, not by the intrinsic and permanent importance of the doctrines or duties themselves, but by the perils which threatened the Christian faith or the Christian integrity of the Churches to which they were written, and by many other circumstances of a temporary character. The exhortations addressed to the Church at Corinth to contribute liberally to the relief of the distressed Christians in Judæa fill as many columns in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians as the discussion of the doctrine of the Resurrection in the First Epistle. The moral scandals and disorders in the Corinthian Church occupy as many pages in the two epistles to that Church as the doctrine of Justification in the Epistle to the Romans; and these disorders and scandals were of a kind which are never likely to occur except in the transition from a heathen to a Christian life.

The frequency and distinctness with which a doctrine is asserted in the apostolic writings is, therefore, no test of its importance. It might even be contended with considerable plausibility that the importance of a doctrine is likely to be in the inverse ratio of the number of passages in which it is directly taught; for the

central and most characteristic truths of the Christian Faith are precisely those which the Churches were least likely to abandon. These truths were safe, and the Epistles generally deal with the truths which were in danger. Even in writing to Churches largely composed of converts from heathenism, it was not necessary for St. Paul to dwell at length on the unity of God and to denounce idolatry, for if a man was a Christian at all, he had finally abandoned the altars and the divinities. of his heathen countrymen. Nor was it necessary to reiterate that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God and the Saviour of men, for unless men had acknowledged His claims they would have had no place in the Churches to which the Epistles were addressed. From the very nature of the apostolic writings those truths which belong to the essence of the Christian creed are, for the most part, implied rather than explicitly taught; they are appealed to and taken for granted as the recognised motives to Christian living and the recognised sources of Christian hope and consolation; they are frequently the inspiration of rapturous thanksgiving, and they frequently constitute the substance and the argument of a prayer.

To make collections of "proof-texts" is therefore an unsatisfactory means of arriving at a knowledge of apostolic faith. We must resort to less easy and less direct methods. Some of the passages which are most decisive in the determination of what the Apostles believed could find no place in such arrangements of "proofs " as are common in theological treatises.

An illustration of what I mean occurs in the wellknown passage on the Lord's Supper in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. Its direct intention is to rescue the Lord's Supper from dishonour and to secure its reverential celebration. St. Paul uses words

which have caused many devout

persons to approach

the Lord's Table with dread. But that in a Church founded by the Apostle himself a very short time before the Epistle was written, it should have been possible for the Lord's Supper to be associated with the disgraceful excesses which he rebukes, and that in rebuking them he makes no use of the awful argument which would have come at once to the lips of a priest of the Church of Rome or a Ritualistic priest of the Church of England, is a proof, from which there can be no appeal, that St. Paul had never taught and did not believe that the consecrated bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ.

To take another illustration. There is no passage in the New Testament which is more destructive of the humanitarian theory of our Lord's person than that in which St. John says that "every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is that spirit of Antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world."

As a "proof-text" these words would be alleged in support of the truth that our Lord was really man ; but that it should have been necessary for the apostle to I 1 John iv. 3.