least and now, still gazing as from afar, not in fruition but in faith, on that which we have not realized in ourselves. We are still kneeling to worship, with arms outstretched from ourselves in a wonder of belief and loving adoration, that reality wholly unique and wholly comprehensive, the figure of Jesus crucified.

SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER

ON

THE ATONEMENT IN HISTORY

IT would be quite foreign to the present purpose to write a history of the doctrine of atonement. The historian of a doctrine must aim at completeness. He will do justice to every development or variation. He will overlook no eccentricity. And his finished work will often present more directly a curious picture of the working, perhaps of the failure, of the human mind, than a vivid or vivifying statement of the inner truth of the doctrine itself.

Such a study is full, no doubt, of its own fascination. But for minds whose great interest is the reality of the doctrine, as practical, living, and true, such a study is by no means always edifying. So far from leading minds straight to the living heart of truth, it seems often to perplex and repel. A comparison between different teachers or schools is occupied more, in proportion, with their differences, and perhaps eccentricities, than with the central reality which they diversely present. To pass in thought from one disproportion to another; to study, and dissect, successive inadequacies, if not grotesquenesses: is, to a mind partly puzzled and wholly eager, a repugnant, and sometimes even a perilous, exercise. If a man doubts the truth of the atonement to himself, he is hardly likely to be reassured by a close historical study of the different, more or less unsatisfying, ways, in which a great variety of minds have struggled to express it. The variety itself is distracting; and each several exposition, when tabulated in

put in its own least The very weariness

comparison and contrast with others, is persuasive, because least living, form. and entanglement of the history of a doctrine, as history, makes it harder to many minds to embrace with any vivid insight, or moral enthusiasm, the living truth itself as living and as true.

But if a history, as history, is as much outside the purpose, as the power, of the present effort; that purpose may nevertheless be served by some glimpses into history. The glimpses, such as they are, may seem to be miscellaneous; but they will have, of course, a connected purpose. That purpose is to show how real is the freedom of essential Christian thought, from those conceptions of atonement with which it has become gradually, and has been supposed to be inherently, identified: and thereby also to vindicate, from the point of view of theological history, the view which has been taken in the foregoing pages. is, then, even more for a defensive than for a purely historical purpose; it is to justify the rest of the volume against some not unnatural distrust, that, in the main, this supplementary chapter is written. It may be felt that there is a suspicion of newness about the present exposition that it is more distinct, than is wise or right, from what look like the larger currents of traditional thought. To this I do not plead guilty. If there is anything in it which seems to our present assumptions to be novel, I should plead in reply not only that in much larger measure it is antique, conservative, orthodox, and scriptural; but that it is only the element of mistake in our present assumptions which causes even the appearance of novelty. The simplest way of justifying this plea is to try to exhibit, in their delicious largeness and simplicity, the mode in which the earliest generations of Christians felt and spoke about the cardinal fact of the atonement. I should like to be able to show that the essential position of the present volume would have sounded in no way either novel or bold to any Christian teachers or communities-though of course every teacher did not put everything in exactly the same way-until, at the least, the end of the Athanasian age.

For this purpose I propose to dwell a little upon the earliest Christian utterances, and to pass from them to Athanasius. From Athanasius, in particular, I hope that it will conclusively appear, not only that his own mind was wholly without some modes of thought about the atone

ment which we are sometimes tempted to regard as inseparable from it; but also that he is altogether unconscious of any such assumptions in the mind of the Church of his time. If there be anything narrow or artificial in the explanations of Irenæus or Origen, or any others, I hope that Athanasius will make it plain enough that any such elements of rigidity belonged to the private efforts of individual theologians to illustrate the central faith of the Church; they were no part either of the central faith, or even, as yet, of those popular Christian conceptions which gathered round the central faith.

For the rest, there seem to be some special reasons for dwelling a little upon Anselm and Abælard: and I have ventured to try and make my position the clearer by direct comment upon one or two of the treatises upon the atonement which seem to be most current and most practically influential amongst ourselves.

To begin, then, with some references to the Apostolic Fathers.

In the epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians there are two passages, each of which strikes a single note, and strikes it most impressively. In the first the blood of Christ is the real possibility of human penitence. Human penitence-not vicarious penitence only in man's stead, but reality of penitence in man himself: this is its beauty, its joy, its preciousness, in the presence of God. It has "won for the whole world the grace of penitence."

Διὸ ἀπολίπωμεν τὰς κενὰς καὶ ματαίας φροντίδας, καὶ ἔλθωμεν ἐπὶ τὸν εὐκλεὴ καὶ σεμνὸν τῆς παραδόσεως ἡμῶν κανόνα, καὶ ἴδωμεν τί καλὸν καὶ τί τερπνὸν καὶ τί προσδεκτὸν ἐνώπιον τοῦ ποιήσαντος ἡμᾶς. ἀτενίσωμεν εἰς τὸ αἷμα τοῦ Χριστοῦ καὶ γνῶμεν ὡς ἔστιν τίμιον τῷ Θεῷ τῷ Πατρὶ αὐτοῦ, ὅτι διὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν σωτηρίαν ἐκχυθὲν παντὶ τῷ κόσμῳ μετανοίας χάριν ἐπήνεγκεν, κ.τ.λ. I. ad Cor. vii.

In the other passage, the one thing that is absolutely clear is that the passion of Jesus Christ was all love, love beyond human conceiving, the love of God Himself. There is not a whisper here of anger, or vengeance. It is simply the unplumbed mystery of love.

1 The text is that of Gebhardt, Harnack, and Zahn. Lightfoot reads vrhveуkev and upon it makes this note,—“ výveyкev 'offered.' So it is generally taken, but this sense is unsupported; for Xen. Hell., iv. 7. 2, Soph. El., 834, are not parallel. Perhaps won (rescued) for the whole world."" whveyker would seem to convey the same meaning still more directly.

"Whoso has love in Christ, let him do the commandments of Christ. What the bond is of the love of God, who is there that can declare? The grandeur of its beauty who is sufficient to utter? The height to which love leads up is beyond telling. Love joins us unto God. Love covers over a multitude of sins. Love bears with all things. Love is all long-suffering. In love there is nothing mean, and nothing haughty. There is no schism in love, and no spirit of division. Love does all things in oneness of soul. In love the elect of God were all made perfect. Without love there can be nothing well pleasing to God. In love the Master took us unto Himself. For the love which He had toward us, Jesus Christ our Lord, in the will of God, gave His own blood for us, and His flesh for our flesh, and His life for our lives."1

An act wholly proceeding out of, wholly characterized by and consisting of, love: an act whose priceless beauty lay in this that it was, in possibility at least, the actual penitence of all mankind: this is the conception of the atonement which meets us at the outset of post-apostolic literature. It is a conception singularly free from the technicalities and perplexing constraints of a good deal of the logic of subsequent writers; and perhaps hardly less striking, in respect of this contrast, than it is in its own large and living suggestiveness.

There is very little in the Ignatian letters which bears upon the rationale of the interpretation of Christ's death. on the Cross. The event itself indeed, in its historical reality, is most earnestly insisted on, as the very centre of the Christian gospel and life. It is astonishing into how many aspects of life it enters as not only a relevant, but the cardinal, thought. The following passages are collected by Bishop Lightfoot, when commenting upon the phrase, in the inscription of the epistle to the Ephesians, which speaks of the Church of Ephesus as "united and elected in the power of a real Passion through the will of the Father and of Christ." "This [ev Tábe]," he says, "should probably be connected with both the preceding words. The 'passion' is at once the bond of their union, and the ground of their election." For the former idea compare

· ἐν ἀγάπῃ προσελάβετο ἡμᾶς ὁ δεσπότης· διὰ τὴν ἀγάπην ἣν ἔσχεν πρὸς ἡμᾶς τὸ αἷμα αὐτοῦ ἔδωκεν ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς ὁ κύριος ἡμῶν, ἐν θελήματι Θεοῦ, καὶ τὴν σάρκα ὑπὲρ τῆς σαρκὸς ἡμῶν καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν ὑπὲρ τῶν ψυχῶν ἡμῶν. I. ad Cor. xlix.

See, e.g. Trall. 9, Smyrn. Į.