equational form. "Christ is the 'Propitiation for our sins'; and therefore, He has allayed the Divine anger, so that God, for His sake, is willing to forgive us." "1 "If the punishment of sin is a Divine act. . . . it would appear that, if in any case the penalties of sin are remitted, some other Divine act of at least equal intensity, and in which the ill desert of sin is expressed with at least equal energy, must take its place." "2 "If God does not assert the principle that sin deserves punishment by punishing it, He must assert that principle in some other way. Some Divine act is required which shall have all the moral worth and significance of the act by which the penalties of sin would have been inflicted on the sinner. The Christian atonement is the fulfilment of that necessity." "When the heart is shaken by fears of future judgment and 'the wrath to come,' a vivid apprehension of the Death of Christ, as the voluntary death of the Moral Ruler and Judge of the human race, will at once inspire perfect peace. Without further explanation, the conscience will grasp the assurance that since He has suffered, to whom it belonged to inflict suffering, it must be possible for Him to grant remission of sins.' "4 "His hostility to our sins has received adequate expression in the Death of Christ, and now He is ready to confer on us the remission of sins for Christ's sake. The remission of sins . . . . brings to the man who has received it a sure and permanent escape from the hostility and the wrath of God." Some of the expressions in these passages are particularly unfortunate. They provoke the query, which is hardly under the circumstances an unfair one,-May I, if my child is shamefully wicked, 'forgive him, provided that, as an adequate expression of 'hostility,' I cut off my own finger first?

Elsewhere Dr Dale writes, "If we ask in what sense He effected this reconciliation, the reply is contained in the words which follow- Not imputing their trespasses unto them. . . . If we further ask what relation there is between Christ and the non-imputation to mankind of those trespasses by which God's righteous condemnation had been merited, the reply to this further question is given in the boldest representation of Christ's redemptive work to be found in the New Testament: God 'made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.' This was the ultimate foundation of the Apostle's ministry, and the ground on 2 * p. 391. • p. 394. ❝ p. 346.

1

1 p. 355.

3 p. 391-2.

which in Christ's stead, and as Christ's ambassador, he could entreat men to be reconciled to God. God reconciles us to Himself, according to St Paul, not in the first instance by delivering us from sin, but by not imputing our sins to us: the reconciliation is primarily, not the removal of our hostility to God, but the cessation of God's hostility to us. The ground of this reconciliation lies in the fact that God made Christ to be sin for us, and its ultimate result is that we are made the righteousness of God in Him."1

Now I am quite unable to acquiesce in the sense which in these chapters is put upon the words punishment and forgiveness; for punishment remains as retaliatory infliction from without by another; and forgiveness as simply remission, or non-infliction, of penalties; and I doubt the possibility of any rational explanation of atonement while this meaning for the two words is assumed. But the most fatal flaw in Dr Dale's exposition, regarded as a rationale of atonement, lies in this-that he has wholly omitted all reference to the presence, or work of the Holy Spirit. He has, in fact, essayed the impossible task of explaining how the atonement affects 'me' at a point, and upon a hypothesis, on which it does not affect me. He stops short of Pentecost; and short of Pentecost tries to show how I am included in the 'forgiveness' of God. But short of Pentecost 'I' am not so included. I am not forgiven-apart from the Spirit of Christ. I am not forgiven through the Spirit,-apart from His operation within myself. It is not the old unchanged 'I,' who am simply, for the sake of an equivalent, let go unpunished. But the old 'I,' brought at first by Divine grace within the region of forgiveness, am therein more and more progressively changed, till my forgiveness is consummated in infinite love. And this love is the love of the righteousness and of the truth, as directly as of the mercy of God. For righteousness and truth and wisdom and power and mercy and love are one.

The crucial point, then, after all, is Dr Dale's omission. And the crucial illustration of this is his exposition of atonement from St Paul's Epistle to the Romans. So exclusively do the thoughts of punishment, and Christ's death as a bearing of punishment, monopolize his mind, that he actually expounds the doctrinal argument of the epistle, as though it finally closed with the close of chapter 1 p. 262-3.

1

vii. The 8th chapter, the grand culmination, the crowning glory of St Paul's exposition, is treated as though it had never been written at all; or, at most, as though it belonged to an utterly different subject, and had no relevance to the atonement whatever. There is absolutely not a hint of its existence. To those who believe that the 8th chapter is at once the climax of all that has gone before, and the indispensable key to any true insight into the rationale of the whole, as a whole; this blank ignoring of its very existence is the most curious illustration that could be conceived of the limitedness, or, to speak quite frankly, the failure, of Dr Dale's explanatory work.

I am quite aware that I have drawn my statement of Dr Dale's theory almost wholly from his first nine lectures; and that in the tenth, while there are emphatic passages which repeat the position of the nine, there are passages which belong to a different strain of thought. But while sincerely welcoming all that he there says as to the relation of Christ, as the Eternal Son, to the human race, and as to our ultimate holiness in Him, I must still say that these things seem to me to belong to another conception of the atonement, which is not the conception of his book. If they are, as they seem to me to be, inconsistent elements, they are inconsistencies for which we may well be altogether grateful. The volume is much the richer for them. For they bear their fragrant witness to a larger and a deeper truth than is properly included within the logic of the previous theory.

In conclusion, it seems to me just to say these two things. First, that whilst Dr Dale had a work to do in stemming a tide of thought that was dangerously latitudinarian, it must nevertheless be admitted that there was something really retrograde, as well as loyally conservative, in his own work. Indeed if, as years go by, nothing more could be said in explanation of the moral righteousness of the atonement than he has succeeded in saying, it is impossible not to feel some doubt whether belief in the atonement, even as fact, could be, on any large scale, ultimately maintained. On the other hand, so great is the value of his vindication of the fact, and so profound and so grateful is the response of the Christian consciousness thereto, as long as the fact is presented in any form whatever in which it can even seem to justify itself or to be intelligible (and the apprehension of the

heart herein is apt to be far wider and more reasonable than the theories by which it struggles to explain itself); that Dr Dale's work, after all, has stood, and will stand, as a real and solid contribution to the faith and goodness of his own generation.

In passing from Prot. Jowett and Dr Dale to Dr Macleod Campbell, we are, to a certain extent, going backwards, as far as the strict order of dates is concerned. Yet this order seems to be more convenient, inasmuch as Dr Macleod Campbell's thought, however much it may be open at some points to criticism, appears to be greatly in advance, alike in philosophical grasp and in theological insight, of the other two. And the order may find, perhaps, some further justification in the fact that most English readers of this generation are probably first, and most, familiar with Dr Dale. It must be owned that Dr Macleod Campbell is not an attractive writer. He is constantly prolix and difficult in style. Too often, indeed, this is simply a literary defect. But it is also connected with the largeness of a thought which is apt to be too many-sided for its language. If he confined himself stringently to the logic of the one thought instantly in hand, his style would be often far clearer. But the real thought would be less rich. What he would have pruned away would not have been merely superfluous. It would have contained many germs of real thought, incidental touches upon other, more or less relevant, aspects of truth. Still, for practical purposes these things cumber, even while in a sense they enlarge, the immediate thought.

We need not ask what occasions the writings of Dr Macleod Campbell. He himself supplies his own background. And very interesting is the representation which his pages contain both of Luther, and of the earlier and later Calvinism. He is anything but hostile. He writes with respect and sympathy of all these. And yet he burns to correct the untruths in their logic which are so transparently plain to the insight of his heart. He is touching in his insistence upon the Fatherhood of God as the fundamental truth of life, and the revelation of the truly filial relation in Christ,-" that spiritual relation to Christ in the light of which we can alone hear and respond to the call to follow God as dear children."1 He is clear that the 1 The Nature of the Atonement, p. 366 (314). The references are to the

root cause of the atonement is not the anger, but the love of God. "An atonement to make God gracious, to move Him to compassion, to turn His heart toward those from whom sin had alienated His love, it would, indeed, be difficult to believe in; for, if it were needed, it would be impossible. To awaken to the sense of the need of such an atonement, would certainly be to awaken to utter and absolute despair. But the scriptures do not speak of such an atonement; for they do not represent the love of God to man as the effect, and the atonement of Christ as the cause, but just the contrary-they represent the love of God as the cause, and the atonement as the effect. 'God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him, might not perish, but have everlasting life.'"1 He is interesting in his protest against a conception of atonement, the core of which is amount of suffering. "What I have felt-and the more I consider it, feel the more-is surprise that the atoning element in the sufferings pictured, has been to their minds sufferings as sufferings, the pain and agony as pain and agony.... my surprise is, not that, to men believing the sufferings contemplated to be strictly penal, the pain as pain should be the chief object of attention, being indeed that for which alone, on this view, a necessity existed; but my surprise is, that these sufferings being contemplated as an atonement for sin, the holiness and love seen taking the form of suffering should not be recognized as the atoning elements-the very essence and adequacy of the sacrifice for sin presented to our faith." 2

He is suggestive again in his tentative definition of forgiveness. "Forgiveness-that is, love to an enemy surviving his enmity, and which, notwithstanding his enmity, can act towards him for his good; this we must be able to believe to be in God towards us, in order that we may be able to believe in the atonement. . . . If we could ourselves make an atonement for our sins. . . . then such an atonement might be thought of as preceding forgiveness, and the cause of it. But if God provides the atonement, then forgiveness must precede atonement; and the atonement must be the form of the manifestation of the forgiving love of God, not its cause." 8 And he is suggestive in his protest against the ordinary sense of the

second edition, published 1867. Those in brackets are to the sixth edition, 1886. 1 1 p. 20 (17). 3 p. 18 (15, 16).

2 p. 116 (99, 100).