redemption through the precious blood of Jesus, but as he also depicts the Father judging all men, without respect of persons, according to their works, he cannot be called a preacher of the Atonement.

The first Epistle of John refers to the death of Jesus as a propitiation for the sins of the whole world;1 but when the author adds, 'Hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren,' we detect how divergent are his views from the modern theory of expiation.

When and by whomsoever the fiction of Messianic sacrifice was introduced into primitive Christian literature, we possess the indestructible fact that, according to the personal teaching of the Son of Man, he died, not as a voluntary offering for sin, but as the reluctant victim of a prophetic destiny, which he would have joyfully escaped, but that he interpreted the imaginary decrees of Hebrew bards as the will of his Father in heaven. 8

3

Turning towards the earliest records of the second century, the creed put into the hands of modern believers as apostolic contains no reference to the Atonement. Clement of Rome speaks of the blood of Christ shed for our salvation, but he also affirms that God has, in every age, accepted man's repentance, and that charity will save all those who turn towards Him in purity and holiness. Barnabas emphatically condemns a ritualism of blood as a misapprehension of what is pleasing to the Deity, and concurs with Isaiah

1 1 John ii. 2.

2 1 John iii. 16.

3 The passages in Matt. xx. 28 and xxvi. 28, referring to the death of Jesus as a ransom for many, are obviously ecclesiastical interpolations, irreconcilable with his teaching.

in commending virtue as the only true sacrifice. The Shepherd of Hermas, once read in Christian congregations as inspired Scripture, is silent respecting the Atonement, but sees in divine forgiveness the necessary sequel of human repentance, and declares that the sins of all who have suffered for the name of Jesus shall be freely blotted out.

The theory of sacrificial expiation finds no place in the writings of Justin, Irenæus, Athenagoras, Clement, or Tertullian; and both Cyprian and Lactantius attribute salvation to good works. Origen, interpreting the language of Paul-' for ye were bought with a price '— affirms that the human race was in the power of the Devil, who demanded and obtained the blood of Christ as the price of our redemption. But, on the other hand, Athanasius assumes that Jesus died to bestow on all men the resurrection from the dead-a divergence of opinion which discloses the mental confusion of theologians in the third and fourth centuries, when considering the death of Jesus, not in the light of his own statements, but through their own ideal conceptions.

The creed-makers of Nicæa knew nothing of that form of vicarious expiation which demands the blood of Jesus to satisfy the justice of God. They tell us that Christ came down from heaven for our salvation, and thus affirm, not the modern doctrine of the Atonement, but the visionary dream of Gnosticism, depicting Monogenes descending from the Pleroma as the Saviour of Humanity. Pseudo-Athanasius was somewhat in advance of the Confession of Nicæa, when he affirmed that Jesus 'suffered for our salvation,' but so indefinite a reference to the central doctrine of modern Christianity fails to

establish that believers of his generation concurred with the orthodox views of the Atonement held in the nine

teenth century.

The doctrine of the Atonement, oscillating between a ransom due to Satan and a sacrifice demanded by God, existed in so mythical a form for nearly a thousand years that its invention or discovery may be justly assigned to Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, who flourished towards the close of the eleventh century, and founded that school of ecclesiastical metaphysicians who accepted their own fallacious conclusions as the spiritual insight of divine mysteries. Anselm affirmed that, although other means of salvation were at the disposal of Omnipotence, God chose the death of Christ to manifest his love towards man; and that, as Christ died without sin, a reward was due to him which he transferred to mankind in the form of pardon for sin. He, however, added that human nature could not be restored unless a penalty were paid to God impossible to humanity, and therefore paid by Christ as God. These conclusions, as fanciful as the theosophic dreams of Egypt, Persia, or Greece, were not, however, sufficiently definite for the final evolution of the Atonement; and the speculative question of expiation was practically solved, in a barbarous age, through the Eucharistic miracle of recurrent sacrifice.

The public sale of Indulgences in the sixteenth century was the immediate cause of the Reformation; and as this abuse of Papal authority involved the existence of human merit, its negation, through the doctrine of the Atonement, became the favourite study of Protestant theologians; and reformed Synods, apparently as

infallible as Roman Councils, determined the limits of Infinity by affirming that the justice of God demands the temporal and eternal punishment of man, and can only be satisfied by the sufferings and death of Christ. How marvellous that men, who appealed to Reason against Rome, should thus dogmatically determine the Creed of Posterity!

To the Reformers came the priceless opportunity of restoring the simplicity of Galilee; but, fascinated by Pauline mysticism, they evolved from the doctrines of Election, Predestination, and Justification by Faith, that chaotic theosophy which Anglican Christians may now freely study in the Articles of their Church.

2

Turning towards those ecclesiastical fossils, we learn that the virtuous actions of uninspired men are sinful and displeasing to God; that Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, and Aurelius cannot, according to the Scriptures, escape perdition; and that Election is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, '3 in whom we inevitably recognise the lineal descendants of the Pharisee who thanked God that he was so much better than his neighbours.*

What, therefore, is the orthodox theory of the Atonement? That God created man in simplicity and ignorance, placed at his disposal the means of his Fall, left him defenceless against the wiles of Satan, condemned the innocent by cursing posterity, denied forgiveness to the penitent, unless appeased by blood, consecrated the heathen rite of human sacrifice by the crucifixion of his Only Son, limited the boon of expia

1 Art. xiii.

2 Art. xviii.

4 Luke xviii. 9-14.

3 Art. xvii.

tion to a chosen few, and finally effaced all that is noblest in Humanity by teaching men to seek His favour, not by righteousness, but through the vicarious sufferings of an innocent man, judicially murdered to satisfy divine justice!

Happily for mankind the results of modern research fully vindicate the Deity from these injurious imputations, and release all Christians from the obligation of belief in a Gospel of blood, unknown to Jesus of Nazareth. The facts of Science, more authentic than the voice of Prophets, now tell us that man has inhabited the earth throughout countless generations of progression from lower to higher conditions of Humanity; his Fall is therefore a myth, and the Atonement, erected on this foundation of sand, the pious fiction of an age unconscious of the buried secrets reserved by Nature as a future revelation to mankind.

As our inquiries, therefore, result in absolute couviction that both Judaism and Christianity are of merely human origin, we are necessarily confronted by the unsolved problem of Man's true relationship with the Infinite; but, before discussing this momentous question, we for the present say to our readersau revoir.