nor himself. I allude to the case of the son of Zaleucus. *

Zaleucus, the king of the Locrians had established a law against adultery, the penalty of which was, that the offender should lose both eyes. The first person found guilty of this offence, was the king's own son. Zaleucus felt as a father towards his own son, but he felt likewise as a king towards his government. If he, from blind indulgence, forgive his son, with what reason can he expect the law to be respected by the rest of his subjects? and how will his public character appear in punishing any future offender? If he repeal the law, he will brand his character with dishonor-for selfishness, in sacrificing the public good of a whole community to his private feelings; for weakness, in publishing a law whose penalty he never could inflict; and for foolishness, in introducing a law, the bearings of which he had never contemplated. This would make his authority for the future a mere name.

The case was a difficult one. Though he was an offended governor, yet he had the compassion of a tender father. At the suggestion of his unbribed mercy, he employed his mind and wisdom to devise a measure, an expedient through the medium of which he would save his son, and yet magnify his law, and make it honorable. The expedient was this, The king himself would lose one eye, and the offender should lose another. By this means, the honor of his law was preserved unsullied, and the clemency of his heart was extended to the offender. Every subject in the government when he heard of the king's conduct, would feel assured that the king esteemed his law very highly; and though the offender did not suffer the entire penalty, yet the clemency shewn him was exercised in such a way, that no adulterer would ever think of escaping with impunity. Every reporter or historian of the fact

*An account of Zaleucus is found in Ælian, V. H. 2, 37. Val. Max. i. 2, 6. Cic. ad Attic. 6. 1.

would say, that the king spared not his own eye, that he might spare his offending child with honor. He would assert that this sacrifice of the king's eye, completely demonstrated his abhorrence of adultery, and high regard for his law, as effectually, as if the penalty had been literally executed upon the sinner himself. The impression on the public mind would be that this expedient of the father was an atonement for the offence of the sou, and was a just and honorable ground for pardoning him.

Such an expedient in the moral government of God, the apostles asserted the death of Christ to be. They preached that all men were "condemned already,"that God had "thoughts of peace, and not of evil” towards men, that these thoughts were to be exercised in such a manner, as not to "destroy the law," and that the medium or expedient for doing this, was the sacrifice of his ONLY SON as an atonement to public justice for the sin of men.

The sufferings of the Son of God were substituted in the room of the execution of the penalty threatened to the offender. The atonement in the death of Christ is not a literal enduring of the identical penalty due to the sinner, but it is a provision or an expedient introduced instead of the literal infliction of the penalty; it is the substitution of another course of suffering which will answer the same purposes in the divine administrations as the literal execution of the penalty on the offender himself would accomplish.

Had Darius found any person willing to be thrown into the lion's den instead of Daniel, and literally to bear the penalty threatened, this could never have been deemed an atonement to the laws of the Medes and the Persians. These laws had never contemplated that the offender should have the option of bearing the penalty, either in person or by his substitute. It would have been a much more likely atonement to the laws, if one of the presidents of the provinces, one high in the esteem of the king, one concerned for the honor of

the government, and one much interested in Daniel, had consented, either to lose his right hand on a public scaffold, or to fight with a lion in an amphitheatre, for the sake of honorably saving Daniel.

Atonement is not an expedient contrary to law, but above law. It is introduced into an administration, not to execute the letter of the law, but to preserve "the spirit and the truth" of the constitution. The death of Christ is an atonement for sin. It is a public expression of God's regard for his law; and it is an honorable ground for showing clemency to transgressors. That the atonement is a doctrine of the word of God, is evident from the fact that it suggests itself to every unprejudiced reader of the New Testament, that in the churches which used the original text only it was never deemed a heresy, and that one end of the modern opponents of it in constructing an "Improved Version of the New Testament" has been to exclude it. The simple and unbending language of the scriptures speak of Christ as an atoning Mediator, "whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation, through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins past through the forbearance of God, to declare at this time his righteousness, that he might be just, AND the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus." Rom. iii. 25.

If this representation of the death of Christ be correct and scriptural, it must be evident that the atonement of the Son of God did not consist in suffering literally the identical penalty, or the identical amount of penalty due to a certain number of offenders for a certain number of offences. The atonement of Christ is represented by men sometimes, as if he would have had to suffer more, had there been more to be saved, or less, had there been fewer to be saved. Sometimes also another aspect is given to the atonement, as if God saved a number of offenders in proportion to value received for them in obedience and suffering from their substitute.

Here, let us pause. Let us bethink ourselves, and seriously consider "Is this the atonement of the scrip

tures." This invests with the meanest calculating mercenariness a moral transaction of the utmost grandeur in the universe. By supposing the literal infliction of the threatened punishment on the substitute, it exalts the condemned suppliant into a presumptuous claimant; it excludes grace from the dispensation of pardon, and, in fact, annuls the idea of an atonement. By maintaining the certain salvation of so many persons, in consideration of so much suffering endured for them, and for them only, it prescribes dimensions to the mercy that "loved the world;" it makes the salvation of some offenders utterly impossible; and it destroys the sincerity of that universal call which summons all men to "receive the atonement."

This commercial atonement accumulates the obligations of the elect to the Son, at the expense of their obligations to the Father; for he has granted no boon without being compensated for it. And it completely darkens the justice of the "sorer punishment" which shall befal the rejecters and despisers of salvation. By its absurdity, it furnishes the most plausible apology for Socinianism, or any other system of opposition to the doctrine of an atonement: and by its boldness it unbridles all the licentiousness of Antinomianism. The character and aspect of such a notion of atonement shew that it is not the atonement of the scriptures.

It is a suspicious circumstance in any system of theology, when it is so promulgated as to excite objections and controversies which were not raised by the ministry of the apostles. We can clearly ascertain the theological doctrines of the apostles, partly from their direct assertions, and partly from their replies to the objections proposed by their adversaries. If the apostle shunned not to declare the whole counsel of God, and if this whole counsel was delivered unto us, when the inspired code of theology was completed, we have no safe ground to expect the revelation of any new doctrine of Christianity.

When the announcing of our theological doctrines raises the same objections as those to which the apostles

have already replied, we may safely conclude that such a statement of the doctrine is apostolical. But if we, by any of our theological statements excite objections which the apostles did not excite, we have good grounds not only for being very jealous of such a doctrine, but for a total and immediate renunciation of it.

The doctrines of the apostles did excite controversies about predestination to life, the sovereignty of divine influences, the accountableness of a sinner to the moral law, the reality of the atonement, &c.; but there is not the remotest allusion to any controversies having been raised concerning the EXTENT of the atonement. Some of the Jews, indeed, at one time had doubts about the universal calling of the Gentiles; but those doubts arose from their views of the Mosaic covenant, and not from considerations relative to the intrinsic aspect and design of the atonement.

The apostles declare, in language the most distinct and unequivocal, that the death of Christ was a ransom for all, and a propitiation for the sins of the whole world, that he tasted death for every man, and that God, consequently, was in him reconciling the world unto himself. Yea, they openly declared that persons who denied or renounced the Lord who had bought them, would, notwithstanding, meet with a damnation that slumbered not. Yet this universal aspect of the atonement is never supposed to have shocked the minds, or clashed with the doctrines of the primitive churches. In all the apostolical writings, there is no bint given that the churches had any narrow views of the design of the death of Christ; and no reply is given to any objection which might imply a misapprehension of such an unshackled, unqualified, and unlimited testimony concerning the extent of the atonement.

That the apostles represented Christ to have died "for the church," "for his people," &c., does not in the least weaken this position; for what is true of the whole of mankind, must be true of a part; and such a language