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pleading, his trust,-is our fellowship with him and reconciliation with God:

"This is saving faith,-true righteousness,-being the living action, and true and right movement of the spirit of the individual man in the light of eternal life. And the certainty that God has accepted that perfect and divine Amen as uttered by Christ in humanity, is necessarily accompanied by the peaceful assurance that in uttering, in whatever feebleness, a true Amen to that high Amen, the individual who is yielding himself to the spirit of Christ to have it uttered in him is accepted of God. This Amen in man is the due response to that word, 'Be ye reconciled to God; for the gracious and gospel character of which word, as the tenderest pleading that can be addressed to the most sin-burdened spirit, I have contended above. This Amen is sonship; for the gospel-call, 'Be ye reconciled to God,' when heard in the light of the knowledge that God made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him,' is understood to be the call to each one of us on the part of the Father of our spirits, 'My son, give me thine heart,' addressed to us on the ground of that work by which the Son had declared the Father's name, that the love wherewith the Father hath loved him may be in us, and he in us. In the light itself of that Amen to the mind of the Father in relation to man which shines to us in the atonement, we see the righteousness of God in accepting the atonement, and in that same light the Amen of the individual human spirit to that divine Amen of the Son of God is seen to be what the divine righteousness will necessarily acknowledge as the end of the atonement accomplished."--p. 225.

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In this view, it is not the rescue from punishment, not any favourable change in our legal standing, not any imputed righteousness, that Christ's mediation obtains, but a real transformation of soul and character through the divine infection and infusion of his own filial spirit. Only in so far as his mind thus spreads to us are we united to him, or in any way partakers of his gift of life. Personal alienation can have no reversal but in personal return; nor can any thing "extraneous to the nature of the divine will itself, to which we are to be reconciled, have part in reconciling us to that will." The fear of Hell is not repentance; the assurance of Heaven is not salvation; nor under any modification can the desire of safety, or the consciousness of its attainment, constitute the least approach to holiness. The good alone can touch the springs of goodness; and the divine and trustful life of Christ must speak to us on its own account, and win us by its own power, or not at all. Not that it acts on us merely in the way of example. We do not so stand apart from him in our independent individuality, that by an external imitation we can copy him, and become, as it were, each another Christ, repeating in ourselves his offering of propitiation. He is the Vine, of which we are the branches. The sap is from him,

drawn through the eternal root of righteousness, and does but flow as a derived life into us. The Son of God is not a mere historical personage, to be contemplated at a distance in the past, but ever with us in the power of an endless life; still succouring us when we are tempted, and ministering to conscience a present help and peace. It is not, therefore, by following him, but by abiding in him, that we have our fellowship in his harmony with God.

The essence, then, of the scheme of redemption, in the view of our author, seems to be this: that the Divine nature entered humanity to open the Fatherliness of God by living the life of perfect Sonship; and that, having awakened that life in us by this its visible realisation, he sustains it by the inner presence of his Spirit. It is one of the obvious consequences of this doctrine, that no exclusive or exceptional value is to be ascribed to the death of Christ. It is simply the final and crowning expression of the same filial mind which is the continuous essence of his whole existence upon earth. Nor does the theory attach importance to any sufferings of Christ, as such; but only as media and measures of moral expression. Had men sinned as spirits, his reconciling work would not have involved death at all: but since in our constitution mortality is "the wages of sin," his response to the Divine mind in regard to sin would have been incomplete, had he not honoured this law and tasted its realisation. Not to lose sight of the main features of the doctrine in pursuit of details, we must pass without notice many curious and subtle thoughts of our author on this part of his subject. Indeed, every where the reader who has patience with the entangled style will find deep hints and delicate turns of reflection. But we must withdraw to a little distance from his system, and endeavour to look at it as a whole; fixing attention especially on the central point of all,—the mediatorial provision, which replaces the penal "satisfaction" of the elder Calvinism, and the "exhibition of rectoral justice" of the modern divines.

Instead of an infinite punishment endured or represented, the theory offers us an infinite repentance performed. Repentance for what?—for human sin. Repentance by whom?-by him "who knew no sin." Is this a thing that can be? Is vicarious contrition at all more conceivable than vicarious retribution? It is surely one and the same difficulty that meets them both. On what ground is the transfer of either moral qualities or their effects regarded by our author as impossible?—because at variance with our consciousness of the personal and inalienable nature of sin. But not less is this truth contradicted when we say that the guilt may be incurred by one person, and the

availing repentance take place in another. Nor can any imagination of Christ's state of mind identify it with penitence. Mr. Campbell himself describes it (p. 135) as having "all the elements of a perfect repentance in humanity for all the sin of man-a perfect sorrow-a perfect contrition,-all the elements of such a repentance, and that in absolute perfection-allexcepting the personal consciousness of sin." This exception, however, contains just the essential element of the whole. Penitence without any personal consciousness of sin is a contradiction in terms; and the requisition of the divine law is, that the sinner shall turn from the evil of his heart, not that the righteous shall make confession for him. The entire moral value of contrition belongs to it as the sign of inner change of character, from prior evil to succeeding good; and it admits of no transplantation from the identical personality which has been the seat of the evil and is the candidate for the good.

Further it seems a paradox to say, with our author, that true repentance is impossible to man, who alone needs it; and can be realised only by the Son of God, in whom there is no room for it. It would indeed be a hopeless realm to live in, which should annex to all sins both an imperative demand and an absolute disqualification for adequate contrition, and first open the fountain of availing tears in holy natures that have none to shed. It is, in truth, of the very essence of repentance to have its seat in mixed and imperfect moral beings and our author lays upon it quite an arbitrary requisition, when he insists that, to pass as adequate, it must contain a perfect appreciation of the sin deplored, a view of it coincident with that of God. Under such an aspect as this it could never have appeared to us, though we had remained guiltless of it, and recoiled from it and we can hardly be required to reach, in the rebound of recovery, a point beyond the station which would have prevented the fall. Many errors in theology arise from applying absolute conceptions to relative conditions, and forgetting that religion, as realised in us, is a life, a movement, a progress, and not an ultimate limit of perfection. Repentance is a transitional state, to which it is absurd to apply an infinite criterion it is a change from the worse to the better mind, and cannot need the resources or belong to the experience of the best. To pronounce it impossible to the wandering and fallen, and make it the exclusive function of the All-holy, implies the strangest metamorphosis of its meaning.

But how, it may be asked, could a paradox so violent find favour with an author every where intent on the exclusion of fiction from Christian theology? To refer a moral act to the wrong personality, to toss about a solemn change like penitence

between guilty and innocent, as if its particular seat were a matter of indifference, is so serious an error, that it could never enter a mind like Mr. Campbell's unless under some plausible disguise. Can we find the shape under which it has recommended itself to his approval?

The sentiment ascribed to the Son of God in regard to sin,— wanting as it does the essential penitential element of personal compunction,-is simple sorrow for others' guilt, founded on perfect apprehension of its nature. But this attitude of soul in him awakens the conscience of his disciples, and is reproduced in them by fellowship. Spread into their consciousness, it is no longer clear of the immediate presence of sin, but, falling in with it, assumes the missing element, and becomes repentance. When the Christian sense of evil, which ever partakes of true contrition, is thus contemplated as a transmigration of the Mediator's own spirit into the soul, the two are so identified in thought, that what is true only of the human effect is referred to the Divine cause; and the moral sorrow of Christ is regarded as potentially equivalent to repentance, because that is actually the form of the corresponding phenomenon in us. If this, however, explains our author's position, it hardly justifies it. Intercession for others in their guilt may move them to remorse for their own, but is a fact of quite different nature. As attributes and expressions of character the two phenomena are not to be confounded; and as affecting our relation to God, there is the obvious and admitted distinction, that intercession avails not for those who remain impenitent, and would not be needed for the spontaneously penitent. The sorrowful expostulations of the Son of God have only so far a reconciling effect as they become the medium, in the hearts of men, of an awakened contrition, aspiration, and faith. We cannot conceive them to have immediately altered, as repentance does,-the personal relation between God and the transgressors of His will; else the change would be a change in the Divine sentiment whilst its objects still remained unchanged. The effect waits for its development in souls melted and renewed. And thus the atoning sorrow of Christ becomes simply a provision for a healing penitence in

men.

The ascription of "repentance" to Christ is curious in another point of view. It arises from a blending together of his consciousness and his disciples'; from slurring the lines of personality between them; from regarding their spiritual state as an organic extension of his, and his as the vital root of theirs. In his endeavour to recommend it to us, our author instinctively runs into abstract expressions in speaking of mankind; fusing down concrete men into "humanity," referring to the Mediator

as "God in humanity," and so, dealing with our nature as if it were a single existence, carrying or turning up all its individuals as partial phenomena of one essence. On the other hand, in our endeavour to correct his doctrine, we have had to lay stress on the inalienable and separate character of all particular persons, taken one by one; to insist on the solitude of each responsible agent, and the impassable barriers which forbid the transference of moral attributes from mind to mind. Which of these two modes of conception is the truer? For according as we incline to the one or the other, according as we treat humanity as the organic unit of which individual samples of mankind are numerical accidents, or take each man as an integer of which the race is a multiple,-shall we lean towards mediatorial or towards direct religion. We are firmly convinced that no doctrine of mediation,-in the strict sense implying transactions with God on behalf of men, as well as in the opposite direction,-can be harmonised with the modern individualism; and that it is precisely in the attempt to unite these incompatibles, that the forensic fictions to which Mr. Campbell objects, and the moral fiction in his own theory to which we object, have had their origin. They are mere artificial devices to compensate the loss of that realistic mode of conception in which alone a true atoning doctrine can rest in peace. So long as you contemplate the Redeemer as a detached person, not less insulated in his integrity of being than angel from archangel or from man, the difficulty will remain insuperable of making his moral acts avail for other human individuals, unless by a fictitious transference, against which conscience protests. Punishment by substitute, righteousness by deputy, vicarious repentance, are notions at variance with the fundamental postulates of the Moral Sense: and in the attempt to defend them, we are liable to lose the solemn, living, face-to-face reality of the strife within us, and to weave around us a web of legal and formal relations, as little like any heartfelt veracity as a Chancery-decree to a law of nature. In proportion as the soul is pierced with a sharper contrition, and attains a deeper and clearer insight into her own unfaithful disorder, will the inherent impossibility of any foreign exchange of righteousness become apparent, and the desire to be shielded from punishment will pass away: nor is the Conscience truly awakened which does not rather rush into the arms of its just anguish than start back and fly away. And the more you hold up to view the holiness of Christ, the darker will the personal past appear to grow for self-reproach will say: "Yes, I see him as the holy Son of God; the guiltier am I that the vision did not keep me from my sin." Talk to such a one of Christ's transactions on our behalf as "federal head" of a redeemed people; and his

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