What defect

less can we discover such an idea in the Bible. then in the scriptural conception of the future state, is it proposed to remedy, by this theory of a mundane heaven? Does scientific compulsion, or do the necessities of interpretation, constrain us to suppose that the happy spirits now thronging to the regions of eternal light, are there for only a transient stay, and will be finally remanded to this planetary sphere, to find the completion of their happiness here? Is this puny globule, alone out of all the systems, to be spread for the populous principalities of God's domain? Pray God a thousand such may not be able to contain them!

The Bible avers that this earth is to be destroyed. Whether, or when, or how, or why, to be rebuilded, it gives no hint. At the touch of Omnipotence, a "new earth" may spring like magic from the ruins of the old-but who shall say? And if it should, to what end will the renovated planet be destined? We know not. The Bible utters no sign. We can only infer that whatever it may become, it will never be heaven. The Scriptures signify in manifold ways, that heaven is ready now. The city of our God is already builded, "not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." No earthly globe will be needed to increase its capacious amplitude, or to bear over the bosom of space, as a ship on the sea, the royal splendor of its thrones and the anthems of its echoing halls.

ARTICLE IV.

DR. BUSHNELL'S RECONSTRUCTED THEOLOGY.

The Vicarious Sacrifice, Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation. By HORACE BUSHNELL. 8vo. pp. 552. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1866.

THE learned Andrew Fuller was once requested to write a series of monthly letters that would, when finished, form a complete system of divinity. Unfortunately for the church, he lived to write only nine. In the third letter he makes these suggestive remarks:

"I do not know how it may prove on trial, but I wish to begin with the centre of Christianity, the doctrine of the Cross, and to work round it, or with what may be called the heart of Christianity, and to trace it through its principal veins or relations both in doctrine and practice. ... The whole of the Christian system appears to be presupposed by it, included in it, or to arise from it. If therefore I write anything it will be on this principle."

This is as it should be; for the doctrine of the Cross is the very centre, the heart-beating point of Christianity. No individual can improve his views on the doctrine of the atonement, without the logical necessity of varying for the better the other cardinal doctrines of his creed; and no one can weaken this doctrine in the estimation the church has of it, without at the same time weakening the whole theological faith and religious life of the church. The injury inflicted will be fundamental.

The contribution of a volume, therefore, to this department of our theological literature is important in any view, specially when it proposes variations from the faith of the body whence it comes. Improvements are to be hoped for from any such author, yet hardly expected in this late age of Christianity. If they be offered from doubtful sources, a respectful quarantine is but safe for the state ecclesiastical, and no way reproachful to the contributor.

We accept this work of Dr. Bushnell as the contribution of an earnest, sincere worker. The steady purpose of the author to add to theological investigation, improvement and final settlement, is apparent throughout the volume. With such a purpose wrought out in the fresh, frank, racy style of this writer, it is refreshing and stimulating to read him. When he says, in his Introduction, that no doctrine of atonement yet developed has received the consent of the Christian world, and that the tendency now is to settle down on "the moral view," we incline to say, that from the days of Augustine the church evangelical has had a generally accepted theory of the atonement, which is not "the moral view" theory. And when he deprecates a hasty judgment against this view under his advocacy, we feel that the church may read him with a kind of forerunning rejection, without incurring the reproach of being hasty or uncandid, since she

has been deliberately coming through centuries to the rejection of this view. To ask for a reading without a prevenient and adverse opinion, is like asking the American people to read, without an opposing settled conviction, an argument against the right of habeas corpus, or of trial by jury. No novelty of views in this volume can lay such a claim on the reader. Their apparent novelty and originality lie in their real antiquity, dating from the days of the Neo Platonic Origen, who to please and attract those of Grecian culture, philosophized, and speculated, and idealized, in Christianity, till he confused and corrupted not a little its simplicity.

But we shall be doing the highest justice to our author when we present his views on this central doctrine, and others as related to it, and qualified necessarily by his qualifications of it.

Dr. Bushnell is quite clear and explicit in his definition of what he conceives to be the vicarious sacrifice of Christ. In this work he says that our Lord does not undertake to relieve us of the penalty due to sin. He does not assume a law relation to us, and penally suffer for us the claims of the law. Nor does he suffer an honorable and satisfactory equivalent for those claims, so that we may justly be quit. Christ does not make his approach to man on the law and penalty side. His work consists, instead, of undertaking to withdraw us from our sinful ways, work in us a hatred of sin, and so, as a consequence, save us from penalty.

"Christ, in what is called his vicarious sacrifice, simply engages, at the expense of great suffering, and even of death itself, to bring us out of our sins themselves, and so out of their penalties." p. 41. The saving endeavor of Christ, touching, for the first time we will suppose, a man to be saved, acts prospectively to reform him. So far as he can be persuaded to abandon sinning he can escape its penalties for future acts. The divine endeavor does not work retrospectively, to save the man from a previously incurred, but as yet unexecuted and impending punishment. This scheme of atonement is not retroactive; it is not an ex post facto remedy. It saves from penalty by preventing sin; it saves a sinner by keeping him back from sinning any more. Briefly and proverbially, it is prevention and

not cure.

But more than this; atonement on this theory is not only not

retroactive, it is only partially and imperfectly prospective, on the writer's theory of penalty and punishment. All punishment for sin, he teaches, is natural only, and not positive at all. Therefore penalty incurred must be borne. Atonement, repentance, pardon even, can not stay it, not even by supernatural intervention. As the weight must fall by the law of gravity, so penal inflictions must follow transgressions. We quote a pas

sage or two:

"God has not undertaken to dispense justice by direct infliction, but by a law of natural consequence." p. 282. Even where penalties are positively threatened in the Scriptures, "it is better to conceive that the language is declarative only of what is coming to pass, by the fixed laws and causes of natural retributions." p. 283. The law of justice is, "like every law of natural order, inviolable, not subject to suspense, or discontinuance, even by miracle itself." "Christ brought forth into bold assertion, for the first time, the doctrine of eternal punishment; not as creating the fact, but only as declaring that which lies in the simply natural causalities of retribution." pp. 342-3. "The doctrine of endless punishment, taken as put into words, was never any thing but a version of the fact, that retributive causes are naturally endless in their propagation." pp. 360—1.

The direct work of Christ, therefore, is to weaken and possibly destroy the old causes of penal suffering in the transgressor, and to prevent him from starting new ones, of the same moral tone. He will also endeavor to induce on the sinful, suffering man a new and holy character, that shall start a new set of causes working the natural retributions of holiness. According to this, punishments running in the groove of natural law, and not being presently optional with God, he pursued by them can hardly find relief through grace. "Neither is it any principal thing that he is to prepare a possibility of forgiveness for sin." p. 132. Atonement mainly serves to keep penalties from multiplying through new sins, while it slowly weakens the force of those already incurred. They must work till they spend and exhaust themselves, as natural causes, in working. All which amounts to a reformation of the sinner under a divine persuading and influencing; and he is to consider himself in the way of a progressive salvation, if only the pursuing penalties are kept from multiplying by new sins, and are

turned toward a hopeful exhaustion of their natural force, sometime in the ages. How such a work, called the vicarious sacrifice of our Lord, differs from regeneration and sanctification, and how this notion of only natural punishment taken in connection with it, affects the doctrines of repentance, faith, pardon, justification, and positive rewards and penalties in the world to come, we shall see in the sequel. We only add here that such a notion of punishment is of philosophy, and not consciousness; and as foreign from general belief as from the Scriptures. No one idea or expectation, probably, so underruns the religion of all nations, pagan and revealed, as this one that God or the gods, will visit sin positively and specially.

This being the vicarious sacrifice of Christ in its substance, we now pass to regard its method of manifestation and working. As the work does not have respect to the divine law and government, by rendering satisfaction to it; but has respect to the moral character of fallen man, that he may be reformed and so brought out of the train of natural evils into the train of natural good, we look for such a method of working, and such measures in the labor of Christ, as are adapted to the moral renovation of man. According to Dr. Bushnell this is accomplished by the incarnation of our Lord and the moral power of his human life among men. He says that a good being is

"Ready, just according to his goodness, to act vicariously in behalf of any bad or miserable being whose condition he is able to restore." p. 41. “Love is a principle essentially vicarious in its own nature, identifying the subject with others, so as to suffer their adversities and pains, and taking on itself the burden of their evils." p. 42. "It does not mean that he literally came into the hell of our retributive evils under sin, and satisfied by his own suffering, the violated justice of God; for that kind of penal suffering would satisfy nothing but the very worst injustice. No, but the bearing of our sins does mean, that Christ bore them on his feeling, became inserted into their bad lot by sympathy as a friend, yielded up himself and his life, even, to an effort of restoring mercy; in a word, that he bore our sins in just the same sense that he bore our sicknesses." p. 46. "This it is which the vicarious cross and sacrifice of Jesus signify to us, or outwardly express." p. 47. "What we call the vicarious

sacrifice of Christ is nothing strange as regards the principle of it, no superlative, unexampled, and therefore unintelligible grace.