men are remitted, because it rendered possible the retention or the recovery of our original and ideal relation to God through Christ, which sin had dissolved, and the loss of which was the supreme penalty of transgression."

3. "The death of Christ is the objective ground on which the sins of men are remitted, because it involved the actual destruction of sin in all those who through faith recover their union with him.”

4. "The death of Christ is the objective ground on which the sins of men are remitted, because in his submission to the awful penalty of sin, in order to preserve or restore our relations to the Father through him, there was a revelation of the righteousness of God which must otherwise have been revealed in the infliction of the penalties of sin on the human race."

The first point to which we wish to direct critical attention is the notion of "the eternal law of righteousness" with which Mr. Dale operates. Our knowledge of this eternal law of righteousness is put on the same footing as our knowledge of the truths of pure mathematics; and we are told " we can trust none of our faculties unless we can trust those by which we apprehend the universal and necessary obligation of justice and truth, and which affirm the eternal distinction between good and evil." In short, our perception of right and wrong is our perception of "the eternal law of righteousness." But is this so? Right and wrong are surely qualities of relations between actually existent beings; and the relations between beings are surely determined by their nature. If this be the case, right and wrong, as far as men are concerned, can have had no existence till men were created; and right and wrong in the human sense can have no existence even now for beings whose nature is not identical with ours. What we perceive, is the rightness or wrongness of a possible or actual relation between ourselves and other beings; and assuming that wherever the same kinds of beings are similarly related the same things will be right and wrong, we attribute to our notion of right and wrong a sort of universality. a universality, however, which does not apply to beings not possessing our nature. But this is not identical with the perception of an eternal law of righteousness. Right and wrong were created for us when we were created what we are. This is evident from the simple fact that what is right and wrong for us is not right and wrong for one of the lower animals. An eternal law of righteousness can have no existence save in or for an eternal being; and, so far as we can see, even such a being can know nothing of such an eternal law, unless it be in relation; for both the idea of righteousness and the idea of law are unthinkable without relationship. The only senses, so far as we can see, in which our perception of right and wrong can be at all fairly described as the perception of "the eternal law of righteousness". neither of which is indicated by Mr. Dale-are the following: When God thought in

eternity the beings which he created in time, he thought, also, their relations, and thought those relations, of course, as right or wrong. When we

think right and wrong relations, it is because we perceive the divine thought; our perception is not merely a perception of the relations themselves as right or wrong, but of the divine thought of the relations. Hence the eternal and necessary element supposed to be in it. Or eternity is predicated of the quality of righteousness in this connection, because the one factor of the relation, God, is eternal. Whether either of these thoughts lies back of Mr. Dale's position, we know not. For our own part, we see nothing in our notion of right or wrong requiring us to give such an account of its rise.

We next come to Mr. Dale's treatment of the relation between God and "the eternal law of righteousness." When combating the idea that the antithesis between right and wrong originates in the will of God, he says that such a notion renders it difficult to account for an atheist's "recognition of moral obligation." We believe it to be impossible to give a scientific or philosophical account of the consciousness of moral obligation apart from the recognition of the existence of God; but we see no more reason why the denial of God should interfere with a man's sense of right and wrong, than with his idea of agreement or disagreement between an intellectual representation and a sensuous impression. God has created us both for the one and the other, and no denial of things outside of us will get rid of things that pertain to our very constitution. We may be unable to explain the origin of the distinction save by referring it to the will of God; but that does not affect the reality to us of the distinction itself. This by the way, for we cannot here enter further into the question of the reason of the so-called universal validity of mathematical and moral truths.

As was mentioned previously, Mr. Dale refuses to find the origin of the antitheses between right and wrong, or of the eternal law of righteousness, either in the will or nature of God, and says that this law is "alive in God," or is "identical with God." We confess that we do not quite understand the difference between his position and one of those which he repudiates. Suppose the eternal law to be alive in God, either the two were primarily distinct and subsequently blended into unity, which cannot be Mr. Dale's notion, or the two were originally identical. In the latter case the questions recurs: What then is the seat of this law in God? Is it his nature, or is it his will? Mr. Dale's mode of speech logically implies the former; for surely life, identity, being, are expressions relating to the nature and its modes of subsistence. Such objections as we reverence God himself because he is righteous; not righteousness because by righteousness men become like God," are not met by the identification of the law and God; for one might reply," in order to know that God is identical with the eternal law of righteousness I must have an independent knowledge both of the law and of God"; indeed, they rather suggest the independence of the law, as maintained by Dr. Young, which we reject as earnestly as Mr. Dale can do.

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But, passing by minor points open to criticism, we must now go on to examine the final outcome of Mr. Dale's reasonings, his own rationale or theory of the atonement.

The problem is stated by him as follows: "If God does not assert the principle that sin deserves punishment by punishing it, he must assert it 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." The alternative divine act thus required was accomplished when Christ submitted to "the awful experience which forced from him the cry My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' and to the death which followed." The question which then arises is, what constituted these sufferings of Christ a sufficient alternative for the infliction of the penalty of sin on the sinner? Mr. Dale's language seems to us at this point to lack its usual clearness and precision. After repeatedly and carefully examining his statements, we have been unable to avoid the impression — though we may be mistaken- that they contain irreconcilable elements. But we will give the reasons of our impression. So far as we can discover, the following are the grounds assigned for the sufficiency of what Christ suffered on the cross:

(a) Endurance of the actual penalty of sin. "On the cross he submitted to the actual penalty of sin." "He did not merely confess our sin; he did not merely acknowledge that we deserved to suffer. He endured the penalties of sin." By the awful experience he endured and his death "he made our real relation to God his own, while retaining and, in the very act of submitting to the penalty of sin, revealing in the highest form - the absolute perfection of his moral life."

(b) "The death of Christ was a propitiation for the sins of men because it was a revelation of the righteousness of God, on the ground of which he can remit the penalties of sin; because it was an act of submission to the justice of those penalties on behalf of mankind, an act in which our own submission was really and vitally included; and because it secured the destruction of sin in all who, through faith, are restored to union with Christ." This statement seems to Mr. Dale "the complete truth." The same ideas are elsewhere expressed: "Act of submission to the righteous authority of the law by which the human race is condemned"; "Surrendered to desertion and to death that the justice of the penalties might be affirmed before the penalties were remitted”; “No assertion on God's part of the ill-desert of sin, no submission on our part to the justice of the penalties of sin, could have made it morally possible for the penalties of sin to be remitted in the absence of a complete security for the disappearance of sin." (c) "The whole law-the authority of its precepts, the justice of its penalties must be asserted in the divine acts." It was asserted in that Christ endured suffering himself, instead of inflicting it on the sinner.

He endured "penal suffering" in order that "the penalties of sin" might be remitted.

In these three sets of extracts there seem to us to be traces of the three following views of Christ's death: The first set would most naturally suit the doctrine that "what Christ paid when he became obedient unto death was exactly what sinners owed, or neither more nor less than an equivalent for it." The second seems to have more affinity, partly with the position of Dr. McLeod Campbell and Mr. Maurice, partly with a declarative, or perhaps a governmental or rectoral, doctrine like that of Dr. Wardlaw and many New England divines. The third set, again, reminds us of what Dr. Crawford calls the catholic view, which is, "that God has been pleased to appoint and to accept of the sufferings of Christ as a propitiation for the sins of all who trust in him; or that he has deemed these sufferings a sufficient ground for exempting all such from the penalties they have justly incurred"; in other words, the "Satisfaction view.”

Our own explanation of these inconsistencies is this: that whilst Mr. Dale's philosophical premises led naturally to the "Satisfaction view,” repelled by the coldness and unreality commonly characteristic of it, he has endeavored, on the basis of the idea of the vital headship of Christ, to deal with the death of Christ as "really, and not merely technically, ours." Hence the use of the strong terms about "penalty." But sensible of the impossibility of such an endurance of "the actual penalty of sin," he turned off towards the idea of submission to "justice," to "authority of law," to “rightecusness"— between which and Campbell's "confession of sin" and the "repentance for sin" advocated by others, there seems to us an essential affinity. We think he would have found a solution of the problem more in harmony with his own instincts, equally, or indeed more, philosophical, far more exactly scriptural, and quite as just to all that is essential in the past thought of the church, in the direction indicated by Professor Dr. Schöberlein in a small, little known, but very suggestive, work, entitled, Die Grundlehren des Heils entwickelt aus dem Principe der Liebe. Whilst we have freely hinted at some, and criticised other, defects of Mr. Dale's work, we cannot part from it without expressing our conviction of its value. Taken as a whole it is pre-eminently fitted to be useful. The inductive portion which deals with the scriptural evidence of the fact is admirably done- as fresh as it is thorough; and the theoretical part, though theoretically unsatisfactory, contains so much of important truth, forcibly, eloquently, warmly put, that it will be sure to arrest attention to its grand theme, and suggest to other minds new lines of investigation.

ARTICLE VIII.

NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

A. GERMAN AND FRENCH WORKS.

ACTS OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.'- Father Theiner, the editor of the work whose full title is given below, was, in his later years, keeper of the papal archives in Rome. He had previously been Professor at the Propaganda. At the outset of his career he sympathized with the movement in Germany which ended in the founding of the sect of the " German Catholics," of whom Ronge was the most noted leader. Midway in his life he sympathized with ultramontane tendencies, though he never went to the lengths to which the Jesuits desired to drag him. He closed his life as a martyr of the opposition to the decree of the Infallibility of the Pope. Ever since he became one of the priests of the oratory, the Jesuits have intrigued against him; and they succeeded at last, during the Vatican Council, in getting him deprived of his archivarial office. The reason of his dismissal was that a copy of the order of procedure adopted by the council of Trent had found its way into the hands of the opposition bishops, and this was laid to his charge. Professor Friedrich, however, proved after his death, that it was not his doing. Amongst his papers was left the work now under notice. It is the official diary of the secretary of the council, Angelo Massarelli, and though, as an official document, marked by reticence, contains and hints at much that was either not known or only guessed. Among other facts of importance are the following that the most important decrees were enacted by only about sixty bishops; and that the Italian bishops, who were all dependent on the pope, disposed of more than two thirds of the votes. Indeed, as the Emperor Ferdinand was in the habit of saying, "the Holy Ghost came from Rome on the horses of the couriers." From the glimpses here gained, the intellectual culture of many of the bishops must be judged to have been disgracefully low; credible enough, however, after the samples of the exegesis of the present infallible pope given by Mr. Gladstone in one of his recent publications. The passions, too, of the bishops would seem to have been as untamed as their learning was limited; for they repeatedly got to blows, and one of their number had to be locked up for his violence. The value of the present publication lies in its official character; it does not profess to give a complete picture of the entire council.

1 Acta genuina ss. oecumenici Concilii Tridentini ab Angelo Masserello Episcopo Thelesino ejusdem concilii secretario conscripta edidit Augustinus Theiner. 2 vols. 4to.