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tion? A law that is not retributive is no law, be it eternal or temporal. It may be a sentiment, an advice, a wish, but not law. It can not rise to the dignity of a warning even. It does seem as if the attribute of justice were dropped out of the character of God, to give place to a theory of atonement that should not be required to satisfy justice or make amends to government.

Our author has an ingenious yet simple process for doing away with the common notion that Christ bore the curse for 66 us, being made a curse for us," when with his stripes we were healed. Starting from the point that punishment for sin is no positive infliction, but merely retribution under the fixed laws of nature, we find the race, in his view, under the great penal suffering of natural consequences.

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"Every thing up to the stars, the whole realm of causes, ranged to be, in some sense, the executive organ of God's moral retributions." p. 385. "This state of corporate evil is what the Scriptures call the curse, and it is directly into this that Christ is entered by his incarnation. In this taking of the flesh he becomes a true member of the race, subject to all the corporate liabilities of his bad relationship." p. 386.

Because of this bad relationship he is "troubled in spirit" and "exceeding sorrowful." Even the culminating and awful agonies of the cross are "the concern he feels for his enemies ... and the baleful shadow that is upon every thing." This is the curse, and this his bearing it for us. "Thus it was that he came into the curse, and bore it for us."

p. 389. The race because of apostasy is under a system of, not positive but, natural retribution; Christ steps into this current of evil, taking its full tide except in its punitive beatings, and this is bearing the

curse for us.

But how for us and our deliverance? And how for the support of government while we are delivered? These are the scriptural questions that this theory must answer. The reply runs thus: Christ having miraculous power used it only for man, and not once for himself, to rescue his person, confound his adversaries or overwhelm his murderers. While he could stop the retributive courses of nature, he did not suspend or infringe any law of punitive causations. To these he also added the doctrines

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of eternal punishment and final judgment, two new forces so called, as sanctions for the honor of government. But as these two doctrines are as old as revelation, and are only freshened by our Lord's restatement of them, they can not come in thus to maintain the honor of a violated law, and that may be yet farther humbled by the pardon of its violators. And we fail to see how he bears the curse for us by simply becoming one of us under it. The man Christ Jesus is added to the number of human sufferers. Is any thing more done, by this view?. He shares with man the inexorable, irresistible processes of natural evil. What he endures does not take from the sufferings of others, or help them out. He even refuses to avert one penalty by staying one retributive law. It is as the addition of one more man to the starving crew on the wreck, bringing them only "love and sympathy."

It is true our author makes the point, that Christ by his love and sympathy, teaching and example, lifts men out of their sinful courses into a holier way; and so far as he does this he lifts them out of this natural order of penal evils. This saves them from future judicial inflictions for future sins, just so far as it keeps them from committing sins, in the future. This is very clear, logically, but when he goes on to affirm, that, Christ having done this, God may now forgive sins without endangering his rectoral honor, we are in the doubt whether forgiveness is either needed or practicable. Penalty, he says, is natural, a simple effect. How can it be remitted, except supernaturally? But, as we have already quoted, he says that the law of justice in penalty is "not subject to suspension or discontinuance even by miracle itself." A broken leg shows a broken law of nature, and the man groans under the natural penalty. Can pardon help that man? By the theory of Dr. Bushnell the same inexorable necessity of penal infliction follows the broken moral law. What can forgiveness avail? If applied it does not release the transgressor from any judgments. Indeed the author says he “is really bound fast in the chains of justice and penal causation, and held as fixedly in their fires after he is let go, as before." p. 297. This is good logic from the premises, but poor comfort for sinWhat is pardon? Heretofore the church of God has supposed that it intervenes between the penitent and his due

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punishment, and stays it; but here is a new kind of forgiveness that does not at all impede penalties. Sins past, sins future, must be visited by penal effects in nature; then forgiveness is ruled out, and repentance is powerless, even with miraculous aid. As well apply the microscope for deafness, as the forgiving power to relieve from such impending punishments. And yet with characteristic confidence and earnestness Dr. Bushnell says of this scheme, so novel to us, and beyond doubt original with him, that it is "mocked by no subtleties, weakened by no moonshine of scholastic science." p. 391. No scholastic moonshine here, evidently. That were not needed, when we have as many new moons as the scholastics.

The obedience of Christ is made prominent in the Bible and in the evangelical scheme of atonement. According to it the satisfaction that Christ rendered to the law clears us from merited penalty, and his obedience imputed to us insures for us the reward of the perfect man. Dr. Bushnell's views of the obedience of Christ will indicate what a reconstruction of our common orthodox theology he has undertaken. Prior to the incarnation of our Lord and beholding our sad estate "his compassions... were tinged all through with sorrowing tenderness." p. 315. But he had power to manifest this sympathy helpfully to man, and therefore did so. "Christ came into the world. . because the eternal, necessary law of love made it obligatory in him to be such a Saviour." p. 309. "He could renounce it only as he could the honors of his own perfect character. In it he is just as good as he is in obligation to be." p. 311. The law, therefore, that he magnified and made honorable by his obedience, was not the law of inaugurated justice, under which the race fell, and to which it was amenable. It was obedience rather to the eternal law of right, to which Christ himself was subject, and out of which there arose no curse and penalty for sinning man.

But the question returns how this obedience to that prior law honored the law under which men are condemned. In this way. That eternal law of love lays its claims on Christ to show us the sympathy that we needed in our fallen state. He does not shrink from the painful obligation. He can not endure to violate the law of love in his being, or slight its majesty. So

obeying, he becomes a divine example of obedience; and it is the force of this that is to win human transgressors back, through penitence, to their allegiance. The illustration of a perfect model, in a subject, is to recall sinners from their rebel state. The seen and felt reverence of Christ for government is to beget the same in man. pp. 314, 15. This is atonement by illustration. It is simply the obedience of the good citizen, who by a loyal life shames or inspires the mob into good citizenship. From such premises the author needed not to say that Christ came not "in a plan to set his obedience over against the damages and debts of sin; or that he came to fill out any scheme of satisfaction or compensation." So that vast part of the redemptive scheme, the obedience of Christ, which takes up the sinner after penalty is remitted through the vicarious suffering of Jesus, but who has as yet no reward of the obedient to look forward to, and that our Lord's perfect obedience for us makes sure, is done away with and lost for us by Christ's paying an obedience where he owed it on his own account. His obedience is no way for our sake or to inure to our good, except as it is a good example. The sum of it is this: Christ was loyal, therefore we should be.

That prior, eternal law of right, it will be seen more and more, is a great convenience for this volume, not to say largely an invention. Certain first truths, or moral postulates, are made to precede God and control him. Under and unto these man is created, they being a kind of axiomatic code of law for him. He is obligated to them, but not by penalty. The apostasy of man is from these, but not into demerit and penal retribution. Redemption is to bring man again under the axiomatic code. Christ in this endeavor enters into no relations with justice and a retributive government. He bears no penalty that man incurred, restores the honor of no government that man has trampled. By a moral force only he would persuade man to come back under this eternal law of right, the law before government, and by his own due obedience to it would give example to man of what he should do. This so changes our common orthodox system of redemption that one would hardly recognize it from the fragments left. Undoubtedly there are certain essential, first truths to which all ethical natures will conform

in a perfect state; and it is as undoubtedly evident that man was created under, fell from, and in redemption is sought to be restored to, an instituted government of positive rewards and penalties. The redemption of Christ is not an effort among moral axioms antedating creation. It has the rather to do with a government and sanctions and sinners, dating back no farther than Eden.

It is painful in the extreme to see how distinctly and variously Dr. Bushnell discards the idea that the death of Christ was an essential part of his vicarious sacrifice. "Christ," he says, came "not here to die, but dies because he is here." Coming "for the very purpose of bleeding"; "to be substituted in our place, and take or somehow compensate for the release of our punishment"; "this, and not anything different, is the coarsely conceived, legally quantative vicariousness ascribed to him." Turning squarely and distinctly away from our common faith, that the culminating efficacy of Christ's work was when he "died for our sins," and rejecting his death as a power to save, he says: "The cross is a very shocking murder triumphantly met." p. 534. "When it came, it was simply the bad fortune such a work, prosecuted with such devotion, must encounter, on the way." Did Jesus Christ fall as a martyr to an unpopular cause, as a missionary among barbarous men, as a patriot in the opening of the battle? Are all the Old and New Testament Scriptures, gathering about his Cross, to be toned down to this? Was his life all, and his death nothing, and almost all that short life given to childhood and obscurity? Was his work in redemption only the moral force of teaching, example, illustration, or infused character, and the record of all but four years of it lost to history, save two or three items of "the child"? Another school of theology has urged this view, and with all the ingenuity of exegesis, and graces of style, and belles lettres force, and a constantly enlarging antilegomena. Dr. Bushnell is sensitive, and with reason, lest he be classed in the rear of this progression.

"Many teachers have been rising up, in all past ages, and propounding it as the true theory of the gospel, that Christ came forth

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