THE ETERNAL FATHER IN VICARIOUS SACRIFICE.

IT has been a fatal source of. difficulty and mental confusion, as regards the vicarious sacrifice and saving work of Christ, that it has been taken to be a superlative kind of goodness; a matter of sacrifice outside of all the common terms and principles of duty or holy obligation; an act, or enterprise of self-sacrifice, not provided for in the universal statutes and standards of moral perfection. The assumption has been that Christ went out of obligation, out of law and beyond, to do the sacrifice, and was just so much better than perfect in good, because he would have been perfect in good, if he had declined the undertaking. Thus it has been a formally asserted point of theology, that his undertaking was "optional;" that which he might, or might not assume, and which, if he had chosen to decline, would have raised no sense of defect before his own standards of excellence. This too has been taken for a point fundamental, as regards the satisfaction for sins accomplished in his death, that he raised a superlative merit in it to be set to our account, only by doing optionally what he was under no obligation, on his own account, to do. What he ought to do for himself, or in his own obligation, could not avail for us, but only for himself. What he did, or suffered beyond this, was a merit in excess, that could be and was accepted for our justification, or the substitution of our just punishment.

Every such attempt to scheme the work of Christ, and put him in the terms of the understanding, begins, we ought easily to see, by removing him beyond all terms of understanding. Hence the painful confusion of ideas, the artificial mock speculations, the conclusions that are shocking to all natural sentiments of right and justice--the imputations that are figments, of merits that are inconceivable, accomplishing satisfactions with God that are as far as possible from satisfying men--all which have infested, for so many centuries, the history of this great subject. Plainly enough we can mean nothing, by a merit that is outside of all our standards of merit. If Christ was consenting, optionally, to what he might as well have declined; if he was just so much better than he ought to be on his own account; then the surplus over is any thing, or nothing; we may call it merit, but we do not know what it is; we may balance it against the sins of the world, but we can not be sure of a grain's weight in it. What can we think, or know, of a goodness over and above all standards of good? We might as well talk of extensions beyond space, or truths beyond the true. Goodness, holy virtue, is the same in all worlds and beings, measured by the same universal and eternal standards; else it is nothing to us. Defect is sin; overplus is impossible. God himself is not any better than he ought to be, and the very essence and glory of his perfection is, that he is just as good as he ought to be. Nay it is the glory of our standards of goodness themselves, that they are able to fashion, or construct, all that is included in the complete beauty of God.

Here then is our first point, when we attempt the cross and sacrifice of Christ; we must bring every thing back under the common standards of eternal virtue, and we must find Christ doing and suffering just what he ought, or felt that he ought, neither more nor less. That which is to be intelligible must be found within the bounds of intelligence. If we can not find a Saviour under just our laws of good, we shall find him nowhere. Looking for him here, we shall not fail to find him.

Do we then assume that Christ, in his vicarious sacrifice, was under obligation to do and suffer just what he did? Exactly this. Not that he was under obligations to another, but to himself. He was God, fulfilling the obligations of God; just those obligations in the eternal fulfillment of which God's perfections and beatitudes are eternally fashioned. We transgressors had no claims upon him, more than our enemies have upon us; there was none above him to enforce such obligations. All that he endures in feeling under them, he endures freely, and this it is that constitutes both his greatness and joy. There is an eternal cross in his virtue itself, and the cross that he endures in Christ only reveals what is in those common standards of good, which are also eternally his.

I shall discuss this matter more fully, at a more advanced stage in the argument. For the present I prefer to handle the subject in a manner less speculative showing that, as Christ is here discovered in vicarious sacrifice, so all good beings, God in the Old Testament before Christ, the Holy Spirit in the times after Christ, and the good created minds both before and after, are and are to be, in one accord with Christ, enduring the same kind of sacrifice. It will seem, it may be, that I am going a long way round in such a canvassing, but the result will be that a platform is gained, where the sacrifice of Christ is at once less peculiar and far more intelligible. Indeed when it is made plain, as a fact of holy Scripture slumbering hitherto in its bosom and hidden from adequate discovery, that vicarious sacrifice is the common property of holy virtue in all minds, uncreated or created, the problem of such sacrifice will be effectually changed, and most of the questions in issue will be superseded, or already settled. This present and the two succeeding chapters will accordingly be occupied with a Scripture review, as in reference to the point stated.

If it be true that love is a principle of vicarious sacrifice, then it will be so, not in Christ only, but as truly in God the Supreme, or the God of revelation previous to Christ's coming. I say "as truly" it will be observed, not of course that he will have done, or endured, the same things. Not even Christ did the same things in his first year as in his last, and yet he was just as truly burdened with our evils and suffering in our lot; for the main suffering of Jesus was not, as many coarsely imagine, in the pangs of his body and cross, but in the burdens that came on his mind. In these burdens God, as the Eternal Father, suffered before him. He had his times and eras appointed, his conditions of preparation, his modes of progress, and the incarnate work was to be done only in the incarnate era; but the design was nevertheless one and the same throughout, and was carried on in the same deep feeling and suffering sympathy, from the first. In the ante-Christian era, it may even have been one of the heaviest points of sacrifice, that there must be so long a detention, and that so great love must be unexpressed, till the fullness of time was come. So that, when Christ came it was even a kind of release, that the letting forth of so great love into healing, and sympathy, and cross, and passion, was now at last permitted.

A great many persons have forced themselves into a false antagonism, by the contrast they have undertaken to raise between the Old Testament and the New. And yet even such will agree, returning so far to the just opinion, that God is God every where, one and the same in all ages and proceedings, instigated by the same impulses, clothed in the same sympathies, maintaining the same patience, under the same burdens of love; acting, of course, in the Old Testament history, for the same ends of goodness that are sought in the New. They will formally disclaim, too, the opinion that trinity supposes a distinction of characters in God, maintaining his strict homogeneity as pertaining to his strict unity. They go farther, they assert, as regards the infinite character, that God is love, that Christ came into the world, because God loved the world. Still further, when it is objected to their schemes of atonement, that they seem to imply an opinion that God is made gentler and more gracious by the sacrifice of Christ, they disclaim any such thought as that God is ever mitigated in his dispotions--the change, they say, is wrought in us, or in the conditions of public justice, by which God's pardons were restricted.

And yet the false antagonism just referred to remains. After all such disclaimers, it has power to feed and keep in vogue a whole set of false impressions, or prejudices, by which the God of the Old Testament becomes another and virtually different being from the Saviour of the New; a kind of Nemesis that needs to be propitiated by suffering, and is far as possible, in himself, from being in any relation of vicarious and burdened feeling for mankind. After the point of difficulty has been turned in their schemes of atonement, by the protestations referred to, they go their way, as if said protestations had no meaning at all, giving in to a kind of partisanship for one Testament against the other, and for one God against the other God. As some disciples took to Paul, and some to Apollos, so they take to Christ, and are much less drawn to the God of the law. There is no comfort in such a prejudice; they are consciously troubled by it. They have a certain sense of something unworthy and false in the preference. It offends their reverence, it raises the suspicion of some latent superstition in their modes of thought and belief. And so it damages, not their peace only, but their piety itself. They never can think worthily of God, or serve him evenly and with satisfaction, as long as they regard his personal manifestations, with predilections that set him in virtual disagreement with himself.

All such predilections it will easily be seen are without foundation. On first principles they are and must be fictitious; for there is and can be no such thing as internal progress in God, that is in his character; he was never inferior to what he now is, and will never be superior--never worthier, greater, more happy, or more to be admired and loved. And yet there is certainly a considerable contrast in the ways of God, as presented in the Old Testament and in the Gospel of Christ. There he maintains a government more nearly political and earthly; here more spiritual and heavenly. There he calls himself a man of war; here he shows himself a prince of peace. There he is more legal, appealing to interest in the terms of this life; here he moves on the affections and covers the ground of eternity. There he maintains a drill of observances; here he substitutes the inspirations of liberty and the law written on the heart. There he operates oftener by force and by mighty judgments; here by the suffering patience of a cross.

Laying hold of this contrast, and quite willing to sharpen it by exaggerations, a great many, taking on the airs of philosophy, turn it, without any scruple of reverence, to the disadvantage, or discredit of revelation. Affecting great admiration of Christianity, they declare that the God of the Old Testament is a lower being and not the same; a barbarian's God, a figment evidently of barbarism itself. And of those who class as believers, it results, in a different way already described, that many are afflicted in the feeling, that the God of the law is a God in justice and retributive will--doubtless good in some sense, but less amiable--and that Christ presents a better side of deity, to which they must instinctively cling, in a preference not to be restrained. They will even profess sometimes to find shelter in one, against the stormy judgments of the other.

What now shall we say to this? If God is one, a strict unity, always in the same perfect character and feeling, what account shall we make of this contrast? And by what method shall we make it appear that he is still the same, bearing the same relation of feeling to men's evils and sins, working in the same great principle of love and sacrifice?

The solution is not difficult, if only we make due account of the fact that, while there is no progress, or improvement, in God, there is and should be a progress in his government of the world. Taken as a plan of redemption and spiritual restoration, it must be historical and must be unfolded in and by a progressive revelation. Beginning at a point where men's ideas are low and their spiritual apprehensions coarse, it must take hold of them, at the first, in such a way as they are capable of being taken hold of. What is political and legal, what appeals to interest and operates by stormy judgments. impressing God's reality by authority, and force, and fear, working chiefly on the outward state--breaking into the soul by breaking into the senses--will be most appropriate; nothing else in fact will get fit apprehension. There will not even be a language, at first, for the higher ideas of God and religion; such a language must be formed historically, under a growth of uses, generating gradually a growth of ideas. Thus if we conceive that holy virtue is constituted by a free obedience to law, the law will have to be set in first, by a drill of observances, and then, when it has been long enough enforced by a restrictive method, ideas may rise, inspirations come, and the soul may pass on to seize in liberty, what it has bowed to in fear. This holds true of every man, and, in a certain broader sense, historically, of a people or a world. The day of ideas, thoughts, sentiments, words quickened to a spiritual meaning, must of necessity come after, and be prepared by a long and weary drill in rites, institutions, legalities and heavy laden centuries of public discipline. But God will be the same in this day as in that, in that as in this, cherishing the same purpose, moving on the senses, out of the same feeling, in the schoolmastering era of law, as in the grace of the cross itself. Becoming, at the first, in a certain sense, a barbarian people's God, he only submits to conditions of necessity by which he is confronted, in preparing to be known, as the God of love and sacrifice, and Saviour of the world. Neither is it any discredit to him that the subjects of his goodness must be manipulated outwardly and roughly, and brought on thus historically, till some higher capabilities of feeling and perception are developed.

To simplify the general subject as far as possible, take, for example, the single point in which the hasty and shallow thinkers of the unbelieving world have been most commonly scandalized; viz., the exclusiveness of the old religion. God, they insist, is the Creator, Lord, and Father of all men--not of any one people; but this old religion holds him forth in promise as the God of a chosen people, taking them as clients in specialty, apart from, and, in some sense,. against the whole world beside. How very unlike to the God of Christianity, erecting a kingdom of universal love and suffering sacrifice. And yet plainly there was no other way to get hold of the low sentiment of the world and raise it, but to begin thus with a partisan, chosen people's mercy, and get himself revealed by light and shade, as between his people and others; creating a religion that is next thing to a prejudice. He could not be revealed, as any one may see, in his own measures, but only in such measures as he found prepared. To bolt himself into men's thoughts, when they had no thoughts, was impossible. He could only come into such thoughts and sentiments as there were. The little, darkened, partisan soul must know him as it can, and not as he is. The nations, too, of that day boasted each a god of their own, whom they took and praised, for what he could do for them, and against the gods of the other nations. A god was no god who could not perch on their banners, and fight out their wars, trampling all other gods by his power. Hence the necessity that Jehovah should choose him a people. And so it was that by overtopping all other deities, in his glorious protectorship, he finally made himself known as God over all--the true Supreme and Saviour of all.

If he had announced himself, at the very first, as the God alike and Saviour of all men, if he had been forthwith incarnate and had shown himself in Moses' day, by the suffering life and death of his Son, the history would have been a barren riddle only. They were not equal to the conceiving of any such disinterested sacrifice; and the fact that it proposed. a salvation for all men would have been enough, by itself, to quite turn away their faith. I verily believe that Jesus, coming, thus and then, would not even have been remembered in history. And yet there was a promise, long before, of which nobody took the meaning, that, in this one people, somehow, all nations should be eventually blessed; and the prophets, too, as the religious sense grew more enlarged, finally began to break out in bold and strong visions of a universal kingdom and glory; in which it may be seen that God was preparing, even from the first, to be finally known as the Lord and Saviour of the whole world.

Does he then, by condescending to the lowness of barbarous mind, and consenting to begin with a religion of prejudice, when there was no higher sentiment to begin with, or be revealed in--does he by choosing out one people, in this manner, show that his character is equal to nothing higher? Ah, what struggles of suffering patience had he rather to endure, in these long ages of training, under such narrow and meager possibilities! Nowhere else, it seems to me, not even in the cross of Jesus itself, does he reveal more wonderfully the greatness and self-sacrificing patience of his feeling. And the fact breaks out, all along down the course of the history--appearing and reappearing, by how many affecting declarations--that he is waiting for a better possibility, waiting to open his whole heart's love, and be known by what he can bear and do for the world of mankind. Nor was there any moment of relief to him so blessed probably, as when he came to Mary with his "all hail," and broke into the world as God with us; God now come at last, to disburden his heart by sacrifice. The retention before was a greater burden on his feeling, we may well believe, than his glorious outbirth into loss and suffering now.

Taking now this very crowded, insufficiently stated solution of his relation to the times of the Old Testament, you will find it borne out, in every point, by a careful review of the whole Scripture; and that Christ, in his vicarious sacrifice, only represents the feeling of God in all the preceding ages.

The principle of love, as we have already seen, is itself a principle of vicarious sacrifice, causing every one that is in it to be entered into the want, woe, loss, and even ill-desert of every other; bearing even adversaries and enemies, just as Christ bore his. But God is love and is so declared in every part of the Scripture; and what have we in this, but the discovery that he is a being, in just such a relation of sympathy and burdened feeling for men, as Christ was. He did not show it by the same outward signs, and therefore could not so powerfully and transformingly impress the fact; and yet he was in the same precise love, waiting, as we just now said, to find relief in a more adequate expression. Yet how often, how affectingly, did he express, in words, the painful sympathy and deep burden of his feeling. As when the prophet says--"In their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and pity, he redeemed them, and bare and carried them, all the days of old." How tenderly does he watch the turning of the ages--"grieved forty years" for his people in the wilderness--"rising betimes" to send his messengers--protesting that he is "weary"--that he is "broken with their whorish heart"--"that he is filled with repentings"--calling also to his people to, see how "the Lord their God bare them as a man doth bear his son"--apostrophizing them, as it were, in a feeling quite broken, "Oh, that there were such a heart in them, that they would hear me and keep my commandments"--"How shall I give thee up, Ephraim, how shall I deliver thee, Israel?"--and again, "Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love, and with loving kindness have I drawn thee." It is as if there were a cross unseen, standing on its undiscovered hill, far back in the ages, out of which were sounding always, just the same deep voice of suffering love and patience, that was heard by mortal ears from the sacred hill of Calvary.

And then, when Christ himself arrives, what does he say but that, "God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son?"--not that he came to obtain God's love, but that God's love sent him and was here to be magnified, in the sacrifice of life he would make. And who is Christ but God manifest in the flesh, reconciling the world unto himself; the express image and word of God; that is God expressed as he is, so that he that hath seen him hath seen the Father; working always for, and to declare, the God that sent him. Neither does he conceive, that he is introducing a new kingdom and order, that is worthier of God, and in better feeling. He declares that he came not to destroy the old system, or law, but only to fulfill it and carry it on to the glorious realization of its ends, opening things that have been kept secret, but have all the time been working, from the foundation of the world; nay, that his kingdom is a kingdom prepared from the foundation of the world; prepared that is in God's love, fixed in his purpose, working in his counsels. What then was Christ in his vicarious feeling and sacrifice, what in his Gethsemane, but a revelation in time, of just that love that had been struggling always in God's bosom; watching wearily for the world and with inward groanings unheard by mortal ears.

But there is, after all, some one will say, a something in Christ that is more gentle and better to feeling--less severity, kinder, softer terms of good. There certainly is a fuller, more adequate, expression of God's love; and so a greater power of attraction, thus of salvation. And yet there are denunciations of future evil in his teachings, that, taken as they stand, are as much more fearful than any which are found in the Old Testament, as they relate to what is more future and of longer duration. I will not here discuss them, I only say that, take what view of them is possible, it does not appear that Christ, in bearing the world's evil, does at all consent to the possible immunity of transgression. If he might consent to that, then he might well enough consent to the continuance of transgression also, and so be excused from the sacrifice of the cross altogether.

God then is such a being from eternity as must, by the supposition, be entered, even as Christ was, into all that belongs to love; entered into patience, long suffering, and sacrifice; burdened in heart for the good of enemies; taking on his feeling the wants and woes of enemies. This is no new thought, no optional, superlative goodness taken up by Christ in the year One, of the Christian era; but the whole deity is in it, in it from eternity. And the short account of all is--"For God so loved the world."

Holding now this view of God--the same which the Psalmist boasts when he sings, "For God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth"--we encounter a large body of current misconceptions, mostly under Gospel terms of expression, which require to be modified if we are to hold the truth understandingly.

Thus we speak of Christ as a mediator, and as doing a work of mediation; which is Scriptural, but we often conceive that he is literally a third being, coming in between us and God to compose our difficulty with him, by gaining him as it were to softer terms. But he is no such mediator at all, nor any mediator, such as does not leave him to be God manifest in all God's proper feeling. No, he is a mediator only in the sense that, as being in humanity, he is a medium of God to us; such a medium that, when we cling to him in faith, we take hold of God's own life and feeling as the Infinite Unseen, and are taken hold of by Him, reconciled, and knit everlastingly to him, by what we receive.

We call Christ our intercessor, too, and conceive that we are saved by his intercession. Does he then intercede for us in the sense that he goes before God in a plea to gain him over to us, showing God his wounds, and the print of his nails, to soften him towards us. Far from that as possible; nothing could be more unworthy. Intercession means literally intervention, that is a coming between; and it is not God that wants to be softened, or made better; for Christ himself is only the incarnate love and sacrificing patience of God; but the stress of the intercession is with us and in our hearts' feeling--all which we simply figure, objectively, when we conceive him as the priest that liveth ever to make intercession for us. We set him before God's altar, in a figure of eternal sponsorship, urging the suit of peace; though the peace he obtains by the suit of his sacrifice, comes, in fact, from our mitigation, not from the mitigation of God.

Other modes of speaking, supposed to be understood in their Scriptural meaning, will not be accommodated by the conception that unites the God of the old time and the Christ of the new, in the same vicarious feeling, but will require to have their colors softened by similar explanations. And it will not be difficult, I rejoice to believe, for any genuinely thoughtful, right-feeling soul, to lay hold of the possibility thus offered, of a conception of God that does not mock his attributes, or set them at war with each other. How distracting and painful, how dreadfully appalling is the faith that we have a God, back of the worlds, whose indignations overtop his mercies, and who will not be satisfied, save as he is appeased by some other, who is in a better and milder feeling. We might easily fear him, but how shall we love him; and where, meantime shall we find that glorious, all-centering unity in the good, which our sufficiently distracted soul longs for in the God of its worship? What can we do as sinners, torn already by our own evils, with two Gods, a less good, and a better--this latter, suffering and even dying to compose and sweeten the other? Where shall our heart rest when our thought itself is bent hither and thither, and torn by a God in no unity with Himself?

Here then I think we may rest in the full and carefully tested discovery, that whatever we may say, or hold, or believe, concerning the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, we are to affirm in the same manner of God. The whole deity is in it, in it from eternity and will to eternity be. We are not to conceive that our blessed Saviour is some other and better side of deity, a God composing and satisfying God; but that all there is in him expresses God, even as he is, and has been of old--such a being in his love that he must needs take our evils on his feeling, and bear the burden of our sin. Nay, there is a cross in God before the wood is seen upon Calvary; hid in God's own virtue itself, struggling on heavily in burdened feeling through all the previous ages, and struggling as heavily now even in the throne of the worlds. This, too, exactly, is the cross that our Christ crucified reveals and sets before us. Let us come then not to the wood alone, not to the nails, not to the vinegar and the gall, not to the writhing body of Jesus, but to the very feeling of our God and there take shelter. Seeing how God bears an enemy--has borne or carried enemies all the days of old--we say "Herein is Love," and in this grand koinonia--this fellowship of the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ--our very unworthy and very distracting preferences are forever merged and lost.