idea that we must believe in the sufficiency of a substitutionary expiation wrought for us on the cross, or must receive Christ in the bread and wine of the eucharist. I fear that these interpretations make salvation too easy. If it can be shown that my dues have been paid by another, it does not seem to be any great moral achievement for me to accept the arrangement and to be glad to appropriate its advantages. If I can receive Christ and his salvation in a morsel of bread, the requirement seems simple and easily accomplished. But if I must learn what Christ's inner life means; if I must view his death as a self-giving which I must repeat in my own heart and life; if I must see in his cross a crucifixion of all selfishness and sin, then salvation seems to me the most real and the most stupendous moral experience and achievement of which we can form any conception. So, I believe, Paul and John and Christ himself conceived it, and this conception as presented in the New Testament, so far from being merely incidental, illustrative, or subordinate to the notion of an external saving act, is the very heart and soul of the biblical doctrine of salvation. Be the expiatory expressions of Paul and of the writer to the Hebrews what they may, they are from the thought-world of late Judaism; but the exposition, by both writers, of the actual realization of salvation is a transcript of moral experience and is presented in terms expressive of moral participation in the inner life of Jesus, the reproduction in the believer of the representative humanity of Christ.

If this idea is, as I believe, the most characteristic note in the New Testament doctrine concerning salvation, it is equally the most profound and morally exacting conception of the subject. "The modern mind " may, indeed, neglect or repudiate it because it is too high and difficult, but it can never bring against it the objections which it feels to theories of external substitution, namely, that they are at once morally unreal and rationally impossible. I have several times heard this question raised in all seriousness by Christian teachers: Granted that the moral interpretation is the more adequate and satisfying, do we not still

need to use, for popular purposes, the terms descriptive of an external substitution? Are not men more likely to be moved by the idea that some one has borne their burden of guilt and penalty than by the idea that one has come to realize in our midst, and to introduce us into, the life of sonship to God? To many popular religious teachers this seems to be the case. Some theologians even are of the same opinion; hence their efforts still to commend to the men of our time some form of external substitution which seems to them acceptable. I cannot help thinking that these efforts are misplaced. I do not know to what extent the apparatus of externalism, realistically presented, may prove effective in evangelistic efforts among people unused to reflection; but so far as my observation has extended, it leads me to say that among thoughtful laymen, quite as much as in theological circles, the notions of substitution, expiation, vicarious penalty, and the like, are unacceptable and obsolescent.

To all this the theological pessimist may answer: "Too true; but the fact only shows the degeneracy of the times." Dr. Hodge, as we have seen, regarded the idea of penal substitution as so fundamental in the whole scriptural view of Christ's death, as constituting the very substance of the biblical doctrine of salvation to such an extent that those who called it in question were to be regarded, either as not Christians at all or as perversely wresting the plain assertions of Scripture into accord with their personal prejudices.1 I apprehend that few present-day theologians, however predisposed in favor of the seventeenth century, would go quite so far as this. Does the change mean progress or retrogression? On this question the reader must form his own judgment.

It is only incidental to my present purpose, however, to inquire what opinions are most acceptable or prevalent among various classes of persons. I am primarily concerned only with an effort to determine what is most central and characteristic in the Christian view of the subject. Apropos of this effort, however, I suggest to the reader to

1 Systematic Theology, II, 479,

bear in mind this question and to put it to the test of his observation: What view of Christ's saving work finds fullest recognition and attestation in the Christian consciousness and experience of men? To what conception of the nature and method of salvation do men bear witness as being, for their minds and consciences, the highest, the truest, the most real and vital?

CHAPTER VII

THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN

WHAT is the relation of the sufferings and death of Jesus to human sin-its guilt, its penalty, its forgiveness? Did he assume its guilt and bear its penalty in order to secure its remission? Was his death a substitute for sin's punishment and so a means of creating a basis for forgiveness? Was his bitter anguish a reparation to God whereby his punitive anger was satisfied and the hindrance to the operation of his grace removed? All these questions are answered in the affirmative by the traditional theories, though with the most various explanations of the sense in which such assertions can be true.

All theories which hold that the death of Christ is the ground of forgiveness meet a difficulty not easily explained in the fact that in the Old Testament God is uniformly represented as a gracious God, willing and eager to forgive the sins of men. The writings of the prophets ring with the proclamation of a free forgiveness to all who truly repent: "As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live;""If the wicked turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die" (Ezek. xxxiii. 11; xviii. 21).

Now there are two ways in which this difficulty is met. On the one hand, it is said that these assurances presuppose the expiation of sin accomplished by the sacrifices. But the obstacles to the success of this explanation are very great. They are such as these: (1) The prophets do not recognize the sacrifices as being at all necessary to reconciliation with God. As we have already seen

(pp. 17, 18), they set no very high estimate upon the Levitical ritual and never consider the offerings essential to obtaining God's forgiveness. Their spirit is well reflected in the words of that classic confession of sin in Ps. li. 16, 17:

"For thou delightest not in sacrifice; else would I give it :

Thou hast no pleasure in burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit:

A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."

Moreover, (2) sacrifices were allowed, in general, only for sins of inadvertence. For wilful crimes like murder and adultery no atonement by sacrifice was available (Num. xxxv. 31; Lev. xx. 10). Were such sins, then, utterly unforgivable? They must have been so if sacrifice was the ground of forgiveness. But how, in that case, could the author of Psalm li. rejoice in God's mercy and forgiveness, and how could Nathan assure David of the divine forgiveness for his twofold crime of murder and adultery? The fact that there was forgiveness for sins for which no offering was accepted, is proof positive that in the view which prevails in the Old Testament the real ground of forgiveness was the gracious disposition of God.

(3) The explanation in question encounters the further difficulty that the primary and fundamental idea of the offerings is not that of substitutionary punishment, but that of a gift or act of homage. The historical study of the institution of sacrifice has completely undermined the position in question.

(4) The one book in the New Testament which largely uses sacrificial analogies by which to interpret the work of Christ—the Epistle to the Hebrews-is most explicit in asserting that animal offerings were only ineffective types and shadows which were powerless to accomplish reconciliation with God, since "it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins" (Heb. x. 4).

But even if all these difficulties could be surmounted if the sacrificial expiations associated with the Levitical ritual were the basis of the prophetic proclamation of free